Friday, May 21, 2010

I Am Not a Terrorist. Don’t Take My Citizenship From Me.

Earlier this month, Senators Scott Brown (R, MA) and Joseph Lieberman (ID, CT) proposed a new bill, the Terrorist Expatriation Act (“TEA”), which expands a 1940 law that gives the State Department the right to revoke the citizenship of anyone who has pledged allegiance to foreign armies or states.  The bill is broad and provides for an administrative process at the State Department that is completely subjective; it does not require the conviction of a crime against the United States government.  There is no due process to indict a suspect, or statutes which provide for the infractions suspects may be considered to have committed, or a jury trial to decide the guilt or innocence of a suspect, though those who are the victims of the Act do have the right to appeal – if they have the money to wage a legal battle from another country.  Giving material support to an organization that is simply suspected of having ties to, for example, Hamas – as the Middle East Children’s Alliance (“MECA”) was once accused of having but was determined after investigation not to actually have – qualifies an individual for citizenship revocation under the TEA.  “The bill is so broad that it would allow the government to strip citizenship from someone who never committed a hostile act against the United States,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor of law at American University (“Brown wants citizenship revoked for terror ties,” Boston Globe, 5/7/10).

Explaining his decision to propose the bill Lieberman said at a press conference May 7th , “Our enemies today are even more willing than the Nazis or fascists were to kill innocent civilian Americans here in our homeland,” in fits of not just hypocrisy, but also, semantic apoplexy; the Nazis and 'fascists' never killed innocent civilian Americans here in our homeland.  The Nazis were responsible for the deaths of 50 million of the world’s citizens by way of the Second World War, including upwards of 11 million Eastern and Western Europeans they exterminated because they felt those people were “undesirable:”  trade unionists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies and six million Jews, among others.  Two representatives, Jason Altmire (D, PA) and Charles Dent (R, PA), plan to submit similar legislation to the House, clearing the way for the Ways and Means Committee to figure out how to fund this fascist endeavor.

Rick Sawyer wrote a timely, cogent and brilliantly elucidated essay on how the Nazis managed to create their fascist state by passing similar laws, in the second of the “solutions” they devised to get rid of people inconvenient to their fascist state (as we know, the first solution was incentivized expatriation, and the final solution was the Holocaust).  He makes the point, yet again and eloquently, that each and every one of us is capable of innocently acting in a way the secret citizenship tribunal at the State Department may regard as anti-American – such as by sending charitable contributions to MECA – and may become in its eyes, thereby, deserving of citizenship revocation.

It’s a point I take to heart, and not merely because I’ve supported MECA in the past, back when I was allowed to work.  Like the American Friends Service Committee, because of their work to help the refugees from the U.S.-backed civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s, I am viewed by our government, because of my political activism, as extremist, and I have been since long before the invasion/occupation/colonization of Iraq, or 9/11.   Here’s what New York University professor and attorney Brian Glick said in 1989 about the U.S.’s propensity to label dissidents of its policies as terrorists in his groundbreaking pamphlet, War at Home:  Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It:  “Much of what the U.S. government has cited as international terrorism, such as the ‘Libyan hit squads’ of the early 1980s, turns out to be pure hoax.  What remains are largely liberation movements like the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa and the FMLN in El Salvador.”  (p. 66)  Glick discovered this truth and many horrifying others about our government’s repression of legitimate U.S. dissidents in volumes of declassified material he acquired through the now moribund and virtually useless FOIA process he used in his work defending members of the American Friends Service Committee, who had been subjected to COINTELPRO (an acronym for “Counter-Intelligence Programs”) in the 1980s despite the fact Congress told the American people in 1974 COINTELPRO had been discontinued.  Back in the 1970s, all of it was illegal, but as Glick notes on page 31, Ronald Reagan took the first steps to make permanent warfare against U.S. activists a key feature of U.S. government policy.  He writes, “Much of what was done outside the law under COINTELPRO has since been legalized by Executive Order No. 12333 (December 4, 1981) and new Attorney’s General ‘Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise and Domestic Security/Terrorism Investigations’ (March 7, 1983).  For the first time in U.S. history, government infiltration ‘for the purpose of influencing the activity of’ domestic political organizations has received official sanction (E.O. 12333, §2.9).  This prerogative is now extended to the FBI and anyone acting on its behalf.  It provided a legal pretext for the Bureau’s attacks on CISPES and other opponents of U.S. policy in Central America.”  (emph. added)  All that happened 29 years ago, but you didn’t hear about it from Geraldo, or 60 Minutes, or Phil Donahue.  You’re not hearing about it today on Frontline, or Bill Moyer’s Journal (because he was a White House Aide earlier in this career), or Oprah.  There's a reason for that.

