Under the assumption that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney will become the Republican Party’s nominee for President in Tampa in June, the Romney campaign staff is growing from 87 to more than 400 to prepare for the national election in November. A close look at Romney’s expanded staff reveals the same influence of elites that was reflected by the members of his “Foreign Policy and National Security Advisory Team” announced last October. Included in that list were:
Tag Archives: Department of Homeland Security
Ammunition Shortage Coming?
- Thursday, 03 May 2012 04:36
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It wasn’t until April 18 that Mike Adams, the “Health Ranger” writing for his NaturalNews.com blog, noticed that Alliant Techsystems, or ATK, had announced in March that they had been awarded a huge contract to produce up to 450 million rounds of .40 S&W caliber jacketed hollow point ammunition for the Departments of Homeland Security (HSA) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). And then he got nervous.
ATK is one of the largest suppliers to the Defense Department with more than 18,000 employees in 22 states including the largest small caliber manufacturing facility in the western world located in Lake City, Missouri. With ATK’s 500 buildings located on 4,000 acres, all Adams could see was trouble behind the contract. He asked: “What does DHS intend to do with 450 million rounds of barrier-piercing hollow point ammunition?”
First of all, such ammunition isn’t used for practice—it’s too expensive. Secondly, hollow point ammunition is “the kind of ammo used by police officers who want to shatter the bad guy’s sternum as quickly as possible and thereby bring him to the ground…” Thirdly, DHS is a domestic agency and therefore, according to Adams:
That the DHS is contracting to buy 450 million rounds of hollow point ammo can only mean DHS plans to need this this ammo to be used against the American people.
Adams looked into the matter further and uncovered a presentation that Maj. General Buford C. Blount III made before the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee of the House Committee on Armed Services back in 2004. After a careful reading of that testimony, Adams concluded that 450 million rounds is enough ammunition to wage war on the American people for ten years.
Adams’ riffing on the HSA’s purposes might be ignored except that ammunition shortages are beginning to show up in gun stores. In Killeen, Texas, for example, David Cheadle, manager for local gun shop Guns Galore, said that “in the last month, I’ve noticed that when I call [my] distributors, there’s really nothing available.” It could just be driven by people receiving their
CISPA Assumes Too Much Trust in Government
- Monday, 30 April 2012 04:05
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In a surprise move the White House issued a statement on Wednesday threatening to veto CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) because of privacy concerns. Parts of the statement sounded as if they had been drafted by Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul:
The sharing of information [between private agencies and the federal government] must be conducted in a manner that preserves American’s privacy, data confidentiality, and civil liberties and recognizes the civilian nature of cyberspace. Cybersecurity and privacy are not mutually exclusive…
[CISPA]…repeal[s] important provisions of electronic surveillance law without instituting corresponding privacy, confidentiality, and civil liberties safeguards…
The bill also lacks sufficient limitation on the sharing of personally identifiable information…and does not contain adequate oversight or accountability measures…to ensure that the data is used only for appropriate purposes…
The bill effectively treats domestic cybersecurity as an intelligence activity and thus, significantly departs from longstanding efforts to treat the Internet and cyberspace as civilian spheres.
This is the first time in recent memory that the White House has expressed any such concerns. When signing into law the controversial National Defense Authorization Act [NDAA] the White House blithely ignored its trampling of those same civil liberties through its “indefinite detention” provisions. Nor did the White House raise any similar concerns when it issued its executive order commandeering all resources from American citizens in the event of an emergency to be declared by the president.
So the following from the White House’s statement on CISPA makes perfect sense: the White House favors government regulation of the internet and invasion of privacy without following the Fourth Amendment. It just doesn’t want
CISPA is Big Brother’s Friend
- Tuesday, 24 April 2012 12:05
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This is “cybersecurity week,” according to Brock Meeks at Wired.com when CISPA (the Orwellian-named Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) is scheduled to move to the House floor for a vote. Offered originally before SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and its sister PIPA (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) were blown up in January, Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) have offered some amendments to the bill (H.R. 3523) to soften some of its critics and to avoid the same result.
The primary problem, according to Meeks, is that it tries to kill a flea with a baseball bat: Any alleged security the bill offers against potential hackers “comes at the expense of unfettered government access to our personal information, which is then likely to be sucked into the secretive black hole of the spying complex known as the National Security Agency.”
Despite some window dressing by Mssrs. Rogers and Ruppersberger, the bill still has major problems. First it has “an overly broad, almost unlimited definition of the information [that] can be shared [by private Internet companies] with government agencies.” It overrides existing federal or state privacy laws with its language that says information between private and public agencies is shared “notwithstanding any other provision of law.”
In addition, the bill would create a “backdoor wiretap program” because the information being shared isn’t limited specifically to issues of cybersecurity but could be used for any other purpose as well. The language is unclear about what would trigger a CISPA investigation: “efforts to degrade, disrupt or destroy” a network. Would that apply to someone innocently downloading a
Colorado Senator Bennet Refuses to Answer Questions About the NDAA
- Tuesday, 03 April 2012 11:42
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I have rarely been as concerned for the future of freedom and our Constitution as I have been since the passage last December of S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012. I have rarely felt more frustrated with a politician than I am with Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (D) for responding to concerns about NDAA with nothing but disinformation and silence.
