The following article is truly outstanding. One of the best I've read in years. I strongly encourage Alex to at least consider having the author (Joachim Hagopian) on as a guest. He knows a lot.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/lost-and-stolen-liberty-for-police-state-security/5381364Lost and Stolen Liberty for Police State SecurityBy Joachim Hagopian
Global Research
May 09, 2014
Based on the May 2014 Supreme Court’s non-action regarding the 2012 NDAA law that allows the US military to come into our homes and arrest us and then throw away the key forever without any legal rights, I had to write the following article.
General Eisenhower as Commander-in-Chief knew better than anyone the ominous threat and fatal danger posed by a growing arms industry wedded to war makers and how its tyranny could destroy American democracy and liberty. Unfortunately his grave warning in his presidential farewell address in January 1961 went unheeded. And now as a result in this post 9/11 era, we face the monster that is now destroying America and our way of life, simultaneously taking seven billion of us on this planet hostage by making the entire world more armed and dangerous than any prior time in human history.Meanwhile, since the 9/11 prearranged attacks, the Patriot Act and the prearranged Iraq and Afghanistan War debacles, American citizens have had their constitutional rights to privacy and due process totally stripped from them. Ever since the Authorization for Use of Military Force Act (
AUMFA) voted in and signed by Bush within a week after the twin towers were pulled a little more than a dozen years ago, America’s president, regardless of party, has assumed God-like power to decide who the enemy is and destroy them through any means necessary. And now with this week’s Supreme Court decision, it’s official – if anyone important in the government now desires you behind bars, all they need do is label you an enemy sympathizer and all your rights to legal representation, due process protection, contact with family are now completely nonexistent.
After passage of Obama’s 2012’s the National Defense Authorization Act (
NDAA), courageous author-journalist Chris Hedges and others representing all US citizens mounted a legal countersuit challenging the 2012 NDAA. A bold decision of one district court judge ruled in favor but was later overturned by an appeals court judge deferring the matter to America’s highest court the US Supreme Court. In a landmark decision that has nightmarish implications, earlier this week the Supreme Court elected to not even bother hearing the case, which in effect renders Hedges et al’s countersuit dead in the water, giving full power of the NDAA to authorize the misuse of the American military to legally break into our homes without a search warrant and arrest us, effectively eliminating our sixth amendment right to a speedy trial.
Now if you are suspected of being a terrorist or even a sympathizer, without any legal judge or warrant or charge, you can be arrested and not even notified of why you are arrested. As long as the US government’s open-ended “war on terror” (itself a convenient fascist fabrication) continues, you can be locked up forever. In this disturbing climate of increasing security surveillance and extreme punitive and oppressive control, the military’s role domestically at home insidiously expands to ensure total fulfillment of a fascist Orwellian police state.
A closer examination of US history sheds light on this dark cast that has been in the making for some time. Going back to the Second World War, purely out of racism and paranoia, President FDR in 1942 signed an
Executive Order 9066 rounding up 120,000 Japanese Americans and placed them in forced labor camps for the next two and a half years for the duration of the war. Shortly after World War II, the Cold War produced the Red scare of McCarthyism that harassed and ruined the lives of many innocent Americans falsely accused of being Communist or Communist sympathizers.
Under the misguided bigoted leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the
FBI and US government have had a long history of illegally compiling government watch lists and targeting selected groups of the American population deemed a threat or danger to political status quo. Hence, Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Vietnam War protesters all became victims of the FBI’s surveillance and harassment campaign during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Selected Black Panthers in various cities as well as Native Americans at Wounded Knee were even assassinated in racist FBI raids and assaults. The FBI lied claiming that its counterintelligence operations were suspended by 1971 when actually government surveillance continued on indefinitely. In 1979 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (
FEMA) came along as a national recovery plan set up in response to natural disasters to ensure that political and social order be restored.
