April 2010
Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Camps
April 30, 2010 by StayFree
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New America Media, News Analysis/Commentary, Peter Dale Scott, Posted: Feb 08, 2006
Editor's Note: A little-known $385 million contract for Halliburton subsidiary KBR to build detention facilities for "an emergency influx of immigrants" is another step down the Bush administration's road toward martial law, the writer says.
BERKELEY, Calif.--A Halliburton subsidiary has just received a $385 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security to provide "temporary detention and processing capabilities."
The contract -- announced Jan. 24 by the engineering and construction firm KBR -- calls for preparing for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs" in the event of other emergencies, such as "a natural disaster." The release offered no details about where Halliburton was to build these facilities, or when.
To date, some newspapers have worried that open-ended provisions in the contract could lead to cost overruns, such as have occurred with KBR in Iraq. A Homeland Security spokesperson has responded that this is a "contingency contract" and that conceivably no centers might be built. But almost no paper so far has discussed the possibility that detention centers could be used to detain American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law.
For those who follow covert government operations abroad and at home, the contract evoked ominous memories of Oliver North's controversial Rex-84 "readiness exercise" in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary "refugees," in the context of "uncontrolled population movements" over the Mexican border into the United States. North's activities raised civil liberties concerns in both Congress and the Justice Department. The concerns persist.
"Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," says Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military's account of its activities in Vietnam. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."
Plans for detention facilities or camps have a long history, going back to fears in the 1970s of a national uprising by black militants. As Alonzo Chardy reported in the Miami Herald on July 5, 1987, an executive order for continuity of government (COG) had been drafted in 1982 by FEMA head Louis Giuffrida. The order called for "suspension of the Constitution" and "declaration of martial law." The martial law portions of the plan were outlined in a memo by Giuffrida's deputy, John Brinkerhoff.
In 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 188, one of a series of directives that authorized continued planning for COG by a private parallel government.
Two books, James Mann's "Rise of the Vulcans" and James Bamford's "A Pretext for War," have revealed that in the 1980s this parallel structure, operating outside normal government channels, included the then-head of G. D. Searle and Co., Donald Rumsfeld, and then-Congressman from Wyoming Dick Cheney.
After 9/11, new martial law plans began to surface similar to those of FEMA in the 1980s. In January 2002 the Pentagon submitted a proposal for deploying troops on American streets. One month later John Brinkerhoff, the author of the 1982 FEMA memo, published an article arguing for the legality of using U.S. troops for purposes of domestic security.
Then in April 2002, Defense Dept. officials implemented a plan for domestic U.S. military operations by creating a new U.S. Northern Command (CINC-NORTHCOM) for the continental United States. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called this "the most sweeping set of changes since the unified command system was set up in 1946."
The NORTHCOM commander, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced, is responsible for "homeland defense and also serves as head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).... He will command U.S. forces that operate within the United States in support of civil authorities. The command will provide civil support not only in response to attacks, but for natural disasters."
John Brinkerhoff later commented on PBS that, "The United States itself is now for the first time since the War of 1812 a theater of war. That means that we should apply, in my view, the same kind of command structure in the United States that we apply in other theaters of war."
Then in response to Hurricane Katrina in Sept. 2005, according to the Washington Post, White House senior adviser Karl Rove told the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, that she should explore legal options to impose martial law "or as close as we can get." The White House tried vigorously, but ultimately failed, to compel Gov. Blanco to yield control of the state National Guard.
Also in September, NORTHCOM conducted its highly classified Granite Shadow exercise in Washington. As William Arkin reported in the Washington Post, "Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military's extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."
It is clear that the Bush administration is thinking seriously about martial law.
Many critics have alleged that FEMA's spectacular failure to respond to Katrina followed from a deliberate White House policy: of paring back FEMA, and instead strengthening the military for responses to disasters.
A multimillion program for detention facilities will greatly increase NORTHCOM's ability to respond to any domestic disorders.
Scott is author of "Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). He is completing a book on "The Road to 9/11." Visit his Web site .
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www.post-gazette.com/nation/20030330codered0330p6.asp Code Red would trigger a virtual lockdown Top terror alert could shut landmarks, ground planes, stop trains or trigger roadblocks Sunday, March 30, 2003 By Michael Collins, Scripps Howard News Service WASHINGTON -- National landmarks such as the Washington Monument, Ellis Island and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis could be shut down. Planes could be grounded, trains could stop running, and bridges and tunnels could be closed. U.S. borders might be sealed off, and roadblocks might be set up on interstates and other major highways. The United States is prepared to go into lockdown mode if the government should raise the nation's terror alert to Code Red, the highest threat level for terrorism. Code Red means there is a severe risk of terrorist attack, or that an attack is imminent or may already be under way. "It essentially means you stop doing everything except protecting yourself," said Dave McIntyre, deputy director of the Anser Institute for Homeland Security, a nonprofit research group in Arlington, Va. Homeland security officials have put Americans on notice to brace for the possibility of terrorist attacks while the country is at war with Iraq. The threat level was raised to orange, the second highest, just two days before the war began March 19. "There are no plans, nor have their been any discussions, about elevating the threat level to Code Red," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. To trigger such an alert, U.S. intelligence would have to be "very specific, credible, corroborated [and] provide us with information such as time, date, location" of a possible attack, Johndroe said. Still, federal, state and local officials across the country are going over emergency plans to be prepared in the event that the terror level should be raised to red. Homeland security officials have been vague about what protective measures might be taken under Code Red. But Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has said such measures might be similar to those put in place Sept. 11, 2001, which means planes could be grounded, borders closed, government buildings shut down and road and rail traffic curtailed. The specific response would depend on the nature of the threat. It's doubtful that the entire country would be placed under a Code Red alert, McIntyre said. A more realistic scenario is that a red alert would result from a specific threat to a particular region or industry. If, for example, there were a terrorist threat against the trucking industry in the Southeast, truck traffic might be temporarily halted in that region but be allowed to continue elsewhere, McIntyre said. Code Red wouldn't mean automatic closure of the Washington Monument and other national landmarks. But superintendents at national parks have been advised that shutting down the facilities is an option at their discretion, said David Barna, a spokesman for the National Park Service. Security was tightened at eight high-profile landmarks, including the Washington Monument, the Liberty Bell pavilion and the Statue of Liberty, after Sept. 11 because they are symbols of democracy and are thus potential terrorist targets, Barna said. Visitors at those landmarks now face airport-security type measures, such as metal detectors, bag searches and checks for explosive devices. Patrols also have been stepped up since the terror alert was raised to orange. But Barna said the landmarks would remain open if possible because they are places of solace that should be available to the public in times of war. A Code Red alert also serves as an advisory to state and local officials, who then must decide whether to put in place protective measures. Emergency plans will vary with each community, but might include calling up the National Guard, closing government buildings and shutting down key roads and bridges. Some schools have plans to lock down their facilities during Code Red and already have begun advising parents not to rush to pick up their children. Residents would be advised to stay away from gathering places, such as sporting events, and listen to the radio or television for instructions. They should be prepared to leave if necessary, but should remain in their homes or offices until they are instructed to leave, McIntyre said. "The worst thing you can do is to flee without reason," which could create gridlock on the streets and keep emergency vehicles from getting through, he said. Emergency measures taken under Code Red would be expensive and aren't intended to remain in effect for extended periods, McIntyre said www.presstelegram.com/Stories/0,1413,204~21474~1251515,00.html WASHINGTON Should war with Iraq erupt, Southern Californians could find themselves living in a world of restricted travel, constrained trade, closed schools and public buildings, canceled events and hypersecurity. your tax dollars at work Grand Central Station, New York City, February 2003 partial-martial law has already begun Concentration Camps for Citizens - Ashcroft's Hellish Visionhttp:/
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From 1982-84 Colonel Oliver North assisted FEMA in drafting its civil
defence preparations. Details of these plans emerged during the 1987
Iran-Contra scandal.They included executive orders providing for
suspension of the constitution, the imposition of martial law,
internment camps, and the turning over of government to the president
and FEMA.
A Miami Herald article on July 5, 1987, reported that the former FEMA
director Louis Guiffrida's deputy, John Brinkerhoff, handled the martial
law portion of the planning. The plan was said to be similar to one Mr
Giuffrida had developed earlier to combat "a national uprising by black
militants". It provided for the detention "of at least 21million
American Negroes"' in "assembly centres or relocation camps".
Recent pronouncements from the Bush Administration and national security
initiatives put in place in the Reagan era could see internment camps
and martial law in the United States.
When president Ronald Reagan was considering invading Nicaragua he
issued a series of executive orders that provided the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) with broad powers in the event of a "crisis"
such as "violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition
against a US military invasion abroad".
They were never used. The plan, which was modeled after a plan that
Reagan and Edwin Meese had developed in California to deal with black
activists, anti-war protesters and members of the student Free Speech
Movement, involved the cooperation of a number of agencies, including
the Immigration and Naturalization Service which took steps to establish
a network of detention centers capable of holding thousands of
undocumented aliens.
Foundations are in place for martial law in the US
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Oliver North's Private Network
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www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/AOPof911p10.html
Domestic Terrorism: General Ashcroft's
"Enemy Citizens," Martial Law and Internment Camps
One of General Ashcroft's campaigns that has received a minimum of coverage in the press are efforts to set up detention and internment camps in the United States as part of preparations for the possibility of declaring martial law. This past summer, journalist Ritt Goldstein wrote two articles -- "Foundations are in place for martial law in the US" and "Internment Camps and Authoritarian US Fast Becoming Reality" [49] -- that detail how "democratic freedoms which have long defined American life are under seige."http:/
/ www.ratical.org/ ratville/ CAH/ martialLaw.html http:/ / www.ratical.org/ ratville/ CAH/ internment.html
This goes back to President Jimmy Carter's creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) through Executive Order 12148 in 1979. While FEMA's charter originally called for planning and training activities concerning "natural disasters, nuclear war, the possibility of enemy attack on U.S. territory, and incidents involving domestic civil unrest," it was with the advent of the Reagan era in 1981 that FEMA's scope was augmented to be a "national emergency" entity, headed by a federal "emergency czar".[50]
"The birth of FEMA's dark side originated in secret during the Reagan administration. FEMA's domestic disaster management role was then broadened to allow it to practice for the imposition of martial law and the internment of so-called aliens and radicals. During this period, a joint exercise was held with the military to prepare for such a contingency, Rex-84. Concurrently, FEMA began assembling files on those whom the Agency might target. . . . The exercise's purpose was to test military capabilities in anticipation of `civil disturbances, major demonstrations', incidentally illustrating the evolution of civil defense into civil control." [51]
After a period of abuse of power, culminating with the constitutional crisis later labeled Iran Contra (which was never fully revealed in public as vital moments during congressional hearings were conducted behind closed doors [52]), then Attorney General William French Smith concluded that activities FEMA had been involved in were openly unconstitutional including compiling dossiers on those it might seek to intern. "The FBI challenged FEMA's right to pursue domestic spying, resulting in FEMA's turning over `12,000 political dossiers' to the Bureau." [53]
FEMA's involvement in martial law plans surfaced momentarily during the Iran Contra hearings. What was arguably the most important question of those hearings never got a public answer. In July 2002, Southwestern University School of Law Professor Butler Shaffer pondered the question, "Will a Police State Protect Your Liberty?":
"It requires no great genius or years of scholarly study to understand how the future is implicit in the present. In July, 1987, the Miami Herald, along with some other newspapers, ran news stories about secret plans, in the Reagan White House, to suspend the Constitution, establish martial law, turn over the functioning of the US government to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and have military commanders running state and local governments, in the event of a national crisis. One of the architects of this plan was the conservative godling, Lt. Col. Oliver North. There were even rumors, in some circles, that government concentration camps were being readied for such a possibility.
"While news of such a plan failed to arouse the attention of most legislators, there was one -- Congressman Jack Brooks of Texas -- who, during the Iran-Contra hearings then being conducted, sought to question North about such reports. Brooks was quickly cut off by the Committee chairman, Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye. In the New York Times report of July 14, 1987, Inouye told Brooks: `that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area,' to which Brooks responded: `I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan developed, by that same agency [NSC], a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American Constitution.' Inouye concluded: `May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon, at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can be made for an executive session.' In other words, Sen. Inouye was determined to live up to the pronunciation of his name: `in no way' are we going to let the public know what we have planned for them!" [54]
It is not publically known what process and command structures of FEMA's past are deceased, dormant or active today. Goldstein cites an August 15th 2002 Los Angeles Times story recounting ``Ashcroft's announced desire to create "camps for US citizens he deems to be `enemy combatants'" [and that] Ashcroft aides "have indicated that a `high-level committee' will recommend which citizens are to be stripped of their constitutional rights and sent to Ashcroft's new camps"''.[55] This is described in conjunction with a July 15th NewsMax.com story that FEMA is pursuing a "crash effort" to build "sprawling temporary cities to handle millions".
John Ashcroft resorts to euphemistic subterfuge when he pretends that he can simply rename a citizen of the U.S. as an "enemy combatant". With Ashcroft's penchant for portraying 9-11 as an act of war, he is now seeking to strip any American he wants to target of their constitutional rights and liberties by labeling them "enemy combatant". In terms of Americans, General Ashcroft should call such person's "enemy citizens" since such person is still protected by our constitutional system of law, even if Ashcroft would rather deny them their rights.
Given General Ashcroft's zeal to create camps for U.S. citizens he deems to be "enemy combatants" (although FEMA's public claim is to handle millions of displaced persons in the event of a terrorist attack), it is not unreasonable to expect such camps will be employed to intern Americans. What would be Ashcroft's grounds for internment? Many people will go to the streets to challenge the brazen and continued aggrandizement of power in the hands of the Chief Executive and his officers if another alleged terrorist attack supplies them with more justification to identify and lock up enemy citizens.
FEMA's activities during Reagan's terms included national training exercises in preparation for a suspension of the constitution in case of massive domestic political turmoil. The Department of Homeland Security intends to "build upon the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as one of its key components." [56] Goldstein stresses that FEMA's 1980s downfall (of pursuing openly unconstitutional goals) "was a direct outgrowth of its pursuit of proactive methods, its attempt to legitimize the assumption of extraordinary powers under the very cloak of `counterterrorism'."
"At present, the final contents and disposition of the Reagan security initiatives, part of a national crisis plan, remains beyond public knowledge. But given the `War On Terror's' scope, even if a formal crisis is not declared, speculation exists that a de facto drift into an effective deployment of FEMA's crisis powers could occur. And this February, the former FEMA executive, John Brinkerhoff, who reportedly drafted the martial law/internment portions of the national crisis plan, revealed it was `approved by Reagan, and actions were taken to implement it.'" [57]
"A Miami Herald article on July 5, 1987, reported that the former FEMA director Louis Guiffrida's deputy, John Brinkerhoff, handled the martial law portion of the planning. The plan was said to be similar to one Mr Giuffrida had developed earlier to combat `a national uprising by black militants'. It provided for the detention `of at least 21 million American Negroes' in `assembly centres or relocation camps'." [58]
General Ashcroft clearly is up to the task he believes he faces. Given last December's performance, when he aggressively bullied the Senate Judiciary Committee with extreme doublespeak such as "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists" and "terrorists are taught how to use America's freedoms as a weapon against us", it would be more accurate to charge the General with applying newspeak tactics to promote his idea of freedoms as a weapon against the people of this nation-state.
It is not clear how far the General's zealotry will carry him and us. Nat Hentoff, writing on September 4th about "General Ashcroft's Detention Camps, Time to Call for His Resignation" notes the status of two American citizens, Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, currently "locked up in military brigs as `enemy combatants.'"
"In Hamdi's case, the government claims it can hold him for interrogation in a floating navy brig off Norfolk, Virginia, as long as it needs to. When Federal District Judge Robert Doumar asked the man from the Justice Department how long Hamdi is going to be locked up without charges, the government lawyer said he couldn't answer that question. The Bush administration claims the judiciary has no right to even interfere. . . .
"Returning to General Ashcroft's plans for American enemy combatants, an August 8 New York Times editorial -- written before those plans were revealed -- said: `The Bush administration seems to believe, on no good legal authority, that if it calls citizens combatants in the war on terrorism, it can imprison them indefinitely and deprive them of lawyers. This defiance of the courts repudiates two centuries of constitutional law and undermines the very freedoms that President Bush says he is defending in the struggle against terrorism.'
"Meanwhile, as the camps are being prepared, the braying Terry McAuliffe and the pack of Democratic presidential aspirants are campaigning on corporate crime, with no reference to the constitutional crimes being committed by Bush and Ashcroft. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis prophesied: "The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people." And an inert Democratic leadership." [59]
As with the bedrock of law in the international arena, we are now witnessing the Bush II repudiation of two centuries of the domestic span of constitutional law undermining the basis of freedoms we presume to be cast in concrete and impermeable to the wiles of such aggrandizement of power. This nullification is being justified behind the all-encompassing façade of a holy "war" against, not a another national entity, but an ambiguous idea that means different things to different people. The supine leadership of Congress is in collusion with this renunciation of constitutional law proceeding apace, given that Congress is not exercising its constitutionally mandated powers of oversight over the Department of Justice.
