Download A Book Get Arrested, Call For Terror Attacks - No Problem

Published on Saturday, May 31, 2008.

Source: Jones Report - Paul Joseph Watson


University employee jailed for researching Al-Qaeda, while Gingrich and others left alone for encouraging dead Americans
A University employee downloads a document from the Internet about Al-Qaeda for a colleague in the politics department as part of the University's required reading list, meanwhile, a former Speaker of the House publicly laments the fact that more Americans have not been killed in terrorist attacks. Who gets arrested under terrorism legislation? The University employee of course!

Welcome to the up is down, down is up twilight zone of the post-9/11 world!

Newt Gingrich can publicly encourage the government to allow terrorists to attack America to prove "we're in danger" and people barely batter an eyelid yet woe betide someone read something about terrorists, otherwise they'll be shackled and locked up quicker than you can say "police state".

"This is ... one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration," Gingrich said during a Long Island bookstore appearance. "The more successful they've been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we're in danger. And therefore, the better they've done at making sure there isn't an attack, the easier it is to say, 'Well, there never was going to be an attack anyway.' And it's almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us."

Just to remind us of what, Gingrich? The Bush administration's blood-soaked eight years in office, the near 3,000 dead on 9/11, the imperial looting and obliteration of Iraq, to remind us that these things really were worthwhile for the greater good? To remind us that "we're in danger"? And you're saying we wouldn't be in danger under a government that willingly allows terrorists to kill us?

Imagine if anti-war demonstrators or 9/11 truthers were calling for violence and killing people to ram through their political agenda? Do you think Homeland Security would turn the other cheek? Do you think Fox News might have something to say about it?

Yet they don't even need to go near advocating violence in order to draw the attention of the authorities - the dastardly crime of downloading a book off the Internet is enough to be labeled a terrorist and have your life ransacked these days, unless you're a frothing-at-the-mouth Neo-Con of course, in that case you can openly call for terror no questions asked.

Nottingham University employees Rizwaan Sabir and Hicham Yezza's deadly conspiracy to obtain a document about terrorism that was on their University's reading list resulted in their arrest, their homes being torn apart, their laptops searched and their friends and family members interrogated.

That's right - reading about Al-Qaeda is now tantamount to being a member of Al-Qaeda according to British cops.

After the arrests, which were cited as a textbook example of "totalitarianism" by Nottingham MP Alan Simpson, police attempted to deport Yezza on immigration charges to sweep their disgraceful actions under the carpet. Yezza subsequently won an appeal and he is free to continue living in Britain in fear of a midnight knock on the door if he dares punch the words "Al-Qaeda Training Manual" into a Google search engine ever again.

Meanwhile, people like Gingrich and his Neo-Con peer Stu Bykovsky, along with a host of other Bush administration cronies, routinely and publicly express their fetish for encouraging terrorist attacks and more dead Americans without a care in the world.

What is wrong with this picture? If we are fighting terrorists then why do those that align themselves with the Bush administration's war on terror mentally masturbate about seeing more terrorist attacks?

Neo-Cons are free to engage in one of the primary definitions of terrorism, spewing terrorist rhetoric by hyping the threat of terror to achieve a political objective.

But you want to download a book that's part of the University reading list to help you put together a research paper? Forget about it - you're a terrorist!

P.S. - I made the mistake of typing "terrorism" into Dictionary.com for the purposes of writing this article. I guess I'll see you all in Gitmo!

EARLY WARNING SIGNS OF FASCISM:

When fascism comes to America, it will be carrying a cross and wrapped in an American flag. -Sinclair Lewis-

EARLY WARNING SIGNS OF FASCISM:
-Powerful and continuing nationalism
-Disdain for human rights
-Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
-Supremacy of the military
-Rampant sexism
-Controlled mass media
-Obsession with national security
-Religion and government intertwined
-Corporate power protected
-Labor power suppressed
-Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
-Obsession with crime and punishment
-Rampant cronyism and corruption
-Fraudulent elections

Sound familiar?

Chertoff Says Fingerprints Aren’t ‘Personal Data’

These people have lost their damned minds. Next to DNA, I think fingerprints are the MOST PERSONAL DATA there is. They have taken a “terrorist” event and used it to take away all of our privacy and civil liberties. Hell, Mr. Chertoff, No. 1, go find some REAL terrorists and No. 2 FOR ONCE, DO YOU DAMNED JOB AND DEPORT ALL ILLEGAL ALIENS IN THIS COUNTRY AND ENFORCE ARTICLE 4 SECTION 4 OF OUR CONSTITUTION. All it would take is one call from our traitorous occupant of the White House the job could be done. To Rabbi-Commissar Chertoff, our very lives aren’t our personal property any more.
Tom

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has badly stumbled in discussing the Bush administration’s push to create stricter identity systems. Chertoff was recently in Canada discussing, among other topics, the so-called “Server in the Sky” program to share fingerprint databases among the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia.