Here’s a sampling of the groups Glick found our government actively undermined with its military tactics:  AIM and the Native American Movement; the Black Movement, including those people who were feeding starving black children, the Black Panthers; the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements; the Women’s Liberation, Gay and Lesbian movements; the anti-war and New Left movements; the Labor movement. (pp. 22-28)  Its main targets were the Communist Party-USA; groups seeking independence for Puerto Rico; groups seeking aid for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans; the Socialist Workers’ Party and Malcolm X; the Black Nationalist “Hate” Groups, and in particular, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the “New Left,” and in particular, Students for a Democratic Society.  The final group of organizations that our government routinely infiltrated which Glick lists on pages 10 through 13 cannot help but incense.  He writes, “‘White Hate Groups’ (1964-71):  This unique ‘program’ functioned largely as a component of the FBI’s operations against the progressive activists who were COINTELPRO’s main targets.  Under the cover of being even-handed and going after violent right-wing groups, the FBI actually gave covert aid to the Ku Klux Klan, Minutemen, Nazis, and other racist vigilantes.  These groups received substantial funds, information, and protection – and suffered only token FBI harassment – so long as they directed their violence against COINTELPRO targets.  They were not subject to serious disruption unless they breached this tacit understanding and attacked established business and political leaders.”  (pp. 12-13, emph. added)  Again, all of this information comes from FBI files.  Now you know why it took decades for people such as the suspects in, for example, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombings, Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton, Jr., to receive judicial sanction for the murders of America’s black citizens, in this case, children.  Thirty-eight years had passed from the time of the 1963 murders, which was not even a whole year before the FBI began officially using White Supremacists against black American citizens, before Cherry and Blanton ever stood trial.  Justice delayed is justice denied, and America’s government wants justice to be denied to its black citizens its quislings murder on its behalf.  It is very reluctant to give up its many types of slaves, despite the pretty talk.  Racial slavery lasted nearly 80 years after the 13th Amendment was passed, don't forget -- in the form of Jim Crow.  It’s just that simple.  As anyone can see from reading this blog, COINTELPRO and other covert tactics are routinely used today to suppress American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.  The only thing that has changed since the 1960s is the extent to which we are now all subject to repression in our military dictatorship.

With reproductions of falsified handwritten letters and documentation on false phone calls the FBI made in the name of activists, Glick demonstrates how our government managed to sow doubt and dissension among activists working together in these movements from the 1960s onward.  One tactic they used was to plant a rumor among activists and when the target they wished to put a “snitch jacket” on took it up, they exposed it as such, thereby ‘proving’ previously sowed speculation about the target’s doubtful allegiance as true.  This happened to me.  Rarely do I discuss my personal repression because so many websites tell in exquisite detail of the type of persecution ordinary Americans experience today at the hands of our government.  For the purposes of illustrating tried and true COINTELPRO tactics our government is using today on law-abiding citizens like me, I will briefly outline the one attack that secured my social isolation from my community members.  Now, please remember that, owing to my health, I’ve never been an active member/leader of any peace/justice organization.  I have no information on the membership of any group, it’s mission statement, its planned activities and strategies and no means to acquire such information.  The idea that I’m a snitch is ludicrous, but I’ve been treated unconscionably by local activists nevertheless, who either truly believe I am an FBI informant, or are themselves covert agents engaged in counter-intelligence.  On one occasion -- January 27, 2007 -- I was assaulted on the bus ride from a PEACE rally in Washington by such activists. 

