By Stephan Salisbury

At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California.  American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere. 

There should have been no surprise. Those flash grenades exploding in Oakland and the sound cannons on New York’s streets simply opened small windows onto a national policing landscape long in the process of militarization -- a bleak domestic no man’s land marked by tanks and drones, robot bomb detectors, grenade launchers, tasers, and most of all, interlinked video surveillance cameras and information databases growing quietly on unobtrusive server farms everywhere.

WHY THE NDAA NOW?

By Marti Hiken and Luke Hiken  January 6, 2012

Barack Obama just signed into law one of the most repressive and right-wing pieces of legislation ever passed in the history of the country: the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It allows the military, a.k.a. the Pentagon, to determine who is a “terrorist” and to detain that person in prison, indefinitely, without trial, under its jurisdiction. It makes no difference whether the person is a U.S. citizen or a foreign “enemy combatant.”

"The global elite have repeatedly demonstrated their animosity toward the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Taking down the First Amendment – in addition to the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and most importantly the Second – under the bogus and contrived aegis of a manufactured war on terror amply reveals what they have in mind: a gulag panopticon where resistance is not only futile, but illegal, and where the slaves are disarmed and powerless to effectuate change."

H.R. 347: Another Step in the Elimination of the First Amendment
Kurt Nimmo  Infowars.com  March 5, 2012

It is fairly obvious Obama and Congress rushed through H.R. 347 in order to curtail demonstrations that will undoubtedly occur during both Democrat and Republican conventions this summer. Also known as the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011,” the bill makes it a felony to disrupt or protest at any place or event attended by any person with secret service protection.

In the Hole

by BILL QUIGLEY Feb 23, 2012

Today US Army Private Bradley Manning is to be formally charged with numerous crimes at Fort Meade, Maryland.   Manning, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by members of the Icelandic Parliament, is charged with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents exposing secrets of the US government to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. These documents exposed lies, corruption and crimes by the US and other countries.  The Bradley Manning defense team points out accurately that much of what was published by Wikileaks was either not actually secret or should not have been secret.

The Manning prosecution is a tragic miscarriage of justice.  US officials are highly embarrassed by what Manning exposed and are shooting the messenger.  As Glen Greenwald, the terrific Salon writer, has observed, President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers for espionage than all other presidents combined.

One of the most outrageous parts of the treatment of Bradley Manning is that the US kept him in illegal and torturous solitary confinement conditions for months at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia.  Keeping Manning in solitary confinement sparked challenges from many groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU and the New York Times.

Many forms of Occupy protests subjected to new bill making protests illegal

Written by Danny WeilPolitics, World News Mar 5, 2012  

A bill passed last week in the US House of Representatives and the Senate would make it a felony to participate in many forms of protest associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests of last year. Several commentators have dubbed it the “anti-Occupy” law, but its implications are far broader.

The bill — H.R. 347, or the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011”—was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate. Only Ron Paul and two other Republicans voted against the bill in the House of Representatives (the bill passed 388-3). Not a single Democratic politician voted against the bill.

The virtually unanimous passage of H.R. 347 exposes the fact that, despite all their posturing, the Democrats and the Republicans stand shoulder to shoulder with the corporate and financial oligarchy that they work for.

[Only a few days after President Obama signed into law provisions for arbitary and capricious seizure and indefinite detention of US citizens--throwing out habeus corpus and other "Constitutional rights"--one of the most prominent and courageous opponents of such a repressive policy--the US' detention of Japanese American citizens during World War II--has died.  --Frontlines ed.]

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Gordon Hirabayashi, shown in 1985, was vindicated in his challenges to internment.

By Madison Ruppert     Editor of End the Lie

President Barack Obama has leveraged heavy rhetoric on the subject of transparency for some time now, even going as far as to publish on the official White House website that his “Administration is committed to an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

If this is open government, I can’t begin to imagine what a closed government is.

After Anwar al-Awlaki was allegedly assassinated in Yemen, the New York Times sought to find out the legal basis for the Obama administration’s secretive “kill list” which apparently can now include United States citizens.

May 22, 2012:  America’s most high-tech intelligence agency is looking to American colleges for the next generation of cyber warriors and it is now designing its own top secret classes to prepare them for training in the dark arts of cyber espionage.

The National Security Agency announced Monday [May 21, 2012] that four universities had been selected for a new academic program designed to teach students skills “associated with specialized cyber operations.”

The NSA is vague on the details of the courses and says on its website the curriculum will only offer the students a “glimpse” of the cyber capabilities sought by the country’s foremost collector of worldwide electronic intelligence data and protector of classified U.S. computer networks.

Officials at the NSA told Reuters that the program, which is an extension of President Barack Obama’s National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education, will focus on the “basic knowledge” of computer systems that would be the foundation of more advanced, secret operations. Any successful students won’t be trained for their real jobs until they actually arrive at the NSA.

Still, students and faculty involved will have to go through background security checks and obtain top secret clearance before cracking open their laptops, the NSA says.

