Get Out of Dodge!

One of the outcomes of 9/11 and shows us a gearing up by the US Corporate State for the impending civil unrest, which is apparently slated for 2012 at the latest…

The Coming Police State

Source: washingtonpost.com

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

The long-planned shift in the Defense Department’s role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.

There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military’s role in domestic law enforcement.

But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, dedicating 20,000 troops to domestic response — a nearly sevenfold increase in five years — “would have been extraordinary to the point of unbelievable,” Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said in remarks last month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the realization that civilian authorities may be overwhelmed in a catastrophe prompted “a fundamental change in military culture,” he said.

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Technorati Tags: posse comitatus

Private armies, hard at work….

Source: washingtonpost.com

Federal prosecutors have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case.

The guards, all former U.S. military personnel, were working as security contractors for the State Department, assigned to protect U.S. diplomats and other non-military officials in Iraq. The shooting occurred when their convoy arrived at a busy square in central Baghdad and guards tried to stop traffic.

An Iraqi government investigation concluded that the security contractors fired without provocation. Blackwater has said its personnel acted in self-defense.

The sources said that any charges against the guards would likely be brought under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which has previously been used to prosecute only the cases referred to the Justice Department by the Defense Department for crimes committed by military personnel and contractors overseas. Legal experts have questioned whether contractors working for the State Department can be prosecuted under its provisions.

The sources cautioned that prosecutors are still weighing evidence gathered in a 10-month investigation that began shortly after the shootings. A federal grand jury has heard testimony from about three dozen witnesses since November, including U.S. and Blackwater officials and Iraqis, according to two of the sources.

Target letters, often considered a prelude to indictment, offer suspects the opportunity to contest evidence brought before the grand jury and give their own version of events. The letters were sent this summer, although the sources, who agreed to discuss the case only on the condition of anonymity because of its sensitivity, said a final decision on whether to indict may not be made until October, about a year after the incident.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and the Justice Department’s National Security Division are leading the investigation. Channing Phillips, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to comment, as did Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd. A spokeswoman for the FBI’s Washington field office, which investigated the shooting on the ground in Iraq in the weeks after the incident, also declined to comment.

Anne E. Tyrell, a spokeswoman for North Carolina-based Blackwater, said that the company believes the guards fired their weapons “in response to a hostile threat” and is monitoring the investigation closely.

“If it is determined that an individual acted improperly, Blackwater would support holding that person accountable,” Tyrell said in a statement. “But at this stage, without being able to review evidence collected in an ongoing investigation, we will not prejudge the actions of any individual. The company is cooperating fully with ongoing investigations and believes that accountability is important.”

Earlier reports on the investigation indicated that the FBI had focused on three Blackwater guards among a larger but unknown number present at the time of the Sept. 16 incident in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square. None has been publicly identified, and authorities did not say which six received the target letters.

The shooting, and the perceived failure to hold anyone accountable for it, has fueled congressional dissatisfaction with the government’s use of private security contractors in a combat zone. Contractors working for the Defense Department are now explicitly liable for crimes under laws covering the military, but several efforts in Congress to extend that jurisdiction to State Department contractors have failed.

The first order of business will be to protect property, business….money. Victims are lower on the priority list.

Source: abc7news.com

Police and firefighters are testing the city’s response time in a theoretical weapons attack.

Several blocks in San Francisco’s financial district were closed down for the day.

The fire department was calling this a real public-private partnership as they got the owners of the downtown building at 555 California Street to allow them to let it fall victim to a mock emergency.

The scene was the aftermath of a chemical attack in a downtown high rise- luckily this was only a drill.

“Each time we do this the better off all of us are,” said San Francisco Fire Department Chief Joanne Hayes-White.

About 500 emergency responders from San Francisco, surrounding cities, the FBI and the Army are participating in this mock release of weapons of mass destruction.

There was also drama at 1 Post Street. A mock shooter went on a rampage where another unidentified chemical had been released.

“It’s truly taxing the resources here in San Francisco, but that’s what it’s all about,” said Hayes-White.

It all started at 10 this morning and from some outsider’s perspectives things were moving slowly. Students playing victims were left lying there for hours.

“We know that things start out at a low level in these exercises today,” said S.F. Police Chief Heather Fong.

“Initially where you’d want to go right in, you see victims on the ground, we need to make sure that we take a step back, pause for a moment and decide what our entry is going to be like,” said Hayes-White.

As the mock decontamination went on this afternoon, a local businessman said his company could help stop the situation before it got to this point.

Mike Welden of Building Protection Systems stated “We have a break-through system that’s designated by the Department of Homeland Security that will detect and identify the toxin in seconds and then automatically shut down the HVAC system so the toxins are no longer circulating through the building.” This product was just released earlier this year, another idea at a time when the government is being criticized about the availability of materials that could be used to make a dirty bomb.

The Government Accountability Office released a report last month saying that advances in security were moving too slowly and that customs officials don’t have enough equipment to detect radiation.

In the meantime FEMA is spending a quarter of a million dollars on today’s drill.