People with expertise in this area have voiced grave concerns about provisions of NDAA, particularly in Section 1031, which allow the government to arrest and indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without charge or due process based on mere suspicions about their support for terrorism or terrorist organizations.
Concerns about provisions so antithetical to the Constitution would be warranted any time. But, they’re even more ominous since the Department of Homeland Security told us in 2009 it considers ordinary citizens who exercise their rights to purchase guns or who serve in the military to be “right wing extremists” and potential terrorists. This motivated me to look a little more deeply into what Colorado Senator Bennet, who voted in favor of S. 1867 had to say.
So, I contacted Senator Bennet’s office in mid-December, 2011 asking him to explain his support for S. 1867 and to clarify concerns about S. 1867 viz-a-viz the Constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.
I received an email from Senator Bennet’s office saying
“Sovereign Citizen Movement” Continues to Attract Attention
- Friday, 02 March 2012 11:36
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Film star Wesley Snipes (One Night Stand, Blade) is scheduled for release from federal prison on July 19, 2013, 31 months after being incarcerated for failure to file his income-tax returns.
During his trial several other charges against him were dismissed including attempts to use the 861 argument, a claim that section 861 of the tax code exempts certain activities from the income tax and that is used unsuccessfully by tax protesters to avoid paying income taxes, as well as fraudulent attempts to obtain income-tax refunds from the IRS—Snipes referred to himself as “a non-resident alien” despite the fact that he is a U.S.-born citizen.
These are some of the tools the “sovereign citizen movement” (SCM) teaches in its quest to free members from various onerous and perceived unconstitutional laws and to declare themselves independent of the government. They take the position that they are “answerable only to common law” and therefore are not subject to any statutes at the federal, state, or municipal levels. They do not officially recognize U.S. currency and declare themselves to be “free of any legal constraints.” One of those restraints is the obligation to pay income taxes, which they consider to be illegitimate, hence the failed “861 argument” in the Snipes case.
A few of the estimated 100,000-300,000 “members” occasionally go off the deep end and when confronted with reality, use threats of force and even violence in defense of their beliefs. According to the Los Angeles Times, Shawn Rice was a “sovereign citizen” who, upon being served a warrant for money-laundering, strapped on a bulletproof vest, armed himself, and then barricaded himself in his home in Seligman, Arizona. He was arrested after a 10-hour standoff and now is awaiting trial.
Several recent clashes, some of them fatal, have raised concerns within the FBI, which is now focusing on SCM members, along with the
Two Years Later: Where Did the Haiti Earthquake Money Go?
- Wednesday, 18 January 2012 04:48
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Two years after the Haiti earthquake on January 12, 2010—which killed 316,000, injured 300,000 more, left one million homeless, and destroyed $8 billion in property—most of the billions of dollars pledged to help the island recover can’t be accounted for. And of that which can be, precious little found its way into the hands and mouths of the Haitians themselves.
Some $12 billion was pledged, including $2.75 billion from the United States, $650 million from the European Union, and the balance from 35 other countries.
Much of the U.S. government’s aid was funneled through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which reported that it helped build a 10-megawatt power plant and repaired and upgraded five electric power substations in Port-au-Prince, provided some $10 million in financing for 46 “micro financial institutions and financial cooperatives” and another 7,600 loans to coffee, cocoa, and mango growers. USAID rebuilt roads, irrigation systems, and storage and processing facilities, while offering “improved seeds, fertilizer and technologies to more than 9,700 farmers [who] have increased rice yields by 64 percent, corn yields by 338 percent, bean crops by 97 percent, and plantain outputs by 21 percent for beneficiary farmers.”
According to the USAID report, the agency built 600 semi-permanent furnished classrooms, which allowed some 60,000 students to return to school after the earthquake. It also helped build a temporary Parliament building to replace the one destroyed by the earthquake.
So far, so good. But when the Government Accounting Office (GAO) looked at the progress made by the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), a joint effort between the Haitian authorities and international donors to coordinate the flow of assistance last May, the GAO was chagrined to find that
Pentagon: Cyberattack an Act of War
- Thursday, 16 June 2011 14:20
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Image by My Melting Brain via Flickr
Following up on the publication of the “International Strategy for Cyberspace” by the Obama administration last month, the Pentagon clarified and expanded upon its intention to consider a computer attack as equivalent to a more traditional act of war.
The White House’s strategy made clear that:
Defense Department Builddown Coming?
- Monday, 21 February 2011 13:03
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As calls for cuts in the defense budget increased, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates knew what he would have to do: throw the cutters a bone, and then dig in against any further reductions. By admitting that he could shave $78 billion out of the defense budget over the next five years, Gates then went to work defending any further suggested incursions into the future spending plans by the military-industrial complex.
TSA Catches More Flak
- Tuesday, 29 June 2010 16:58
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The new DVD Please Remove Your Shoes, to be released on July 1, was reviewed by Scott Mayerowitz at ABC News, who asked rhetorically, “Do You Really Believe You Are Safe at the Airport?” and then answered “No.”
Fred Gevalt paid for this documentary out of his own pocket because “our real security at the airport…appears to be worse than ever. Clearly something has to be fixed. We have given TSA sufficient time since their creation to establish their merit and they haven’t. It’s time to call for a rethink of the whole security system, and now is as good a time as any. We certainly shouldn’t allow this farce to continue.”
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