William Arkin sheds more light on the NSA’s recent move.
Aurora is already a reconnaissance satellite downlink and analytic center focusing on domestic warning. The NSA and CIA join U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) in Colorado. NORTHCOM is post 9/11 the U.S. military command responsible for homeland defense.
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According to Government Executive Magazine -- thanks DP -- "NSA is building a massive data storage facility in Colorado, which will be able to hold the electronic equivalent of the Library of Congress every two days." This new NSA data warehouse is the hub of "data mining" and analysis development, allowing the eavesdropping agency to develop and make better use of the unbelievabytes of data it collects but does not exploit.
Psychologists who study survival say that people who are rule followers don't do as well as those who are of independent mind and spirit. When a patient is told that he has six months to live, he has two choices: to accept the news and die, or to rebel and live. People who survive cancer in the face of such a diagnosis are notorious. The medical staff observes that they are "bad patients," unruly, troublesome. They don't follow directions. They question everything. They're annoying. They're survivors. The Tao Te Ching says:
The rigid person is a disciple of death;
The soft, supple, and delicate are lovers of life.
When Mike and I were hiking around in the Arboretum a few months ago (the same day I fell off a cliff), we discovered a man-made shelter of sorts, hiding well off any trails. Yesterday, I went back there alone and took photos, along with some video and commentary for all to enjoy. Of course, I’m not going to say exactly where it is – I don’t want it to be destroyed – but, if you ask me, I’ll take you there.
Sometime in the spring, I may try to spend a few nights there.
When I first received Laurence Gonzales’ Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, I expected it to be a dry survival manual – specific solutions to specific situations. After the few few pages of the book, my expectations were quickly shot to the ground and the book managed to raise itself to the status of one of the best books I’ve ever read. Rather than dry disaster reports and analysis, I found the book to be part brain science, part stoic philosophy, and part zen teachings. It is a survival manual, but not like anything you expect. I highly recommend it to anyone, regardless of your interest in wilderness, as, more than anything, it’s a book about how to live.
A provision in the "Patriot Act" creates a new federal police force with power to violate the Bill of Rights. You might think that this cannot be true as you have not read about it in newspapers or heard it discussed by talking heads on TV.
Go to House Report 109-333 -USA PATRIOT IMPROVEMENT AND REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2005 and check it out for yourself. Sec. 605 reads:
"There is hereby created and established a permanent police force, to be known as the 'United States Secret Service Uniformed Division'."
This new federal police force is "subject to the supervision of the Secretary of Homeland Security."
The new police are empowered to "make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony."
The new police are assigned a variety of jurisdictions, including "an event designated under section 3056(e) of title 18 as a special event of national significance" (SENS).
"A special event of national significance" is neither defined nor does it require the presence of a "protected person" such as the president in order to trigger it. Thus, the administration, and perhaps the police themselves, can place the SENS designation on any event. Once a SENS designation is placed on an event, the new federal police are empowered to keep out and to arrest people at their discretion.
The language conveys enormous discretionary and arbitrary powers.
What is "an offense against the United States"? What are "reasonable grounds"?
You can bet that the Alito/Roberts court will rule that it is whatever the executive branch says.
The obvious purpose of the act is to prevent demonstrations at Bush/Cheney events. However, nothing in the language limits the police powers from being used only in this way. Like every law in the US, this law also will be expansively interpreted and abused. It has dire implications for freedom of association and First Amendment rights.
We can take for granted that the new federal police will be used to suppress dissent and to break up opposition. The Brownshirts are now arming themselves with a Gestapo.
Many naive Americans will write to me to explain that this new provision in the reauthorization of the "Patriot Act" is necessary to protect the president and other high officials from terrorists or from harm at the hands of angry demonstrators: "No one else will have anything to fear." Some will accuse me of being an alarmist, and others will say that it is unpatriotic to doubt the law's good intentions.