Last month Mr. Hentoff wrote about retired California Congressman Don Edwards as "the Congressman from the Constitution". On August 10th Edwards received the American Bar Association's Thurgood Marshall Award for his "unswerving devotion to the Constitution and its values throughout his career."
"He served in the House from 1962 to 1995; for 23 years, Don was chair of the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights-which has oversight of the FBI. Himself a former FBI agent, Don set unprecedentedly high standards for containing the FBI within the bounds of the Constitution, very much including the Bill of Rights. . . .
"In the 1970s, Edwards -- along with Senator Frank Church and his committee -- exposed the FBI's pervasive abuses of civil liberties in J. Edgar Hoover's Cointelpro (counter-intelligence program), which monitored, infiltrated, and disrupted entirely lawful civil rights and anti-war organizations.
"Edwards . . . worked with Gerald Ford's attorney general Edward Levi in formulating FBI investigative guidelines faithful to the Constitution. It is these guidelines that John Ashcroft has contemptuously discarded in order to allow the FBI to go back to the hunting fields of Cointelpro.
"Characteristically, Edwards, though respected even by his opponents in Congress, refused a repeated request that he join the Intelligence Committee. He said that the people's business should be done in public, and through his influence in the House he blocked various expansions of unreviewable intelligence-authorization powers.
"Recently, I asked Don Edwards what he thought of the Bush-Ashcroft conception of the Bill of Rights. `The Bill of Rights,' he said, `is under assault. For example, locking people up-citizens or noncitizens-without being charged and without access to a lawyer is wrong. Under our system of justice, you must have a lawyer if you're imprisoned.
"`Also,' he added vigorously, `Congress is not exercising its oversight powers over the Department of Justice, including the FBI. Committees should be hauling in Justice Department officials to justify what they're doing.'" [60]
So far General Ashcroft and Bush II have felt justified in locking up two citizens of the United States without access to a lawyer and claiming the judiciary has no right to interfere. Aides to Ashcroft "have indicated that a `high-level committee' will recommend which citizens are to be stripped of their constitutional rights and sent to Ashcroft's new camps." We find ourselves living our own contemporary Scoundrel Time and must draw inspiration from Lillian Hellman and her accounts of how people stood up to and challenged the unconstitutional authority of an earlier pack of scoundrels: ruthless, ambitious politicians who engaged in their own assault on our constitutional laws and principles.
by Adam Cohen, New York Times [US]
September 22nd, 2002
rehnquist When America is at war, according to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, people have to get used to having less freedom.
There is a limit to what courts will do to help those deprived of rights, he says, because judges have a natural "reluctance" to rule "against the government on an issue of national security during wartime." In fact, there is "some truth," he concludes, to the Latin maxim "inter arma silent leges" — in time of war, the law is silent.
With all of the war talk today — the so-called war on terror and the prospect of a real one in Iraq — it may sound as if the chief justice is laying the groundwork for a drastic rollback in civil liberties. But these reflections come from a history book, "All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime," that he wrote four years ago. When it came out, "All the Laws but One" seemed like an academic exercise. But with several major terrorism cases headed to the Supreme Court, court watchers are starting to pick it up as a possible guidebook.
If Mr. Rehnquist the jurist sees the world as Mr. Rehnquist the historian does, there is cause for concern.
The Supreme Court term that begins next month could prove momentous. It will be the justices' first chance to rule on the impact on civil liberties from the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath. The court could resolve several key questions: whether American citizens can be held indefinitely without access to lawyers simply because they have been labeled "enemy combatants," whether terrorism suspects can be held in secret detention and whether their deportation hearings can be closed to the public.
"All the Laws but One," which discusses civil liberties during the Civil War and World Wars I and II, does not answer those questions. But its central message is that in wartime, the balance between order and freedom tips toward order. In recounting the history, Justice Rehnquist gives all the arguments for order, and far too few for freedom. The people whose liberties are taken away are virtually invisible.
Justice Rehnquist's selective blindness is most evident in his discussion of the worst denial of civil liberties in American history, the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry at the start of World War II. He lavishes pages of detail on the military reasons for the roundup. Against that, he offers a single sentence about the hardship imposed on those put in the camps. His account is as dubious as it is brief: he writes that there was "no physical brutality," but historians report that some prisoners were beaten and shot.
Justice Rehnquist endorses only part of the Japanese internments, but he seems far more accepting than many scholars who regard the entire episode as a disaster. It would be harder for the reader to accept his conclusions if he had included details about the men, women and children who were rounded up, and the economic, physical and emotional toll imposed on them.
It is much the same with the book's discussion of President Abraham Lincoln's decision, during the Civil War, to suspend habeas corpus — the right of someone taken into custody to challenge his imprisonment before a judge. It offers considerable detail about the wartime problems confronting Lincoln, but only a vague sense of how many innocent people may have been kept in prison as a result. Justice Rehnquist readily accepts Lincoln's famous formulation: that if he had preserved habeas corpus, it would have meant allowing "all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one" — habeas corpus — "be violated." It is this quotation, of course, that gives the book its title.
Justice Rehnquist's eagerness to see things from the viewpoint of those charged with keeping order — and his relative lack of concern about their victims — could have important implications for the cases the court hears this term. If the justices think only of terrorism and the threat to national security, they may be inclined to uphold whatever restrictions the Bush administration imposes. The more they actually consider the people being held in secret, or denied the right to see a lawyer, the more likely they are to appreciate the costs of those policies.
Another problem with "All the Laws but One" is its contention that presidents cannot be reined in during wartime, so it is pointless to try. Justice Rehnquist quotes, with approval, Francis Biddle, President Franklin Roosevelt's attorney general, who said, "The Constitution has not greatly bothered any wartime president." The opposite case can be made. When President Harry Truman tried to seize the nation's steel mills during the Korean War — arguing that an impending strike threatened national security — he backed down when the Supreme Court objected. Other presidents would probably be just as compliant.
But the most disturbing aspect of Justice Rehnquist's book is the lack of outrage, or even disappointment, he evinces when rights are sacrificed. The greatest American patriots have been eloquent about the danger of letting freedom lapse even briefly. Benjamin Franklin said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." There are times when Justice Rehnquist sees the wisdom of standing up to wartime fervor — he is particularly good about the importance of freedom of speech and assembly. But too often, giving up essential liberty for temporary safety seems an easy call for him.
Shortly after "All the Laws but One" came out, in an interview on C-Span, Justice Rehnquist was asked what he thought of writing books. "It's very nice," he responded, "to be able to write something you don't have to get four other people to agree with you [on] before it can become authoritative." This may be the term when we see which of these views he can get four justices to agree with him on. His colleagues should be cautious. If we keep sacrificing "one" law to save "all the laws," there will eventually be no laws left to save.
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More on AshKroft's Kamps:
1. Apparently, some think that the original article on the camps has been completely debunked. The point is that there are at most 20 prison cells in question, and that fact, while unfortunate, is not enough to get upset about. The camps issue is thought to be a red herring, and the real issue is still the indefinite detention of 'enemy combatants', especially when the determination of whether one is an 'enemy combatant' is made solely by the Bush Administration. It seems to me that this is true, but it is also important not to forget the issue of the camps. The actual physical construction of the camps is irrelevant. FEMA (the agency that can predict the future) and no doubt other organizations already have suitable camps, constructed for legitimate and semi-legitimate reasons. Once the precedent is set using Padilla and Hamdi (it is possible that the Padilla case is worse than the Hamdi case), and the mechanism is set up to allow the Administration to process 'enemy combatants' in bulk (and anyone who followed the Eichmann trial knows how important the institutional mechanics of repression are to this type of person), it would therefore be easy to 'scale' the 20 cells into 200, 2000, or 20,000. The critical point is the fact that the precedent of Padilla and Hamdi has been set, and as hardly anyone complained about it, it can be used against anyone, even an American citizen arrested in the United States.
2. The whole system being proposed by Ashcroft is actually the equivalent of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. His theory is that once he has determined that you are an 'enemy combatant', then all normal Constitutional protections immediately evaporate. However, presumably the protections can't evaporate before he makes that determination, i. e., in that legal millisecond before he makes his determination the courts still must be able to examine the Constitutional validity of the making of the determination, and in examining this, presumably have the right to consider all the facts of the case. The judge in the Hamdi case is alive to these issues. The whole 'enemy combatants' issue appears to be a rather transparent method to avoid human rights protections using the circular argument that the Constitution doesn't apply because it doesn't apply to 'enemy combatants', coupled with the dubious notion that you can become an 'enemy combatant' by your alleged involvement in the never-ending and ill-defined 'war on terror'.
3. The most interesting questions about Padilla have never been asked. He was detained in early May, but his detention only came to light with Ashcroft's announcement in early June. Since the Administration felt absolutely no qualms about Padilla's detention, and almost didn't bother to mention it until it needed a big distraction from the Coleen Rowley testimony, the whole issue of how many other detainees like Jose Padilla there are remains completely open. The camps may already be full!
4. Jonathan Turley, who seems to hold a monopoly in writing about these issues, points out that Ashcroft now wants to turbo-charge the secret court which interprets and enforces the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make its draconian powers apply to American citizens. This would presumably grant the government practically unlimited powers of investigation in order to obtain the information required to label the 'enemy combatants', as well as on anyone else the Administration would like to investigate without regard to that nasty Constitution (somewhere in hell, Richard Nixon must be laughing).
5. There is an interesting pattern here in the Administration's use of the media. We constantly hear about 'leaks' from the Bush Administration, and sometimes (e. g., Rumsfeld) even hear complaints about the 'leaks'. The 'leaks' and general use of the media appear to be the work of a master manipulator (Rove?):
* the Padilla case was clearly set out for the American people, and the full implications of his treatment explained, allowing for his case to be used as a precedent for the indefinite detention without trial or legal representation for any American citizen labelled an 'enemy combatant';
* the constant flow of warnings about imminent terror attacks, to continue the charade of the 'war on terror';
* all the 'leaks' involving plans on Iraq, which may be a combination of trial balloons and misdirection, especially if the real goal of the Administration is also to capture Saudi oil fields;
* all the obvious media manipulation concerning the anthrax attacks and Steven Hatfill, a patsy who is apparently to be used to distract public attention from the real issues of the case (with apparently another patsy in the wings to take over once the Hatfill investigation peters out).
But hey, if you don't want to worry about the AshKroft Kamps, then don't worry about the AshKroft Kamps. As long as you're white and quiet and don't criticize the government, you'll probably be fine.
"There's fool's gold because there's real gold." - 13th-century Persian poet Rumi
April 30, 2010 by StayFree
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"Lots of conspiracy theories are bogus, but rejecting them all just because of how they're framed is not wise. The way it is today, a gang of conspirators could get away with anything: they just need to start an Internet rumor of what they just did, framing it as a conspiracy theory, and anyone who tries to talk about it will be ignored."
- comment posted in discussion about "Petrocollapse" conference athttp:// www.theoildrum.com/ story/ 2005/ 10/ 5/ 212831/ 898#more "One of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed and nothing can be known… nothing of significance, that is."
-- E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy"“I have a legal case that will convict Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, General Myers, right now in court based upon evidence that is not scientific in nature, I don’t need to go there, that is a red herring when we focus on the crime that has been committed against this country. We’ve already proven who did it, the how doesn’t have to be fully fleshed out. ...
“These discussions of what possibly induced that [collapse of the towers] is a major psychological operations campaign designed to keep the american people from looking at the evidence of guilt.”
- Michael Ruppert, February 14, 2005, interview on KZYX, “The Party’s Over”
Successful propaganda is not "based on lies but rather on truth interpreted in a particular war," wrote William Dorman. While the Reagan administration's presentation of the Flight 007 case did contain outright falsehood, limited truth and irrelevancy were much more common. As Anthony Marro put it, half-truths are "a specialty at the State Department" and for a reason Tennyson described a century ago:
That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.-- David Pearson, "KAL 007: The Cover-Up," Summit Books (1987), p. 159
Crossing the Rubicon: a best seller without reviews
Michael Ruppert’s book Crossing the Rubicon: the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil is the best selling book about 9/11 from the skeptics point of view. It has sold very well despite a deafening silence from the media, an extremely unusual circumstance for a book. Even the publications that attacked From the Wilderness in the months after 9/11 for daring to connect the dots about 9/11 foreknowledge have refused to say anything (good or bad) about Rubicon. If the thesis was flawed, surely someone somewhere would describe the errors.
After Rubicon was published in September 2004, a strange smear campaign accelerated on the internet making a variety of bizarre accusations about the author. Most of these attacks came from internet personalities who promote extreme ideas about 9/11 complicity that lack substantive evidence, an effort that is probably the official response to the book.
No administration representative has dared say anything specific about the book or the evidence contained in it. The only politician in Washington who has publicly tried to get an answer to the book’s accusations is the Honorable Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia). This writer is aware of a few Democratic politicians and party officials who privately agree that there was official complicity in 9/11 -- one admitted to this author that he knew Cheney was running war games on 9/11, but an hour later, when in front of a microphone, refused to touch the subject when asked. Fear is the currency of empire.
www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/030105_mckinney_question.shtml
"Mr. Chairman, I have a question"
On-the-Record: Representative Cynthia McKinney Rocks Rumsfeld on War Games
and a follow-up: www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/031505_mckinney_transcript.shtml
State Department “Identifying Misinformation” website
In 2005, the U.S. State Department posted a website for "Identifying Misinformation" as part of their public relations efforts http:/
Their website, run at public expense, is an excellent guide to nearly every disinformation tactic on 9/11 complicity claims. It contains a mix of obvious government lies and highlights of fake claims that distract from the best evidence.
It is not surprising that the State Department, like other defenders of the official story, focused on the hoax that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon. but ignoring serious documentation of foreknowledge, and complicity as documented by Michael Ruppert, Paul Thompson, Nafeez Ahmed, Peter Dale Scott, Daniel Hopsicker, among others.
The State Department is promoting the sloppy (fake?) efforts to allege 9/11 complicity while avoiding serious efforts to establish the truth. 9/11 skeptics who don't believe the official story should recognize this is a crude effort by the government to select which "conspiracy theories" should be considered representative of the 9/11 truth movement.
Depleted Uranium: the real dirty bombs
The State Department webpage http:/
The State Department mentioned other government entities that have dismissed claims of depleted uranium: NATO, the Rand Corporation (a major military contractor), the European Commission and the World Health Organization. WHO is the only one of these agencies with a public health mission, but their independence on nuclear issues was compromised in the 1980s when they signed onto endorsements of food irradiation on behalf of the IAEA. www.organicconsumers.org/irradlink.html
The State Department offers this explanation for the term “depleted” uranium”
-- http:/
Depleted uranium is what is left over when natural uranium is enriched to make weapons-grade or fuel-grade uranium. In the process, the uranium loses, or is depleted, of almost half its radioactivity, which is how depleted uranium gets its name. But facts like this are less important in peoples’ minds than the deeply ingrained associations they have with the world “uranium.” For this reason, most people believe that depleted uranium is much more dangerous than it actually is.
So-called "depleted" uranium is called this because the much of the uranium-235 isotope (0.7% of natural uranium) useful for nuclear power fuel and weapons has been removed. “Depleted” does not mean that its biological hazards have been mitigated.
DU burns on impact, the reason it is used in some weapons system. Burning uranium pulverizes it into tiny particles that are easily inhaled and cause lung cancers. Uranium-238 has a half-life roughly as long as the Earth has been in existence. DU tipped weapons are the real "dirty bombs" and are a war crime to manufacture and use. From a public health perspective, calling this material "depleted" uranium is a form of linguistic detoxification.
The chemical toxicity of uranium, a heavy metal, is not changed by having its isotopic percentages changed -- uranium-235 and uranium-238 are the same, chemically. www.oilempire.us/depleted-uranium.html
Two sources of accurate information about DU on American veterans and Iraqi civilians are the National Gulf War Resources Center at www.ngwrc.org and the Military Toxics Project at www.miltoxproj.org
The best films on uranium poisoning in Iraq are Hidden Wars of Desert Storm (2000) and The Oil Factor (2005), both from Free Will Productions (filmed on location in Iraq). www.freewillprod.com
The film “Beyond Treason” (2005) about depleted uranium was produced by The Power Hour, the group that produced the film 911: In Plane Site, an effort that was mostly disinformation (a review is at www.oilempire.us/inplanesite.html).
The destruction of Fallujah in November 2004
The State Department webpage at http:/
Time has a way of exposing all lies. In November 2005, it was revealed that the US used white phosphorus weapons as part of the arsenal unleashed on the people of Fallujah, and that the US government had classified white phosphorus as a chemical weapon. http:/
When this information was leaked, the State Department posted the following retraction:
http:/
/ usinfo.state.gov/ media/ Archive_Index/ Illegal_Weapons_in_Fallujah.html
[November 10, 2005 note: We have learned that some of the information we were provided in the above paragraph is incorrect. White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, i.e., obscuring troop movements and, according to an article, "The Fight for Fallujah," in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery magazine, "as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes …." The article states that U.S. forces used white phosphorous rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds.]