In 1993 when agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) raided the
Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, it quickly spun out of control. So under the direction of President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno, the FBI and US Army were called in to take over, mounting a 51-day siege. Under the
Posse Comitatus Law that originated in 1878 during post-Civil War Reconstruction and then updated in 1982, the US military role in incidents of domestic civil unrest is unlawful where state National Guard and civilian law enforcement have clear jurisdiction. But the FBI held press conferences repeatedly making false claims that the FBI was in charge of the operation. But in reality, a half dozen years before committing his war crimes over Kosovo, General Wesley Clark commanded the military operation that resulted in at least 82 deaths of family members, dozens of whom were women and children belonging to the religious cult. Yet the
federal law at Waco was blatantly violated and covered up.
It was later confirmed that the initial BATF unit that raided the compound had just been given prior military training at the Army’s Home of the Armor branch, Fort Hood, and utilized two M1A1 tanks, one tank retrieval vehicle, nine Bradley fighting vehicles, and five combat engineering vehicles all operated by borrowed Fort Hood Active Duty Army personnel. Because original search warrants included suspicion of drugs, the BATF was authorized to receive Army training and equipment despite no drugs ever being found at the compound. However, with military involved in the attack, a federal law was definitely once again broken and many innocent Americans were needlessly murdered.
After the
Oklahoma City bombings two years later, the FBI and federal government stepped up its surveillance toward potential homegrown terrorism. With use of corporate media, the public was barraged by hype of increasing danger from domestic terrorists like the Unabomber. Thus, numerous organizations on watch lists began being targeted for systematic harassment. Any citizens who were publicly promoting gun rights, property rights, constitutional rights, home schooling or religious groups labeled as cults all became prime suspects that were under highest priority surveillance and increasingly harassed throughout the 1990’s right into this century.
In 1999 the World Trade Organization (
WTO) meetings in Seattle attracted 50 to 100,000 anti-globalization protesters from all over the world. Police brutality was rampant, multiple arrests were unlawfully made and many of the victims whose rights were violated were detained at a nearby Navy installation center, again a violation of both free speech and the Posse Comitatus law. These protests spawned the government’s first use of so called “free speech zones” designated far away from WTO activities, in effect cordoning off and limiting free speech dissidents from gathering where they can be seen and heard. Corporate media was overtly absent from the event, but then any coverage finally given was slanted and biased against the demonstrators. Independent media did ensure that evidence of unlawful abuse damning to law enforcement was documented, leading to the Seattle police chief’s resignation.
Those same restrictive, brutally oppressive tactics were also deployed against protesters in
Denver in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention and more recently used to crush the
Occupy Wall Street uprising in cities across the nation. The civil disobedience movement represents the growing awareness and unrest building amongst Americans that today’s extreme economic and social injustice must be challenged by us 99% have-nots.
Last year’s aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings was but a convenient preparatory practice drill for US martial law in the modern militarized US police state, a mere litmus seeing of how US citizens would react.
Of course ever since 9/11 under the Bush-Cheney neocons, the Patriot Act ushered in an era of over-the-top abuse with unconstitutional practices violating free speech, privacy and due process rights, many of which were secretly signed into law by presidential executive order. In 2002 Bush created a whole bureaucratic extension of the military industrial complex when he announced the formation of the
Department of Homeland Security. The secrecy and lack of accountability of funding such a cumbersome unbridled entity that overlaps and duplicates both functions and agencies of both the State and Defense Departments have allowed enormous runaway federal expenditures again at taxpayer expense and burden.
In 2003 Bush placed FEMA under Homeland Security. Then in 2005 Hurricane Katrina struck, and the Posse Comitatus law again was violated when soldiers straight from the battlefields of Iraq were deployed to the designated urban war zone known as New Orleans. FEMA’s total lack of response many days after the flooding provided the overwhelming evidence that Bush’s mobilizing the military in a militarized police state took precedence over rescue efforts to save hurricane victims that were primarily the poor and black left behind in the most defenseless areas of the city. As a result, war criminal Bush has 1464 dead Americans on his bloody hands from that fiasco alone.