On the occasion that ended my attempts at alliance with my local peace activist groups, I had attended a vigil on the Cambridge common that was organized by two women (of the same name) who attended a local church.  When I arrived the following week, the women were gone, never to be seen at the vigil again, and in their place was a cadre of alleged peace activists of unimpeachable (which is to say, deep cover) credentials:  the 70 year-old vegan former seminary woman; her impoverished “daughter” and “granddaughters;” an Irish ex-pat high school teacher; an Indonesian woman (and, on occasion, her so belligerent husband I became afraid for her safety), and, of course, the same familiar faces of leaders of local peace groups.  On one occasion, the afore-mentioned 70 year-old vegan began telling me about the counter-intelligence group she had joined that worked at Boston English High School once a week.  Now normally, this woman had very little to say – always very carefully measured statements whenever she did say anything, which I often appreciated since the initial intent of the gathering was to be a vigil, which are traditionally held in silence, but since the originators abandoned it to the cadre, it had become an at times obnoxious protest.  On this occasion – and when no other “activists” were present – she repeatedly brought up the fact the counter-recruitment group was having trouble attracting members because it was held in the middle of the week at the beginning of the day (7:00 AM).  I could feel the pressure to join it mounting inside me.  After her THIRD time mentioning this, feeling like a heel, I acquiesced and said I would love to join the group; at no time did she ever invite me to join, which is important to remember.  This PSYOP (an acronym for Psychological Operation) tactic, by the way, is called “forcing” and is used by, for example, magicians to subconsciously goad potential volunteers to assist them in their acts.

I began attending the vigil.  A few weeks into my counter-recruitment activities, a leader of a Boston peace/justice group that had been a rival to Boston ANSWER (which was also undermined from within through the work of agent provocateurs, who made the chapter seem pro-violence) planted the rumor that a Latina woman had come to them and complained that her child was told his gym class was over-subscribed and he would have to “take” ROTC instead to fulfill his gym requirement.  ROTC has been a feature in poor public schools that receive federal funding since the “No Child Left Behind Act.”  Since the group had already decided to write our representative about the over-bearing presence of ROTC in these schools, naturally, I wrote a letter that contained this, what I later realized was manufactured, rumor. When I shared the copy of my letter with the group, I received the harshest condemnation from the man said to be coordinating counter-recruitment efforts, from an email address at the AFSC – in the public arena of the listserve group.  I had never met the man because he had never been to any of the counter-recruitment activities that I had been to, and if I tell you who he and all these other people are, it would look like I am, in fact, a snitch – because there’s no way to prove their true allegiance, and by making my accusations, I only look like the one sowing dissent.  Diabolical.  The last time I saw the 70 year-old vegan former seminary woman was as I was walking by her last “protest” on Cambridge Common, wrapped in the once ubiquitous peace flag favored by Boston area activists.  I greeted her civilly, said I couldn’t chat, to which she replied she couldn’t either – right before she invited me to attend an event with her that evening, an invitation I knew was sincere since she was making it as she walked away from me, over her shoulder, sneering wickedly, apparently expecting me not to reply.  What did I learn from this experience?  The snitch jacket was intended to separate me from other activists and potential allies, and it worked, and after several peculiar encounters with the AFSC, I am now convinced its leadership has been thoroughly infiltrated by our government, thanks to Reagan's E.O. 12333, despite the sincerity of some of its ordinary members.  But the 70 year-old vegan former seminary student wasn't the only provocateur that attended this "vigil" by no means; I would say that after the two women who started it dropped out, every one of the dozen or so other individuals were provocateurs and it became a military operation.

And there have been plenty of other attacks.  I’ve been race-baited, gay-baited and immigrant-baited in sometimes extremely clever coordinated attacks and sometimes with simple psychological terrorism in which an acquaintance traps me into a ‘so-when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife’ slander situation.  All I can say is, PSYOP, especially COINTELPRO, works.

As I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve learned that former political prisoner, Black Panther, jailhouse lawyer and Angola prison inmate, Robert King, who spent 28 years in solitary confinement at the most notorious prison in America, has finished his promotional tour in the UK for the documentary, In the Land of the Free, which tells his story and the stories of two other Angola inmates who were subjected to the same inhumane torture.  Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, the other two members of “the Angola Three,” each spent 36 years in solitary confinement and are still imprisoned.  King has been added to Amnesty International’s watch list of “political prisoners/prisoners of conscience,” a distinction that may be the only thing that saves him from prosecution under TEA if he tries to promote his documentary in other countries; American citizens who agitate against the United States in a foreign country will be subject to immediate prosecution under TEA.  The Supreme Court’s ruling that the three men’s case against the State of Louisiana has merit may be of absolutely no benefit to him if the machinery of the state grasps him in its clutches once again.  The Pentagon never concedes in its wars of attrition.  King’s documentary premieres in New York June 16th at The Film Society of Lincoln Center, 6:30 PM.

