7 years ago it was Ron Paul, conspiracy theorists, and
right-wing gun nuts.
Today it's Keith Olberman, the ACLU, and Naomi Wolfe.
Even the snarky, smug, little libs are beginning to wake up <vbg>!
My my, how things have changed...
The Olberman interviews with NSA Whistleblower: Domestic Spying
on Journalists, Politicians, and the American Public:
youtube.com
youtube.com
Naomi Wolfe: "The End of America" - A Warning to a Young Patriot:
youtube.com
The ACLU on "Spying, Secrecy & Presidential Powers:"
youtube.com
Yet the vast majority of America is still apathetic, and in
deep denial...
-- "I won't lose MY job."
-- "The stock market has bottomed, no way it's going
to DOW 3,4, or 5,000."
-- "My 401K is safe."
-- My pension is fine."
-- "I'm not worried about "my" bank, it's Bank of America and
they have the largest deposit base of any bank in the US.
-- "The Government will never confiscate my guns, my gold,
or my 401K."
--"There's no such thing as FEMA camps."
-- "There aren't any foreign troops stationed on US soil. And
foreign troops will never patrol American streets under
Martial Law, that's a bunch of conspiracy theory nonsense."
The same people who are in denial now, were in denial back
in 2002.
Read these warnings from Ron Paul, and the New York Time's
William Safire from way back in 2002, and see how much has
now come true.
******************************************************************
lewrockwell.com
"Oppose the New Homeland Security Bureaucracy!"
by Rep. Ron Paul, MD
Ron Paul in the US House of Representatives, November 13, 2002
Mr. Speaker, when the process of creating a Department of
Homeland Security commenced, Congress was led to believe that
the legislation would be a simple reorganization aimed at
increasing efficiency, not an attempt to expand federal power.
Fiscally conservative members of Congress were even told that
the bill would be budget neutral! Yet, when the House of
Representatives initially considered creating a Department of
Homeland Security, the legislative vehicle almost overnight
grew from 32 pages to 282 pages – and the cost had ballooned
to at least $3 billion. Now we are prepared to vote on a
nearly 500-page bill that increases federal expenditures and
raises troubling civil liberties questions.
Adding insult to injury, this bill was put together late
last night and introduced only this morning. Worst of all, the
text of the bill has not been made readily available to most
members, meaning this Congress is prepared to create a massive
new federal agency without even knowing the details. This is a
dangerous and irresponsible practice.
The last time Congress attempted a similarly ambitious
reorganization of the government was with the creation of the
Department of Defense in 1947. However, the process by which
we are creating this new department bears little resemblance
to the process by which the Defense Department was created.
Congress began hearings on the proposed Department of Defense
in 1945 – two years before President Truman signed legislation
creating the new Department into law! Despite the lengthy
deliberative process through which Congress created that new
department, turf battles and logistical problems continued to
bedevil the military establishment, requiring several
corrective pieces of legislation. In fact, Mr. Speaker, the
Goldwater-Nicholas Department of Defense Reorganization Act of
1986 was passed to deal with problems steaming from the 1947
law! The experience with the Department of Defense certainly
suggests the importance of a more deliberative process in the
creation of this new agency.
HR 5710 grants major new powers to the Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS) by granting HHS the authority to
"administer" the smallpox vaccine to members of the public if
the Department unilaterally determines that there is a public
health threat posed by smallpox.
HHS would not even have to demonstrate an actual threat of
a smallpox attack, merely the "potential" of an attack. Thus,
this bill grants federal agents the authority to force
millions of Americans to be injected with a potentially lethal
vaccine based on nothing more than a theoretical potential
smallpox incident.
Furthermore, this provision continues to restrict access to
the smallpox vaccine from those who have made a voluntary
choice to accept the risk of the vaccine in order to protect
themselves from smallpox. It is hard to think of a more
blatant violation of liberty than allowing government
officials to force people to receive potentially dangerous
vaccines based on hypothetical risks.