In that same year 2005 the Missouri Information Analysis Center (
MIAC) was opened. MIAC was a fusion center that was 28% funded by Homeland Security to work with local and state intelligence agencies to sniff out terrorists. A MIAC report entitled “The Modern Militia Movement” was leaked to WikiLeaks exposing the illegal profiling of individuals driving cars with “Ron Paul for President” bumper stickers as tied to militia groups. The same month it was discovered this kind of homegrown fascism was quietly suspended and shut down in 2009, four years after it began. But many state fusion centers across the nation still remain open. As extensions of Homeland Security, they illustrate the covert nature of such far reaching entanglement as flagrant first amendment violations due to the over-arching abusive and monolithic security agency.
William M. Arkin, author of “American Coup: How a Terrified Government Is Destroying the Constitution,” states that this self-serving monster of a governmental entity has grown exponentially in the ten years it has existed to involving a colossal 33% of the total adult American population between ages 20-64. The Department of Homeland Security counts as “part of the regimented conglomeration of troops, government workers, first-responders, private-sector enlistees and civilian volunteers.” This level of intrusive, secret spying and informing on your neighbor smacks of Nazi Germany. Its abuse of power is massive and blatant, not to mention sinfully wasteful.
In October 2006 Bush signed the
Military Commissions Act into law that if even as an American citizen you are deemed an enemy of the state by the government, your right to habeas corpus, or right to defend yourself in a court of civil law, is forfeited and replaced by military tribunal. The right to habeas corpus is the oldest human right in the English speaking world regarded to be among the most important parts of the 1215 Magna Carta. One by one, under the boldface lie of security, Bush was effectively killing our liberties and rights guaranteed under the US Constitution. Fortunately in 2008 the US Supreme Court found this law unconstitutional, restoring the writ of habeas corpus and access to federal courts to any detainee, American citizen as well as foreign.
Army Regulation
210-35 drafted in 1997 and then reformulated on Bush’s watch in 2007 provides military installations with a civilian inmate labor program as well as prison camps on military grounds. In 2006 Kellogg, Brown and Root (or now known as KBR, formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton and the largest non-union construction company in America) signed a lucrative $385 million dollar contract with Homeland Security to refurbish old military posts into civilian prison camps. The government holds the not-so- secret plan to fill up these military prisons with American citizens.
Despite all these too obvious ties to the Bush administration with sitting Vice President Cheney Halliburton’s ex-CEO and their flaunting record of no bid contracts, corruption and cronyism during the Bush years quietly went unchallenged both legally and in the media. Meanwhile, KBR has had numerous lawsuits of women allegedly gang raped while working in Iraq as well as charges of exploiting human trafficking victims for cheap slave labor.
As a generously paid consultant of the
Carlyle Group, GW’s dad had just cemented a huge defense contract. So where does junior decide to visit? A Carlyle owned company fresh off his photo ops session on an aircraft carrier where he infamously and prematurely declared false victory in Iraq, stopping off for yet another photo op to celebrate his family making millions more in another shady deal engineered by daddy Bush. Yet not one media outlet bothered to connect these all too obvious shameless dots. Bush and Cheney’s unprecedented level of in-our-face corruption was so out in the open, complete with those cocky, smug twisted smiles of pure evil personified, knowing with certainty there would be no repercussions or consequences for being such blatant war criminals or for being the most crooked presidency in American history. Money and Israeli-Saudi bin Laden connections simply buy impunity.
With the ultimate betrayal of the demonically executed inside job of 9/11, the Bush-Cheney regime set into monstrous motion what dictator Obama has only accelerated, an unholy globalized merger between US Empire bullied national governments and Fortune 500 transnational corporations along with un-repayable IMF and World Bank loans, all serve the controlling shareholder interests of one-one hundredth of one per cent of the total world population that owns and controls virtually everything on our entire planet. This most obscene and perverse abomination is what humanity has tragically devolved and degenerated into on a global power structure scale. A corrupt and sinister caldron of unprecedented epic proportions presently forecasts only doom and gloom for an ailing planet earth and all its inhabitants.
Operation Garden Plot is a military plan developed in response to the civil unrest in the 1960’s. Its 253 pages represent the established protocol the US Army and National Guard have in place for responding to any major domestic civil disturbances within the United States. The plan is now under the control of the US Northern Command (NORTHCOM), providing federal military and law enforcement assistance to local governments during times of major civil unrest and crises.