In a recent briefing with Canadian press (which has yet to be picked up in the U.S.), Chertoff made the startling statement that fingerprints are “not particularly private”:

QUESTION: Some are raising that the privacy aspects of this thing, you know, sharing of that kind of data, very personal data, among four countries is quite a scary thing.

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Well, first of all, a fingerprint is hardly personal data because you leave it on glasses and silverware and articles all over the world, they’re like footprints. They’re not particularly private.

Many of us should rightfully be surprised that our fingerprints aren’t considered “personal data” by the head of DHS. Even more importantly, DHS itself disagrees. In its definition of “personally identifiable information” — the information that triggers a Privacy Impact Assessment when used by government — the Department specifically lists: “biometric identifiers (e.g., fingerprints).”

Chertoff’s comments have drawn sharp criticism from Jennifer Stoddart, the Canadian official in charge of privacy issues. “Fingerprints constitute extremely personal information for which there is clearly a high expectation of privacy,” Stoddart said.

There are compelling reasons to treat fingerprints as “extremely personal information.” The strongest reason is that fingerprints, if not used carefully, will become the biggest source of identity theft. Fingerprints shared in databases all over the world won’t stay secret for long, and identity thieves will take advantage.

A quick web search on “fake fingerprints” turns up cheap and easy methods for do-it-at-home fake fingerprints. As discussed by noted security expert Bruce Schneier, one technique is available for under $10. It was tried “against eleven commercially available fingerprint biometric systems, and was able to reliably fool all of them.” Secretary Chertof either doesn’t know about these clear results or chooses to ignore them. He said in Canada: “It’s very difficult to fake a fingerprint.”

Chertoff’s argument about leaving fingerprints lying around on “glasses and silverware” is also beside the point. Today, we leave our Social Security numbers lying around with every employer and numerous others. Yet the fact that SSNs (or fingerprints) are widely known exposes us to risk.

There have been numerous questions raised about how this Administration is treating our personal information. Secretary Chertoff’s comments show a new reason to worry — they don’t think it’s “personal” at all.

Memo Linked to Warrantless Surveillance

April 3, 2008

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn't apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.

That view was expressed in a Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view.

The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity.

The 37-page memo has not been released. Its existence was disclosed Tuesday in a footnote of a separate secret memo, dated March 14, 2003, released by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

''Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations,'' the footnote states, referring to a document titled ''Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.''

Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP.

That program intercepted phone calls and e-mails on U.S. soil, bypassing the normal legal requirement that such eavesdropping be authorized by a secret federal court. The program began after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and continued until Jan. 17, 2007, when the White House resumed seeking surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Wednesday that the Fourth Amendment finding in the October memo was not the legal underpinning for the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

''TSP relied on a separate set of legal memoranda,'' Fratto told The Associated Press. The Justice Department outlined that legal framework in a January 2006 white paper issued by the Justice Department a month after the TSP was revealed by The New York Times.

The October memo was written just days before Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, briefed four House and Senate leaders on the NSA's secret wiretapping program for the first time.

The government itself related the October memo to the TSP program when it included it on a list of documents that were responsive to the ACLU's request for records from the program. It refused to hand them over.

Late Wednesday, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said department officials believe the October 2001 memo was not about the eavesdropping program, but he did not explain why it was included on requests for documents linked to the TSP.

Earlier, Roehrkasse said the statement in the footnote does not reflect the current view of the department's Office of Legal Counsel.

''We disagree with the proposition that the Fourth Amendment has no application to domestic military operations,'' he said. ''Whether a particular search or seizure is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment requires consideration of the particular context and circumstances of the search.''

Roehrkasse would not say exactly when that legal opinion was overturned internally. But he pointed to the January 2006 white paper.

''The white paper does not suggest in any way that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military activities, and that is not the position of the Office of Legal Counsel,'' he said.

Suzanne Spaulding, a national security law expert and former assistant general counsel at the CIA, said she found the Fourth Amendment reference in the footnote troubling, but added: ''To know (the Justice Department) no longer thinks this is a legitimate statement is reassuring.''

''The recent disclosures underscore the Bush administration's extraordinarily sweeping conception of executive power,'' said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project. ''The administration's lawyers believe the president should be permitted to violate statutory law, to violate international treaties and even to violate the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. They believe that the president should be above the law.''

''Each time one of these memos comes out you have to come up with a more extreme way to characterize it,'' Jaffer said.

The ACLU is challenging in court the government's withholding of the October 2001 memo.