There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using "outlawed" weapons in Fallujah. The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Fallujah or anywhere else in Iraq.”
One observer noted “soon this site will have to be updated every few hours to keep up with the doublespeak.”
The “Baghdad Burning” weblog has a very good, sobering commentary on the white phosphorus revelation at http:/
2005_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#113218124805731713
December 27, 2005 - The Progressive Review
DAVID SWANSON - Last week, [Rep. John Conyers] released a 273-page report titled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War." This 273-page report covers many war-related crimes, including the use of white phosphorous. On page 165, following discussion of other crimes against humanity, the report states:
"Finally, there is evidence that the U.S. Military used an incendiary weapon in combat known as White Phosphorus, even though the U.S. Battle Book states, '[i]t is against the Law of Land Warfare to employ WP against personnel targets,' and which would be in contravention of the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the War Crimes Act.". . .
As George Monbiot makes clear in the Guardian, a chemical weapon is illegal, according to the Chemical Weapons Convention, regardless of whether the people targeted with it are civilians. "The Pentagon argues that white phosphorus burns people," Monbiot wrote, "rather than poisoning them, and is therefore covered only by the protocol on incendiary weapons, which the U.S. has not signed. But white phosphorus is both incendiary and toxic."
http:/
http:/
al-Qaeda’s role in 9/11
http:/
/ usinfo.state.gov/ media/ Archive/ 2005/ Jan/ 14-610042.html
Al Qaeda Says They Carried Out September 11th Attacks
Allegations doubting Al Qaeda involvement proven false
In a videotape broadcast on October 30, 2004, Osama bin Laden unequivocally admitted that he and al Qaeda had planned and directed the September 11 attacks.http:/
/ usinfo.state.gov/ media/ Archive/ 2005/ Jan/ 24-318760.html
Did the U.S. "Create" Osama bin Laden?
Allegations that the U.S. provided funding for bin Laden proved inaccurate
Walter Cronkite told CNN’s Larry King on October 29, 2004, after seeing this video of Osama taking credit for 9/11, that he was “a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing.” http:/
Journalist Wayne Madsen wrote an excellent analysis of the significance of this video “Waking Up From Our Global Nightmare,” archived at
http:/
The State Department “misinformation” website ignores well-documented financial connections between the Bush and bin Laden clans that go back more than two decades. James Hatfield, in a July 3, 2001 article titled “Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill Dubya, his former business partner?” detailed some of these business ties. http:/
The Carlyle Group, a secretive international financial organization, had the Bush and the bin Laden families as key investors before 9/11. When the planes hit the towers, bin Laden family members were at a Carlyle meeting at the Ritz Carlton hotel a few blocks from the White House. (“Crossing the Rubicon,” p. 129)
The BBC documentary “The Power of Nightmares” (2004) concluded that “al Qaeda” as an organization did not really exist before 9/11.
“The terrible truth was that there was nothing there because Al Qaeda as an organisation did not exist. The attacks on America had been planned by a small group that had come together around bin Laden in the late 90s. .... the real danger was the way this idea could inspire groups and individuals around the world who had no relationship to each other. In looking for an organisation, the Americans and the British were chasing a phantom enemy and missing the real threat.”
Unfortunately, “The Power of Nightmares” avoided the issue of how the Bush regime deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, but otherwise is one of the most powerful examinations of how the terrorist “threat” has been systematically exaggerated by those seeking to maintain their own power.
Crossing the Rubicon is structured as an investigation of the “motive, means, and opportunity” for exposing the crimes of 9/11. There are certainly many forces in the Islamic world that have the motive to attack the United States in retaliation for its policies in the Middle East, but al-Qaeda did not have the means and opportunity to accomplish the attacks of September 11. The fact that someone takes credit for a crime is not proof that they perpetrated it, since there can be many political and psychological motivations. Whatever role the bin Laden organization had in 9/11, it is clear that the culpability is not exclusively theirs.
Chapter 12 of Crossing the Rubicon documents how multiple FBI investigations that could have prevented 9/11 were sabotaged by Special Agent Dave Frasca of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters. al-Qaeda does not have the means or opportunity to disable this normal function of government to protect against terror attacks.
Crossing the Rubicon shows how multiple war game exercises were scheduled at the same time as the actual “attacks” and that these simulations helped paralyze the air defenses over New York and Washington. al-Qaeda does not have the means or opportunity to control Air Force and intelligence agency exercises. Osama bin Laden also does not have the power to promote those in charge of air defenses or to ensure that the so-called independent Commission set up to examine 9/11 would cover-up the facts.
An anonymous report written by an intelligence insider on September 11 (“Peeling the Onion”) suggested that the bin Laden group may have been manipulated:
“The onion [US / CIA, Pakistan, Taliban, bin Laden] provides plausible deniability. Assistance will be provided through cooperating elements of Pakistani intelligence and then through cooperating elements in the Taliban to bin Laden and perhaps on to elements of Laden's network operating without his direct control. The network cell conducting the operation will be suicide squads, perhaps recruited from the Palestinian population. Deniability for everyone and obliteration for the perpetrators. Pretty clean all around.
“Laden will never know that he is a pawn of the U.S. national security state. He will believe that Allah has suddenly blessed him with resources and capability that previously eluded him.” archived at www.oilempire.us/qaeda.html
In the 9/11 truth movement, a false dichotomy emerged between those who think that the government “Let it happen on purpose” (LIHOP) and those argue it was completely an inside job. While the full details of precisely how 9/11 was perpetrated may forever remain unknown, the most likely scenario is a combination of LIHOP and “inside job.” A hybrid scenario that fits the known evidence is "hijacking the hijackers." In this view, the hijackers were allowed to finish their preparations, board the planes, hijack the cockpits but then remote control technology was used to ensure that the planes not only completed their missions but also did not strike targets (Indian Point nuclear power station, north of New York City and the other parts of the Pentagon that were full of people) that would have caused even more damage. This hybrid scenario is described in more detail at “Understanding 9/11 paradigms.” www.oilempire.us/lihop-mihop.html
http:/
/ rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/ 2004/ 10/ skinny-on-osama.html
I've long thought that if we assume a decision had been taken to let it happen, then we should expect that measures were be taken to ensure it happened precisely as desired, and spectacularly so. With so much at stake, nothing would be left to the skill and luck of the 19 hijackers. Flight 77's 270 degree turn to hit the ground floor of the virtually unoccupied side of the Pentagon, while supposedly piloted by the grossly incompetent Hani Hanjour, is the most striking example. The recent report that the WTC black boxes were recovered after all, is suggestive of the same: that the data conflicted somehow with the received fiction. Perhaps the hijackers were themselves hijacked. [emphasis added]from Nicholas Levis, 911truth.org:
"Staging 9/11 as an inside job is going to work best (in fact, is likely to work only) if there actually exists an active network of anti-American terrorists who are deeply committed to killing Americans in response to U.S. policy. In other words, those who would blame Qaeda need a (relatively) real Qaeda. A partly-real enemy is much better than an entirely fabricated one.
"The most robust way for insider masterminds to stage 9/11 and get away with it is to arrange for their agents to infiltrate among "real foreign terrorists." Let them come up with their own plots (or plant plots among them), choose a plot that will produce the results desired by the masterminds, and see that through to fruition. At some point, the masterminds and their agents will hijack the plot from the would-be hijackers, to make sure it happens. You won't risk the whole game on the ability of amateurs to get away with it, you will help them along or even replace them (with a remote control hijacking, for example). But it's best to have "real terrorists" in play. They leave a more solid trail of evidence internationally. Cops and agents and academics of two dozen countries can honestly confirm the existence of an al-Qaeda network. That way there is less need to initiate outside observers into the plot and you don't have to hope they are all stupid, as they would have to be to fall for a complete fabrication of "Qaeda." (Qaeda at this point is just a term of convenience for the Islamist extremist networks.)
"The best result would be for a whole bunch of Islamist extremists running around believing that their crew pulled off 9/11 all by themselves (how inspiring for them!). The patsies should believe they actually did it. This was the case with the Reichstag Fire and Marinus van der Lubbe: the patsy believed he had done it." [emphasis added]
The Reichstag Fire seems to be the closest historical parallel to 9/11, where the perpetrator / patsy was allowed to try to commit the crime, but the full crime was actually done by a faction of the secret police. www.oilempire.us/reichstag-fire.html
Smearing Skeptics as Anti-Semites
The State Department webpage “The 4,000 Jews Rumor” at http:/
This page ostensibly is an effort to refute the hoax that 4,000 Jews, or 4,000 Israelis, were warned not to go to work at the WTC on 9/11, thereby showing Israeli involvement (or complicity) in the attacks. The State Department cites the bin Laden videotape of October 2004 to disprove Israeli involvement (Israeli foreknowledge is carefully avoided by this effort). The anonymous authors at the State Department say:
Vague conspiracy theories blaming Israel began to appear within 24 hours of the attacks. Syria's government-owned Al Thawra newspaper may have been the first newspaper to make the "4,000 Jews" claim. According to U.S. embassy reporting, its September 15th edition falsely claimed "four thousand Jews were absent from their work on the day of the explosions."
The 4,000 figure apparently came from an article entitled "Hundreds of Israelis missing in WTC attack" which appeared in the September 12th internet edition of the Jerusalem Post. It stated, "The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attacks."
Unknown conspiracy theorists apparently seized upon the 4,000 figure, transforming it into the false claim that 4,000 Jews did not report for work at the World Trade Center on September 11.
In this article, the State Department references the Jerusalem Post article at fpp.co.uk, the website of Holocaust Denier and pseudo-historian David Irving. (FPP is Focal Point Publications, which is Irving’s organization.) In other words, a United States Government media campaign dedicated to refuting “misinformation” is promoting a notorious neo-Nazi promoting Holocaust Denial without even mentioning his political affiliation and his efforts to promote lies about the Nazi genocides. Is Irving’s website really the only place to find this article by Jerusalem Post? Does the State Department consider Irving a reliable source of information? Or is the State Department trying to bait 9/11 skeptics to think of Irving’s website as a credible source of information about 9/11? (Note: the Jerusalem Post, a publication with extensive connections to the neo-conservatives, has an on-line archive that goes back to the late 1990s, but this September 12, 2001 article is not accesible from their archives.)
Irving, like several other Holocaust deniers, has published information about 9/11 complicity that might be true, but is unverifiable. He published a claim that Condolezza Rice was the source who warned then San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown not to fly on 9/11 (the September 12, 2001 San Francisco Chronicle published a story noting that Brown had been cautioned the night before not to fly to New York City on 9/11, but Brown has never revealed who warned him). It is plausible that Rice was his source (she probably knew him from her tenure at Stanford and on the board of San Francisco based Chevron corporation), but it is unlikely that proof will ever be made public. If Rice really was Brown’s source, then leaking the truth to a famous racist would be a great means to discredit the information.
From the Wilderness editor Jamey Hecht wrote in a public letter to the Anti-Defamation League that “Those who believed the rumor think they needn't look further, and those who rejected it think the same, for opposite reasons.” www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/101304_open_letters.shtml
The “4,000 Jews” story distracted from well documented evidence of foreknowledge. Many of the US’s closest allies provided extremely specific information in advance. www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?
timeline=complete_911_timeline&before_9/11=foreignIntelligence and www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essaytheytriedtowarnus.html are excellent references to this material.
Mainstream news sources document that a few people were warned not to fly or to get out of the way. Barbara Bush’s book Reflections: Life After The White House stated
“my nephew Jim Pierce narrowly escaped injury or possible death. He was scheduled to attend a meeting on the 102nd floor of the South Tower, which was the second building hit. However, the night before, the meeting was moved to an adjacent building because the group had outgrown the conference room.
an excerpt is posted at http:// msnbc.msn.com/ id/ 3225746/ site/ newsweek/
Newsweek also reported two weeks after 9/11 that “On Sept. 10.... a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.” Like most suspicious evidence about 9/11 in the mainstream media, there was not ever any follow-up.
The “4,000 Jews warned” story was a great false target for media attention to distract from a lot of evidence for foreknowledge (and consciously allowing it to happen). Since about one-third of New York is Jewish, having a lot of anti-semites promote information about 9/11 complicity was a brilliant technique to discourage many of the victims and bystanders from questioning the official story. Some of the websites now promoting disinformation about 9/11 complicity (fake claims that distract from real evidence) are also advocates of Holocaust Denial, which ensures that most Bush opponents will shy away from the embedded truths about 9/11 in the websites. www.oilempire.us/holocaust-denial.html discusses in detail how Holocaust Deniers are inserting disinformation into the 9/11 truth movement.
One curious fact that might or might not be relevant is the towers were less than half full when attacked. Figures vary, but the WTC had between 15,000 and 25,000 people inside at 8:46 am on 9/11 -- on a normal workday at least 50,000 people worked there. However, one WTC employee that I personally know of (a low-level computer operator) merely had not arrived at work and saw the events from a distance.
The idea that thousands in the towers would have been specifically warned makes no sense considering the perpetrators could not risk letting lots of people know what was going to happen. Warning more than a tiny handful of people would have risked exposing the operation. The fact that Barbara Olsen, wife of US Solictor Ted Olsen, was on the doomed Flight 77, suggests that very few actually were warned, and it was her bad luck to be caught up in the events. Once trapped on board, there was nothing anyone could have done to save her despite her loyalty to the regime. Her fate is reminiscent of a story from the Nazi death camp at Treblinka -- a German non-Jewish woman and her sons accidentally got on a train that took German Jews to the camp. According to survivors, she protested that she was not Jewish and her husband was a military officer. But she and her sons were killed anyway, since there was no way she could have been allowed to return to Germany with knowledge of the terrible truth.
Karl Rove paradigm: muddy the waters with fake evidence
Sifting through the volumes of 9/11 evidence is analogous to archeology. Only some of the evidence for the distant ancestors of all living beings has been unearthed and catalogued. However, the fact that the currently known fossil record is incomplete does not prevent science from attempting to determine patterns and draw tentative conclusions about the history of life on Earth, knowing that additional evidence is likely to alter the story as we gain further knowledge.
The early days of archeology saw spectacular forgeries "revealed" by unscrupulous advocates of particular theories, which parallels current efforts to distract and discredit 9/11 skeptics with disinformation. Some religious fundamentalists are now engaged in bizarre efforts to “prove” that the fossil record is consistent with a timeline for the Earth being about 6,000 years old, which shows the depths of distortion that some will use to discredit physical evidence.
It is unlikely that any story of 9/11 is 100% true, and hopefully enough of the documentation will be made public in the years to come - and enough whistleblowers step forward - so that historians will be able to more fully explain what happened to the United States of America.
The official story of 9/11 is dependent on bogus evidence to support a conspiracy theory -- the claim that 19 guys directed by a wealthy dialysis patient in a cave in Afghanistan managed to outwit the largest military and intelligence system in history, a system so incompetent that it needs a massive budget increase to protect the public from a repeat of the attack.
But a more subtle, different set of bogus evidence is also in wide circulation, making wild claims about official complicity based based on poor quality images, fraudulent photos, and misrepresentation of facts. This material masquerades as investigative journalism, but is largely devoid of verifiable evidence (some of it does include real facts to establish the bona fides of the disseminator to make the hoaxes more palatable to the reader). The volume of this disinformation became increasingly prominent as the 9/11 Truth Movement experienced political successes in persuading larger numbers of people that 9/11 was not a surprise attack.
White House advisor Karl Rove is famous for his skills with dirty tricks to sabotage political campaigns. Perhaps the most widely recognized Rove success was the allegedly fake memos given to CBS (see BS?) News in September, 2004 that documented how George W. Bush went AWOL from the Air National Guard. Those memos were immediately proclaimed to be fake after CBS used them, and in the ensuing brouhaha, the AWOL story was completely discredited even though the facts were correct. It would have been much harder for Rove to steal the 2004 election if the reality of the AWOL scandal had been taken seriously by the media, and using this faked, but true evidence was a successful gamble to immunize his candidate from these explosive facts.
The film Horns and Haloes documents the effort in 1999 and 2000 by writer Jim Hatfield to publish his book “Fortunate Son,” a biography of George W. Bush. Rove was a source for Hatfield’s revelation that Bush had indeed used cocaine as a younger man, but when the book was published, the media focused instead on Hatfield’s past, not Bush’s. Hatfield had served time in prison for attempted murder, and leaking the story to a writer with a criminal record was a very cynical strategy to neutralize the impact of Bush’s drug use.
Similar tactics were also used to wreck the “JFK Truth Movement,” the independent investigators who examined the assassination of President Kennedy. Perhaps the most notorious is the case of Charles Spiesel, a surprise witness for the prosecution who popped up during the trial of Clay Shaw (as depicted in the film JFK by Oliver Stone). On the witness stand, Mr. Spiesel admitted having heard Shaw discuss plans for the assassination with Lee Harvey Oswald and other conspirators. Under cross examination, he stated that he fingerprinted his daughter before she went to college and after she returned, to make sure she was the same person. Jim Garrison, the prosecuting attorney, wrote in his memoir “On the Trail of the Assassins”
I realized that the clandestine operation of the opposition was so cynical, so sophisticated, and, at the same time, so subtle, that destroying an old-fashioned state jury trial was very much like shooting fish in a barrel with a shotgun. .... it was clear by now that no jury would find an eminently respectable, prominent, distinguished community leader guilty of conspiring to kill the President, especially following an unforgettable example of genuine lunatic testimony from a prosecution witness."