For those who still dismiss all these in-our-face warning signs of how the US government has plans to lock up Americans who disagree with its unconstitutional practices and policies, declaring dissidents enemy sympathizers, as just more hocus pocus conspiracy theory gone mad, citizens need only check out the Department of Defense (DoD) document released in February 2010 entitled “Internment and Resettlement Operations” or
FM-3-39.40. This document shows that with Obama in power, it predates the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that Obama signed authorizing without warrants the military to be able to round up, arrest and detain US citizens for an indefinite period of time, denying all access to legal representation and constitutional rights. This same Obama signed law nullifies the previous Comitatus Law protecting Americans by prohibiting US military from arresting US citizens. And now that the US Supreme Court this week has opted not to even examine much less challenge the 2012 NDAA, USA tyranny is officially here to stay.
The 325 page document called
FM-3-39.40 acts as undeniable evidence that in fact our government’s sinister agenda is very real, outlining in very specific detail how the DoD, FEMA, Homeland Security, and the United Nations together will be operating the military detention camps within US borders and beyond, targeting American political dissidents and citizens of the world for detainment. Psychological Operations Officers will be responsible for developing and executing indoctrination programs to reduce and remove antagonistic attitudes as well as identifying political activists. It calls for conditions that justify use of lethal force, in effect killing anyone caught trying to escape. This in itself proves detainees are not there for benign humanitarian disaster relief purposes.
Page 260 of this document covers the physical layout of these detainment camps that include interrogation areas, military tribunal areas and mortuaries. Mortuaries indicate that human deaths are part of the facility’s function that will house up to 4000 detainees. Clearly dissidents who oppose the tyranny of our government will be rounded up and imprisoned in these resettlement camps. Tactics utilized at these camps may well involve torture techniques similar to those currently used on foreign detainees at infamous Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib prisons. Another page describes civilian resettlement facilities housing 8000 people that include many rows of barbed wire fence areas within the camp as well as around the camp perimeter along with fourteen guard towers. This proves that any American citizen who dares to speak out and resists our government’s tyranny as a dissident will be locked up and incarcerated.
And with extreme surveillance and names being added daily on dissident watch lists, the government has been preparing and is ready to execute this demonic plan that to most Americans is just too unimaginable and unreal. But unfortunately this document proves that imprisonment of American dissidents in America is very real, signed by Joyce E. Morrow, Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the Army John McHugh.
Just as telling and alarming as civilian labor and resettlement camps on military installations might be, the fact is since 2009 the US Army actually has want ads out with the title for those military personnel who will be employed as prison guards at these military internment camps. The Army is currently advertising unlimited openings for “
Internment Resettlement Specialists,” complete with a full training program preparing these soldiers to become armed prison guards at all the labor camps. The US prison industrial complex and Homeland Security complex right along with the military industrial complex are all growing exponentially gluttonous and ever more dangerous. The most shuddering, chilling thought is that our very taxpayer dollars we are now toiling away so hard to earn may inadvertently be funding the very same prisons where we end up incarcerated.
As if the civilian inmate camps manned by military Internment Resettlement Specialists is not shocking enough, a bill that died in committee in 2009 as of January 2013 was back in the House of Representatives, the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act (
H.R. Bill 390). It proposed that six more massive emergency centers capable of holding thousands of people and families be built on military installations in America for “temporary housing under emergency situations.” What constitutes emergency situations? President Obama and the Director of Homeland Security will dictate those parameters.
Concerned skeptics of this massive proliferation and privatization of detainment centers across the country believe it is another ominous sign that proves what our government is expecting and planning for us. Multimillion dollar prisons for profit are not built to remain empty. So reasons why any particular group of American citizens risk being rounded up like the Americans who happened to be Japanese during World War II is a growing worry amongst those who see their once cherished liberty, rights and freedom being rapidly replaced by a tyrannical militarized police state. America is simply one false flag or natural disaster away from martial law and FEMA concentration camp roundups.
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