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Sunday, April 8, 2012

The attack on civil liberties...

On September 11, 2001, my wife called me in to watch the TV. Incredulous, I saw a passenger jet plane fly into a skyscraper and casually remarked to her, "The CIA did that. I'm going to work."  Only, when I got to work, no one was in my building.  Apparently, those who followed after I arrived were not being let in the door!  Since that day, I have watched fools, idiots, liberals, conservatives,and  so called "patriots" sit idly by while the military-industrial complex has waged war on the American middle class.  I stopped believing almost instantly in the "War on Terror", seeing clearly then what it has become today: a poorly disguised attempt to destroy our country and democracy by fascist elements who need a weakened American populace to support their ambitions and greed. To accomplish these ends, our country has nearly bankrupted itself by creating a massive surveillance state that hourly abrogates the first ten amendments while using an unknown number of internal security forces to violate the privacy of, and terrorize our fellow citizens.

There are a number of organizations and writers who cover this topic with some authority on a technical and sometimes political level: James Bamford, Naomi Wolf, Jennifer Stisa Granick, Bruce Schneier, Christopher Soghoian, the ACLU,  the EFF, Wired Magazine, "The Lawfare Blog" are some people and places that come to mind.  Every now and then, I read a story that exemplifies our country's new found identity as "The Fourth Reich". Journalist Glenn Greenwald has published just such a piece this Sunday about award winning  film maker Laura Poitras. If his blog is real, one can only wonder how Ms. Poitras puts up with so much crap from the DHS without going postal. From Glenn Greenwald's blog:
"Since the 2006 release of “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called when she arrived at immigration). Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke. They have exhibited a particular interest in finding out for whom she works."