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Sunday, February 22, 2015

A Veteran's Response to the National Security Agency

Here is my citizen's disclaimer to the NSA 1 and which I will be attaching to everything I write from now on!

My personal statement to the first sychophant (and hangers-on [aka police / military person{s} 2 who might arrest me]) of the 0.1% is as follows:

“It is not an honorable action to torture those who are testifying for their Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of assembly and speech. 3  Those taking such shameful actions can only be seen as enforcers - terrorsymps - for the terroristic 0.1%.  And as a Vietnam veteran, and then a person testifying for (the meaning of protest, after all) alternatives to the Vietnam (and succeeding Imperialistic) War(s), and now a supporter of Veterans for Peace, and a Third Order Lutheran Franciscan Associate, I take the suggestion of Stéphane Hessel - to return to the values of the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (values for which so many veterans fought during WW II) as the foundation from which to become outraged as the financial war being waged by the terrorist 0.1% against the activist 99.9% continues to take its toll.  To proclaim again that:
  1. ‘disregard and contempt for human rights [by the terrorist 0.1%] have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind’ and
  2. the highest aspiration of the common people - the activist 99.9% - is ‘the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want’”!
I still see the best overall review of the situation we face as being expressed in this 22+ minute video:  “Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine!!  4



























































1 Also known as Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit (MfS) oder Staatssicherheitdeinst (SSD) fur seine Strumabteilung (SA), Schutzstaffel (SS), Sicherheitzpolizei (SiPo [Gestapo und Kriminalpolizei {Kripo}]), und Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) Untergebenen - eine Art Nachkriegs ODESSACf. the covert counterintelligence branch of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) located in South America during World War II - the SIS - (Special Intelligence Service), and the documents from the Internet Archive.

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2 As David Graeber reminds us *, “Police represent the state; the state has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within its borders; therefore, within that territory, police are by definition incommensurable with anyone else.  This is essential to understanding what police actually are.  Many sociological studies have pointed out that maybe 6% of the average police officer’s time is spent on anything that can even remotely be considered ‘fighting crime’.  Police are a group of armed, lower-echelon government administrators, trained in the scientific application of physical force to aid in the resolution of administrative problems.  They are bureaucrats with guns, and whether they are guarding lost children, talking rowdy drunks out of bars, or supervising free concerts in the park, the one common feature of the kind of situation to which they’re assigned is the possibility of having to impose ‘non-negotiated solutions backed up by the potential use of force’. ** The key term here I think, is ‘non-negotiable’.  Police do not negotiate ‐ at least when it comes to anything important ‐ because that would imply equivalency.  When they are forced to negotiate, they pretty much invariably break their word.” ***

* David Graeber, ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF GIANT PUPPETS:  broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture, p.28.

** Egon Bittner's phrase from Aspects of Police Work.  See also Mark Neocleus, The Fabrication of Social Order:  A Critical Theory of Police Power.

*** Consider here the fact that “police negotiators” are generally employed in hostage situations; in other words, in order to actually get the police to negotiate, one has to literally be holding a gun to someone’s head.  And in such situations police can hardly be expected to honor their promises; in fact, they could well argue they are morally obliged not to.

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3 In spite of former President George W. Bush's statement that the Constitution is “just a God-dammed piece of paper.”

After his 8:30 PM (EDT) address to the nation from the Oval Office on September 11, 2001, President G. W. Bush, went immediately to the Emergency Operations Center (his first visit there), where he centered the discussion on the new war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Late in the discussion, Secretary of War, Donald Rumsfeld, noted that international law allowed use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution.

The President nearly bit his head off, yelling in the conference room, "No . . . I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." (Richard Allen Clarke, Against All Enemies:  Inside America's War On Terror. [New York: Free Press, 2004], p.24).

Cf. the transcript of Leslie Stahl's (CBS News 60 Minutes) interview with Paul O'Neill (former Treasury Secretary under President George Bush) as the source for Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty:  George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill which demonstrates (based on 19,000 internal documents) the impact of the PNAC "praetorian guard" on the "new American century."  That is to say, that plans were put in place, at least eight months before 9/11, for the invasion of Iraq.  Here's a YouTube link to the interview in case you're not a subscriber to 60 Minutes.

The comments of the person, Jon Gold, posting the above video are also quite instructive:  “What qualifies as suspicious behavior?  Bush telling his principals 10 days after his inauguration to "go find me a way" to go into Iraq?  Cheney meeting with nearly every oil executive in existence and discussing Iraq's oil fields months before 9/11, even though those executives denied meeting with him before Congress?  People in the Bush Administration discussing creating a "cassus belli" for war with Iraq prior to 9/11?  FBI Superiors blocking subordinates from doing their jobs?  The CIA seemingly protecting at least 2 of the hijackers?  The NSA lying about not knowing the location of two of the hijackers in San Diego?  NORAD lying about their air response that morning?  Multiple people in the Bush Administration denying that there were any warnings even though at least 14 countries warned us, and even though Bush received the August 6th, PDB [Presidential Daily Brief] and a multitude of PDBs that are supposedly worse than that one that we're not even allowed to see?  Cheney having a "back channel" to the different intelligence agencies prior to 9/11?  Bush fighting against having an investigation?  Bush refusing to cooperate fully with investigations?  A Bush lackey being put in charge of the so called "Independent" 9/11 Commission?  Money connected to 2 of the hijackers supposedly (and most likely) coming from a friend of the Bush family?  People like Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice planning for war with Iraq within hours of the attacks?  Bush using 9/11 to go to war with Iraq?  Nobody being held accountable, and instead people that didn't deserve it being rewarded and promoted?  Does any of it?” Now, compare the 2017 film "War Machine"!

And, the rest, as they say, is ongoing history!

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4 Other references of interest:
  • "Could this be part of the problem?"
  • In a TEDx talk, Lawrence Lessig fleshes out the Anonymous Banker's presentation with his own fix - "Our democracy no longer represents the people . . . ."
  • While, Noam Chomsky, puts much more of the big picture in context with his presentation - "Requiem for the American Dream"
  • And recently, the Honorable Paul Craig Roberts (economist, and former United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan Administration [and noted as a co-founder of Reagonomics] and editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and the Scripps Howard News Service) was invited to address an important conference of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in Moscow, in celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the Yalta Conference.  Dr. Roberts gave a two part address on “The Threat Posed to International Relations By The Neoconservative Ideology of American Hegemony” both of which are available for perusal on his Institute for Political Economy WWW site.
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