Americans will write such nonsense despite the fact that the president and foreign dignitaries are already provided superb protection by the Secret Service. The naive will not comprehend that the president cannot be endangered by demonstrators at SENS at which the president is not present. For many Americans, the light refuses to turn on.
In Nazi Germany did no one but Jews have anything to fear from the Gestapo?
By Stalin's time Lenin and Trotsky had eliminated all members of the "oppressor class," but that did not stop Stalin from sending millions of "enemies of the people" to the Gulag.
It is extremely difficult to hold even local police forces accountable. Who is going to hold accountable a federal police protected by Homeland Security and the president?
There’s a good interview of Chomsky over at Seattle Weekly, by local reporter Geov Parrish. Chomsky discusses our current one party system, the war on terror, and the current administration’s policies.
They're not stupid. They know that they're increasing the threat of a serious catastrophe. But that's a generation or two away. Who cares? There's basically two principles that define the Bush administration policies: stuff the pockets of your rich friends with dollars, and increase your control over the world. Almost everything follows from that. If you happen to blow up the world, well, you know, it's somebody else's business. Stuff happens, as Rumsfeld said.
Over at The Alternative Press Review, there’s a transcript of Chomsky’s lecture, “War on Terror”.
To take one of these official definitions, terrorism is "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature...through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear," typically targeting civilians. The British government's definition is about the same: "Terrorism is the use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public and is for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause." These definitions seem fairly clear and close to ordinary usage. There also seems to be general agreement that they are appropriate when discussing the terrorism of enemies.
But a problem at once arises. These definitions yield an entirely unacceptable consequence: it follows that the US is a leading terrorist state...
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What about the boundary between terror and resistance? One question that arises is the legitimacy of actions to realize "the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of people forcibly deprived of that right..., particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation..." Do such actions fall under terror or resistance?
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There are other such examples. We might want to bear them in mind when we read Bush II's impassioned pronouncement that "the United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support them, because they're equally as guilty of murder," and "the civilized world must hold those regimes to account." This was proclaimed to great applause at the National Endowment for Democracy, a few days after Venezuela's extradition request had been refused. Bush's remarks pose another dilemma. Either the US is part of the civilized world, and must send the US air force to bomb Washington; or it declares itself to be outside the civilized world. The logic is impeccable, but fortunately, logic has been dispatched as deep into the memory hole as moral truisms.
I’ve finally finished reading Carlos Castaneda‘s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. The book documents Casteneda’s time with a Yaqui shaman named Juan Matus. In the book, Don Juan takes Casteneda, a then young anthropology student at UCLA, under his wing as an apprentice shaman, teaching him the ways of Mescalito, Devil’s Weed, and a smoke mixture containing mushroom. (During my reading, a number of people asked if the book served as a sort of manual for these entheogens. Spiritual, perhaps, but not practical.)
There’s plenty of controversy surrounding the series of books, of which The Teachings of Don Juan is the first, but I really don’t see why it matters if Don Juan was a real person, or whether he was created as a medium for the book’s message – or whether Castenada simply hallucinated the whole thing. The books explores many interesting ideas, many of which would do good to be considered by people today.
Don Juan’s personification of not only the plants mentioned in the book, but also non-living objects, such as his pipe, have been imprinted on my mind. Regardless of whether you honestly suscribe to the indigineous way of thinking – that, in Don Juan’s case, the peyote plant is actually a teacher named Mescalito with various human characteristics – it is undeniably a healthy way of living.
Try this: take one day, or one hour, out of your life and treat everything you come in contact with – from your underwear, to your boss(es)/teacher(s)/parent(s)/friend(s), to your food – not as an item to be exploited but as a being to enter into a relationship with.
If you look at a tree and see dollar bills, you’ll treat it one way. If you look at a tree and see a tree, you’ll treat it another.
Which way of thinking, do you think, children seven generations from now will thank you for?
(Those who listened to the Derrick Jenson interview I previously linked to will find this concept not so new.)
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