Homeland Security Declares Open Season on Everybody

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Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:49:34 EST

Homeland Security Declares Open Season on Everybody

 

 

 

Everyone needs to read this -- if you read anything at all today, this

should be what you read. And then pass it on to others.

 

Remember in Nazi Germany how people were afraid to say anything

negative about Hitler -- how they were afraid to share any information

with strangers...

 

*****

 

http://www.almartinraw.com/

 

by Al Martin

 

Homeland Security Declares Open Season on Everybody

 

(12-19-05) The shooting †" murder of a US citizen by federal air

marshals at the Miami International Airport presages a new era in the

United States -- an age in which everyone is presumed to be a

“terrorist†or “enemy of the state.â€

 

On Friday, Dec. 16th, the important Senate vote to extend parts of the

PATRIOT Act due to sunset on December 31 of 2005 was voted down. A

Senate filibuster led by Democrats and moderate Republicans was

expected because they did not have sufficient votes to defeat the

bill. The morning of Dec 16 was, of course, the release of the front

page New York Times article, regarding thousands of telephone

conversations now being monitored regularly in the United States by

the NSA and a host of other federal agencies. The majority of the

phone conversations were by various native-born, Caucasian U.S.

citizens who are members of various anti-Bush groups, which is really

a catchall that covers anyone from “anti-abortion†to

“pro-environment†to literally any group or organization that

disagrees with Bushonian policies.

 

It was this article that brought six additional Republican

senators on board, Bush faction Republicans, who defected and joined

their moderate and fiscally conservative Republican brethren along

with Democrats in a solid majority to defeat the “measure to

extend†-- despite pleas from the White House.

 

Of course, what happened was that pro-Bush faction Republicans

led by Senator Frist, knew that the bill was going to be defeated, so

they used it as a way to appeal to the NFWC’s, the naive flag-waving

crowd, by saying the defeat of this bill was a victory for terrorism

in America. This is what he said on the Senate floor.

 

Senator Schumer responded by telling him that a defeat of this

bill was a victory for democracy in America. And he’s right. Schumer

cited a number of polls on the Senate floor, wherein it was blatantly

obvious that the majority of the American people believe†" to use

Senator Schumer’s words†" that the real terrorists are not in

Afghanistan or Iraq, but on Pennsylvania Avenue.

 

Both Senator Schumer and Senator Grassley, the head of the

moderate Republican faction, said the New York Times article was the

turning point. Otherwise they would have had to filibuster, but it

gave them enough votes to defeat the measure in a rebuke of what

Senator Grassley calls the penchant of George Bush for imperial power.

It is unusual for a Republican, even a moderate Republican, to say

something like that.

 

The New York Times article certainly threw a chill into the

radical pro-Bush faction majority in the House that had already passed

this bill, another win for the American people because George Bush

himself asked for re-submission of the bill.

 

Orrin Hatch and Bill Frist have told the White House that there

isn’t any sense trying to resubmit it; it isn’t going to pass.

Eventually this strategy is going to backfire.

 

Senator Frist apparently told George Bush that public opinion

polls show that most of the American people think the terrorists are

in the White House. Bush’s approval rating right now is 38%.

 

Frist understands that, with the continued attack of the

Democrats and moderate Republicans, trying to link anti-Patriot Act

sentiment to being seditious and supporting terrorism is not working

anymore. In fact, it is having an opposite effect.

 

You do have a growing conservative, religious-oriented Republican

coalition led by former Congressman Robert Barr of Georgia and John

Sununu, Jr., of New Hampshire that has coalesced largely around Pat

Robertson.

 

What is now being built in this country is an anti-Patriot Act

movement that is coming out of the Religious Right. This is what the

White House is most concerned about †" Religious Right turning

against the PATRIOT Act. Why? Because the Bible-thumping Republican

crowd sees it as a threat to their own power.

 

Remember what Pat Robertson said -- that, of the so-called five

classifications within Patriot II, one of those 5 groups that was

being classified as seditious was anti-abortionists. Pat Robertson

then is correct in pointing out, as he has repeatedly said on The 700

Club, that the PATRIOT Act is a threat to Christian Americans.

