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C R I M E S A G A I N S T H U M A N I T Y
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the focus is:
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Big Brother
back to Crimes Against Humanity contents
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"In George Orwell's classic novel
1984,
Oceania is in a state of perpetual war with Eurasia. Even though
the "Big Brother" state of Oceania insists that such has always been
the case, the protagonist, Winston Smith, remembers that the states
were in fact at one time aligned. The same is true of the United
States and Osama bin Laden/Afghanistan. The CIA provided funding
and arms to bin Laden during the decade-long proxy war with
the Soviet Union. Now bin Laden, "The Evil One," has become
the Goldstein character, who is held up as the "Enemy of the
People." And our rulers readily admit that the War on Terrorism
will last indefinitely.
"To
keep the masses in line and to suppress opposition, Oceania
developed a language called Newspeak, which actually
reduced the number and variety of words in use to render
dissenting thought obsolete. Closely related to Newspeak is
doublethink, in which someone is conditioned to either
say the opposite of what he thinks or think the opposite of
what is true.
The
U.S. government has engaged in such obfuscations with the
passage of the Uniting and Strengthening America Act by
Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct
Terrorism. Yes, it's the USA PATRIOT
Act. Clearly the name of
the bill was concocted to fit the acronym. The purpose of this
acronym is two-fold. One, it makes it politically dangerous for
politicians to vote against it ("He voted against the Patriot
Act? Who can we nominate to run opposite this traitor in the
next election?"). Two, it stifles opposition among the American
people. "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists."
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- Bush Aides Consider Domestic Spy Agency,
articles assembled by Paul Wolf, 17 Nov 2002
- Bush Aides Consider Domestic Spy Agency, The Washington Post, 16 Nov 2002
- Bush Aides Consider Bolstering Domestic Spying, Reuters, 16 Nov 2002
- CIA Is Expanding Domestic Operations, The Washington Post, 23 Oct 2002
- Iraqis in U.S. to be monitored for terror threat, The New York Times, 17 Nov 2002
- Congress strikes deal on independent commission on 9/11, The Scotsman, 16 Nov 2002
- Specialty provisions threaten to sink homeland security bill, Knight Ridder Newspapers, 17 Nov 2002
- Who's watching the watchers?,
by Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe, 22 Nov 2002
- John Poindexter to Head
New Domestic Espionage Office:
Is The Government Monitoring
Our Every Communication Already?
by The Partnership for Civil Justice
Legal Defense and Education Fund, Fall 2002
- No more Mr Scrupulous Guy,
by John Sutherland, The Guardian, 18 Feb 2002
How one of the two brains behind the Iran-Contra scandal
this week became one of America's most powerful men
- Who Knows?
The FBI may be hot on the trail of books read by potential terrorists.
We're not sure because we're not permitted to know,
by Nat Hentoff, Legal Times, 22 Apr 2002
- Background and Shockwaves of 9-11: An Orwellian
Nightmare
by Biörn Ivemark, Indymedia, 5 Feb 2002
- Is the US Turning Into a Surveillance Society?: ACLU, 15 Jan 2003
- The USA PATRIOT Act Was
Planned Before 9/11,
Jennifer Van Bergen, t r u t h o u t, 20 May 2002
Note (beginning about
two-thirds of the way down) how
Section 218 of the USAPA
opens the door to "the FBI, the CIA, or any other
intelligence agency, ... surveil[ling] you without probable
cause, as long as they say the surveillance has something
to do with a foreign intelligence investigation of some
sort (which may otherwise not even involve you directly). . . .
[I]t is obvious that the proponents of this amendment [to the
1978 Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)] know it is an end-run around the
Fourth
Amendment. They have had many years to think about it
and have repeatedly shown their willingness to enact
carefully crafted, unconstitutional laws."