“The money is absolutely worth it because if we don’t spend it now it’s going to cost us so much more later on,” said Tom Saragoosa of the S.F. Fire Department.

The Coming Urban Terror by John Robb, City Journal Summer 2007

For the first time in history, announced researchers this May, a majority of the world’s population is living in urban environments. Cities—efficient hubs connecting international flows of people, energy, communications, and capital—are thriving in our global economy as never before. However, the same factors that make cities hubs of globalization also make them vulnerable to small-group terror and violence.

Over the last few years, small groups’ ability to conduct terrorism has shown radical improvements in productivity—their capacity to inflict economic, physical, and moral damage. These groups, motivated by everything from gang membership to religious extremism, have taken advantage of easy access to our global superinfrastructure, revenues from growing illicit commercial flows, and ubiquitously available new technologies to cross the threshold necessary to become terrible threats. September 11, 2001, marked their arrival at that threshold.

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This is rather interesting, we think…

Via: NaturalNews

by Mike Adams

The U.S. media is loudly protesting the censorship of their reporters at the Olympics in Beijing. Betraying its promise to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), China has blocked reporters’ access to “sensitive” websites, including those that mention human rights violations, the suppression of the Falun Gong religious group, the Tiananman Square uprising and other similar topics the Chinese government would like to imagine never happened. In response to these restrictions, U.S. reporters are crying foul, insisting that they should have full access to information without government censorship. By implication, they are also stating that the U.S. is a “free society” where information is never censored by the government.

Perhaps these reporters have never actually opened their eyes in their own country. While China’s censorship of news websites is deplorable, the U.S. is engaged in a far more restrictive, freedom-crush brand of censorship in the health industry: The censorship of truthful descriptions of health products by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Like China’s government at the Olympics, the FDA has outlawed free speech by nutritional supplement companies, threatening them with fines, business interruptions and even jail time for their founders if they don’t remove all text from their websites and product packaging that seeks to inform consumers about the genuine health benefits provided by their products.

The FDA’s campaign of intimidation against food and supplement companies
For example, last year the FDA sent threatening letters to 29 growers of cherries, warning that they could not place links on their websites linking to scientific studies documenting the health benefits of cherries. Allowing consumers to be informed of the scientific truth about cherries, it seems, was simply intolerable by the FDA. Any company that linked to a scientific, peer-reviewed study showing cherries to be natural anti-inflammatory foods would be sued by the FDA and put out of business, the letters warned.

And that’s just the beginning. Over the last several decades, the FDA has seized imports of herbs from South America, threatened honest supplement companies to remove accurate information from their labels, and pursued a campaign of intimidation and tyranny against virtually the entire natural products industry. In fact, the FDA has even ordered the destruction of recipe books containing dessert recipes using stevia (you thought book burnings only happened in China? Think again…).

Why China and America both use censorship to protect the powerful
In all, the actions of the FDA makes China’s government look downright Libertarian. In the United States, the FDA has made sure that consumers have virtually zero access to truthful information about the benefits of nutritional supplements in much the same way the Chinese government blocks its citizens from having access to truthful information about human rights websites. These campaigns of censorship also happen for much the same reason: To protect the status quo and prevent a revolution from taking place (in China, it would be a social revolution. In the U.S., it would be a health care revolution).

You see, when it comes to real freedom, it makes no difference that China is a Communist government and America claims to be a Democracy: America blocks its citizens from accessing all sorts of crucial information about health freedom, just like China censors its internet to prevent people from learning about political freedom. In fact, both China and the FDA use many of the same online technologies to search for “offending” websites that they can shut down, intimidate or threaten with legal action. Those technologies, of course, were created by American companies like Google. And it is American companies like Yahoo that gladly hand over free speech protestors to tyrannical governments, betraying the privacy of their users and colluding with the thought police of various nations.

So reporters can protest all they want at China’s censorship of the internet, but when they return home from the Olympics, they will return to nations that practice the same brand of crushing censorship… the kind of censorship that keeps consumers ignorant and uninformed, protecting the profits of drug companies and cancer centers, all while interfering with the distributing of truthful information about the astounding ability of foods, superfoods, herbs and nutritional supplements to prevent cancer, halt heart disease, reverse diabetes, dissolve kidney stones, end depression and greatly extend lifespan (among other benefits).

They will talk about how China’s citizens don’t have access to a free press, and then they’ll turn right around and execute the very same censorship they are criticizing by refusing to print stories about the fraud of modern medicine; the quackery of chemotherapy; the monopoly price controls of Big Pharma and the outright criminal actions of the FDA.

The U.S. media mirrors China’s media censors
In fact, it is the mainstream media — the very group whining about freedom at the Olympics — that fully cooperates with the FDA by focusing its reporting on pharmaceuticals while ignoring the wealth of important information about natural remedies that could revolutionize health care and save the U.S. more than $40 trillion over the next few decades.