Is there any hope, now, for our freedoms – for our rights, our dignity, our sovereignty?  Mine is dwindling fast.  As I’ve said many times before, the people who created this once ingenuous constitutional republic under which we’ve been deluded into thinking we still live – where every citizen’s rights are enshrined into law and considered sacrosanct – told us to do two things to keep those rights that ensured our freedoms:  first, be ever vigilant of our leaders, and second, throw them – all of them – out of office whenever they proved themselves unworthy of our trust.  Congress and then Vice President Al Gore did just that when they allowed Bush’s theft of the presidency in 2000, and when Congress voted to invade Iraq without cause.  For decades we’ve done neither, and now, we’re not merely at war with one another but unable to help ourselves in meaningful ways, though I’ve done my best to brainstorm some.  What should you do today?  Plague Senators Brown and Lieberman with faxes, emails, letters, voicemail denouncing their new Nuremberg law; get your church, family, online forum, chat buddies, facebook and myspace friends to do the same.  Organize protests in Washington and these Senators' offices and, most importantly, create or join campaigns to recall them from office now, or in the next mid-term election (guess when that will be).

I’ve also said, after having been shot at on Mass. Ave. in broad daylight; nearly run over on several occasions with every mode of transport one can think of; almost run off Interstate 95 in Connecticut by a semi with no license plate (oh, yes; it’s true); bioassaulted a number of times including with a pathogen that behaved just like anthrax; poisoned with food poisoning repeatedly where I’ve never had food poisoning before that, that I won’t be around much longer.  That never seemed more true than it is today.

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Thursday, May 6, 2010

Not Quite the Same Tea in Palin's "Tea Party"

I didn’t write about Sarah Palin’s visit to Boston last month at the end of her “Tea Party” tour, Wednesday, April 14th. Sometimes, the task of sifting the treasure from the trash in a story is just too overwhelming; whatever observations I have to share with my readers come not so much from the actual who, what, when, where, why and how of it, but from the examination of how our government manipulates our perceptions of those things. A recent conversation with a clerk in my neighborhood health food store got me thinking about these binary components of our political tableau and about how successful our government has been because of them. Tea time today seems an appropriate time to turn my attention to Ms. Palin’s stunt on the common and contribute a fresh, badly needed perspective.
We Americans are used to politicians who act as though they understand the issues of greatest concern to us when they so obviously don’t. This discrepancy in our political discourse is now so familiar it’s a foregone conclusion, and its rich history gives us much material to scrutinize – far more than can be analyzed in this little blog. What is immediately obvious is the fact that where this discrepancy exists, only those already in power – no matter their party affiliations – benefit from it. We, those without power, are left fighting not the true battles to see our problems taken up by our leaders, but rather, whomever those running for office pit against us with this contrivance: weak on crime and terrorism ‘liberals’ v. hawk neocons, anti-empire protesters v. oil and military bourgeoisie. Ms. Palin is certainly a politician. She knows that garnering the kind of support she needs to afford the type of pervasive PR every politician who’s selected by our corporate leaders needs in order to control the public discourse requires her to set forth talking points of no relevance to the average American. That’s how she proves her status as a quisling to her backers. Thus, her “Tea Party” tour. But she's also so much more than that.  With one breath, she’ll tell you America’s problem is big government, and then with another, she’ll assure you she wants a strong defense – in an age when the Pentagon’s budget is (and has been for quite some time) in excess of $75 billion dollars annually and all that money (which we borrow from Saudi Arabia and China at exorbitant interest rates) goes to – what else – big outsourced government, also known as the private security industry. The average American doesn’t see this contradiction reinforced in evening news broadcasts, or morning and afternoon talk shows, or popular non-fiction, so it believes it doesn’t exist, even though all it takes to see it is a willingness to do so.  Palin wants to keep the military industrial complex happy because those are the people who fund her campaign “war chest,” and so we may rightfully ask, "Is Sarah Palin merely a politician, or a soldier, herself, and, if so, what kind of soldier?”

