Hillary’s speech
Tonight Hillary gave one of the most brilliant speeches yet. Equal to any that her husband has given. Far better and more REAL than anything Obama has ever given. She rises to every occasion. Always has. Always will. She’s my girl!
In spite of her best efforts to encourage us to support Obama and to articulate the causes we are all supposed to be fighting for, the main impression I was left with after her speech is that she showed the party that they had missed an opportunity to nominate a truly capable, experienced leader who knows how to stand up to adversity — Hillary. Her speech had the one thing that Obama’s has always lacked — heart. Eloquent, empty words or a poser contrasted with substantive argument made from the heart and the mind of a true leader. Hillary won the night. She should have won the convention and the nomination.
But it is not Hillary’s job to win this election for Obama. He has to win it for himself by himself. If he is to become the leader of the free world, he must first lead. There is no co-presidency, and there is, therefore, no co-candidacy. His win or loss is his and no one else’s.
Why has Obama not closed the deal?
It’s like a guy who is courting a woman and has all his friends and his family and her family tell her what a wonderful husband he would make and how she should marry him. He sends one emissary after another while sitting and watching events transpire from a safe, comfortable distance, waiting for success to come to him, to be served on the “silver” platter. But he doesn’t want to take the time to get up off his ass, go to her, look her in the eye and tell her “this is who I am, this is what I believe, this is what I want in life, and I want to share it with you and have you as a partner by my side. Will you marry me?” Until he is willing to do that, nothing anyone else says matters.
Obama can’t close the deal because he doesn’t want to look into our eyes and tell us who he is and what he believes in and what he wants for us. He can tell us what he wants for himself. But he can’t say what he wants FOR us, that is not on his agenda, what he wants FROM us is — our vote, because that is his stepping stone to power. But votes have to be earned. You only earn them by humbly asking for them and promising to deliver on an agreed agenda. There is no other way to get our vote.
What is his agenda? His agenda is to obtain power. Ours is to make a better country and a better life for ourselves and our children. There is a difference with a distinction here. And he knows it will show if he tries to fake it. That’s why he still can’t close the deal.
He is expecting Hillary and Bill and Biden and all his surrogates to win our votes for him, but he must win them for himself. Surrogates can reinforce what is already there or lay the groundwork for what is to come, but Obama must close the deal himself. He must lead.
Hillary gave one of the most brilliant speeches yet. She was presidential. She was committed. She was selfless. And she was leading us, as her followers and supporters, to commit ourselves to our common goals, or what she believes is Obama’s common goals with her and us. The problem remains that I’m not convinced yet. I’m not convinced Obama really cares about me and my life. I’m not convinced that Obama wants the same thing for our country that I do. I just can’t believe yet, not in him. I really, truly wish I could.
I believe in Hillary. I believe in her motives and her agenda. And I believe that Hillary believes. But I just don’t believe in Obama. Not now. Maybe not ever.
The most touching part of the speech came after it was over, when Suzanne Malveaux of CNN interviewed a black woman, a Hillary supporter — Ann Price Mills (see http://countusout.wordpress.com/). She had tears in her eyes. She was fighting not to lose the battle with her emotions and break down. She said all the things all of us Hillary supporters have been feeling. She remarked how Hillary was so presidential. It was so obvious and real. Hillary had experience. Hillary could have made all of OUR dreams happen…. Hillary could have made ALL our dreams happen. But she said several times emphatically that she would not vote for McCain. She also added: “Would you given a Harvard graduate a position of CEO right after graduation? No!” When Malveaux asked her several times during the interview if she would vote for Obama, she could not say yes….
And I was saying to myself, “Ann is right. She’s absolutely right.”
What else could I say? What else can I say?
Obama has not even served a full first term in the U.S. Senate and has no previous national experience. What was he thinking? Ted Kennedy told him to run before he had a record to run against. By doing that, he doesn’t have enough experience or a record of proven judgment to validate his candidacy.
Dick Morris finally says it best:
It’s a little like a movie that opens with flat ticket sales and bad reviews. Then the star they rejected for the lead role auditions and everyone wonders why she wasn’t given the part.
The Last Roundup
By Christopher Ketcham
Illustration by Brett Ryder
April 29, 2008
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20080430182318128
Wednesday, April 30 2008
For decades the federal government has been developing a highly classified plan that would override the Constitution in the event of a terrorist attack. Is it also compiling a secret enemies list of citizens who could face detention under martial law?