 Jan 18, 2012  PARIS: A French judge has requested access to Guantanamo to probe claims by three Frenchmen that they were tortured at the notorious jail which US President Barack Obama once promised to close.

Judge Sophie Clement wants permission from the US authorities to inspect and copy all documents relating to the three men and to interview all persons who had contact with them there, according to legal documents seen by AFP.

The judge requested access to "all documents relating to the justification and modalities of (US) armed operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan and to the treatment of persons arrested during these operations," the documents said.

The three Frenchmen who made the accusations -- Mourad Benchellali, Nizar Sassi and Khaled Ben Mustapha -- were arrested in late 2001 on the Afghan-Pakistani border and sent to Guantanamo.

By TRUDY BOND, ROY EIDELSON, BRAD OLSON AND STEPHEN SOLDZ  CounterPunch  Jan 10, 2012

As we commemorate the 10th anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Guantánamo Detention Center, several thousand miles away sits another United States detention facility, less well-known but with a history perhaps even more gruesome. Obscured throughout the decade-long “global war on terror,” the detention center at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan is where two detainees died in December 2002. Initial autopsies at the time ruled both deaths homicides, according to a 2,000-page confidential Army file obtained by the New York Times. Autopsies of the two dead detainees found severe trauma to both prisoners’ legs. The coroner for one of the dead noted, “I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus.”

Our calls and petitions have worked before.  They must work again!   STOP THE EXECUTION! FREE TROY DAVIS!

Stop Sept 21 Execution of Troy Davis!

On March 28, 2011, the US Supreme Court failed to take up the appeal of Troy Davis. He could be executed at any time.

AND NOW HIS EXECUTION HAS BEEN SET FOR WEDNESDAY, SEPTMEBER 21!.

TELL THE GEORGIA GOV., LEGISLATURE, PRESIDENT OBAMA, ATTORNEY GENERAL HOLDEN, CONGRESS AND THE MEDIA: STOP THE EXECUTION OF TROY DAVIS! 

Big Brother Obama: White House Plans Internet ID System

by Tom Burghardt

Urged by one and all to "tone down" what media pundits and political elites describe as "strident," even "violent" rhetoric that has "poisoned" our "national conversation" and "sharply polarized" the population, the shooting rampage in Tucson which claimed six lives, including that of a nine-year-old girl is, in fact, emblematic of the moral bankruptcy and utter hypocrisy of those selfsame capitalist elites.

Obama is seeking more control of the Internet, a "frontier of freedom" he seeks to control.

President Barack Obama and his national security team are seeking to expand the government's role in  eavesdropping on the Internet including emails, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as BlackBerries.
 
According to reports, the Obama White House plans to submit a bill after the new congress takes over both houses next January that would require all online services that provide communications between users to be enabled to comply with federal wiretap orders.
 
The proposed monitoring measures will affect encrypted e-mail, such as the popular BlackBerry, networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, as well communication sites such as Skype.
 

Bradley Manning is the U.S. soldier now in a US military prison in Kuwait who has been arrested and charged with two violations for releasing classified information (the Wikileaks "Collateral Murder" video) and facing 54 years in prison. He is being held in isolation from the outside world - with no contact with his civilian attorneys working to defend him.

If the allegations are true, Bradley Manning is a hero for bringing to light the realities of the crimes being committed in the U.S. occupation.

We call for his immediate release and that his attorneys be allowed to talk to him.

  Sign-On In Support of Bradley Manning & His Right to Counsel

END BORDER MILITARIZATION CONTINGENT
DEMANDING DIGNITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS FOR INDIGENOUS & MIGRANT COMMUNITIES

O'odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective sends you greetings from occupied O'odham lands,

May 2, 2010
To the Original Peoples of the Fourth World and all International Press Services:

At high noon today US Army helicopters of the US Seventh Cavalry air division attempted to land their Blackhawk aircraft upon Lakota Sacred Burial grounds in South Dakota. The presence of military aircraft from this unit... See More is a sad and insulting reminder of the slaughter of more than 300 American Aboriginals on December 29,1890 when soldiers of the US 7th Cavalry gunned down more than 300 Aboriginal Minneconjou Lakota refugee children, women, infants and the elderly at what is now called Wounded Knee in South Dakota Indian Country. The military then left the bodies of their victims to decay unburied in the driving snow.

Partisan Defense Committee Statement                        24 January 2010

Mumia Is Innocent—Free Him Now!

Supreme Court of Death Rules Against Mumia Abu-Jamal

Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

On January 19, the U.S. Supreme Court took a clear step toward the legal lynching of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Court vacated a 2001 decision by federal district court judge William Yohn overturning Mumia’s death sentence. Yohn’s decision had been previously upheld by the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The new ruling by the Supreme Court underscores our insistence that fighters for Mumia’s freedom must place no faith in the courts, which, at every level, have colluded with the police and prosecutors to see through the execution of this innocent man.