Really? $40 trillion? Absolutely: According to the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, a 1% reduction in cancer mortality is worth about $500 billion to the U.S. economy over the long term. We have nutrients right now that can slash cancer rates by nearly 80 percent, across the entire population (vitamin D being the simplest one). That comes to $40 trillion in economic abundance from preventing cancer alone. (That’s enough money to rebuild every school, bridge, highway, park, library, airport and seaport in the entire country, by the way, but again, you’re not supposed to know that…)

The FDA doesn’t want anybody to know that Vitamin D prevents cancer, you see. That’s why no Vitamin D supplement company can make any statements at all about cancer. If they tried, they’d be arrested at gunpoint and dragged into prison like a Falun Gong member in Beijing. In China, of course, you might be sentenced to death and have your organs harvested and sold on the black market. In America, you might have your children kidnapped by state officials and watch in horror as their organs are destroyed by state-mandated chemotherapy chemicals that you are then obliged to pay for (at monopoly prices, no less). Don’t believe this actually happens in the United States? Think again. Read the story of Abraham Cherrix: http://www.naturalnews.com/019617.html

Don’t believe for a minute that you are free in America. You are merely a subject that’s exploited by powerful corporations and corrupt government regulators working in collusion with a media institution engaged in all-out censorship of stories that threaten the status quo: Health freedom, the truth about 9/11, voting fraud, the mass fluoridation of public water supplies, the real story behind the fractional reserve banking system and other similar topics. While every American citizens is TOLD they are free, if you look at the man behind the curtain, you’ll realize it’s all just smoke and mirrors (and bombs and bullets).

Censorship is a tool that protects the powerful
Every government, you see, has its power base to protect, and in the U.S., the power base is the corporations. If you threaten the corporations by telling the truth about nutritional supplements or natural healing modalities, you will be arrested, imprisoned or run out of the country. It happens in America every day. That’s why all the really effective cancer clinics are in Mexico and South America — they’ve all had to flee the “health police” in the U.S. that run around arresting people like Communist China Secret Police! Read my article documenting the true history of armed FDA raids on health clinics: http://www.naturalnews.com/021791.html

The thought police aren’t limited to China
I hope this latest fiasco at the Olympics in Beijing will serve as a reminder that China isn’t the only country that isn’t free: The U.S., U.K., Australia and most other western nations practice their own forms of censorship, and much of it is carried out at gunpoint. (Many health clinic raids in the U.S., for example, are carried out with SWAT teams armed with assault rifles and body armor.)

When it comes to accessing accurate information about health and supplements, U.S. citizens are no more free than China’s citizens, and they’re nowhere near as free as the citizens of Ecuador, for example, where a package of the Chanca Piedra herb just openly says, “Eliminates kidney stones.” Try to put that text on your bottle of herbs in the U.S. and you’ll find your product inventory confiscated by the FDA, which has become the “Ministry of Truth” on anything related to health.

While many reporters might be hoping for freedom in China right now, I’m hoping for freedom at home first. Let’s reclaim our own freedom of speech right here at home before we go worrying about how other countries censor their news.

Words and ideas banned in China:
Falun Gong
Tiananmen Square
Religious worship (including Christianity)
Voting rights
Workers’ rights
Civil liberties

Words and ideas banned in America:
Curing cancer with herbs
Saying no to vaccinations
Reversing heart disease with nutrition
Curing diabetes with vegetable juices
Eliminating depression with supplements
“Treating” any disease at all with herbs
Disagreeing with the “official” explanation of 9/11 and the WTC7 building

… and more. And while some skeptics might say that China’s censorship is far more severe because it deals with human rights violations, I say the FDA’s censorship of truthful health information IS a human rights violation!

What could be more important to human rights than the right of an individual to protect and preserve their own life by learning the truth about nourishing foods? To deny a population access to truthful information about the life-protecting properties of common nutrients is, all by itself, a crime against humanity and a damning violation of human rights!

It’s always easy to fool the sheeple with TV propaganda
The most astonishing thing about all of this is that China’s citizens think they are free! And if you live in the U.S., I’m willing to bet you think you’re free, too.

Remember this: Tyranny is always, always, always sold to the People as freedom. Every government lies to its People, as it is a necessary component of creating the illusion of freedom. But there is no such thing as real freedom in a society that restricts the Peoples’ access to the very information they need in order to make informed decisions about their own lives. America, then, is no more “the Land of the Free” than China.

Want to make America free? You’ll have to take it back from those who stole it from you. Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson:

And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that the people preserve the spirit of resistance? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Source: ABC News

Government officials have been quietly stepping up counterterror efforts out of a growing concern that al Qaeda or similar organizations might try to capitalize on the spate of extremely high-profile events in the coming months, sources tell ABC News.
Homeland security is on alert with Olympics near, elections on horizon.

Security experts point to next month’s Olympics as evidence that high-profile events attract threats of terrorism, like the one issued this past weekend by a Chinese Muslim minority group that warned of its intent to attack the Games.

Anti-terror officials in the U.S. cite this summer and fall’s lineup of two major political parties’ conventions, November’s general election and months of transition into a new presidential administration as cause for heightened awareness and action.

This is what the Department of Homeland Security is quietly declaring a Period of Heightened Alert, or POHA, a time frame when terrorists may have more incentive to attack.
…