While this provision appears to be based on similar provisions
granting broad mandatory vaccination and quarantine powers to
governors from the controversial "Model Health Emergency
Powers Act," this provision has not been considered by the
House. Instead, this provision seems to have been snuck
into the bill at the last minute. At the very least, Mr.
Speaker, before Congress grants HHS such sweeping powers, we
should have an open debate instead of burying the
authorization in a couple of paragraphs tucked away in a
484-page bill!
HR 5710 also expands the federal police state by allowing
the attorney general to authorize federal agency inspectors
general and their agents to carry firearms and make
warrantless arrests. One of the most disturbing trends in
recent years is the increase in the number of federal
officials authorized to carry guns. This is especially
disturbing when combined with the increasing trend toward
restricting the ability of average Americans to exercise their
second amendment rights.
Arming the government while disarming the public encourages
abuses of power.
Mr. Speaker, HR 5710 gives the federal government new powers
and increases federal expenditures, completely contradicting
what members were told about the bill. Furthermore, these new
power grabs are being rushed through Congress without giving
members the ability to debate, or even properly study, this
proposal. I must oppose this bill and urge my colleagues to do
the same.
Dr. Ron Paul
********************************************************************
query.nytimes.com
November 14, 2002
"You Are a Suspect"
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage,
here is what will happen to you:
Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine
subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every
Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every
academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every
trip you book and every event you attend -- all these
transactions and communications will go into what the Defense
Department describes as ''a virtual, centralized grand
database.''
To this computerized dossier on your private life from
commercial sources, add every piece of information that
government has about you -- passport application, driver's
license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records,
complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime
paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance -- and
you have the supersnoop's dream: a ''Total Information
Awareness'' about every U.S. citizen.
This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what
will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if
John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.
Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the
Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to
national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He
had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran
to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to
illegally support contras in Nicaragua.
A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of
misleading Congress and making false statements, but an
appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had
given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted,
''The buck stops here,'' arguing that the White House staff,
and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions
that might prove embarrassing.
This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan
even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the
''Information Awareness Office'' in the otherwise excellent
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the
Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now
realizing his 20-year dream: getting the ''data-mining'' power
to snoop on every public and private act of every American.
[ TOO LATE! It's already here:]
youtube.com
Even the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which widened the
scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and
weakened 15 privacy laws, raised requirements for the
government to report secret eavesdropping to Congress and the
courts. But Poindexter's assault on individual privacy rides
roughshod over such oversight.
He is determined to break down the wall between commercial
snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced
admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as
bureaucratic ''stovepiping.'' And he has been given a $200
million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million
Americans.
When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood
foursquare in defense of each person's medical, financial and
communications privacy. But Poindexter, whose contempt for the
restraints of oversight drew the Reagan administration into
its most serious blunder, is still operating on the
presumption that on such a sweeping theft of privacy rights,
the buck ends with him and not with the president.
This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open. In
the past week John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert
O'Harrow of The Washington Post, have revealed the extent of
Poindexter's operation, but editorialists have not grasped
its undermining of the Freedom of Information Act.
[Hmmm? Like Bloomberg's FOIA suit concerning what the Fed
did with our billions of bailout dollars? - Too Late Again"]
Political awareness can overcome ''Total Information
Awareness,'' the combined force of commercial and government
snooping. In a similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft
tried his Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS),
but public outrage at the use of gossips and postal workers as
snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate should
now do the same to this other exploitation of fear.
The Latin motto over Poindexter"s new Pentagon office reads
''Scientia Est Potentia'' -- ''knowledge is power.'' Exactly:
the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power
over you. ''We're just as concerned as the next person with
protecting privacy,'' this brilliant mind blandly assured The
Post. A jury found he spoke falsely before.
=============================================================
People it's not Orwell's 1984 that you need to worry about,
because it's too late... it's already here.
It's Obama & the NWO's 2012, that you'd better be worrying about, and fighting against.
Learn the lesson's of 2002, when we ignored the warnings of
the Ron Pauls and the William Safires 7 years ago, because
it "couldn't happen here" -- because it did happen, and it's
going to again.
S.O.T.B. |