This disinformation strategy is used to coverup many crimes of State. It is very effective, but not very creative, since the same approach is used over and over. Its practioners are like a musician with a one string guitar connected to a very loud amplifier -- they can’t play many notes, but everyone hears their noise.
The “Two Front War” for truth
http:/
/ cuban-exile.com/ doc_001-025/ doc0019b.html
The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi
The first question I tried to get approved was the one by experience in investigating the case had dictated as a priority: Was there an intelligence agency connection through anti-Castro Cubans and Oswald to the Kennedy assassination? That, I knew, would never pass muster because of the investigative approach and effort it would require. By the nature of its operations, an intelligence agency doesn't leave authentic tracks. One had to look for patterns. The issue I wanted to pursue involved the patterns of verified misinformation -- almost all linking Oswald to Castro -- which were born in Miami immediately after the assassination.
Propaganda Patterns, a report at www.oilempire.us/propaganda.html, is an effort to analyze the patterns of disinformation used to discredit serious investigation and exposure of numerous crimes, including 9/11. This analysis shows that the best evidence is usually in the middle between the “limited hang outs” (efforts to partially expose that ensure the full truths stay concealed) and distracting disinformation (efforts that encourage those drawn to limited hang outs not to probe deeper).
Most activists who have made efforts to spread information about official complicity in 9/11 have experienced the reluctance of many to face these truths, even among liberal opponents of the Bush regime. Many who have been active is discussing this evidence have been the recipient of similar psychological strategies by advocates of disinformation claims, urging deeper and deeper examination. The history of the “COINTELPRO” campaign contains countless examples where activists were encouraged to prove how radical they were, with the result that they alienated themselves from their allies. With 9/11 investigation efforts, it is important to ensure that ones suspicions mesh with documented evidence.
www.questionsquestions.net/WTC/review.html
A Critical Review of WTC 'No Plane' Theories
by Eric Salter
28 September 2005
It should go without saying that an investigation of a conspiracy like 9/11 will always be a two-front war against disinformation. On one side are the gatekeepers pursuing a limited hangout. On the other side are crackpots and disinfo agents pushing bogus, discrediting evidence. Weeding out bogus claims is neither gatekeeping nor censorship but an absolutely critical activity. [emphasis added]
Bad intentions and reverse psychology
Sometimes, it can be difficult to discern the intentions of family members and friends. Determining the motivations of website authors publishing inaccurate material is almost impossible
Many websites, publications, books and movies that contain erroneous 9/11 information about 9/11 complicity issues are well-meaning and merely have been fooled by some of the hoaxes -- but good intentions do not make the claims true. Many 9/11 websites that claim to have proof about 9/11 complicity promote claims that are not true -- some of these sites are incompetent, a few appear to be promoting nonsense deliberately. Most of the liars make sure to include enough real material to establish their bona fides before lying.
Some of the false claims about 9/11 conspiracy are probably disinformation to smother actual evidence with distracting nonsense, but some are possibly created (or at least echoed) by people without fact-checking skills. These increasingly wilder stories make truth seeking far more difficult. These smokescreens obscure public examination of a large body of incriminating evidence that is proven beyond reasonable doubt plus other evidence that has good standards but is not totally proven.
The REAL evidence that 9/11 was an inside job is hard to find due to loud liars offering phony evidence used to distract (and discredit) 9/11 skeptics. The growing flood of fake claims for complicity is evidence of a sophisticated psychological warfare effort to cover the tracks of the conspiracy.
Blurry photos that magically appear years later, just as the 9/11 truth movement grows in popularity and political influence, are not evidence if there is not a “chain of custody” proving the images authentic. Just because someone says "inside job" does not mean that their theories of what happened, whether well-intentioned or malicious, are proven or even provable.
Many, if not most of the people echoing these hoaxes are sincere in their beliefs - but their sincerity doesn't make these claims true, nor does it mitigate the ridicule factor that the hoaxes generate among the majority of the public. The idea that 9/11 was an inside job is a difficult enough point of view to advocate for the majority of people in the United States without making the thesis dependent on blurry images or other fraudulent types of evidence -- it is critical to focus on the claims that are proven beyond reasonable doubt, with the highest quality documented evidence.
There will never be complete agreement in the 9/11 truth movement given the widely varying quality of standards used by different people, the complete lack of peer review, and the presence of hoaxers trying to keep people off balance. It's more productive to persuade people outside the "truth movement" about the best evidence, and caution them about the hoaxes.
In early 2002, Kelia Ramares, a journalist at KPFA-FM / Pacifica Radio, wrote a blistering critique of syndicated columnist Norman Solomon’s “gatekeeping” efforts to discourage Pacifica from covering evidence of 9/11 complicity:
“You are leveraging your reputation in the community to commit character assassination against Ruppert, knowing it is highly unlikely anyone will call you on it.”
-- Kelia Ramares letter to Norman Solomon and Steve Rendall of FAIR
It is hard to know what Solomon’s intentions were in defending the official “surprise attack” story, although the timing of his attack (just as the evidence of foreknowledge was becoming more widely known) is suspicious.
But there is no ambiguity about the State Department’s intentions. Their “misinformation” campaign is doing the exact opposite that Mr. Solomon was doing -- the State Department is leveraging their lack of credibility among critics of US government policies to ensure that skeptics focus on the hoaxes and avoid the provable evidence. The State Department knows that anyone who suspects government collusion in 9/11 is unlikely to believe anything that they say -- and their choice of targets reflects a curious focus on the speculative and the bogus, apparently hoping that the skeptics would see this emphasis as a reason to embrace the claims that are “debunked” by the State Department.
http:/
/ rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/ 2005/ 10/ left-right-and-wrong.html
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2005
The Left, the Right, and the Wrong
Last July 27, the US State Department very thoughtfully posted a resource tool for journalists and media consumers entitled "How to Identify Misinformation." Though "there are no exact rules" to tell whether a story is true or false, the State Department offers clues. First among them, "Does the story fit the pattern of a conspiracy theory?"Does the story claim that vast, powerful, evil forces are secretly manipulating events? If so, this fits the profile of a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are rarely true, even though they have great appeal and are often widely believed. In reality, events usually have much less exciting explanations.
The U.S. military or intelligence community is a favorite villain in many conspiracy theories.
To demonstrate a pattern of falsity, the "counter-misinformation team" provides links to just three of the "many conspiracy theory websites which contain a great deal of unreliable information": Rense.com, Joe Vialls and Conspiracy Planet ....Consider its solitary example of 9/11 conspiracy theory: Thierry Meyssan's Pentagon cruise missile. I've written numerous times here what I think of the supposition that something other than Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. Regardless of what any of us think, it remains the most divisive wedge issue and energy sink for 9/11 activists. Of course the State Department would draw attention to it, to the neglect of all others. No mention of insider trading, squelched investigations and coincident wargames. The "counter-misinformation team" is trying to proscribe counter-information by accentuating the preposterous. Meyssan's work becomes, in a sense, "approved" conspiracy theory, because it's the only one to receive official recognition. Not only in this State Department publication, but in virtually every mainstream treatment of alternative appraisals of 9/11 the "no plane" theory still takes pride of place. (A similar process is occurring with respect to reports of Katrina "conspiracy theory," in which soft rumours of the levees being blown take precedence over hard analysis of the intentional withholding of aid.)
What the State Department is doing by holding up these sites - one, Vialls, rather obscure - as exemplars of "conspiracy theory," is to administer a poison pill to contrary analysis. To the poor journalist or media consumer taking cues from the "counter-misinformation team," it will appear as though conspiracy theory has an essential core of anti-semitism.
Meyssan and Rumsfeld manufacture the missile hoax
The "no Boeing hit the Pentagon" claim is the most important and widespread 9/11 hoax. It was probably set up before the event since government agents seized surveillance camera videos within minutes of the crash (which is evidence for foreknowledge, but not for “no plane”). It is extremely unlikely that the conspirators who allowed (and assisted) 9/11 would not have taken care to create misdirecting hoaxes before the "attack," since they are very aware that large segments of the population would have suspicions about the events and therefore they would "need" to disrupt skeptical inquiry with red herrings, hoaxes, false dichotomies, etc.
This hoax is based on misrepresentation of photos taken shortly after the crash, ignoring of physical evidence and documented reports from hundreds of eyewitnesses who saw the plane. There is NO credible, verifiable evidence in support of ANY of the many and varied "theories" pretending that a plane did not crash into the Pentagon, and therefore, 9/11 was an inside job. See www.oilempire.us/pentagon.html for details.
It was first floated in early October 2001 by French author Thierry Meyssan and US War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Monsieur Meyssan started a webpage that suggested a plane did not hit the Pentagon on October 7, and Rumsfeld gave an interview to Parade magazine on October 12 where he said a "missile" hit the Pentagon. That "missile" quote was then used by many no plane advocates as part of the campaign to draw attention to this claim. Meyssan went on to create the "Hunt the Boeing" website and then published two books "The Horrifying Fraud" (published in English as "9/11 The Big Lie") and Pentagate. These books have been translated into a total of 28 languages, which ensures that they are the dominant version of the claim suggesting complicity or conspiracy that is seen around the world.
On September 4, 2004, two months before the pseudo Presidential election, Parade magazine claimed that this quote was a mis-statement and the sole source for the no plane hoaxes, thus dismissing 9/11 "truth" to an audience of millions of voters.
www.pentagate.info/revue-en.html
Chronologie
Lundi 8 octobre 2001 : le Réseau Voltaire publie sur son site internet « Les mystères de l'attentat contre le Pentagone ».translation: Monday October 8, 2001 - the Voltaire Network published on its internet site “The Mysteries of the attack on the Pentagon.”
This was the first website to suggest that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon.www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2001/t11182001_t1012pm.html
Friday, Oct. 12, 2001
Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Parade Magazine
(Interview with Lyric Wallwork Winik, Parade Magazine)
Q: This is a question that's been asked by many Americans, but especially by the widows of September 11th. How were we so asleep at the switch? How did a war targeting civilians arrive on our homeland with seemingly no warning?
Rumsfeld: There were lots of warnings. The intelligence information that we get, it sometimes runs into the hundreds of alerts or pieces of intelligence a week. One looks at the worldwide, it's thousands. And the task is to sort through it and see what you can find. And as you find things, the law enforcement officials who have the responsibility to deal with that type of thing -- the FBI at the federal level, and although it is not, it's an investigative service as opposed to a police force, it's not a federal police force, as you know. But the state and local law enforcement officials have the responsibility for dealing with those kinds of issues.
They [find a lot] and any number of terrorist efforts have been dissuaded, deterred or stopped by good intelligence gathering and good preventive work. It is a truth that a terrorist can attack any time, any place, using any technique and it's physically impossible to defend at every time and every place against every conceivable technique. Here we're talking about plastic knives and using an American Airlines flight filed with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Center.www.parade.com/aol/current/columns/intelligence.html
Parade magazine, September 4, 2004
In this week's "Intelligence Report," Lyric Wallwork Winik writes that 9/11 conspiracy theories are growing and that people from all walks of life believe them. How do these theories get started? ....
The Internet, too, is a potent tool for spreading conspiracy theories. PARADE found this out after Lyric Wallwork Winik interviewed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Oct. 2001. In a transcript of Winik's interview with Rumsfeld, which was published on the Department of Defense's Web site, Rumsfeld seemed to indicate that the Pentagon was hit by a missile on 9/11 instead of a plane. It turns out that a transcription error led to the confusion, but conspiracy theorists latched onto Rumsfeld's supposed admission and spread it over the Internet.
If this was really a “transcription error,” then why does the official Pentagon news service still have this quote on their website? Rummy’s “missile” quote was probably bait to set up the “no plane” hoax.
“REPORTS THAT say something hasn’t happened are interesting to me, because as we know, there are known unknowns; there are things we know we know.We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
-- Donald Rumsfeld
Physical Evidence: the hole in the “no plane” theories
The loudest claim for the no plane hoax is that the "hole" in the facade of the Pentagon was supposedly too small to have been created by a 757. Many of these claims state that photos taken during the half hour between the crash and the collapse of that part of the building show a hole merely 16 to 18 feet across. However, these photos show only the area hit by the fuselage of the plane, and the larger damage caused by the rest of the plane is obscured by firefighting foam and smoke. The hole on the ground floor (where most of the plane hit) is about 90 feet wide, with additional damage caused by the wingtips visible for tens of feet beyond the hole. The impact on the outside of the building was the size and shape of the cross-section of a 757. A number of photos and reconstructions documenting these facts are linked from www.oilempire.us/pentagon.html
http:/
/ 911research.wtc7.net/ essays/ pentagontrap.html
The Pentagon No-757-Crash Theory:
Booby Trap for 9/11 Skeptics
by Jim Hoffman October 7, 2004
The idea that no 757 crashed at the Pentagon is easily the most controversial and divisive issue among researchers of the 9/11/01 attacks. Effectively promoted since early 2002, this idea has enjoyed an increasing acceptance in the 9/11 Truth Movement, despite its blatant incompatibility with the extensive body of eyewitness evidence that a 757-like twin-engine jetliner flew into the Pentagon and exploded.
Many researchers have ignored or dismissed this eyewitness evidence in favor of a seemingly overwhelming physical evidence case that no 757 crashed at the Pentagon, based on photographs of the crash site. As I show below, however, each of the pieces evidence adduced in favor of the no-757-crash theory can be reconciled with the crash of a 757.
Hoaxes Hidden in Plain Sight
The State Department campaign simultaneously cites rense.com as unreliable and as a source to debunk the no plane hoax.
http:/
/ usinfo.state.gov/ media/ Archive/ 2005/ Jul/ 27-595713.html
There are many conspiracy theory websites, which contain a gr
THE WAR AT HOME:U.S. MILITARY CIVIL DISTURBANCE PLANNING By Frank Morales
April 30, 2010 by StayFree
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ORIGINS OF OPERATION GARDEN PLOT:
THE KERNER COMMISSION
"Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave."
--Frederick Douglass,
Rochester, New York is the former home of Frederick Douglass¼s, North Star newspaper. In 1964, it erupted in one of the first large-scale urban outbursts of the decade. Precipitated by white police violence against the black community, the July uprising lasted several days, subsiding only after the arrival of 1500 National Guardsmen. In "the fall of 1964, the FBI, at the direction of President Johnson, began to make riot control training available to local police departments, and by mid-1967 such training assistance had been extended to more than 70,000 officials and civilians."(2)
On July 29, 1967, President Johnson issued Executive Order 11365, establishing the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. It is more commonly known as the Kerner Commission, named for it¼s chair, former Major General, and then Governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner. The creation of the commission came hot on the heels of the violence in Detroit, a conflict which left 43 dead, several hundred wounded and over 5,000 people homeless. Johnson sent troubleshooter Cyrus Vance, later Secretary of Defense, as his personal observer to Detroit. The commission issued its¼ final report, completed in less than a year, on March 1, 1968.
Although the Kerner Commission has over the years become associated with a somewhat benign, if not benevolent character, codifying the obvious, "we live in two increasingly separate America¼s" etc., the fact is that the commission itself was but one manifestation of a massive military/police counter-insurgency effort directed against US citizens, hatched in an era of emergent post-Vietnam "syndrome" coupled with elite fears of domestic insurrection.While the movement chanted for peace and revolution, rebellious, angry and destructive urban uprisings were occurring with alarming frequency, usually the result of the usual spark, police brutality, white on black crime. The so-called urban riots of 1967-1968 were the zenith, during this period, of social and class conflict. "More than 160 disorders occurred in some 128 American cities in the first nine months of 1967."(3)
The executive order establishing the commission called for an investigation of "the origins of the recent major civil disorders and the influence, if any, of organizations or individuals dedicated to the incitement or encouragement of violence."(4) The work of the commission was funded from President Johnson¼s "Emergency Fund." The executive order sought recommendations in three general areas: "short term measures to prevent riots, better measures to contain riots once they begin, and long term measures to eliminate riots in the future."(5) Their two immediate aims were "to control and repress black rioters using almost any available means", (6) and to assure white America that everything was in hand. Commission members included Charles B. Thorton, Chairman and CEO, Litton Industries, member of the Defense Industry Advisory Council to the DoD and the National Security Industrial Association, John L. Atwood, President and CEO, North American Rockwell Corporation ("Commission Advisor on Private Enterprise"), and Herbert Jenkins, Atlanta Chief of Police and President of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
During the early stages of staff recruitment, commission Deputy Executive Director Victor H. Palmieri "described the process as a war strategy"(7) and so he might given the overwhelming presence within the commission and its¼ consultants of military and police officials. One quarter of over 200 consultants listed were big-city police chiefs, like Daryl F. Gates, former chief LAPD. Numerous police organizations, including the heavily funded Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (financiers of SWAT), guided the commission¼s deliberations. No less than 30 police departments were represented on or before the commission by their chiefs or deputy chiefs.