“I trusted Obama to change the direction our country was headed, but so far, I’ve seen no change. We need smaller government,” one Palin supporter commented to a WBZ news reporter the day of her party. That’s the news bite the majority of New Englanders heard, followed by Palin, herself: “I want to tell you – [nah] – we’ll keep clinging to our constitution and our guns and religion, and you can keep the change,” as if this mission statement hasn’t been forcibly undertaken by every administration since Reagan’s. “Smaller government” isn’t our issue, clearly, and it hasn’t been their issue, either, for the last 30 years, as we can see from the Pentagon’s budget, the proceeds of which have been distributed to ‘free’ market privateers who have completely undermined our constitutional republic by replacing public government that represents us all with the permanent police state they control. Less corrupt, more effective government – without the propaganda shrink wrapped around the agenda of items permissible to discuss in the public discourse – is the issue. Palin’s tea ‘parody’ represents far more closely the fête the Mad Hatter threw for Alice than the 1773 demonstration in Boston Harbor for that reason. So one must ask – is it really ‘tea,’ or something else, at the heart of Palin’s ‘protest?’

“Well, that’s why I get to live in the bubble I live in – thanks to people like you,” the clerk said to me that day, without even a hint of shame, when I told her about my blog. She’s about the age of the initial group of youth who cast their first votes when Viacom’s MTV inaugurated its Rock the Vote campaign in 1990, becoming the first global corporation to sponsor mass, direct American civics education – bad mass, direct American civics education, at that. For her, as for most Americans, self-governance begins and ends at the polling booth every four years, when she and her cohorts organize themselves into that type of “mob” which Founding Father James Madison decried as the enemy of the American Constitutional Republic in Federalist Paper No. 10 – that democratic mob made up of the most powerful factions of people in our country (such as the broadcasting industry), whose interests are the only ones our elected officials represent. Madison, like all the other Federalists, despised democracy and preferred to it instead a constitutional republic in which the people elected “virtuous” men to represent everyone, not merely the most powerful of the body politic.

But here’s the catch: to whom can a concerned Patriot turn for help in fighting fascist hypocrites such as Palin now that we’re down this rabbit hole – where up is down, down is up, and nothing our politicians say or do makes patent sense? Ron Paul supporter Michael Edward has made good use of the disaffection of those of us who understand these things about our politicians and our lost form of government, but when we scratch the surface of his “Restore the Republic” movement, we find the same type of hypocrisy that calls for less, not more effective, civil government. It’s easy to see that what they want is actually vigilante-style “independence,” the freedom to live as lawless frontiersmen in the mistaken belief that that is what our Founding Fathers wished for us.

I admit it – much of Edward’s research is spot on, and he demonstrates a thorough understanding of the singularly most distressing aspect of our emerging socialist state: the totalitarianism that a group of privileged (less and less honorably elected) people increasingly exert over the majority of us. But that the one, effective antidote to this situation is a government-less, “free market” exploitation of the issues at the heart of our attempts to promote the commonwealth our Founding Fathers intended us to create is a fallacy, one they are prepared to cling to, if necessary, with guns in hand. They couldn’t be more closely aligned with the neocons they claim to abhor.

There is an unmistakable pattern of propaganda at work here: embedded into a manufactured issue that takes a perspective beneficial only to those who created the issue is a grain of truth to which we are drawn, but then the subsequent dialogue is inevitably channeled in a way that benefits only those people who created the ‘issue.’ With its ‘answer’ of no government to its specious ‘problem’ of big government, it’s easy to see that Restore the Republic is clearly a “false flag” organization created to ensnare unsuspecting disaffected Americans by pretending to be something that it is not – representative of the interests of the average American.  I can only deduce his organization is a false flag, one of the many propaganda tools of "historic" importance George W. Bush ordered the quislings of his Global Communications Office to create in 2003 for his never-ending covert war.