The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft’s second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush’s first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration’s various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn’t allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush’s men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.
Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program’s authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey’s words, “to take advantage of a very sick man,” sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft’s sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and “literally ran” up the hospital stairs to beat them there.
Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their heavy-handed ploy. “I’m not the attorney general,” Ashcroft told Bush’s men. “There–he pointed weakly to Comey–is the attorney general.” Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey’s presence in the room. The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House “without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality,” he testified.
What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can’t help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey’s testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him “to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases.” The larger mystery remained intact, however. “It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate,” the article conceded.
Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed “every 45 days” as part of planning to assess threats to “the continuity of our government.”
Few Americans–professional journalists included–know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it’s no surprise that the president’s passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces–and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it’s a road map for martial law.
While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government�s data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.
According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, �There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived �enemies of the state� almost instantaneously.� He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.
Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a �national emergency.� Executive orders issued over the last three decades define it as a �natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency,� while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like �riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order.� According to one news report, even �national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad� could be a trigger.
Let�s imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blast�say, a suitcase nuke�in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and have been aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a �parallel government� that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state.
Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency�s incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.
Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem farfetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese-Americans�everyone from infants to the elderly�be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of �militants� and �American negroes� who were to be held at �assembly centers or relocation camps.� In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root�then a subsidiary of Halliburton�was handed a $385 million contract to establish �temporary detention and processing capabilities� for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for �an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs.� Just what those �new programs� might be is not specified.
In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who�for a tremendously broad set of reasons�have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.
It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance state�as seems to be the case with Main Core�even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.
Another well-informed source�a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community�says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets� behavior and tracks their circle of associations with �social network analysis� and artificial intelligence modeling tools.
�The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help,� he says. �Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets.� An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that �it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time.�
A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as �warrantless wiretapping.� In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor �huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records.� Authorities employ �sophisticated software programs� to sift through the data, searching for �suspicious patterns.� In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it�s notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. �The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed,� the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. �Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach.�
The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.
Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local �intelligence� reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; �commercial databases�; and unidentified �private sector entities.� Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI�s Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department�s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor anti-war protestors and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.
If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protestors, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.
A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room drama, James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database was being used �to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time.� Though not specifically familiar with the name Main Core, he adds, �What was being requested of Comey for legal approval was exactly what a Main Core story would be.� A source regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence community adds: �Comey had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to use a highly classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government database on Americans in computerized searches of its domestic intercepts. [Comey] had concluded that the use of that �Main Core� database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic surveillance project.�
If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. �If a master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues��the CIA and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws��so I suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints.� Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic security. �It�s clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling and owning master lists. The process is not transparent, and the criteria for getting on the list are not clear.� Giraldi continues, �I am certain that the content of such a master list [as Main Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there would be many names on it for many reasons�quite likely, including the two of us.�
Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, the question of legality is murky: �In the event of a national emergency, the executive branch simply assumes these powers��the powers to collect domestic intelligence and draw up detention lists, for example�� if Congress doesn�t explicitly prohibit it. It�s really up to Congress to put these things to rest, and Congress has not done so.� Fein adds that it is virtually impossible to contest the legality of these kinds of data collection and spy programs in court �when there are no criminal prosecutions and [there is] no notice to persons on the president�s �enemies list.� That means if Congress remains invertebrate, the law will be whatever the president says it is�even in secret. He will be the judge on his own powers and invariably rule in his own favor.�
The veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey�s suggestion that the offending elements of the program were dropped could be misleading: �Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a National Intelligence Finding anyway.�
But even if we never face a national emergency, the mere existence of the database is a matter of concern. �The capacity for future use of this information against the American people is so great as to be virtually unfathomable,� the senior government official says.
In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make us safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world renowned expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won�t prevent terrorist conspiracies. �Because there is so little historical terrorist event data,� Jonas tells Radar, �there is not enough volume to create precise predictions.�
The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in post-war American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to �accumulate the names, identities, and activities� of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding �security index,� according to declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by �the National Military Establishment.� By 1960, a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included “professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid” to unnamed “subversive elements.” This same FBI “security index” was allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the time).