- Homeland Security Act: The Rise of the American Police State,
by Jennifer Van Bergen, truthout, 2,3,4 Dec 2002
- Text of Homeland Security Act, (H.R. 5005), November 2002
- Terrorism in the Age of Surveillance
by Paul Wolf with accompanying articles, 28 Jul 2002
- This excerpt from Frank Donner's book,
The Age of Surveillance (1980), written
while the United States was still in the grip of anti-communist paranoia,
gives an interesting historical perspective.
- Ashcroft: TIPS Plan Won't Have Central Database
- Anti-Terror Information Will Be Passed On, He Tells Committee,
by Dan Eggen, Washington Post, 26 Jul 2002
- Ashcroft's Terrorism Policies Dismay Some Conservatives,
by Neil A. Lewis, New York Times, 23 Jul 2002
- FISA Court Decision
by Paul Wolf with accompanying articles, 2 Sep 2002
- Introduction
"The discretion to choose which groups to put under surveillance, and
especially the discretion to say who are the members of those groups, are
really the issues here. According to the FISA statute, `foreign power'
includes what we call terrorist organizations, and `agent of a foreign
power' includes anyone working with them."
- Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Opens Up,
by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News,
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, 27 Aug 2002
- Secret Court Decision Silently Overrules Provision of PATRIOT Act,
by Jennifer Van Bergen, truthout, 25 Aug 2002
- Balanced vs. Unbalanced Law Enforcement,
Excerpts from the Church Committee Reports of 1975-76
- A Shot Across the Bow From the Darkness,
by Jonathan Turley, Los Angeles Times, 26 Aug 2002
- Court Backs Open Deportation Hearings in Terror Cases,
by Adam Liptak, New York Times, 27 Aug 2002
- Ashcroft Watch by Nat Hentoff: The Terror of Pre-Crime,
The Progressive, Sep 2002
- The Globalization of
Repression:
A Special Report to the European Parliament, December 2001
This edited version of a 112-page report was prepared by the
Omega Foundation for the European Parliament's department of
Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA) and
published in September 1998. While the
report and its subsequent updates are widely known throughout
Europe, it has never appeared in the US media.
The 1998 Executive Summary, from STOA, Luxembourg, is titled:
" STOA: An Appraisal
Of The Technologies Of Political Control."
- Barak in to bat for Big Brother,
by Ian Grayson, The Australian, 1 Mar 2002
- Chief Takes Over New Agency to Thwart Attacks on U.S.,
by John Markoff, New York Times, 13 Feb 2002
"Mr. Poindexter was responsible for several computer policy mistakes in
the computer security realm in the 1980's," said Marc Rotenberg, a
former counsel with Senate Judiciary Committee, referring to Mr.
Poindexter's policies that shifted control of computer security to the
military. "It took three administrations and both political parties
over a decade to correct those mistakes."
- The Arrival Of Orwellian America, by Rick Gee, Strike The Root, 1 Jan 2002
- Disputed Air ID Law May Not Exist, by
Paul Boutin, Wired, 15 Aug 2002
- Secrecy of September 11 Detainees Challenged
Center for National Security Studies v. The Department Of Justice
Secrecy News, by Steven Aftergood,
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, 25 March 2002
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"In 1990 Poindexter was convicted for the felonies of conspiracy
and lying to Congress and obstructing congressional inquiries.
[Although] [t]he conviction was overturned in 1991 . . . [t]he
facts of Poindexter's lying and gutting of the Constitution were
never in dispute, not when he defiantly told the world, `The
buck stops here with me.'
"Now
the Bush administration, as if to punctuate its assault on
civil liberties under the cover of the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, has appointed Poindexter to figure out how to
assemble and use all the data one could possibly gather on
Americans. . . . By appointing Poindexter, the administration
justifies fears that it will treat our privacy in the
cavalier way that Poindexter once treated the law. . . .
"The
fact that Poindexter has already admitted keeping knowledge
of illegal activities from the president should automatically
disqualify him from having anything to do with the privacy of
Americans. The fact that the White House cannot talk straight
about his appointment should make Americans demand that the
project be scrapped until secrecy becomes an open debate."
"
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