Then there’s the hatred of the other that is so assiduously promoted by American culture that's also used to undermine belief in a public government that has given us everything from the interstate highway system to the enforcement of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, of anyone who doesn’t ascribe to the anti-humanistic notion we are all nothing more than animals in a jungle, of anyone who remembers a time when the American government wasn’t directly involved in creating debased culture that encourages us to fight amongst ourselves.  Probably the most detrimental war being waged against the American citizen is in the area of quality public education.

Thomas Jefferson, our 3rd president and the author of the Declaration of Independence, was a firm believer in universal, government-supported education for all Americans, regardless of their ability to pay for it. He and a group of his colleagues put together what can only be called the first charter school in Washington, D.C., by pledging the sum of $200 in ten installments in 1805 for its creation, when he was barely solvent. Together, they raised more than $35,000 to start this, the forerunner to the public school, just to prove to lawmakers that publicly-supported education was worth financing with public funds – and they succeeded. Less than a decade-and-a-half later, the Commonwealth of Virginia created the first public institution of higher learning, the University of Virginia, and Jefferson became its first head. Jefferson envisioned what recent educators would call constructivist principles as the basis of good, universal education, but since the 1970s, education has been turned into an enterprise where only performance matters, an enterprise in which even basic science and history facts have been relegated to the rubbish heap. In the last 20 years especially, the charter school movement has done everything it can to create an elite class of citizens culled for advancement from those students that demonstrate susceptibility to indoctrination, not the ability to think critically. Charter schools still get public funding, but it’s the private funding mechanism that has ultimate decision-making power in our classrooms, given that it is they, through their access to local political representatives vis-à-vis their respective tax bases, who now dictate whatever government requirements the schools must meet for accreditation. This isn’t the type of influence Jefferson and his colleagues believed was the right of citizens in a constitutional republic. Though they could have predicted it, they would never have tolerated the undue influence of the corporation in American society. In an age when accurate science and history information is under siege, the proliferation of this system of education is troubling indeed.

Jefferson also had such disdain for the power exerted by religious leaders, and such a mistrust of institutionalized religion, that he wrote his own version of the gospels in which he redacted all the supernaturalism that he felt obscured the collective wisdom of the ancient texts. And he made certain that anyone who so chose could follow his example and freely worship G_d as he or she pleased. That’s why the first organizing principle of our nation’s founding documents, the first amendment to our federal constitution, established a clear-cut separation between church and state. He would be appalled if he were alive today that American church leaders now have the power to perform the duties of civil law enforcement and arrest people, thanks to George W. Bush’s administration.  Perhaps Sarah Palin’s former party leader didn’t expressly call our Constitution “just a piece of paper,” but he certainly acts as though he believes that is all it is.

By all accounts, we can see that the "smaller" government of the former neocons and the even smaller -- or non-existent -- government of the Tea Party -- actually exists, particularly where it concerns services such as quality education, so what the heck is Palin and the crazies that follow her around talking about?  And where did Christine O'Donnell come from?  Here, we can benefit from some more history to help answer our mounting questions.

In 1953, the CIA engineered the coup against Iran's reformist leader, Moussadgh, by paying poor Iranians to pretend, by conducting mass protests, that Moussadgh was unpopular and that there was a legitimate counter party to him.  They did this to install the pro-west business (Great Britain, especially), oil cartel-friendly Shah.  Then the CIA did the same thing 20 years later in Chile, ushering in the brutal, pro-fascist Pinochet dictatorship.  In 1981, Ronald Reagan made it legal for the CIA to do the same type of theatre here, in America, and, as we've already seen, to infiltrate "for the purposes of influencing the activities of" all political action groups in order to polarize factions against each other.  He did so because he realized - as every great dictator does - that conquering a people is easier when they are fighting each other, instead of you.  Probably the most ludicrous thing Tea Party candidates such as newly "elected" Christine O'Donnell tell people about the surge in popularity of Tea Party candidates is that the American people want them, the true conservatives, because neocons such as Rush Limbaugh aren't right-wing enough.   All those Tea Party "protestors" at their rallies?  Government-paid, militants-for-hire.  Remember -- the Joint Forces have been working in America since 1996 with all the CIA's and FBI's tools and technologies, and the ability to hire from your neighborhood minions to do their street theater.