FEMA, however–then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency–already had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford’s character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans, which contained information gleaned from wideranging computerized surveillance. The database was located in the agency’s secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator’s findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers “can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers”–a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather’s databases were run “without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate.”
Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a “secret contingency plan,” code named REX 84, which called “for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run
state and local governments.” The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.
North’s program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas Congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. “I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution,” Brooks said. “I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked.” Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, “That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir.” Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.
Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individuals–prisoners, for example–by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, “Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy’s blacklist looks downright crude.” Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.
In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts it, “The gloves seemed to come off.” What is not yet clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, “How extreme were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?” Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.
In July 2007 and again last August, Rep. Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the “classified annexes” of the Bush administration’s Continuity of Government program. DeFazio’s interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.
But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls for disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last August, DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of Government plans are “extra-constitutional or unconstitutional.” Around the same time, he told the Oregonian, “Maybe the people who think there�s a conspiracy out there are right.”
Congress itself has recently widened the path for both extra-constitutional detentions by the White House and the domestic use of military force during a national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspended habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch to designate any American citizen an “enemy combatant” forfeiting all privileges accorded under the Bill of Rights. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act, also passed in 2006, included a last-minute rider titled “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies,” which allowed the deployment of U.S. military units not just to put down domestic insurrections�as permitted under posse comitatus and the Insurrection Act of 1807–but also to deal with a wide range of calamities, including “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or incident.”
More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence
expert William Arkin, “allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control.”
“We are at the edge of a cliff and we�re about to fall off,” says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. “To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There’s no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this–for example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, “We have to be cautious.” The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, “You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.’ “
As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of the House are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S. citizens; instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding with the government in the surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like Main Core. The Protect America Act would legalize programs that appear to be unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey’s testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an “endemic surveillance society,” alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.)
These days, it’s rare to hear a voice like that of Senator Frank Church, who in the 1970s led the explosive investigations into U.S. domestic intelligence crimes that prompted the very reforms now being eroded. “The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny,” Church pointed out in 1975. “And there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.”
Source: Radar Magazine (http://radarmagazine.com/from-the-magazine/2008/04/mayjune_2008_table_of_contents.php). Please purchase a copy of the May/June 2008 issue immediately, or subscribe.
Obama and the case of the missing ‘thesis’
By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer
Posted on Thursday, July 24, 2008 12:01 PM ET
Conservative provocateurs have been hunting for it. Investigative journalists have been on the prowl, too. Even a former professor has been searching through old boxes for his copy of it. But today Barack Obama made it official: He doesn’t have and can’t release any copies of the thesis-length paper he wrote 25 years ago while a senior at Columbia University.
“We do not have a copy of the course paper you requested and neither does Columbia University,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told NBC News.
The hunt begins
The hunt for Obama’s senior “thesis” began with a throwaway line in a newspaper article last October. The New York Times story, on Obama’s early New York years, mentioned in passing that the presidential contender had majored in political science at Columbia and had spent his time “writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament.”
Journalists began hounding Columbia University for copies of the musty document. Conservative bloggers began wondering if the young Obama had written a no-nukes screed that he might come to regret. And David Bossie, the former congressional investigator and “right-wing hit man,” as one newspaper described him, took out classified newspaper ads in Columbia University’s newspaper and the Chicago Tribune in March searching for the term paper.
Bossie came up dry, but said the effort was well worth it. “A thesis entitled Soviet Nuclear Disarmament, written at the height of The Cold War in 1983, might shed some light upon what Barack Obama thought about our most pressing foreign policy issue for 40-plus years (U.S.-Soviet Relations),” he wrote in an e-mail to NBC News.
So what does the missing paper say, and could it be politically damaging to Obama?
The Obama campaign won’t offer any guidance since it says it doesn’t have a copy. Spokesman Ben LaBolt wouldn’t even say whether Sen. Obama threw out his copy or lost it.
So we turned for answers to the former professor who graded the now-elusive paper.
Ace student
In 1983, as a senior at Columbia in New York, Barack Obama enrolled in an intense, eight-student honors seminar called American Foreign Policy. His former professor, Michael Baron, recalled in an interview with NBC News that Obama easily aced the year-long class. But Baron says he never had any inkling that the gangly senior would scale such heights.