Robertson understands that eventually they will be the targeted ones

instead of the ones doing the targeting. And he’s right. He points

out that there are a lot of historical precedents of how Christians

have become scapegoats.

 

The New York Times had the story, and they were waiting for the

most opportune time to use it. I think Charlie Schumer is behind this.

Schumer is very close to the New York Times. I think there was a

little agreement made: Let’s wait to use this until it is most

opportune.

 

This is a major blow to the most sinister of the PATRIOT Act

provisions. If you have seen Duncan Hunter and Dan Burton on C-SPAN in

recent days, they knew that this bill was in trouble, and they tried

to extend an olive branch by saying: Let us just retain what is

important to the radical pro-Bush faction leadership and what is

important to the President. And that is: the continuing power of

secret arrest of U.S. citizens, the continued indefinite detention

without charge, right of counsel, or ex parte communication of U.S.

citizens both domestically and overseas. And of course, the continuing

ability of the NSA and the Office of Internal Security to continue

with its citizen-threat profile classification, and then the passage

of the National Identity Card Act and overturning of posse comitatus.

In other words, they were trying to front-load part of PATRIOT III.

 

It was a smart tactic. I can understand why radical pro-Bush

faction Republicans wanted to do this -- to strip out what they knew

were the two most controversial provisions of PATRIOT III, which

hasn’t even come up yet†" namely, the final funding for the National

Identity Card Act and the overturning of posse comitatus.

 

The Democrats knew that eventually the White House could break

the filibuster, and that the longer they filibustered, the longer they

remained political targets for Bill Frist and Orrin Hatch.

 

The article said the NSA was doing the eavesdropping on US

citizens. What it did not say is that the actual surveillance is being

done by a new confederation of agencies -- the National Security

Agency, Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Intelligence

Agency and this new Office of Internal Security. There is also a

little esoteric counterintelligence unit hidden within the bowels of

the Department of Defense’s internal security apparatus. But

they’re just fronting it. It’s much bigger.

 

The reason these intercepts are being made, by the way, is to

further the compilation of the Citizen Security Threat-Profiling

program. That’s the reason these taps are occurring. They’re not

of Arab-Americans; they’re for the native-born, blond-haired,

blue-eyed Republicans with names like Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones. Not the

Abdul Mohammed’s from Afghanistan.

 

Being targeted are the native-born American citizens who have

expressed public opposition to the regime. Those are the people that

are being specifically classified. Chuck Schumer made a reference to

this on C-SPAN-2 a few days ago, expressing his chagrin in that he had

notified the few remaining non-Bushonian-controlled radio stations in

the United States that, indeed, there was an effort being made to

penetrate and to record radio talk-show people, the few that remain

that are trying to tell the American people the truth about George

Bush and Company.

 

Meanwhile the air marshals, which are under TSA and under

Homeland Security, will be used to patrol trains and boats †" and not

only planes. What has been released publicly is that the air marshals

have now become the most powerful law enforcement agency in the United

States because they are the only ones that act with full PATRIOT Act I

and II powers. The air marshals can act in all jurisdictions, more

importantly, even jurisdictions beyond that of the United States.

That’s what gives them such power.

 

Remember what George Bush said about PATRIOT II -- the United

States was declaring unilateral ability to extend the original

kidnapping policy that the Supreme Court signed off on in 1988, giving

the then Reagan-Bush Regime the legal authority to illegally kidnap US

citizens from foreign soil.

 

What Patriot II has done, according to what the White House says,

is that they’re taking that a step further. They are now kidnapping

foreign nationals from their own soil or from the soil of third-party

countries. And the air marshals’ authority is now being derived, in

part, from that Supreme Court decision in 1988.

 

The air marshals can also act aboard a U.S. air carrier, even

though it is in international air space, or even in the air space of a

foreign nation. Why? They’re claiming that on any U.S. property, or

any property belonging to a domestically based American corporation,

such as an aircraft, U.S. law still prevails, no matter where the

aircraft is.