A key player within the commission, "consultant" Anthony Downs, stated at the time that, "it would be far cheaper to repress future large-scale urban violence through police and military action than to pay for effective programs against remaining poverty." (8) As for the military, twelve generals, representing various branches of the armed services appeared before the commission or served as contractors. The commission¼s "Director of Investigations", Milan C. Miskovsky, was "on leave as assistant general counsel of the treasury, and formerly connected to the Central Intelligence Agency."(9)
The Kerner Commission¼s "study" of "civil disorder" lead directly to (civilian) recommendations regarding the role of the military in domestic affairs. The report dutifully "commends the Army for the advanced status of its training." Further, it states that "the Department of the Army should participate fully in efforts to develop nonlethal weapons and personal protective equipment appropriate for use in civil disorders." In addition, "the Army should investigate the possibility of utilizing psychological techniques to ventilate hostility and lessen tension in riot control, and incorporate feasible techniques in training the Army and National Guard units."
THE ARMY AND CIVIL DISORDER
Under the heading, "Army Response To Civil Disorders", the commission report states that "the commitment of federal troops to aid state and local forces in controlling a disorder is an extraordinary actäAn Army staff task group has recently examined and reviewed a wide range of topics relating to military operations to control urban disorders: command and control, logistics, training, planning, doctrine, personnel, public information, intelligence, and legal aspects." The results of the Army brass¼s study was subsequently, "made known to the National Guard and to top state and local civil and law enforcement officers in order to stimulate review at the state and local level."(10)
The Army Task Force which assisted the Kerner Commission issued its¼ own report in early 1968. In it, the Pentagon took a multi-pronged approach to solving the civil disturbance problem. "Expanding the suggestion of Cyrus Vance, Military Intelligence ‚ working with the FBI, local, county and state police forces ‚ undertook a massive domestic intelligence gathering operationäthe Senior Officers Civil Disturbance Course was instituted at the Military Police Academy in GeorgiaäSecurity forces ranging from Army troops to local police were trained to implement their contingency plansäContingency plans, called planning packets, were prepared for every city in the country that had a potential for student, minority or labor unrest."(11)
In addition, "the Army Task Force that had designed this program took on a new name, the Directorate of Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations. The Army Task Force transformation into the Directorate occurred during the massive rioting that broke out in black ghettos of 19 cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968."(12) At that time "seven army infantry brigades, totaling 21,000 troops were available for riot duty. And a hugh, sophisticated computer center kept track of all public outbursts of political dissent, thereby furnishing the first of the Army Task Force¼s prescribed remedies: intelligence."(13)
By June of 1968, the Directorate had become the Directorate of Military Support, setting up shop in the basement of the Pentagon. "Better known as the domestic war room, the Directorate had 150 officials to carry out around-the-clock monitoring of civil disorders, as well as to oversee federal troop deployments when necessary. At the cost of $2.7 million, this massive directorate also developed policy advice for the secretary of the Army on all disturbances and maintained intelligence packets on all major U.S. cities."(14)
Even though the full extent of US military intelligence activities during this period is far from generally known, "by 1968, many Justice Department personnel knew that the military was preparing to move in massively if needed to quash urban riots, and some officials feared the development of a large national military riot force. It was well known among top officials that the Department of Defense was spending far more funds than the Justice Department on civil disorder preparationsäindicative of the growing trend at the federal level toward repression and control of the urban black rioters."(15)
By 1971, Senator Sam Ervin, later of Watergate reknown, had convened his Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights which "revealed that Military Intelligence had established an intricate surveillance system covering hundreds of thousands of American citizens. Committee staff members had seen a master plan - Garden Plot ‚ that gave an eagle eye view of the Army-National Guard-police strategy."(16) "At first, the Garden Plot exercises focused primarily on racial conflict. But beginning in 1970, the scenarios took a different twist. The joint teams, made up of cops, soldiers and spies, began practicing battle with large groups of protesters. California, under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, was among the most enthusiastic participants in Garden Plot war games."(17)
As time went on, "Garden Plot evolved into a series of annual training exercises based on contingency plans to undercut riots and demonstrations, ultimately developed for every major city in the United States. Participants in the exercises included key officials from all law enforcement agencies in the nation, as well as the National Guard, the military, and representatives of the intelligence communityäAccording to the plan, joint teams would react to a variety of scenarios based on information gathered through political espionage and informants. The object was to quell urban unrestä"(18)
Unrest of a different sort took place on the evening of February 27th 1973. At that time, a group of Native Americans occupied a trading post in the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. By the 2nd of March the takeover had "triggered the army contingency plan for domestic disturbances. Emergency Plans White ‚ now coded as Garden Plot ‚ brought the Army into South DakotaäThree army colonels, disguised as civilians, and reconnaissance planes assisted", while "the Justice Department used the army to conduct intelligence for civilian law enforcement around Wounded Knee."(19) Information on other instances in which Garden Plot was "triggered" over the intervening years is presently locked in Pentagon vaults.
In essence, the contemporary roots of militarized efforts to suppress domestic rebellion lie in the US Army¼s master plan, Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, Garden Plot. Since at least 1968, the military has expended billions of dollars in this effort. The plan is operative right now, most recently during and after the Los Angeles uprising of 1992. A view into details of this plan is possible by way of an examination of United States Air Force Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, Garden Plot which is the "implementing" and "supporting plan for the Department of the Army (DA) Civil Disturbance Plan - GARDEN PLOT ‚ dated 1 March 1984 (which) provides for the employment of USAF forces in civil disturbances." It is specifically drawn up "to support the Secretary of the Army, as DOD Executive Agent for civil disturbance control operations (nicknamed GARDEN PLOT), with airlift and logistical support, in assisting civil authorities in the restoration of law and order through appropriate military commanders in the 50 States, District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and US possessions and territories, or any political subdivision thereof." The plan "is effective for planning on receipt and for execution on order."(20)
U.S. AIR FORCE 55-2 - GARDEN PLOT
"The long title of the plan is United States Air Force Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, Employment of USAF Forces in Civil Disturbances. The short title of this document is USAF Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2. The nickname assigned by Department of the Army is GARDEN PLOT." It's dated July 11, 1984.
The plan opens with some basic "assumptions", namely that "civil disturbances requiring intervention with military forces may occur simultaneously in any of the 50 States, District of Columbia, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, US possessions and territories." And like the current situation in Vieques, Puerto Rico, "civil disturbances will normally develop over a period of time." In the event it evolves into a confrontational situation, under Garden Plot, it is a "presidential executive order" that "will authorize and direct the Secretary of Defense to use the Armed Forces of the United States to restore law and order."
According to the Air Force plan, the military will attempt "to suppress rebellion whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impractical to enforce the laws of the United States in any state or territory by the ordinary course of judicial proceedingsä(10 USC 332)". Applying its¼ own version of equal protection under the law, the military can intervene "when insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combinations, or conspiracies in a state so hinder or obstruct the execution of the laws as to deprive individuals of their Constitutional rights, privileges, and immunities or when the insurrection impedes the due course of justice, and only when the constituted authorities of the state are unable, fail or refuse to protect that right, privilege, immunity, or to give that protection (10 USC 333)." In other words, the Army makes an offer of "protection" that the citizenry can¼t refuse.
T.Alden Williams, in a sympathetic 1969 treatment of the Army in civil disturbances, put it this way: "Where officials have not shown determination, or have invited violence by predicting it, violence has developed. Hence, it follows that with few exceptions, serious riots are evidence of police failure and that, implicitly, it is at the point of police failure that states and their cities redeem their national constitutional guarantees and the Regular Army may be asked to intervene."(21) Some redemption.
According to the Air Force plan's "Classification Guidance", the roughly 200 page document "is UNCLASSIFIED and does not come within the scope of direction governing the protection of information affecting national security. Although it is UNCLASSIFIED, it is FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY as directed by AFR 12-30. This plan contains information that is of internal use to DOD and, through disclosure, would tend to allow persons to violate the law or hinder enforcement of the law." Consequently, the plan¼s "operations orders and operating procedures must be designed to provide the highest degree of security possible." Therefore "the entire staff should identify known or suspected opposition awareness of previous operations and operations plans", while "procedures should be designed to eliminate the suspect sources to the degree possible." And "in the event of organized oppositionäsome sort of advisory intelligence gathering capability should be assumed."
The Air Force document warns, under the heading of "Open Literature Threat", presaging current military discourse on "info-war", that "any information/document, though seemingly unclassified, which reveals information concerning this Plan is a threat to OPSEC (operational security)" This is especially true given the nature of the "Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Threat." Recognizing that, "prior to and during sustained military operations in Support of the Plan, the potential HUMINT threat could be considerable", the plan recommends that "every effort should be made to reduce vulnerability to this threat by adhering to OPSEC procedures and safeguarding Essential Elements of Friendly Information (EEFI)."
Under "Operations to be Conducted: Deployment", the Air Force plan states that "a civil disturbance condition (CIDCON) system which has been established to provide an orderly and timely increase in preparedness for designated forces to deploy for civil disturbances control operations, will be on an as required basis for USAF resources for such operations as aerial resupply, aerial reconnaisance, airborn psychological operations, command and control communications systems, aeromedical evacuation, helicopter and weather support." The Air Force does have some experience in this area. "In response to the US invasion of Cambodia, student unrest broke out. Under Operation Garden Plot, from 30 April through May 4, 1970, 9th Air Force airlift units transported civil disturbance control forces from Ft. Bragg to various locations throughout the eastern US."(22) In fact, two years earlier, "Air Force Reserve C-119 and C-124 units participated in Garden Plot operations set up to quell domestic strife that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King."(23)
Although the section on "Counterintelligence Targets and Requirements" is "omitted", the plan does specify its¼ targets, namely, those "disruptive elements, extremists or dissidents perpetrating civil disorder." A "civil disturbance" is defined as a "riot, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, or other disorders prejudicial to public law and order. The term civil disturbance includes all domestic conditions requiring the use of federal armed forces pursuant to the provisions of Chapter 15, Title 10, United States Code." Conditions precipitating Garden Plot activation are "those that threaten to reach or have reached such proportions that civil authorities cannot or will not maintain public order." As for legal authority, "the Constitution of the United States and numerous statutes provide the President with the authority to commit Federal military forces within the United StatesäDOD Directive 3025.12 provides guidance in committing Federal armed forces."
FORCE STRUCTURE
The "application of forces should be in the following order: local and state police, Army and (in support role) Air National Guard under State control, Federal civil law enforcement officials, federal military forces to include Army and (in support role) Air National Guard." According to the plan, "State Adjutants General prepare civil disturbance plans for the employment of National Guard units under state control." Specifically, "as a general rule for planning purposes, the minimum forces to be supported in any single objective area is 5,000. The maximum to be supported is 12,000 for any objective area other than Washington, DC and 18,000 for Washington, DC." The "objective areas" are "those specified by the Presidential Proclamation and Executive Order in which the Secretary of Defense has been directed to restore law and order", and as "further defined by the Letter of Instruction issued to Task Force Commanders by the Chief of Staff, US Army."
In order to avoid the unseemly implications of "martial law", "requirements for the commitment of Federal military forces will not result in the declaration of a National Emergency". In this regard, the "Public Affairs Objectives" include the development of "procedures for the public release of appropriate information regardingäcivil disturbance control operations." Media and other queries "concerning employment of control forcesämay be locally answered by an interim statement that the: Department of Defense policy is not to comment on plans concerning the possible employment of military units and resources to carry out assigned missions."
Concerning "Force Requirements", the plan states that, "US Army and Marine Corps units designated for civil disturbance operations will be trained, equipped and maintained in readiness for rapid deployment, (with) ten brigades, prepared for rapid deployment anywhere in CONUS. A Quick Reaction Force (QRF) will be considered to be on a 24 ‚ hour alert status and capable of attaining a CIDCON 4 status in 12 hoursä" Upon receipt of orders, "the Task Force Commander assumes operational control of the military ground forces assigned for employment in the objective area", including "specials operations assets." In case the soldiers are unfamiliar with "urban terrain", the "Defense Mapping Agency Topographic Center provides map services in support of civil disturbance planning and operations."
The "Summary of the Counterintelligence and Security Situation" states that "spontaneous civil disturbances which involve large numbers of persons and/or which continue for a considerable period of time, may exceed the capacity of local civil law enforcement agencies to suppress. Although this type of activity can arise without warning as a result of sudden, unanticipated popular unrest (past riots in such cities as Miami, Detroit and Los Angeles serve as examples) it may also result from more prolonged dissidence." USAF Garden Plot advises that "if military forces are called upon to restore order, they must expect to have only limited information available regarding the perpetrators, their motives, capabilities, and intentions. On the other hand, such events which occur as part of a prolonged series of dissident acts will usually permit the advance collection of that type of informationä"
The United States Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), "provides training programs and doctrine for civil disturbance operations to military services." The US Army Force Command (FORSCOM), "organizes, trains, and maintains in readiness Army forces for civil disturbance operations", while the Director of Military Support (DOMS), "conducts, on a no-notice basis, exercises which direct headquarters of uniformed services, appropriate CONUS command, and other DOD components, having GARDEN PLOT responsibilities to assume a simulated increased preparedness for specified forces." In addition, the DOMS, "maintains an around-the-clock civil disturbance command center to monitor incipient and on-going disturbances."
The document, the United States Air Force¼s "implementing plan" for the US Army¼s Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, Garden Plot, goes on to detail every aspect of military "suppression" of "rebellion against the authority of the United States", including who pays, who bills and how to secure "loans" to cover the costs "attributable to GARDEN PLOT." Ominously, under "Resources Employed Without Presidential Directive", the document states that when the "immediate employment of military resources is required in cases of sudden and unexpected civil disturbances or other emergencies endangering life or federal property, or disrupting the normal processes of Government, expenses incurred will be financed as a mission responsibility of the DOD component employing the military resources."
PENTAGON DIRECTIVES
Department of Defense Directive 3025.12, Military Assistance for Civil Disturbances (MACDIS) became effective on February 4, 1994 when signed by then Defense Secretary William Perry. It states that, "the President is authorized by the Constitution and laws of the United States to suppress insurrections, rebellions, and domestic violence under various conditions and circumstances. Planning and preparedness by the Federal Government and the Department of Defense for civil disturbances are important, do to the potential severity of the consequences of such events for the Nation and the population." Further, "the Secretary of the Army, as DoD Executive Agent, shall provide guidance to the other DoD Components, through DoD 3025.12-R, the DoD Civil Disturbance Plan (GARDEN PLOT), or both, in accordance with this Directive".
DoDD 3025.12 makes it clear that "MACDIS operations are unprogrammed emergency requirements for the Department of Defense", and that in order to "ensure essential control and sound management of all military forces employed in MACDIS operations, centralized direction from the DoD Executive Agent (the Army) shall guide planning by the DoD component." Thus, "MACDIS missions shall be decentralized through the DoD Planning Agents or other Joint Task Force Commanders only when specifically directed by the DoD Executive Agent."
According to the directive, the "Army and Air National Guard forces have primary responsibility for providing military assistance to state and local governments in civil disturbances." Accordingly, "the Army National Guard State Area Commands (STARCs) shall plan for contingency use of non-Federalized National Guard forces for civil disturbance operations." The directive further outlines policy, guidelines, and legal justification for "military assistance for civil disturbances", including policy regarding domestic law enforcement, designating the Army as "the principle point of contact between the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Justice (DoJ) for planning and executing MACDIS." (24)
The militarization of domestic "law enforcement" is founded, in part, upon Department of Defense Directive 5525.5, DoD Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Officials, dated January 15, 1986, five years after Congressional "drug warriors" passed the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act. Referencing the 1971 version of DODD 3025.12 (above), the directive states that, "it is DoD policy to cooperate with civilian law enforcement officials to the extent practicaläconsistent with the needs of national security and military preparedness." In addition, "the Military Departments and Defense Agencies may provide training to Federal, State, and local civilian law enforcement officials."
Apparently, military Judge Advocates (lawyers) have no problem with the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, (18 U.S.C.1385) which states that: "Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than two years or both." Nor is there much concern shown for "the historic tradition of limiting direct military involvement in civilian law enforcement activities." For even though the Act is cited within the directive as "the primary restriction on military participation in civilian law enforcement activities", it is rendered null and void in deference to "actions that are taken for the primary purpose of furthering a military or foreign affairs function." In fact, "under guidance established by the Secretaries of the Military Departments and the Directors of the Defense Agencies concerned, the planning and execution of compatible military training and operations may take into account the needs of civilian law enforcement officials for information when the collection of the information is an incidental aspect of training performed for a military purpose." (25)
ARMY FIELD MANUAL
United States Army Field Manual 19-15, Civil Disturbances, dated November 1985, is designed to provide hands-on "guidance for the commander and his staff in preparing for and providing assistance to civil authorities in civil disturbance control operations." The Army manual opens by noting that, "the DA Civil Disturbance Plan, known as Garden Plot, provides guidance to all DOD components in planning civil disturbance missions." Its' thirteen chapters cover, in depth, every aspect of military "tasks and techniques employed to control civil disturbances and neutralize special threats." Subjects include the nature of civil disturbances, participants ("the crowd"), federal intervention, information planning ("intelligence"), control force operations, crowd control operations, threat analysis ("criminal activists"), about which "law enforcement sources can provide useful information", riot control agents, extreme force options, apprehension, detention, and training.