“You wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, he’s going to be secretary of state or president someday’,” Baron said. Obama was whip smart and “clearly one of the top one or two students in the class,” he said, but Obama’s seven classmates also could hold their own. “No real dolts in the class,” Baron remembered.
Twenty-five years later, Baron is president of a digital-media company in Florida and has hung up his professorial tweeds for good. He had saved Obama’s senior paper for years, and even hunted for it again this month in some boxes. But he said his search was fruitless, and he now thinks he tossed it out eight years ago during a move.
Baron described the paper as a “thesis” or “senior thesis” in several interviews, and said that Obama spent a year working on it. Baron recalls that the topic was nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union.
“My recollection is that the paper was an analysis of the evolution of the arms reduction negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States,” Baron said in an e-mail. “At that time, a hot topic in foreign policy circles was finding a way in which each country could safely reduce the large arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at the other … For U.S. policy makers in both political parties, the aim was not disarmament, but achieving deep reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal and keeping a substantial and permanent American advantage. As I remember it, the paper was about those negotiations, their tactics and chances for success. Barack got an A.”
Baron said that, even if he could find a copy of the paper, it would likely disappoint Obama’s critics. “The course was not a polemical course, it was a course in decision making and how decisions got made,” he said. “None of the papers in the class were controversial.”
So would it provide any political ammunition today? “I don’t think it would at all,” Baron said. “It wasn’t a position paper; it was an analysis of decision-making.”
Obama and his former Columbia professor, Michael Baron, at a political event in 2007.
Baron acknowledges that he’s a big Obama supporter. He wrote a letter of recommendation for his former student when Obama applied to Harvard Law School. And, Federal Election Commission records show, the former professor has donated $1,250 to Obama’s presidential campaign.
The dog ate my homework?
Columbia University can’t help solve the mystery, either. The university says that it never had a copy of the paper in its archives, and doesn’t today. A spokesman said that no student technically could have written a thesis in 1983, since the university didn’t even have a thesis requirement for undergraduates then.
“At the time Barack Obama was a student, the political science department had no mechanism by which undergraduate political science majors in Columbia College could receive recognition for writing an independent thesis,” said university spokesman Robert Hornsby. “The department’s procedures for students to write theses were created in the 1990s.”
Obama’s spokesman seconds that notion: “Senator Obama did not write a thesis, in fact, Columbia’s political science department didn’t even begin offering the option for College undergraduates to write independent credit theses until the 1990s, well after Obama had graduated.”
[In February, Obama’s campaign did make available a copy of Michelle Obama’s senior thesis, written at Princeton University and entitled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” But that was an official thesis, Obama’s folks said, and not just a “course paper.”]
Case closed?
So is that it? Is the Case of the Missing “Thesis” over?
Not so fast, Sherlock.
“If Obama says he doesn’t have a copy, I would have to call him a liar,” declared David Bossie, the conservative activist. “Obama has it or knows where it is but no one has pressed him seriously for it,” Bossie said.
In other words, for some, the search continues.
Illinois to pursue release of Obama records
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26309921/
Connection to former 1960s radical activist William Ayers at issue
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Obama’s missing thesis sparks debate
July 25: Bloggers are hunting for Sen. Barack Obama’s missing college thesis, ‘Soviet Nuclear Disarmament.’ NBC’s Jim Popkin reports. MSNBC |
WASHINGTON – The University of Illinois says it can’t release records relating to Barack Obama’s service to a nonprofit group linked to former 1960s radical activist William Ayers.
Ayers, now a professor of education, founded Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which was awarded nearly 50 million dollars to help reform Chicago schools. Obama was its first chairman and Republicans have been highlighting his ties to Ayers through the group.
In his youth, Ayers co-founded the Weatherman organization, later known as the Weather Underground Organization, which espoused violence as a necessity for political change.
University officials say the material will be released if it can work out an agreement on ownership rights with the donor of the records. No time frame was given. The university says the donor is concerned that the release not invade personal privacy, including Social Security numbers.
The Obama campaign says the senator does not have control over the records or the ability to release them, adding that it has made many documents related to Obama’s life available to the public and that “we are pleased the university is pursuing an agreement that would make these records publicly available.”
A reversal of position?
On Monday, the National Review magazine posted an online article saying that the institution had initially declared that the records were open to inspection, but that the university subsequently reversed its position.