 

That’s as imperial as you can get. Why do you think Michael

Chertoff was so anxious to insure that total control of TSA remained

under Homeland Security? That it was not split up and some given to

the FBI like the FBI wanted, when even the FAA wanted some oversight

capacity. Chertoff was able to outmaneuver all other federal law

enforcement and regulatory agencies and keep total control of the TSA

under Homeland Security. You may remember that the FAA had complained

about this originally, saying that they’re not meeting any FAA

safety protocols at all. The FAA had complained about this issue: The

air marshals were actually becoming a threat to the safe operations of

aircrafts.

 

This was what the FAA had originally said, and what Charlie

Schumer had originally propounded on: The air marshals, with their

imperial power, had the absolute ability to shoot anyone. The man who

was shot dead in the Miami airport is a good reminder of the power

that the air marshals have.

 

What’s interesting is that their power of arrest is actually

extralegal. The odd thing about it is they do not have a specific

power of arrest. The way Chertoff sees it (he’s running the show),

the air marshals have the unfettered right to maintain the security of

the state. They have the ability to shoot down any citizens. Yet

it’s funny. They don’t have specific power of arrest, but they

have the absolute authority to shoot anyone.

 

The odd thing about it is that they do not have specific

authority of arrest since they are not part of the regular U.S.

Marshal service. They are part of the Transportation Security

Administration, which is not a law enforcement agency.

 

Even with this Miami case, when the plane was on the ground, even

before the plane landed, the local police were contacted to come in

and effectuate an arrest. That’s why the local police were called:

to effectuate the arrest. The air marshals only have the power to

detain, not to effectuate the arrest specifically. They have the power

to restrain, detain and shoot. And what I think it is, and I’ve

always thought this, this is being done on purpose.

 

Why? Because if they have to be classified as a civilian law

enforcement agency (which Chertoff could very easily do†" if Chertoff

wanted them classified as a civilian law enforcement agency with the

full power of arrest) it means they would also have to afford citizens

their rights while they are under arrest. That’s specifically what

Chertoff wants to avoid.

 

Now the air marshals are going to be on board public trains,

buses, subways, ferries, etc. Another reason why this is being done,

and, I think, the ultimate reason, by the way, is that the air

marshals’ extralegal ability to detain citizens means that the air

marshals can keep them detained and move them directly into, using

General Primakov’s words, “The New American Gulag.†In other

words, they can keep them out of the normal state and/or federal

jurisdiction, wherein they would be afforded some rights, and move

them directly into the new post-Patriot Act gulag of secret arrest

warrants, secret prisons, without legal representation or counsel, and

without any contact with the outside world.

 

It would be obviously more expedient to have some other regular

law enforcement agency do this. Why have air marshals, who aren’t

specifically trained to do it? It isn’t anything to do with them.

It’s to do with their authority.

 

Or in the alternative, their lack of authority. Their lack of

specific law enforcement powers means that they do not have to afford

any rights to those citizens that they are detaining.

 

Here’s an example: You’re sitting on a train. You start

talking to one of these air marshals, who is obviously operating under

cover. And you say that you hate George Bush and his policies and

you’re anti-, and on and on and on. The air marshal considers that

you are a seditious citizen, or a threat. He then has the power to

detain you. When the train stops, you can pass directly into federal

custody, while being classified as a seditious citizen throughout the

entire chain of custody within the federal process. In other words,

you can be kept under the PATRIOT Act process from the time you are

detained to the time you wind up in a secret prison. That is, I think,

one of the real reasons to have these air marshals.

 

The purview, not the power of the air marshals is now being

extended to include other public transportation, as has been publicly

announced this week. The air marshals will now be passengers†" under

cover, of course†" on all public transportation systems, land and sea.

That’s what it comes down to. In other words, trains, buses,

subways, ferries†" what is delineated as ‘all public transportation

systems regardless of venue.’ And they carry with them, of course,

the same powers that they have on aircraft.