Now, I'm not saying there aren't some seriously stupid, deluded people in the Tea Party "movement," but the Tea Party is clearly another type of propaganda tool the CIA uses -- misdirection. While you sit here deriding them, or laughing at their staged stupidity on The Colbert Report, or The Jon Stewart Show, your civil society is being transformed exactly the way Nazi Germany was in the First and Second Solutions (and you know what that led to; that's right - the Final Solution, which is well under way), and every legitimate activist working to change this already patently fascist government is derided as crazy -- just like Tea Party candidates.  Propaganda tools such as these are the reason why the American public has been deluded into believing it is still a government of, by and for the people, and that it isn't already every horrible thing the Tea Party candidates say they want for America's future government, which is no government at all, according to them.  That's exactly what you have -- no public, shared government, just a police state.  So we've come to the point where we can now answer the question, "Who is Sarah Palin, and is she a member of our military, and if so, what type?"  She's clearly not a mere politician, and if she's not, neither are any other Tea Party "candidates," including Christine O'Donnell.  Since they're using CIA-developed tools, we can justifiably deduce they are members of the CIA and, that being the case, that they are not legitimate political figures, or true freedom-loving American patriots, or any type of entity that can benefit you, the American people.  They're puppets on a string, and the people pulling those strings are the fascists in control of our government.

We could all use a bubble tea break from the sophistry of Palin and the neocons, I understand, but buckling under the pressure to rid the public discourse of pernicious voices such theirs, as our Founding Fathers instructed us to do, would ensure our enslavement to this fascist status quo, and slavery is not what this country was created to perpetuate. This is the issue facing all Americans today:  American fascism, and it is the responsibility of us all to fight and defeat it. So I turn to you today with my plea – save yourselves. The Sarah Palins of the world aren’t interested in doing that. They’re off somewhere, training in the uses of their favorite T, the next mind-control weapon.

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Monday, May 3, 2010

May Day

It occurred to me Saturday that my blog was crying out for help – shouting its own mayday call. Much of its content has to do with my life as a targeted individual, but I realize only now that many of my readers may have no idea just what is a targeted individual, or “TI.”

The term comes from the military, not surprisingly. They’re the ones with the artillery, and they direct that artillery as anyone with it does: at targets. Most people think of artillery as bullets and bombs, but our military has been involved in the development of an array of non-ballistic weapons for almost the entire 20th century. Stealth is the key feature of these weapons. Branches of our military involved in secret surveillance, such as the FBI and the CIA (now, indistinguishable from one another), developed a two-pronged approach to oppress legitimate political activists, such as peace and antinuclear weapons activists: cointelpro, which does the actual spying, and mk ultra, which employs a variety of techniques to discredit and socially exterminate targets who testify against the military about their repression.

The unconstitutional targeting by our military of non-combatant American citizens for surveillance and repression has a long history that continues today. “Special surveillance groups” consist of ordinary members of the community – students, housewives, retirees – and have been used in every decade since the 1960s to monitor law-abiding citizens who are in opposition to the empire-building missions carried out by America’s true government, its military. To keep the prime objective of stealth in play, our government has assiduously proffered colloquial definitions of SSGs as “gang stalkers,” or groups of politically disinterested individuals who target for harassment individuals whose lifestyle, religion, or political views disagree with those of the group. As we can easily see, these groups use the same techniques and technology that have been developed and are used by our military, which also uses NPR, America’s TASS, to convince Americans that SSGs are only deployed against terror suspects and mobsters. The previous link is to a story which, when it originally aired on July 5th, 2008, featured a woman who was employed by the FBI during the 1960s to monitor peace activists in her community; needless to say, the story no longer features this woman.

Among the fictions these SSGs proffer community members about the targeted individual to discredit her or him is that the TI is paranoid and crazy – that the military wouldn’t waste its time and energy on the TI because he or she isn’t important. Like Frank Olson, many TIs such as me are walking around today with a lot of testimony about our military’s human and civil rights crimes – in our case, about the bioslavery it commits. Trillions of dollars have been spent to develop, using ordinary Americans and others, bioweapons such as AIDS. Who could be more critical to silence, with that kind of money at stake, not to mention the loss of the false façade of a free and just society that America’s government has patiently crafted?

Voilà! C'est tout.


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