Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Big Brother Has Come to the Birthplace of America
Pennsylvania is literally the birthplace of the United States of America. The Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia, and that is where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were signed.
It is therefore disconcerting that Pennsylvania's tax authority - the Department of Revenue - recently launched a big brother "we know where you live" type ad:
And according to the Department of Justice's Inspector General (via AP), the FBI spied on an anti-war rally in Pittsburgh sponsored by a nonviolent anti-war and anti-discrimination group, pretending it was preventing terrorism:
The FBI gave inaccurate information to Congress and the public when it claimed a possible terrorism link to justify surveilling an anti-war rally in Pittsburgh, the Justice Department's inspector general said Monday in a report on the bureau's scrutiny of domestic activist groups.Inspector General Glenn Fine said the FBI had no reason to expect that anyone of interest in a terrorism investigation would be present at the 2002 event sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, a nonviolent anti-war and anti-discrimination group.
The surveillance was "an ill-conceived project on a slow work day," the IG stated in a study of several FBI domestic terrorism probes of people affiliated with organizations such as Greenpeace and the Catholic Worker.
Earlier, in statements to Congress and in a press release, the FBI had described the surveillance as related to a terrorism investigation.
***
The FBI has broad definitions that enable it to classify matters as domestic terrorism that actually are trespassing or vandalism, the inspector general said.
Regarding the Pittsburgh rally, controversy erupted in 2006 over whether the FBI had spied on protesters at the event several years earlier because of their anti-war views.
(Its not just trespassing and vandalism. According to Department of Defense training manuals, protest is also now considered "low-level terrorism". And see this, this and this).
And the state of Pennsylvania hired an Israeli-American company with extensive military and intelligence ties to put out "terror" alerts. The company - ITRR - describes itself as:
The preeminent Israeli/American security firm providing training, intelligence and education to clients across the globe.ITRR explains:
The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response's research and analysis center, known as the Targeted Actionable Monitoring Center (TAM-C), is located in Israel. The Targeted Actionable Monitoring Center is staffed with former law enforcement, military, and intelligence professionals experienced in the production and utilization of intelligence products.
ITRR categorizes itself as a “Targeted Action Monitoring Center” that does not function as a “clipping service, but a powerful fusion center of battle-tested operatives, analysts, and researchers who have real-life experience fighting both terrorists and criminal entities [...] distinguished among other agencies by its access to a vast network of on-the-ground key-sources in virtually every region of the world.”
In Pennsylvania, ITRR apparently considered opponents of gas drilling, and attendees at anti-BP candlelight vigils and a gay and lesbian festival to be potential terrorists.
And as Pittsburgh Live notes, the ITRR may have also tracked and disabled "activist groups that planned to protest the 2009 Group of 20 economic conference in the city". And see this and this.
For more on "fusion centers" and the use of national security apparatus for corporate purposes, see this, this and this.
Big brother has come to the birthplace of America.ITRR does not just operate in Pennsylvania. It's website states:
The client list of the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response is confidential.
***
Training clients of the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response have ranged
from
• US military and law enforcement personnel in Israel
• the South Central Pennsylvania Taskforce
• AMTRAK counter-terror unit
• New Hampshire law enforcement agencies
5 comments:
→ Thank you for contributing to the conversation by commenting. We try to read all of the comments (but don't always have the time).
→ If you write a long comment, please use paragraph breaks. Otherwise, no one will read it. Many people still won't read it, so shorter is usually better (but it's your choice).
→ The following types of comments will be deleted if we happen to see them:
-- Comments that criticize any class of people as a whole, especially when based on an attribute they don't have control over
-- Comments that explicitly call for violence
→ Because we do not read all of the comments, I am not responsible for any unlawful or distasteful comments.
Posts
This is sounding more and more like Operation Gladio to me. It's the same mentality: waging war against the left and defending privilege against beneficial social change, as Steve Lendman put it in his review of Daniele Ganser's book NATO's Secret Armies.
ReplyDeleteTerrorist bombings in Europe that were carried out by the Gladio operatives were blamed on the left, to steer public opinion and voters toward the authoritarian right. This is why they call peaceful protesters 'terrorists', in preparation for......?
And according to the Department of Justice's Inspector General (via AP), the FBI spied on an anti-war rally in Pittsburgh sponsored by a nonviolent anti-war and anti-discrimination group, pretending it was preventing terrorism:
ReplyDeletePretending to fight terrorism is the most important part of that sentence to me for that is what they are doing...pretending...they are the real terrorist!
This is poignant; thank you, George Washington, for posting it.
ReplyDeleteThe "Big Lie" of omission from Big Brother is that states have billions of our dollars "invested" for us, that they then don't mention when they discuss budget deficits. Collectively, this sum is in the trillions. For example, CA has a ~$20 billion deficit and yet the 2009 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) states they have $367 billion of investments in stocks and securities. They further lie by saying that OUR $367 billion is needed to be held in order to pay a $1.8 billion difference between retiree payouts and current state employee contributions.
Of course, an honest government would remind us of our available investment money and submit the numbers and facts to INDEPENDENT professionals for cost-benefit analyses.
Of course, an honest government would state the "emperor has no clothes" obvious that we have a national Federal Reserve system that creates a "debt supply" rather than a "money suppley."
I walk people through CAFR data, and how you can do so for your state, in the economics section of my paper, "Open proposal to US higher education" by Carl Herman.
Carl Herman said: “The "Big Lie" of omission from Big Brother is that states have billions of our dollars "invested" for us, that they then don't mention when they discuss budget deficits. Collectively, this sum is in the trillions. For example, CA has a ~$20 billion deficit and yet the 2009 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) states they have $367 billion of investments in stocks and securities.”
ReplyDeleteCarl has found the truth, all of the states keep two sets of books, that is how the banksters corrupted our government system down to the local level.
Read all about the Tavistock Institute here. This is a big secret that will blow your socks off.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_tavistock.htm#menu
I printed the wrong link. This is the link for Walter Burien Comprehensive Financial Report and “The biggest game in town” video.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFG9CW2RNkA&feature=related