 

Since they are not a law-enforcement agency, another interesting

part of their function is that they can carry tape recorders with

discreet microphones.

 

One of their roles†" and what people do not understand, by and

large†" is to ferret out and classify seditious citizens. Seditious

citizens, of course, being any citizens who oppose the policies of the

current regime.

 

What they specifically do on aircraft is they will sit next to

people, and they have been given false identification. It’s not just

undercover police. They are given a complete set of false

identification, business cards, everything. They listen and they

engage passengers in conversation.

 

“I’m Joe Smith. I’m a representative for Conoco. Here’s

my card.†You know how people exchange cards. They shoot the breeze.

They try to steer the conversation to politics. They purposely are

attempting to identify seditious citizens. And I don’t think the

American people, by and large, understand what Chertoff has made all

of their function. This is in essence a new American Gestapo and it

will be used to entrap citizens into talking about politics.

 

In the post-PATRIOT II environment, the Department of Homeland

Security is not required to list the number of people anymore that

work for the federal marshal’s office. However, the TSA does have

to. They, after all, are a civilian agency. But what they do is they

list them under all sorts of different classifications, believed to be

somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000. Chertoff said that they would like

to eventually have 30,000 †" to 50,000. And the amount of money

Chertoff wants is another $10 billion.

 

This would be a more sophisticated version of the East German

style Stasi neighborhood snitch program, a well-organized, more

sophisticated version of it, that is both a security role against

people with books of matches in their shoes that connect to bombs that

don’t work, with also the capacity of ferreting out and identifying

seditious citizens. This is a role that I think that is not generally

understood.

 

There was also the confirmation from the State Department that

the United States has established secret prisons in foreign countries,

and further revelations in recent days that these secret prisons are a

well-organized operation and, in order to hide them, are coming under

the portfolio of the National Intelligence Directorate, i.e., John

Negroponte’s office.

 

Look how little we’ve heard about them. Look how successful

that agency, which is already a multibillion-dollar-funded agency, has

been in keeping it out of the media. Senators Schumer and Grassley

together are going to subpoena the National Intelligence Directorate,

the NID, because they want to know how many of these secret prisons

have been built and in what nations they have been built. Of course,

they’re not going to get very far. It has been shown that many of

them are former KGB prisons in Poland. Most of them appear to be in

Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Transcaucasus states, but

there may be more. It’s done very secretively.

 

It looks like Poland is going to get out of the game because

they’re under the pressure from E.U. The E.U., despite pressure from

the White House, has decided to go ahead with a full parliamentary

investigation. They were under pressure from the White House not to do

so. The E.U. has rebuffed the US and said -- We are going into a full

parliamentary investigation.

 

Any members of the E.U. that currently have a secret prison run

by any agency in the United States on their soil will be thrown out of

the European economic community. That is a big threat to the Eastern

European nations, and there’s nothing Washington can offer to

counter that threat. Therefore I think you are going to see the

Eastern Europeans getting out of the business of secret prisons. I

think that the secret prisons are now going to move to Africa and

South America.

 

It’s interesting what Schumer specifically said about the

information he and Grassley are seeking. What they were concerned

about was reports they had received (they didn’t name it) from

former KGB generals who were consultants to the Office of Homeland

Security about American anti-Bush citizens who were either cajoled

outside of U.S. territory or actually waylaid in foreign soil and now

residing in these secret prisons.

 

The E.U. said essentially the same thing -- that their

intelligence that they had received from Poland suggested that it

isn’t simply people with turbans that are inhabiting these U.S.

secret prisons.

 

I think the CIA is actually controlling the prisons, but I think

it’s been brought under the operational jurisdiction of the new NID

to hide it -- both to hide it and to hide the funding for it.

 

Schumer is alluding to how many native-born, blond-haired,

blue-eyed Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones types with high security threat

profile classifications, E-6 or above, that have been labeled

seditious for having voiced criticism of the regime in public or in

some other venue†" how many of these people have potentially been

waylaid or cajoled to leave the United States under some pretext, then

kidnapped by U.S. agents while on foreign soil and then wound up in

one of these prisons?

