I’m seriously surprised this didn’t get any comments or play the first time I posted it. With all attention being drawn to the Iranian ordeal, here in the belly of the beast the system is closing fast. As much as we speculate on things here, I am miffed as to why no one seems willing to discuss these two things…
Pentagon Rebrands Protest as “Low-Level Terrorism”

You have to hand it to Pentagon securocrats and their corporate cronies, they never miss an opportunity to demonize, vilify or otherwise slander domestic political dissent as “terrorism.”
The American Civil Liberties Union reported June 10 that “Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression in the form of public protests should be regarded as ‘low level terrorism’.”
According to the civil liberties’ watchdog: “Among the multiple-choice questions included in its Level 1 Antiterrorism Awareness training course, the DoD asks the following: ‘Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorist activity?’ To answer correctly, the examinee must select ‘protests’.”
Yes, you read that correctly. The Pentagon has designed a training system that puts you in the crosshairs! And why not? Back in 2003 Mike Van Winkle, the spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) said of antiwar demonstrators brutally attacked by riot cops at the Port of Oakland during a protest against the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq,
“You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest),” said Van Winkle, of the state Justice Department. “You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.” (Ian Hoffman, Sean Holstege and Josh Richman, (“Intelligence Agency Does Not Distinguish Between Terrorism and Peace Activism,” Oakland Tribune, May 18, 2003)
Pretty ironic coming from a sprawling bureaucracy currently engaged in two aggressive wars of conquest for whom dropping a proverbial dime on unsuspecting goat herders or wedding parties is a walk in the park! Not to mention Joint Special Operations Command’s “executive assassination ring” operating out of the former Vice President’s office, who without so much as a by-your-leave, bumped-off official regime enemies.
This latest outrage follows a consistent pattern by the Pentagon that the ACLU has called “an egregious insult to constitutional values.”
As Antifascist Calling revealed in previous reports, the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team is now deployed inside the United States “under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the “service component” of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM).
AFC also reported that since NORTHCOM’s launch in 2002, it has been mired in controversy. Among its more dubious accomplishments were illegal domestic spying operations in conjunction with the Pentagon’s shadowy Counter Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA). Before being run to ground, like many Defense Department intelligence operations, CIFA was heavily outsourced to security corporations. More than 900 employees out of a total work force of 1,300 were high-paid contractors.
A veritable honey-pot for defense grifters such as Mitchell Wade, the notorious ex-chairman of MZM Inc. and his sidekick, disgraced former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA), eventually imprisoned when a cash-and-hookers-for-contracts scandal signaled the (temporary) eclipse of neoconservative stalwarts in Congress.
Despite CIFA’s shut-down last year, its TALON database (Threat and Local Observation Notices), which contained hundreds of files on antiwar activists, was shunted over to the FBI for safekeeping in its Guardian database, one component of the Bureau’s massive Investigative Data Warehouse.
Its a safe bet however, that the illegal collection of intelligence on domestic dissidents continues.
Inside the Antiterrorism-Training-Complex
While the ideological mind-set driving domestic counterterrorism policies may not have changed much in the intervening years since Van Winkle’s provocative statement, security firms and a veritable army of consultants drive America’s Homeland Security-Industrial-Complex.

more…
And the means…
Alan Grayson (High Quality Version): Is Anyone Minding the Store at the Federal Reserve?

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jun 22 2009 13:19 utc | 4

not much comment either on these thoughts of the maniac ralph peters writing @ jinsa last month
Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars

Pretending to be impartial, the self-segregating personalities drawn to media careers overwhelmingly take a side, and that side is rarely ours. Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.
The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories are ultimately in humanity’s interests, while our failures nourish monsters.
In closing, we must dispose of one last mantra that has been too broadly and uncritically accepted: the nonsense that, if we win by fighting as fiercely as our enemies, we will “become just like them.” To convince Imperial Japan of its defeat, we not only had to fire-bomb Japanese cities, but drop two atomic bombs. Did we then become like the Japanese of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? Did we subsequently invade other lands with the goal of permanent conquest, enslaving their populations? Did our destruction of German cities—also necessary for victory—turn us into Nazis? Of course, you can find a few campus leftists who think so, but they have yet to reveal the location of our death camps.
We may wish reality to be otherwise, but we must deal with it as we find it. And the reality of warfare is that it is the organized endeavor at which human beings excel. Only our ability to develop and maintain cities approaches warfare in its complexity. There is simply nothing that human collectives do better (or with more enthusiasm) than fight each other.

the kicker

we must be willing to kill those who would kill others

follow that idea to its logical conclusion…

Posted by: b real | Jun 22 2009 14:22 utc | 6

the misinformation now made it into the new york times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23iran.html?_r=1&hp
actually I think this paragraph was lacking in the first press tv information
“Kadkhodaei further explained that the voter turnout of above 100% in some cities is a normal phenomenon because there is no legal limitation for people to vote for the presidential elections in another city or province to which people often travel or commute. ”
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=98711&sectionid=351020101

Posted by: outsider | Jun 22 2009 18:01 utc | 8

ralphieboy, i meant health care reform will die, my mistake.
and it’s really embarrassing we can’t even get our shit together in this country to ensure our taxes are used to cover everyone with basic health care.
but, there are lots of reasons to be ashamed of this country. health care reform is just the current, glaring fuck you we are getting from our “elected” officials, both parties.

Posted by: Lizard | Jun 22 2009 18:34 utc | 10

Heh b, you were gone last night….how odd that at about that time some people were scaling a reactor dome. right there where you live…
it has been fun watching the politicians spin this, I heard on the teevee that they knew all along that the intruders were Greenpeace and that is why they did nothing to stop them.
those guys got some balls, you have to give them that.

Posted by: dan of steele | Jun 22 2009 20:15 utc | 12

DavidS,
Your past comment about “sheeple” being “flockheads” reminds me of this priceless comment from one of my favorite commenters on the econ-blogosphere, Bruce Wilder:
“I am no fan of the judgment of the American public, who are remarkably passive, callous, ignorant and reluctant to engage in critical thinking. But, in my view, they are blameworthy for being sheep; that doesn’t mean that the sheep are leading the shepherds — or even that the sheep should transform themselves into some other species. The best you can ask from sheep, is to distinguish between shepherds and wolves. I don’t expect either the sheep or the wolves to change their own natures, fundamentally. But, I think the sheep are, at least, capable of hiring shepherds, and not wolves, to lead them. The mainstream media is overrun with wolves. Border collies of the blogosphere [such as b and others of his breed] need to bark loud enough to get the sheep following a better class of shepherd.”
[:>)]

Posted by: Cynthia | Jun 23 2009 0:09 utc | 14