Elaine Meinel Supkis
On top of illegally spying on American citizens exercising Constitutional rights, the GOP has been caught in a morass of corruption as bribes are passed out so various mercenary organizations, ofter working for our top politicians, can suck up as much taxpayer backed funds as possible. This is all so very illegal and unconstitutional, time to put a lot of politicians in prison.
CIFA recently has come under fire following disclosures that it maintained information on individuals and groups involved in peaceful anti-war protests at defense facilities and recruiting offices.How on earth does spying illegally on citizens practicing their Constitutional rights "ensuring liberty"? Only people living deep inside Orwellia can state this sort of nonsense with a straight face.
The information was stored in a database that was supposed to be reserved for reports related to potential foreign terrorist activity.
In a March 8 letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., a senior Pentagon official said that a review of the Cornerstone database had identified 186 "protest-related reports" containing the names of 43 people that were mistakenly retained in the database.
"These reports have since been removed from the Cornerstone database and refresher training on intelligence oversight and database management is being given to all CI (counter-intelligence) and intelligence personnel," said the letter from Robert W. Rogalski, an acting deputy undersecretary of defense.
The disclosure that CIFA was storing information on anti-war activities added to concerns that the Bush administration may have used its war on terrorism to give government agencies expanded power to monitor Americans' finances, associations, travel and other activities.
The administration's domestic eavesdropping program and FBI monitoring of environmental, animal rights and anti-war groups have also fueled such fears. The administration contends that its programs are legal and insists that they're designed to ensure civil liberties while protecting national security.
Even during the anti-Vietnam war protests, the riots that did happen were nearly always begun by the police which is why we called them "police riots." I used to work at these protests mostly as a medic. But also as a parade marshall. Anyone agitating for violence was controlled by us, usually, we would walk them away from the demonstration. The police were always looking for an excuse to supress our marches so if someone was acting up, they would charge in and smash everyone in their path. Their tendency for hair-trigger violence made them annoying and frightful. Like a drunk spouse always on the verge of attacking the family at dinner.
What is also interesting about this news is how the Cunningham affair is exposing all sorts of hair raising side issues. The race to privatize war work, for example. This has caused the costs of our police state/eternal war machine to shoot to Mars and beyond. We are spending an insane amount of money, nearly all of it going to GOP supporters, and to grab this money, they, in turn, hand out bribes to our "representatives" and they use this money to warp election processes by giving huge amounts to pro-war, pro-corruption candidates.
Americans sit by passively as our government pays out billions of dollars a year across the planet for "private guards" for our embassies and our war zones. We bankroll the security of the Quisling ruling Afghanistan which is increasingly out of control, just this week, another warlord who supports him was rubbed out, in Iraq, these guards murder people for fun and run riot and have no one to answer to except their company presidents who hand out bribes to all and sundry all the way to the White House.
In New Orleans, after the hurricane, private companies were awarded contracts to go door to door to disarm American citizens. This mixing up of private armies with public affairs has many bad sides to it!
One is, private armies tend to take over. They can eventually subvert the government, this is what "Praetorian Guards" are all about! We can barely control our military via our "elected" officials but the citizens have zero control over private armies. Also, the tendency of private armies to loot is very strong. After all, they are there to make a profit.
Any cursory reading of Italian political history from 1000 AD to 1700 AD is a long and dirty tale of hiring private contractors to protect a city-state only to be taken over by them or abandoned by them or betrayed by them.
This is one reason why "citizen-armies" were a huge innovation. The Swiss started this back when they defeated the various noble-led suppressions. Training hill farmers to fight in massed squares was so successful, they hired them out to the various city-states in Italy and then discovered they could take over! To this day, the Vatican is still protected by Swiss hill farmer fighters in an ossified system.
Napoleon tapped the energy of the French Revolution to create mass citizen armies. The USA showed the way during the Revolution and the French military worked closely with this process over here and then translated it into French. Then Germany copied the system with horrifying results over time.
Why am I talking about the Roman army under the banner, "IN THE NEWS"? Because the United States now has a military that is moving toward the Roman model.This blog article has a pretty good take on all this.I don't think many Americans see or understand this transformation. Daily evidence—"contractors" killed in Fallujah, the use of hastily-trained Afghan troops to encircle the Tora Bora stronghold in Afghanistan—don't fit into any larger picture. Not every service is moving in this direction, but the Army certainly is. Meanwhile, the average American is convinced that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being fought by American soldiers, when in reality many traditional military functions are now in the hands of the modern equivalents of auxiliaries and mercenaries.
Privatization of the military while making the citizens pay for it is a dangerous process that has no good end to it. When we stopped the draft and basically privatized the military by making it a seperate profession, we began the long road down into fascism without citizen participation. Bush Sr. was estatic when he egged America into fighting for Kuwait. We basically sold our services to the Saudi and Kuwaiti royal families and became a mercenary gang. We were repaid for all this by being repeatedly attacked by outraged Saudi and UAE members cresting with the 9/11 attacks and still on-going.
To keep up public support for all this, the owners of the various companies that are mercenaries have to run propaganda campaigns. This means suppressing people who want to stop the mercenaries. Thus, the corrupt contracts to spy illegally on antiwar agitators.
The super corruption is via Cheney and the Bushes running mercenary businesses on the side, reaping billions of taxpayer dollars in profits even as they personally create wars and mayhem in our collective names. They are trying as hard as possible to do this today, egging us all into a futile and insane confrontation with Iran. On top of all this mess, the oil corporations that are stripping America of all oil resources have latched onto our military to use them as means of negotiating contracts that benefit only the oil companies. This is another reason for the wars in the Middle East. We have to take over various countries so the oil corporations can steal the profits from pumping oil from the locals which drives them all nuts and causes them to attack us at every turn.
And on top of everything, this is why we are going bankrupt. The bills are in the trillions and piling up rapidly and the rich who are reaping the benefits of these mercenary activities are not being taxed at all while we get to foot the bill when the Chinese and Saudis decide it is time for the IMF to begin the payback process.
Millions of Americans will die during that process.
But on the bright side, there are too many people in the world, some culling of the stupid is desirable.
Posted by: big al | March 19, 2006 at 09:58 AM
Unless it is one's own self....
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | March 19, 2006 at 05:54 PM