 

The next dangerous step (I think Schumer’s alluding to this)

would be the outright kidnapping by security forces loyal to the Bush

Cheney regime (under whatever alphabet soup they’re going by) of

native-born, blond-haired, blue-eyed citizens of the United States,

then their being unlawfully transported outside of the country into

these facilities.

 

How is it being funded? The money is all being hobbled together

through a series of these newly created agencies. Of the 43 new

federal agencies, bureaus, councils, commissions, etc. that arose

because of Patriot I and Patriot II, 35 of them, as we know, can exist

as skeleton organizations, but cannot be lawfully funded or have any

administrative capability until the overturning of posse comitatus.

Nonetheless, these agencies are still being funded. Mostly through

Homeland Security, but they’re still being funded.

 

All of these so-called ‘on paper’ organizations†" the Office

of Internal Security, Northern Command or NorthCom, as it’s being

called†" are all being funded. And yet the actual cost of most of

their physical plant is still being picked up by the General Services

Administration.

 

What the regime is doing is using these on-paper, newly created

government departments and agencies as a funneling mechanism for money

to the maintenance of a much larger covert operation to spy on U.S.

citizens to collect intelligence domestically, to form an intelligence

unit around NID and GeorgeBush.com, as I mentioned before.

 

People forget about the comments John Negroponte made when Ed

Gillespie was chairman of GeorgeBush.com. (I don’t know if he still

is.) But they go back a long way. Negroponte had talked about how

useful the GeorgeBush.com loyalists could be to the National

Intelligence Directorate in terms of forming, not a Gestapo, but a

Stasi-like network of stool pigeons, on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood

basis, informing on the seditious neighbors, block by block.

 

Readers should be reminded that AlMartinRaw.com has published

columns on these topics in recent years, when they were less

believable. But now we see publicly what is happening that I had

predicted 2- 4 years ago, when I received criticism for predicting

such a future. Now you need only read through the archives of

AlMartinRaw.com and what is happening today would be no surprise to you.

 

The long and short of it is simple. We continue to live under the

auspices of the current regime as the nation walks into the Twilight

of American Democracy.

 

American Democracy. It really is the “Twilight’s Last

Gleaming.â€

 

* AL MARTIN is an independent economic-political analyst with 25

years of experience as a trader on NYMEX, CME, CBOT and CFTC. As a

former contributor to the Presidential Council of Economic Advisors,

Al Martin is considered to be a source of independent analysis for

financially sophisticated and market savvy investors.

 

After working as a broker on Wall Street, Al Martin was involved in

the so-called " Iran Contra " Affair as a fundraiser for the Bush Cabal

from the covert side of government aka the US Shadow Government.

 

His memoir, " The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider, "

(http://www.almartinraw.com) provides an unprecedented look at the

frauds of the Bush Cabal during the Iran Contra era. His weekly

column, " Behind the Scenes in the Beltway, " is published weekly on Al

Martin Raw.com, which also publishes a bimonthly newsletter called

" Whistleblower Gazette. "

 

Al Martin's new website " Insider Intelligence " (

http://www.insiderintelligence.com) will provide a long term

macro-view of world markets and how they are affected by backroom

realpolitik.

 

 

 

" The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can

shield the people from the political, economic and/or military

consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the

State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is

the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes

the greatest enemy of the State. " --Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels

" If tyranny and oppression come to this land,

it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. "

James Madison

 

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little

temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin

 

" first they arrested the communists -- but I was not a communist,

so i did nothing. then they came for the social democrats, but i was

not a social democrat, so i did nothing. then they arrested the trade

unionists -- and i did nothing because i was not one. and then they

came for the jews and the catholics, but i was neither a jew nor a

catholic and i did nothing. at last they came and arrested me -- and

there was no one left to do anything about it. " ~~rev. martin

niemoller, nazi prison survivor