According to the Army manual, "civil disturbances in any form are prejudicial to public law and order." They "arise from acts of civil disobedience", and "occur most often when participants in mass acts of civil disobedience become antagonistic toward authority, and authorities must struggle to wrest the initiative from an unruly crowd." They are caused by "political grievances" and "urban economic conflicts", or maybe even by "agents of foreign nations", but mostly, "urban conflicts and community unrest arise from highly emotional social and economic issues." And in a statement that resonates with the "benign neglect" of some years ago, the manual points out that disturbances may arise because "economically deprived inner-city residents may perceive themselves treated unjustly or ignored by the people in power."
Utilizing Garden Plot language, the manual states that "the president can employ armed federal troops to suppress insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful assemblies, and conspiracy if such acts deprive the people of their constitutional rights and a state¼s civil authorities cannot or will not provide adequate protection." Never mind the Congress or Constitution, "federal intervention in civil disturbances begins with the issuance of a presidential proclamation to the citizens engaged in the disturbance." In other words, the President reads "the riot act" and "a control force" is sent in to "isolate the disturbance area." The goal is to "isolate the people creating the disturbance from those who have not yet become actively involved."
According to FM 19-15, the Army can gather intelligence on civilians if their "activities can be linked directly to a distinct threat of a civil disturbance that may involve federal forces." This is especially important, given that "during civil disturbances many people engage in unlawful behavior." Therefore, "when at all possible, civil law enforcement agents are integrated with the military control force team making apprehensions", and "if police are not available, military personnel may search people incident to an apprehension." Useful measures for "isolating an area include barriers, patrols, pass and ID systems, and control of public utilities." Also, "imposing a curfew is a highly effective control measure in many civil disturbances." Army "saturation patrols", "integrated with civil police patrols", blanket the area, creating "the psychological impression of the control force being everywhere at once."
The Army field manual points out that when "control forces" resort to "forceful measures" they can turn to a host of weaponry, including "the M234, which is a nondeadly force measure, to the machine gun, which is the most deadly force measure." The manual states that "machine guns, 7.62 millimeter and below, may accompany units on civil disturbance missions." In addition, the "control forces" can utilize the M234 launcher, which is "a riot control weapon" mounted on an M16 rifle which "fires a projectile that causes pain on impact." In addition, "the riot shotgun is an extremely versatile weapon. Its appearance and capability have a strong psychological effect on rioters."
MARTIAL RULE
The concept of martial rule, as distinct from martial law, is not written, and therefore is an eminently more workable arrangement for "law enforcement forces". That¼s because, as FM 19-15 points out, "martial rule is based on public necessity. Public necessity in this sense means public safety." According to the manual, U.S. state authorities "may take such action within their own jurisdictions." And yet, "whether or not martial rule has been proclaimed, commanders must weigh each proposed action against the threat to public order and safety. If the need for martial rule arises, the military commander at the scene must so inform the Army Chief of Staff and await instructions. If martial rule is imposed, the civilian population must be informed of the restrictions and rules of conduct that the military can enforce." Realizing the power of free speech, the manual suggests that "during a civil disturbance, it may be advisable to prevent people from assembling. Civil law can make it unlawful for people to meet to plan an act of violence, rioting, or civil disturbance. Prohibitions on assembly may forbid gatherings at any place and time." And don¼t forget, "making hostile or inflammatory speeches advocating the overthrow of the lawful government and threats against public officials, if it endangered public safety, could violate such law."
During civil disturbance operations, "authorities must be prepared to detain large numbers of people", forcing them into existing, though expanded "detention facilities." Cautioning that "if there are more detainees than civil detention facilities can handle, civil authorities may ask the control forces to set up and operate temporary facilities." Pending the approval of the Army Chief of Staff, the military can detain and jail citizens en masse. "The temporary facilities are set up on the nearest military installation or on suitable property under federal control." These "temporary facilities" are "supervised and controlled by MP officers and NCOs trained and experienced in Army correctional operations. Guards and support personnel under direct supervision and control of MP officers and NCOs need not be trained or experienced in Army correctional operations. But they must be specifically instructed and closely supervised in the proper use of forceä"
According to the Army, the detention facilities are situated near to the "disturbance area", but far enough away "not to be endangered by riotous acts." Given the large numbers of potential detainees, the logistics (holding, searching, processing areas) of such an undertaking, new construction of such facilities "may be needed to provide the segregation for ensuring effective control and administration." It must be designed and "organized for a smooth flow of traffic", while a medical "treatment area" would be utilized as a "separate holding area for injured detainees." After a "detainee is logged in and searched", "a file is initiated", and a "case number" identifies the prisoner. In addition, "facility personnel also may use hospital ID tags. Using indelible ink, they write the case number and attach the tag to the detainees¼ wrist. Different colors may be used to identify different offender classificationsä" Finally, if and when it should occur, "release procedures must be coordinated with civil authorities and appropriate legal counsel." If the "detainee" should produce a writ of habeas corpus issued by a state court, thereby demanding ones¼ day in court, the Army will "respectfully reply that the prisoner is being held by authority of the United States."
Training under FM 19-15/Garden Plot must be "continuous" and must "develop personnel who are able to perform distasteful and dangerous duties with discipline and objectivity." Dangerous to the local citizenry given that "every member of the control force must be trained to use his weapon and special equipment (including) riot batons, riot control agent dispersers and CS grenades, grenade launchers, shotguns, sniper rifles, cameras, portable videotape recorders, portable public address systems, night illumination devices, firefighting apparatus, grappling hooks, ladders, ropes, bulldozers, Army aircraft, armored personnel carriers, and roadblock and barricade materials." Sounding a lot like recent Urban Warrior war-games, the manual makes note that although unit training must address "the sensitivity and high visibility of civil disturbance operations", the "unit training must be realistic." In this regard, "the unit commander should try to include local government officials in field training exercises. The officials can be either witnesses or participants. But care must be taken to prevent adverse psychological effects on the local populace, especially if tension is high."(26)
Sources:
1.. New York Times, "Pentagon Misused Millions in Funds, House Panel Says", July 22,1999, pg. A-1. See also, on the subject of "unacknowledged Special Access Programs" wherein "the USAF's $7.4 billion budget for classified procurement is more than a third of the service's total budget", Bill Sweetman, "In search of the Pentagon's billion dollar hidden budgets - how the US keeps its R&D spending under wraps", International Defense Review, Jane's Defense Weekly, January 2000 www.janes.com/defence/editors/pentagon.html
2.. James W. Button, Black Violence, The Political Impact of the 1960¼s Riots, Princeton University Press, 1078, pg.116.
3.. Button, pg.121. Also, see, Cyrus R.Vance, Final Report of Cyrus R.Vance, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Concerning the Detroit Riots, July 23 Through August 2, 1967.
4.. Michael Lipsky and David J. Olson, Commission Politics: The Processing of Racial Crisis in America, Transaction Books, 1971, pg.161. The Executive Order is reprinted in US Riot Commission Report, Bantam Books, 1968, pgs.534-535.
5.. Lipsky and Olson, pg.163, citing pg.198 of a transcription of Lyndon B. Johnson, "Statement by the President", July 29, 1967.
6.. Button, pg.107.
7.. Lipsky and Olson, pg.165.
8.. Anthony Downs, Opening Up the Suburbs: An Urban Strategy for America, Yale University Press, 1973, pg.176. Downs, a leading "housing expert", believed that the key to effective urban based counter-insurgency was the notion of "spatial deconcentration", or the "adequate outmigration of the poor" from the cities. Downs wrote Chapters 16 and 17 of the Kerner Report which deal with "housing". He is the leading exponent of "deliberate dispersal policies" designed to "disperse the urban poor more effectively". The origins of "homelessness" (state repression) lie here.
9.. Lipsky and Olson, pg.168.
10... Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Washington, DC, March 1, 1968, pgs.279-281.
11.. Ron Ridenhour and Arthur Lubow, "Bringing the War Home", New Times Magazine, 1975, pg.20.
12.. Ridenhour and Lubow, pg.20.
13.. Ridenhour and Lubow, pg.20.
14.. Button, pg.133.
15.. Button, pg.133.
16.. Ridenhour and Lubow, pg18.
17.. Donald Goldberg and Indy Badhwar, "Blueprint for Tyranny", Penthouse Magazine, August 1985, pg.72.
18.. Goldberg and Badhwar, pg.72.
19.. Joan M. Jensen, Army Surveillance in America, 1775-1980, Yale University Press, 1991, pgs.257-258. This excellent historical account actually does what it says, tracing American "internal security measures" right back to the "founders".
t.. United States Air Force Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, Garden Plot, Headquarters, United States Air Force, June 1, 1984. (roughly 200 pages, not paginated)
21.. T. Alden Williams, "The Army in Civil Disturbance: A Profound Dilemma?", pg.161, in ed. Robin Higham, Bayonets in the Streets, University of Kansas Press, 1969.
22.. Federation of American Scientists, Military Analysis Network, "Garden Plot", Nov.1998.
23.. US Air Force News Service, Kelly Air Force Base, Texas, "Air Force 50th Anniversary: April History", March 25, 1997, pg.2. In fact, Garden Plot may have been operative prior and during the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. William F. Pepper, attorney for the late James Earl Ray, as well as the King family in their current attempts to get to the bottom of the murder, claims (Orders To Kill, Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1995, pg.424) that the orders to kill King, which were delivered to special forces operatives in Memphis were tied to Garden Plot. Pepper states that the orders to kill King "appeared to come from the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were issued under the umbrella of the anti-black terrorist operation Garden Plot which was a part of the overall U.S. Command antiriot operation CINCSTRIKE which was activated with the outbreak of any major riot."
24.. Department of Defense Directive 3025.12, Military Assistance for Civil Disturbances (MACDIS), February 4, 1994. http:// web7.whs.osd.mil/ text/ d302512p.txt) Note: DoDD 3025.12 is one quarter of 4 correlated directives that deal with civil disturbance. The others include DoDD 3025.1, Military Support to Civil Authorities (Jan. 93), DoDD 3025.15, Military Assistance for Civil Authorities (Feb.97), and DoDD 3025.1-M, Manual for Civil Emergencies (June 94).
25.. Department of Defense Directive 5525.5, DoD Cooperation With Civili an Law Enforcement Officials, January 15, 1986. http:// www.ngb.dtic.mil/ re ferenc/briefngs/wmd/DODD5525.5DoDCooperationwithCivilianLawEnforcementOffic ials.htm)
26.. United States Army Field Manual 19-15, Civil Disturbances, Headquarters, Department of the Army, Washington, DC, November 25, 1985.
(An edited version of this article currently appears in CovertAction Quarterly,
#69 Spring/Summer 2000 http:/
INFORMATION YOU MAY NOT WANT TO KNOW - BUT SHOULD!!
April 30, 2010 by StayFree
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Propaganda in the United States From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Please help improve this article by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (June 2008) This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2010) World War I propaganda poster depicts Columbia sowing vegetables. Propaganda in the United States comes from governments and private entities of various kinds. Propaganda is information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to influence opinions. Propaganda is not only in advertising. It is also in radio, newspaper, posters, books, and anything else the government might send out to the widespread public.
Channels News media Numerous sources of news exist in the US, most of which are operated by private companies. Whether they propagandize, either on behalf of the government or private actors, remains hotly debated.[1][2] The "big three" broadcast networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC, and cable news channels CNN and MSNBC, are frequently accused by many on the political right of biasing their coverage toward left-wing views, and, by many on the left, toward right-wing views. These contrasting positions suggest that neither claim is clear-cut. The newer Fox News Channel has been widely accused of biasing coverage toward the right and toward an American jingoist point of view. According to the propaganda model of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, privately owned news media promote the economic and political interests of the large companies that own or advertise with them (such as General Electric). Political campaigning and lobbying As in other countries with elected governments, parties and politically active individuals publicize their views and promote their candidates of choice. This propaganda goes through the usual advertising channels, such as television, radio, and the press, as well as non-advertising channels like bumper stickers. Candidates promote themselves to the public through speeches, political debates, and photo ops. In May 2005, US President George W. Bush openly referred to his efforts to gain public support for his plan to phase out Social Security in favor of private accounts as contesting against propaganda. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," he said.[3] Aside from election campaigns, people and organizations communicate their views on particular issues through lobbying organizations, which distribute propaganda to the public and to political representatives. These come in the form of advertisements, fax distributions, newsletters, and letter-writing campaigns, to name a few. Think tanks bring together like-minded experts and analysts to review current legislative and policy issues and present their conclusions to legislators, the public, and news media. Both lobbyists and think tanks receive their funding from businesses, private foundations, and individual donors. The influence of money in American politics is a frequent subject of controversy and reform efforts. Social propaganda Various non-profit private organization use advertising channels to advance social goals outside the political system. Groups such as the Ad Council and The Foundation for a Better Life distribute public service announcements to encourage tolerance, generosity, and environmental responsibility. Government propaganda Domestic An American propaganda poster from World War II produced under the Works Progress Administration. The first large-scale use of propaganda by the U.S. government came during World War I. The government implemented citizens and children to help promote war bonds and stamps to help stimulate the economy. To keep the prices of war supplies down, the U.S. government produced posters that encouraged people to reduce waste and grow their own vegetables in "victory gardens." The government used propaganda on a larger scale during the New Deal and World War II. Why We Fight is a famous series of US government propaganda films made to justify US involvement in World War II. During the Cold War, the U.S. government produced vast amounts of propaganda against communism and the Soviet bloc. Much of this propaganda was directed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover, who himself wrote the anti-communist tract Masters of Deceit. The FBI's COINTELPRO arm solicited journalists to produce fake news items discrediting communists and affiliated groups, such as H. Bruce Franklin and the Venceremos Organization. See also: Pentagon military analyst program In early 2002, the U.S. Department of Defense launched an information operation.[4] The goal of the operation is "to spread the administrations's talking points on Iraq by briefing ... retired commanders for network and cable television appearances," where they have been presented as independent analysts.[5] On 22 May 2008, after this program was revealed in the New York Times, the House passed an amendment that would make permanent a domestic propaganda ban that until now has been enacted annually in the military authorization bill.[6] International Through several international broadcasting operations, the US disseminates American cultural information, official positions on international affairs, and daily summaries of international news. These operations fall under the International Broadcasting Bureau, the successor of the United States Information Agency, established in 1953. IBB's operations include Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Alhurra and other programs. They broadcast mainly to countries where the United States finds that information about international events is limited, either due to poor infrastructure or government censorship. The Smith-Mundt Act prohibits the Voice of America from disseminating information to US citizens that was produced specifically for a foreign audience. During the Cold War the US ran covert propaganda campaigns in countries that appeared likely to become Soviet satellites, such as Italy, Afghanistan, and Chile. Recently The Pentagon announced the creation of a new unit aimed at spreading propaganda about supposed "inaccurate" stories being spread about the Iraq War. These "inaccuracies" have been blamed on the enemy trying to decrease support for the war. Donald Rumsfeld has been quoted as saying these stories are something that keeps him up at night.[7] Psychological operations US PSYOP pamphlet disseminated in Iraq. Text: "This is your future al-Zarqawi" and shows al-Qaeda fighter al-Zarqawi caught in a rat trap. Further information: Psychological operations (United States) and Psychological warfare The US military defines psychological operations, or PSYOP, as: planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.[8] The Smith-Mundt Act, adopted in 1948, explicitly forbids information and psychological operations aimed at the US public.[9][10][11] Nevertheless, the current easy access to news and information from around the globe, makes it difficult to guarantee PSYOP programs do not reach the US public. Or, in the words of Army Col. James A. Treadwell, who commanded the U.S. military psyops unit in Iraq in 2003, in the Washington Post: There's always going to be a certain amount of bleed-over with the global information environment.[12] Agence France Presse reported on U.S. propaganda campaigns that: The Pentagon acknowledged in a newly declassified document that the US public is increasingly exposed to propaganda disseminated overseas in psychological operations. [13] Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the document referred to, which is titled "Information Operations Roadmap." [11][13] The document acknowledges the Smith-Mundt Act, but fails to offer any way of limiting the effect PSYOP programs have on domestic audiences.[9][10][14] Several incidents in 2003 were documented by Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel, which he saw as information-warfare campaigns that were intended for "foreign populations and the American public." Truth from These Podia,[15] as the treatise was called, reported that the way the Iraq war was fought resembled a political campaign, stressing the message instead of the truth.[11] See also * American propaganda during World War II * Bureau of International Information Programs * Censorship in the United States * List of topics related to public relations and propaganda * Media in the United States * Operation Mockingbird * United States Information Agency * Walt Disney's World War II propaganda production
Operation Garden Plot
[Acquired via a circuitous route from the Internet. Sources have been deleted to protect their identity. Thanks to the tireless work of you guys out there. If the guy(s) who gathered this great scoop wish to be identified, please email me. Forest<glen@bayarea.net> ]
The United States Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2