On Tuesday, the university said that there had been a misunderstanding about the status of the collection.
Ayers is an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who in his youth co-founded the Weatherman organization, later known as the Weather Underground Organization, which espoused violence as a necessity for political change.
In the 1990s, Ayers was instrumental in starting the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which was awarded nearly $50 million by a foundation to help reform Chicago schools.
Obama was the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Republicans have been highlighting his ties to Ayers through the group.
The Republican National Committee posted the National Review article on the RNC’s Web site.
Owner permission required
In an interview, university spokesman Bill Burton said that the institution only recently was made aware that it did not have ownership, a requirement for making the collection public.
The owner notified the university about the absence of a signed ownership agreement last week.
“The donor’s only concerns regarding the collection are due to personnel information that could include names, confidential salary information and even Social Security numbers,” said the university spokesman.
Burton, who has no connection to the Obama campaign spokesman with the same name, said he was not authorized to identify the owner.
Obama was board chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for three years starting in 1995 and he remained on the board until the project closed in 2001.
The $49.2 million was the largest private gift ever made to Chicago schools. The money went to 250 schools in one of the nation’s largest school districts.
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During a primary debate in Philadelphia last October, Obama criticized rival Hillary Rodham Clinton over the release of presidential papers from the National Archives. Clinton said at the time that neither she nor husband Bill Clinton could do anything to speed the process of review at the Archives before papers from the Clinton era could become public.
Obama compared her record of public disclosure of records to that of the Bush administration, saying the country had “just gone through one of the most secretive administrations in our history.”
In March, edited versions of the former first lady’s appointment calendars were publicly released.
DNC Warehouse “Concentration Camp” Uncovered By Reporters
Steve Watson, Infowars.net
Friday, August 15, 2008
http://infowars.net/articles/august2008/150808Camps.htm
(I was unable to insert the pictures in this version, so if you go to the link above, you can see the article complete with pictures and video.)
Cells topped with barbed wire to be used to hold protesters rounded up in mass arrests
A CBS news crew has uncovered a huge warehouse holding facility in Denver, consisting of steel cages topped with barbed wire, ready to receive thousands of protesters at this year’s Democratic National Convention.
“This is a building filled with metal holding cells,” described CBS reporter Rick Sallinger. “We showed up at the facility unannounced today, the doors were wide open, and we managed to shoot for several minutes until a Denver sheriff’s captain asked us to leave.”
The warehouse is located on the north-east side of Denver and is owned by the city. It appears that officials wanted to keep it a secret until the convention began. The police captain captured on film warned that if made public, the facility could be compromised “by people who are potentially trying to be disruptive.”
The CBS footage shows a huge area of metal chain-link cells that measure 5 yards by 5 yards, topped with rolls of barbed wire. Each pen is adorned with an identifying letter.
Signs on the walls of the warehouse read “Warning! Electric stun devices used in this facility.”
On seeing the footage one local political organizer told the crew it resembled a “concentration camp”, while another described it as a “meat processing plant”. The facility has already been dubbed “Gitmo On The Platte”.
Such “prison camps” were also used in 2004 during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. The areas close to the DNC in Boston consisted of concrete walls, barriers and metal cages with barbed wire.
The areas were invisible to the Fleet Center where the convention was held and were referred to as “Boston’s Camp X-Ray”.
At the 2004 RNC in New York holding pens were also employed as protestors and innocent people were swept up in mass arrests and transferred to then-recently closed Hudson Pier Depot at Pier 57 on the Hudson River in Manhattan.
The facility was quickly dubbed “Guantanamo on the Hudson” as thousands were bound and paraded into a large warehouse area behind steel caging.
More recently, such holding areas have been employed in conjunction with the Orwellian concept of “free speech zones”.
The Secret Service has been granted the power to declare “first amendment areas”. They scout locations where the president is scheduled to speak, or pass through, target those who carry anti-Bush signs and escort them to the protest pens prior to and during the event.
Inevitably the pens are far away from the event location and well away from any media spotlight.
Holding pens will also be employed at the RNC later this year with local law enforcement working with the secret service to designate the areas in Minneapolis.
Caucus Fraud: Caucus Fraud Data, Analysis, Articles, Testimonials & Videos
In two weeks the Democratic Party will formally nominate Barack Obama as its candidate for President of the United States.