The following information was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The original printing was of June 1, 1984. The information herein is UNCLASSIFIED and does not come within the scope of directions governing the protection of information affecting the national security. It took a little more than three years to obtain a full copy of Operation Garden Plot from the U.S. Government, and was done so under the freedom of information act for unclassified documents. The implications within the full context of this document should make the hair on the back of your head stand on end!!!!! In this document signed by the Secretary of the Army, is hereby assigned as DOD Executive Agent for civil disturbance control operations. Under Plan 55-2 he is to use airlift and logistical support, in assisting appropriate military commanders in the 50 states, District of Columbia, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and US possessions and territories, or any political subdivision thereof. The official name of this project is called "Operation Garden Plot." Under this plan for the deployment of Operation Garden Plot, the use of CIDCON-1 will be mandatory. This direct support of civil disturbance control operations is to be used by the Army, USAF, Navy, and Marine Corp. with an airlift force to be comprised of MAC Organic Airlift Resources, airlift capable aircraft of all other USAF major commands, and all other aerial reconnaissance and Airborne Psychological Operations. This is to include control communications systems, aeromedical evacuation, helicopter and Weather Support Systems. If any civil disturbance by a resistance group, religious organization, or other persons considered to be non-conformist takes place, under Appendix 3 to Annex B of Plan 55-2 hereby gives all Federal forces total power over the situation if local and state authorities cannot put down said dissenters. Annex A, section B of Operation Garden Plot defines tax protesters, militia groups, religious cults, and general anti-government dissenters as Disruptive Elements. This calls for the deadly force to be used against any extremist or dissident perpetrating any and all forms of civil disorder. Under section D, a Presidential Executive Order will authorize and direct the Secretary of Defense to use the Armed Forces of the United States to restore order. 2 TAB A APPENDIX 1 TO ANNEX S USAF CIVIL DISTURBANCE PLAN 55-2 EXHIBIT POR:SGH, JCS Pub 6, Vol 5, AFR 160-5 hereby provides for America's military and the National Guard State Partnership Program to join with United Nations personal in said operations. This links selected U.S. National Guard units with the Defense Ministries of "Partnership For Peace." This was done in an effort to provide military support to civil authorities in response to civil emergencies. Under Presidential Decision Directive No. 25, this program serves to cement people to relationships between the citizens of the United States, and the global military of the UN establishments of the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern European countries. This puts all of our National Guardsmen under the direct jurisdiction of the United Nations. Section 3:This plan could be implemented under any of the following situation: (1) Spontaneous civil disturbances which involve large numbers of persons and/or which continue for a considerable period of time, may exceed the capacity of local civil law enforcement agencies to suppress. Although this type of activity can arise without warning as a result of sudden, unanticipated popular unrest (past riots), it may also result from more prolonged dissidence. This would most likely be an outgrowth of serious social, political or economic issues which divide segments of the American population. Such factionalism could manifest itself through repeated demonstrations, protest marches and other forms of legitimate opposition but which would have the potential for erupting into spontaneous violence with little or no warning. (2) Planned acts of violence or civil disobedience which, through arising from the same causes as (1) above, are seized upon by a dedicated group of dissidents who plan and incite purposeful acts designed to disrupt social order. This may occur either because leaders of protest organizations intentionally induce their followers to perpetrate violent acts, or because a group of militants infiltrates an otherwise peaceful protest and seeks to divert it from its peaceful course. Subsection C: (2) Environmental satellite products will be continue to be available. (d) Responsibilities. Meteorological support to civil disturbance operations will be arranged or provided by AWS wings. The 7th. Weather Wing (7WW) is responsible for providing / arranging support for Military Airlift Command (MAC) airlift operations. The 5th Weather Wing (5WW) is responsible for supporting the United States Army Forces Command. (3) SITUATION. Civil disturbance may threaten or erupt at any time in the CONUS and grow to such proportions as to require the use the Federal military forces to bring the situation under control. A flexible weather support system is required under control. A flexible weather support system is required to support the many and varied options of this Plan. ANNEX H: XXOW, AWSR 55-2, AWSR 23-6, AFR 23-31, AR 115-10, AFR 105-3. Subsection B: Concept of Environmental Support. Environmental support will be provided by elements of Air Weather Service (AWS) in accordance with refs a-f. The senior staff meteorologist deployed int the Task Force Headquarters (TFH) will be the staff weather officer (SWO) to the TFH. Centralized environmental support products are requested in accordance with AWSR 105-18. (4) Weather support is provided by weather units located at existing CONUS bases or by deployed SWOs and / or weather teams to the objective areas. (5) Support MAC source will be provide in accordance with the procedures in MARC 103-15. MAC forces will be provided in accordance with the procedures in AFR 105-3. (a) Air Force Global Weather Central: Provides centralized products as requested. REFERENCES : JCS Pub 18 - Doctrine for Operations Security AFR 55-30, Operations Security 1. GENERAL Opposition forces or groups may attempt to gain knowledge of this plan and 'use that knowledge to prevent or degrade the effectiveness of the actions outlined in this plan. In order to protect operations undertaken to accomplish the mission, it is necessary to control sources of information that can be exploited by those opposition forces or groups. OPSEC is the effort to protect operations by identifying and controlling intelligence indicators susceptible to exploitation. The objective of OPSEC, in the execution of this plan, is to assure the security of operations, mission effectiveness, and increase the probability of mission success. 2. RESPONSIBILITY FOR OPERATIONS SECURITY (OPSEC): The denial of information to an enemy is inherently a command responsibility. However, since the operations Officer at any level of command is responsible to his commander for the Overall planning and execution of operations, he has the principal staff interest in assuring maximum protection of the operation and must assume primary responsibility instibility for ensuring that the efforts of all other staff elements are coordinated toward thisend. However, every other individual associated with, or aware of, the operation must assist in safeguarding the security of the operation. 3. OBJECTIVES: a. The basic objective of OPSEC is to preserve the security of friendly forces and thereby to enhance the probability of successful mission accomplishment. "Security" in this context relates to the protection of friendly forces. It also includes the protection of operational information to prevent degradation of mission effectiveness through the disclosure of prior knowledge of friendly operations to the opposition. b. OPSEC pervades the entire planning process and must be a matter of continuing concern from the conception of an operation, throughout the preparatory and execution phases, and during critiques, reports, press releases, and the like conducted during the post operation phase. 4. Specific operations orders and standard operating procedures "MUST be developed with the awareness that the opposition may be able to identify and exploit vulnerable activities. Reference Material: Released under Freedom of Information Act on March 30th, 1990. All material presented here has been declassified and supersedes USAD Operations Plan 355-10 of July 16, 1973. Information released by USAF under supervision of Alexander K. Davidson, BRIG. GEN, USAF, Dep. Director of Operations. APPENDEX 5 TO ANNEX E TO USAF CIVIL DISTURBANCE PLAN 55-2 Annex Z. Other References: 10 United States Codes 331,332,333,8500,1385, MARC 105-1, MARC 105-18, AR 115-10, AFR 105-3, PDD-25.
Additional backup documents will be found on another site at
http:/
That is a good site to read this type of material. Lots of curious stuff.
If I can give anyone credit for this great file, I give to the guys in the "cafes". Thanks, guys.
Please notice that your "faithful" political servants did not tell you about this law. But they wrote and passed it. It took someone about there years to find it. And they had to force it out into the open. Congressman Gonzalez admits that it exists. Gee, thanks a lot, you guys.
INFORMATION YOU MAY NOT WANT TO KNOW-BUT TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION!!!
April 30, 2010 by StayFree
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Operation Mockingbird
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (February 2009)
Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s.
The activities, extent and even the existence of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis' 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. But Davis' book, alleging that the media had been recruited (and infiltrated) by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was itself controversial and has since been shown to have had a number of erroneous assertions.[1] More evidence of Mockingbird's existence emerged in the 2007 memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, by convicted Watergate "plumber" E. Howard Hunt and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford (2008).[2]
History
In 1948, Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects (OSP). Soon afterwards OSP was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."[3]
Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic and foreign media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham from The Washington Post to run the project within the industry. According to Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great; "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."[4]
In 1951, Allen W. Dulles persuaded Cord Meyer to join the CIA. However, there is evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and had been spying on the liberal organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s.[5] According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird's "principal operative".[6]
In 1977, Rolling Stone alleged that one of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists alleged by Rolling Stone Magazine to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (The Miami News), Herb Gold (The Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times).[7] According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman), these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.[8]
After 1953, the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with well-known right-wing views such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham, Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science Monitor).[7]
The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by siphoning of funds intended for the Marshall Plan. Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers. Frank Wisner was constantly looking for ways to help convince the public of the dangers of communism. In 1954, Wisner arranged for the funding of the Hollywood production of Animal Farm, the animated allegory based on the book written by George Orwell.[9]
According to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA), in the 1950s, "some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts". Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events. For example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran (See: Operation Ajax) and Guatemala (See: Operation PBSUCCESS).[10]
Thomas Braden, head of the International Organizations Division (IOD), played an important role in Operation Mockingbird. Many years later he revealed his role in these events:
"If the director of CIA wanted to extend a present, say, to someone in Europe—a Labour leader—suppose he just thought, This man can use fifty thousand dollars, he's working well and doing a good job - he could hand it to him and never have to account to anybody... There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war—the secret war.... It was a multinational. Maybe it was one of the first. Journalists were a target, labor unions a particular target—that was one of the activities in which the communists spent the most money."[11]
Part of the Directorate for Plans
In August 1952, the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations (the espionage division) were merged under the Deputy Director for Plans (DDP). Frank Wisner became head of this new organization and Richard Helms became his chief of operations. Mockingbird was now the responsibility of the DDP.[12]
J. Edgar Hoover became jealous of the CIA's growing power. He described the OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdos" and began carrying out investigations into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to Joseph McCarthy who started making attacks on members of the OPC. Hoover also gave McCarthy details of an affair that Frank Wisner had with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war. Hoover claimed that Caradja was a Soviet agent.[13]
Joseph McCarthy also began accusing other senior members of the CIA as being security risks. McCarthy claimed that the CIA was a "sinkhole of communists", and claimed he intended to root out a hundred of them. One of his first targets was Cord Meyer, who was still working for Operation Mockingbird. In August, 1953, Richard Helms, Wisner's deputy at the OPC, told Meyer that Joseph McCarthy had accused him of being a communist. The Federal Bureau of Investigation added credibility to the accusation by announcing it was unwilling to give Meyer "security clearance". However, the FBI refused to explain what evidence they had against Meyer. Allen W. Dulles and Frank Wisner both came to his defense and refused to permit an FBI interrogation of Meyer.[14]
Joseph McCarthy did not realize what he was taking on. Wisner unleashed Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson, Joe Alsop, Jack Anderson, Walter Lippmann and Ed Murrow all engaged in intensely negative coverage of McCarthy, whose political reputation was permanently damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner.[15]
Guatemala
Mockingbird was very active during the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala during Operation PBSUCCESS. People like Henry Luce were able to censor stories that appeared too sympathetic towards the plight of Arbenz. Allen W. Dulles was even able to keep left-wing journalists from travelling to Guatemala, including Sydney Gruson of the New York Times.[16]
Even in the wake of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' 1952 presidential campaign pledge to "roll back the Iron Curtain", American covert action operations came under scrutiny almost as soon as Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated in 1953. He soon set up an evaluation operation called Solarium, which had three committees playing analytical games to see which plans of action should be continued. In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the 5412 Committee in order to keep more of a check on the CIA's covert activities. The committee (also called the Special Group) included the CIA director, the national security adviser, and the deputy secretaries at State and Defence and had the responsibility to decide whether covert actions were "proper" and in the national interest. It was also decided to include Richard B. Russell, chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. However, as Allen W. Dulles was later to admit, because of "plausible deniability" planned covert actions were not referred to the 5412 Committee.
Eisenhower became concerned about CIA covert activities and in 1956 appointed David K. E. Bruce as a member of the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities (PBCFIA). Eisenhower asked Bruce to write a report on the CIA. It was presented to Eisenhower on 20 December 1956. Bruce argued that the CIA's covert actions were "responsible in great measure for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exists in many countries in the world today." Bruce was also highly critical of Mockingbird. He argued: "what right have we to go barging around in other countries buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that, or the other office."[17]
After Richard M. Bissell, Jr. lost his post as Deputy Director for Plans in 1962, Tracy Barnes took over the running of Mockingbird. According to Evan Thomas (The Very Best Men) Barnes planted editorials about political candidates who were regarded as pro-CIA.
First exposure
In 1964, Random House published Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross. The book exposed the role the CIA was playing in foreign policy. This included the CIA coups in Guatemala (Operation PBSUCCESS) and Iran (Operation Ajax) and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. It also revealed the CIA's attempts to overthrow President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam. The CIA considered buying up the entire printing of Invisible Government but this idea was rejected when Random House pointed out that if this happened they would have to print a second edition.[3]
John McCone, the new director of the CIA, also attempted to stop Edward Yates from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). This attempt at censorship failed and NBC went ahead and broadcast this critical documentary.
In June, 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 FitzGerald found out that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, had discovered that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association.[18] FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off."[19]
This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop Ramparts publishing this story in March 1967. The article, written by Sol Stern, was entitled NSA and the CIA. As well as reporting CIA funding of the National Student Association it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America. It named Cord Meyer as a key figure in this campaign. This included the funding of the literary journal Encounter.[11]
In May 1967, Thomas Braden responded to this by publishing an article entitled, "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'", in the Saturday Evening Post, where he defended the activities of the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden also confessed that the activities of the CIA had to be kept secret from Congress. As he pointed out in the article: "In the early 1950s, when the cold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare."[20]
Meyer's role in Operation Mockingbird was further exposed in 1972 when he was accused of interfering with the publication of a book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. The book was highly critical of the CIA's dealings with the drug traffic in Southeast Asia. The publisher, who leaked the story, had been a former colleague of Meyer's when he was a liberal activist after the war.[21]
Church Committee investigations
Further details of Operation Mockingbird were revealed as a result of the Frank Church investigations (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) in 1975. According to the Congress report published in 1976:
"The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets."
Church argued that misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year.[22]
In February 1976, George H. W. Bush, the recently appointed Director of the CIA, announced a new policy: "Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station." However, he added that the CIA would continue to "welcome" the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.[23]
"Family Jewels" Report
According to the "Family Jewels" report, released by the National Security Archive on June 26, 2007, during the period from March 12, 1963 and June 15, 1963, the CIA installed telephone taps on two Washington-based news reporters.
External links
- Carl Bernsten's 1977 article for Rolling Stone "The Cia and the Media"
- CIA "Family Jewels" Report
- Alex Constantine: The CIA's Project MOCKINGBIRD: Ongoing Covert Control of the Media
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Categories: Central Intelligence Agency operations | American political media | Propaganda in the United States
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from February 2009 | All articles that may contain original research
Propaganda in the United States From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Please help improve this article by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (June 2008) This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2010) World War I propaganda poster depicts Columbia sowing vegetables. Propaganda in the United States comes from governments and private entities of various kinds. Propaganda is information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to influence opinions. Propaganda is not only in advertising. It is also in radio, newspaper, posters, books, and anything else the government might send out to the widespread public.
Native Freedom Warriors and Patriots* - In Pictures-
April 28, 2010 by StayFree
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WE MUST NEVER FORGET THAT SEVERAL MILLION NATIVE AMERICAN INDIANS WERE ALREADY HERE WHEN THE FIRST WHITE MAN ARRIVED. THE U.S. GOVERNMENT BROKE EVERY TREATY IT EVER SIGNED WITH THEM AND A FTI - IT WAS A GROUP OF WHITES THAT BEGAN THE SCALPING OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN - THE NATIVES RETURNED THE INSULT. THEY BELIEVED YOU HAD TO BE PHYSICALLY WHOLE TO RETURN TO THE GREAT SPIRIT (GOD). TAKING A SCALP WAS LIKE CONDENMING THAT PERSON'S SPIRIT TO WALK THE EARTH FOREVER. THEY WERE DRIVEN FROM THEIR LANDS AND MUDERED OR ROUNDED UP AND PUT ON WHAT IS PRETTY MUCH USELESS LAND IN RETURN FOR OUR AMERICA. LET'S NOT FORGET THEY WERE HERE FIRST AND SHOULD BE RESPECTED. 
Progressives Versus The Founders
April 24, 2010 by StayFree
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Matthew Spalding
“Are you serious?”
That’s how a visibly annoyed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied when a reporter dared ask where the Constitution grants Congress authority to require individuals to buy health insurance.
This vexed response from the House’s top Democrat last fall reveals the extent to which the intellectual, cultural and political elites have blithely abandoned the principles of America’s founding as outdated, defective and of little relevance to modern governance.
How—and why—did this come to be? The abandonment of first principles began about a hundred years ago as an intellectual project involving mostly academics and writers. It grew into a popular reform effort under the banner of “progressivism.”
Progressive thinkers sought to “re-found” America according to ideas alien to Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison. Repudiating the Founders’ belief in the existence of self-evident truths, progressives saw only relative values. Similarly, they claimed, man enjoys no permanent rights endowed by God, only changing rights held at the indulgence of government.
With no eternal truths or permanent rights, Americans must be governed by a “living” Constitution, one that endlessly evolves and grows with the times.
The progressive movement—first under a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, and then a Democratic one, Woodrow Wilson—set forth the platform of modern American liberalism: Progress means a form of government able to engineer a better society, assuring equal outcomes and redistributing wealth.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society were grand steps toward achieving the progressive platform.
"Progressives insist the modern world is so complex and problematic that we need an activist government to manage political life and human affairs."
And today, under President Barack Obama and the current Congress, we see a more aggressive move in this direction. Progressives insist the modern world is so complex and problematic that we need an activist government to manage political life and human affairs.
This new liberalism seeks to transform our constitutional structure of limited government into an increasingly powerful, centralized government focused on social reform. The rise of the modern administrative state, the growth of bureaucracy at every level, and the host of benefits the public has come to expect from government all undercut and pervert the American idea of self-government.
More than 170 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville warned Americans of an emerging danger to democracy: “soft despotism.” This insidious threat, the French political thinker explained, could reduce a self-governing people to “nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
The danger is greater than ever. The Left is pushing America toward European-style centralization of power. Liberal panjandrums seek an even more highly regulated economy, nationalization of industries and socialized health care. Lawmakers increasingly leave the “details” of how to implement legislation to unelected bureaucrats.
This isn’t progress. It’s the revival of a failed, undemocratic and illiberal kind of statism.
"Progressive ideas have not completely won the day. And in important ways, the progressive liberals have had to adapt to realities defined by the American political tradition."
However, the slow Europeanization of America isn’t inevitable, and it’s not too late. Progressive ideas have not completely won the day. And in important ways, the progressive liberals have had to adapt to realities defined by the American political tradition.
Even so, the dominance of progressive arguments—in our schools and in the public square, as well as in our politics—has significantly weakened the very foundations of constitutionalism and limited government. That, of course, makes it all the more necessary to defend and recover the ideas of the Founders.
To flourish in the 21st century, America doesn’t need to redefine or remake itself by rejecting core principles in favor of more stylish beliefs. Rather, what’s needed is a great renewal of the foundational principles that are the true roots of American greatness.
We should focus on six priorities:
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Educate for liberty. Public high schools tend to minimize or disparage the story of America’s founding, justifying this neglect by arguing it’s outdated and difficult to explain. Or teachers give short shrift to the principles of constitutional government and fixate on the Founders’ acknowledged flaws. It’s time the classroom again fostered understanding and appreciation of founding principles.
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Engage the American mind. Despite constant scorn by academic elites and popular media, most Americans still believe our country is something special and respect the Founders’ ideas that make it so. Conservatives must repeatedly articulate these core principles and apply them to questions of the day, giving voice to the majority of citizens who haven’t given up on the American experiment.
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Uphold the Constitution. Public officials take a solemn oath to support the Constitution, so they have a moral obligation to understand and abide by it. For members of Congress, this means refraining from passing bills that exceed their constitutional authority. For the president, it means rejecting unconstitutional bills and executing the law in a constitutional manner. Judges, uniquely positioned to spell out the meaning of the Constitution, must recognize they aren’t immune from its constraints.
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Defend free markets and fiscal responsibility. Americans work hard to move their families up the economic ladder. The fruits of their labor are moral goods contributing to happiness, as are opportunities to pursue the American Dream. Yet democratic capitalism is under attack by progressives. Principled leaders must reconnect the economic arguments for liberty and prosperity with the moral case for equal opportunity, free enterprise and creativity.
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Revive self-government. Government has assumed more and more tasks in more and more areas outside its responsibilities, greatly damaging American self-rule. When it encourages an entitlement mentality and dependency rather than self-reliance and independence, government weakens the character of the nation. Determined to impose moral neutrality, the state pushes churches and other traditional social institutions into the shadows. To strengthen the fabric of civil society, we must restore the standing and roles of those institutions.
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Promote liberty. The United States has a special responsibility to defend the cause of liberty at home and abroad. Friends of freedom everywhere draw inspiration from our ideas and example. A confident understanding of founding principles reaffirms what Americans hold to be self-evident. Anything less would deny our birthright and undermine our moral standing in the world.
"Reclaiming America’s future will require a concerted, monumental effort to push back progressive liberalism’s assault on individual liberty and recover the Founders’ principles in our political culture."
Thankfully, more and more Americans realize how deeply the progressive movement has transformed our politics and society. We see this in town hall meetings, “tea party” protests and recent election returns.
Taxpayers and voters are looking to the principles of the American founding. Not merely as a matter of historical curiosity, but for its philosophical grounding, practical wisdom and limitless spirit of self-government and independence.
Reclaiming America’s future will require a concerted, monumental effort to push back progressive liberalism’s assault on individual liberty and recover the Founders’ principles in our political culture.
In a world of moral confusion, of arbitrary and unlimited government, the founding provides our best access to permanent truths. It’s our best ground from which to repulse the whole progressive project to remake America. It is still our rock of assurance and direction, ready to guide us to the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity.
Are we serious? Yes, Madame Speaker, we are.
Matthew Spalding, Ph.D., is director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
This article is based on portions of his book, “We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future” (ISI Books).
A 'Secular-Socialist Machine'
April 24, 2010 by StayFree
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April 23, 2010 11am <!-- regular node view template HTML here -->
by Newt Gingrich
April 23, 2010
Washington Post
An April 14 op-ed by Norman J. Ornstein, "The great 'socialist' smear," argued that to those "outside the partisan and ideological wars," it is "bizarre" to accuse the Obama administration of "radicalism, socialism, retreat and surrender." I was among those he cited, for having called Barack Obama "the most radical president in American history" and describing the goals of the left and its methods of operation as a "secular-socialist machine."
In fact, Ornstein has it exactly backward. It is only from the perspective of the cultural elite that the left-wing governing of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid team could be seen as moderate.
Arthur Brooks, who is the president of the American Enterprise Institute (where Ornstein and I both serve), has analyzed years of Gallup data to show that America is largely (70-30) a center-right country. Polling by American Solutions, a citizen action network I founded in 2007, shows that on issues such as producing more American energy, cutting taxes to create jobs, balancing the budget by cutting spending, English as the language of government, and more, Americans oppose the views of academic elites by 75 to 85 percent. And a recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 52 percent of Americans think the Obama administration's actions are leading America more toward socialism (38 percent disagree).
It was precisely my effort to place the Obama-Pelosi-Reid team in some historic context that ledme to conclude that this is, indeed, a secular-socialist machine. While clarity may make some uncomfortable, such language is appropriate in explaining a movement of big government, high taxes, big bureaucracy, massive deficits and huge debt run from a politician-centric system of power.
Consider these examples of each key word:
-- "Machine": Getting $787 billion from Congress in February when no elected member had fully read and understood the economic stimulus package. This is behavior worthy of the Chicago political machine. If no elected officials know what is in the bill, how can someone assert that this was an act of self-government?
-- "Machine": Rejecting the will of the American people expressed through town hall meetings, tea parties, polls and elections by ramming through an unpopular 2,600-page health-care bill. The moment of real clarity came after Republican Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts special Senate election, when by every traditional American measure the Democrats should have stepped back and said to voters, "I hear you." Instead, their actions said: "Your voice and vote do not matter."
-- "Socialist": Creating czar positions to micromanage industry reflects the type of hubris of centralized government that Friedrich von Hayek and George Orwell warned against. How can a White House "executive compensation czar" know enough to set salaries in multiple companies for many different people? Having a pay dictatorship for one part of the country sets the pattern for government to claim the right to set pay for everyone. If that isn't socialism, what word would describe it?
-- "Socialist": Violating 200 years of bankruptcy precedent to take money from bondholders and investors in the auto industry to pay off union allies is rather an anti-market intervention.
-- "Socialist": Proposing that the government (through the Environmental Protection Agency or some sort of carbon-trading scheme) micromanage carbon output is proposing that the government be able to control the entire U.S. economy. Look at the proposals for government micromanagement in the 1,428-page Waxman-Markey energy tax bill. (I stopped reading when I got to the section regulating Jacuzzis on Page 442.) If government regulates every aspect of our use of power, it has regulated every aspect of our lives. What is that if not socialism?
-- "Socialist": Nationalizing student loans so that they are a bureaucratic monopoly. This will surely lead to fraud on the scale we see in Medicare and Medicaid, from which more than $70 billion per year is stolen.
-- "Socialist": Expanding government mortgage intervention to 90 percent of the housing market.
-- "Secular": Describing America's promise as a "secular country that is respectful of religious freedom," as Obama did last April, is an act of willful historical revisionism. The United States was founded as an intensely religious country that believes our rights come from God, including the right to worship as our conscience dictates. The Founding Fathers forbade the establishment of a national religion to protect individual rights of conscience but understood that public life would reflect the religious nature of the American people. This understanding of America's promise is far more tolerant of religion in the public square than the secular purge that we have seen since the Supreme Court outlawed school prayer in 1963.
-- "Secular": Appointing David Hamilton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. That Hamilton had previously ruled that opening legislature sessions with sectarian prayers is unconstitutional is further evidence of this anti-historical secular outlook.
Although its actions may seem like "centrism" to some, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid system is clearly a secular-socialist machine. And Obama is the most radical president in American history.
The Hidden Agenda of the Southern Poverty Law Center
April 24, 2010 by StayFree
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Tom Tancredo
Friday, April 23, 2010
With the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, many liberals exploited the actions of one deranged individual to tar millions of patriotic Americans as extremists and potential terrorists.
Bill Clinton said that it was legitimate to draw "parallels to the time running up to Oklahoma City and a lot of the political discord that exists in our country today."
The mainstream media and liberal commentators are awash with news stories like “Hate: Antigovernment extremists are on the rise—and on the march” in Newsweek.
In an excellent piece “What's behind the anti-Tea Party hate narrative?” the Washington Examiner’s Chief Washington Correspondent Byron York notes that “Many of the claims that extremism is on the rise in America originate in research done by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based group that for nearly 40 years has tracked what it says is the growing threat of intolerance in the United States.”
The SPLC is not only taken seriously by the liberal media, but also by the Department of Homeland Security. When they issued their now infamous report on “Right Wing Extremists” that warned “disgruntled” military veterans will become potential terrorists, they quoted a SPLC report entitled "A Few Bad Men" that claims racists are infiltrating the military.
Coincidentally, "A Few Bad Men" appeared as the SPLC attacked the American Legion for its support of immigration enforcement, which they called "Legionnaires' Disease."
This is indicative of what the SPLC is really about. Instead of monitoring “hate” and “extremism,” they are concerned with tarring patriotic Americans who oppose their left wing agenda as haters and extremists.
As a vocal opponent of uncontrolled immigration, I am a frequent target of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Their website contains over 60 articles that attack me.
Last year, I spoke at a college in New York State. After my speech, a student handed me one of his text books entitled Understanding Human Differences: Multicultural Education in a Diverse America. Given the title, I didn’t expect sympathetic treatment.
However, I was still shocked to see myself quoted as saying, "illegal immigrants were 'coming to kill you and kill me and our families.'"
While illegal aliens disproportionately commit violent crimes, I would never make such a blanket assertion. I contacted the publisher who gave the source as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hysterical smear piece against the immigration control movement creatively titled "The Nativists."
The SPLC purported that I said this at a 2004 speech in Illinois. What I actually said was that our open borders policies allow terrorists to sneak into our country. And yes, terrorists want to "kill you and kill me and our families." But the SPLC’s intentional misrepresentation is now repeated across the internet and even in college textbooks.
In an excellent report put out by the Center for Immigration Studies, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jerry Kammer detailed the smear tactics used by the Southern Poverty Law Center to silence those in the immigration debate.
Kammer shows that the SPLC’s attacks on immigration control organizations were carefully coordinated with the National Council of La Raza. La Raza means “The Race” in Spanish. The SPLC recklessly listed the Federation for American Immigration Reform as a hate group, just as La Raza began its “We Can Stop the Hate” campaign aimed at pushing FAIR from being quoted by the media or testifying at Congress. FAIR’s board of advisors includes such right-wing racists as former Democratic Governor of Colorado Richard Lamm and the former head of the Congressional Black Caucus foundation Frank Morris.
Kammer shows that the SPLC even sees racism in the Lord of the Rings, which one of their columnists called “little more than a glorified vision of white patriarchy” in which the heroes “are manly men who are whiter than white” and “are frequently framed in halos of blinding bright light and exude a heavenly aura of all that is Eurocentric and good.”
The SPLC not only sees no problems with left wing racists, they also have no problem with left wing terrorists. Their “Teaching Tolerance” magazine fawningly interviewed Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, who they described merely as a "civil rights organizer, radical anti-Vietnam War activist, teacher and author" who "has developed a rich vision of teaching that interweaves passion, responsibility and self-reflection." They did not mention that Ayers set off bombs in the US Capitol, the Pentagon, and the New York City Police Department. Unrepentant, he told the New York Times in 2000 "I don't regret setting bombs…I feel we didn't do enough."
Gabrielle Lyon, a fellow with the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project co-edited a book with William Ayers and was director of his School Change Institute at the Small Schools Workshop.
That’s the SPLC in a nutshell. The Lord of the Rings is racist, but a group called “The Race” is not. Patriotic Tea Partiers are potential terrorists, but actual terrorists like Bill Ayers are civil rights organizers.
Another Assault on Capitalism
April 24, 2010 by StayFree
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Michael Reagan
Thursday, April 22, 2010
As President Obama pushes for stricter regulations on Wall Street institutions, I want to call us back to caution. Undoubtedly, we should learn from past mistakes and forge a path through to prosperity and an understanding of proper limits on the dangers associated with potentially catastrophic lending and investment practices. But without appropriate caution, we will jump the gun with an over-expanded and unjustifiably influential federal government in the financial sector.
It is imperative that we look at our past to truly understand how we got here. And we need not look further than the Carter administration's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 for the answer. That act required banks to lend to un-creditworthy borrowers, mostly in underprivileged and minority communities.
While the concept of putting more Americans in homes comes across as a "feel good" policy, the fact of the matter is that these types of policies saddle families who don't have the income or earning potential to meet their payment obligations, leading to foreclosure and displacement.
This type of enabling legislation, coupled with predatory lenders and institutions, including those under federal government control, who would push potential investors into home-buying and other schemes for which they were not fiscally viable, formed an all-too-powerful formula that led to an almost paralyzing economic bust.
Democrats in Washington have looked at this scenario as a political opportunity in the run-up to the midterm elections. Without acknowledging the complexity or history of the issue, they hope to score easy points with a hit on Wall Street and the promise of reform. But insensible reform is nothing but reckless.
Last week, all 41 Republican senators, under the leadership of Mitch McConnell, signed a letter stating their opposition to the current version of the "Wall Street reform bill." If needed, this type of unity could stop the bill.
Key Republicans have declared their intent to use their unity as a negotiating position with which to improve the bill, rather than as a tool to kill it. Sen. John McCain said, "This one is a little bit different [than the health care bill]. We want to keep 41 votes together to have a negotiating position; on healthcare, we didn't like any of it."
This is the type of measured, strategic leadership we need in Washington. Promising bipartisan talks are underway, and if Republicans stay strong, we can see a way through to a reasonable reform which does not increase the size and influence of the federal government at the expense of the core components of our economy.
There are a few key provisions Republicans must continue to fight:
First, the suggested creation of a new "Consumer Protection Agency" to tighten government oversight is a blatantly unnecessary power-grab. Its proposed duties could be easily handled through existing agencies.
Second, Democrats are pushing for the creation of a $50 billion fund which could be used by the government to seize and dismantle large, failing financial agencies. This proposal only endorses "too big to fail" and institutionalizes the misguided bailouts of the past two years.
Third, Republicans must oppose a proposed tax on bank liabilities, to the tune of $90 billion over 10 years, which would be designed to help the government recoup losses from the recent bailouts. While Americans are entitled to recoup their lost tax dollars, placing a new tax on a weak financial sector is not the way to go about it.
Lastly, we can expect new regulatory standards for derivatives to soon be passed through committee. Abuse of derivatives must end, but the private sector rightly argues that these proposed regulations are too intrusive and restrictive and would harm America's ability to compete internationally. More risky investments and sales would potentially be prohibited. We need smart -- not smothering -- reform on derivatives.
As Washington grapples with these important issues, and the president seeks camera time in our nation's financial capital, it is important for us all to remember that the reforms of a past failing Democratic administration enabled the very issues over which they are now indignant.
Too-broad reform only serves as a mask for an expanded federal government and will ultimately lead to greater economic uncertainty and market paralysis. When it comes to market innovation, Americans will vote far more effectively with their wallet than through misguided and self-interested members of Congress.
More than ever, we need smart and realistic leadership, not another Washington power grab.