It’s the triumph of fraud.
I’ve spent the past two months immersed in data from the 2008 Democratic caucuses. After studying the procedures and results from all fourteen caucus states, interviewing dozens of witnesses, and reviewing hundreds of personal stories, my conclusion is that the Obama campaign willfully and intentionally defrauded the American public by systematically undermining the caucus process.
This site represents the fruits of my research. It’s a work in progress, obviously, and also a central repository for a vast array of data: articles and blog posts from around the web, personal emails to me, interviews with witnesses, affidavits and testimonials, campaign communications, and videos of the caucuses themselves.
I have elected to make this information public. I hope that it sheds light on the caucus process and inspires reform or total elimination of the caucuses. I also hope it gives pause to those Democrats who believe that Barack Obama is the rightful nominee and that Hillary supporters should just “get over it.” I have been a Democrat my entire life, but I will not support the Democratic Party at the cost of democracy.
Lynette Long
August 2008
http://www.lynettelong.com/caucusfraud/
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In addition, I have written a piece about why I and many others feel it is so important that these issues be addressed before we have to live with them in the General Election.
When the Client is in pain, does it matter who is at fault?
Re: Dowd’s article “Yes, She Can “
Before you start protesting against the possibility of war with Russia, consider this…
Remember when Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the conference table with JFK? He said he would “bury us economically.”
Well, here we are in two wars we cannot afford, with our troops stretched paper thin, with our economy in shambles, and in debt up to our ears to China, Saudi Arabia and others that we can scarce call our true friends.
Do you think this did not figure into Putin’s calculations? Don’t think for a minute that Putin did not carefully choose this moment for that very reason. Putin is not our friend.
Putin controls Russia. He has been taking over newspapers and media in Russia for years now. he has been assassinating journalists that don’t “quote the party line” (sound familiar?). He has systematically done all the things that Hitler did to take control of the Germans in building the Third Reich.
Putin isn’t playing. He has chosen his moment carefully, when America is at her very weakest in my lifetime. Not just weak militarily or economically, but weak in terms of our “brand” and our ability to influence the world to do “the right thing.”
Putin is not our friend. And he knows how to play diplomacy and its slow pace to his advantage militarily. He could care less about negotiating. Negotiating is for fools who don’t understand what he is up to. And that is not a neo-con talking, that is a progressive liberal who understands the ultimate goal that Putin has for Russia.
What’s Russia’s motive?
His goal, as an old KGB agent, has always been to reconstitute the Soviet Union, only bigger and better and more powerful economically.
How does he do that? By controlling the flow of oil to the world.
Hoe does he accomplish that? By controlling all the territory from Russia to the Persian Gulf.
Right now, Iran is a pseudo-satellite of Russia, and is blind to Putin’s true intent. By the time Putin reaches Iran and annexes it, it will be all over but the shouting. We must stop him now or face another world war with him in control of the majority of the world’s oil reserves.
China and India
China is dependent on oil, actually more addicted to it than we are, as is India. Putin and Russia have always been concerned about China’s size and population (military strength). What better way to control China than through oil? it is no mistake that Chavez has been negotiating with China to supply them oil instead of the U.S., and Chavez and Putin are big buddies.
So, controlling the world’s oil would put Putin in virtual control of China and India, or at least put their economies under his control, which is virtually the same thing.
The End Game
How long could the Western world last without the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf? A month? Longer? Even with rationing, if gas goes to $12/gallon, how will our economy survive that kind of hit that quickly? Not to mention the need for gasoline and petroleum products for our war effort.
What must we do?
NATO must step up with America’s leadership to prevent another world war, which will take place if we appease Putin and let him build strength, just like we did with Hitler and Stalin.
If you want to know where appeasement gets you, just Google Neville Chamberlain.
About Laura Schneider
I am a moderate progressive, life-long Democrat and supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton. I am a retired IT consultant, musician, animal lover, environmentalist and human rights activist, with particular interest in the protection of civil liberties and constitutional rights and freedoms.
One of my deepest concerns is the loss of our constitutional rights and protections during the last decade. We have been told that 9/11 changed everything and that we would have to change to accommodate to this new reality, but:
Abandoning our democratic values in exchange for the delusion that we are safer is the greatest “win” the terrorists could have hoped for…. and we gave this to them out of fear.
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