Douglas J. Hagmann

DHS Insider: “Preparations Have Been Finalized to Respond to a Crisis of Unprecedented Magnitude Within the United States”

Introductory note by Peter Schiff & Marc Faber / SHTFplan.com: One of the questions oft asked in alternative news circles is why, if elements within the U.S. government intend to collapse our economy and implement martial, no one within these circles has spoken out.

The fact is that scores of people have made it their duty to alert the American people to what’s going on behind the scenes. They’ve told us of the corruption and backroom deals. They’ve given us the warning signs to look for, many of which have already come to pass. They’ve even made us aware of the government’s response should the worst come to pass.

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John Kaminski

Banks and the State: When we endorse a system we don't understand, we guarantee our own doom.

In the Soviet Union, it was the state that swallowed up all the property, as well as tens of millions of lives, in its insane drive for total power and control. In the United States today, it is the banks who are fulfilling that function, seizing property on the premise that they are the impartial arbiters of financial power, just as the Soviet government pretended it was a legitimate authority of benefit to its people. It is no coincidence that both endeavors — these twin nightmares of capitalism and communism — were Jewish frauds, mocking all known morality with their conscienceless mayhem and mass murder that they called both legal and necessary.

Karl Marx's dictum that religion was only the opiate of the masses spelled the final end of religious authority that kings and dictators long pretended was what motivated their efforts to organize societies into coherent and secure wholes. Looking back on all this noble history we can't help but wonder if moral codes and holy writs were not just deceptive justifications for the undisguised plunder we see at work today, the snake of profit consuming everything in its path and the pleasant world as we knew it disappearing into ruin right before our eyes.

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Stephen Lendman

Israel is a racist police state. Zionist ideology espouses Jewish superiority, specialness, and uniqueness. It claims Jews are God's "chosen people." It's uncomfortably close to Nazi Aryan dogma. Master race notions are troubling. They reflect racist extremism. Israel is a prime example.

It calls itself a democratic Jewish state. Democracy is nowhere in sight. Jews alone have rights. Increasing numbers have limited ones. Neoliberal harshness denies them. Arab citizens have few rights. Bedouin Arab citizens and Occupied Palestinians have none. Israel has various Judaization plans. They feature ethnic cleansing.

David Ben-Gurion's Plan Dalet preceded Israel's War of Independence. It called for:

"Mounting operations against enemy population centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:

■ Destruction of villages - setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris - especially those population centres which are difficult to control continuously.
■ Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it.
■ In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.

Ben-Gurion mandated ethnic cleansing. "I don't see anything immoral in it," he claimed. Bloodbath slaughter followed.

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Vincent Di Stefano

This post offers a fifth anniversary commemoration of Operation Cast Lead, the tragic and highly destructive assault of the Israeli military on the people of Gaza which commenced on the 27th December 2008 and ended on the 18th January 2009. It offers an account of pivotal events in the history of Israel/Palestine from 1947 to the present through the reflections of a number of informed and articulate commentators. — Vincent Di Stefano [IA]

And What Rough Beast Slouches Towards Gaza? - Operation Cast Lead and the Dismembering of a People

Philip Giraldi

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid, of Fearmongering Fake Terror Alerts, Fear is the Empire's Fence ■ Terrorism has become as all-American as apple pie. It is ingrained in our civic DNA, it fills our newspapers and is the backstory for every foreign policy discussion on talk radio and television. One might reasonably expect that American mothers might now cajole their children into turning out the light and going to sleep not because the bogeyman would otherwise be coming but rather because al-Qaeda might be lurking somewhere up the street.

Warning one’s children about bin Laden would be an astonishing consequence of national paranoia but for the fact that American mothers do no such thing. For something of a national obsession, Americans largely deal with the terrorism problem in an absent minded fashion by allowing the Federal government to help itself to their tax money to make the terrorists go away. Hardly anyone actually knows a victim of terrorism and I have yet to meet anyone who spends his life in fear of a terrorist attack. The disparity between an imagined threat and the actual public response would tend to indicate that the terrorist menace is phony, meant to produce a certain mind set that feeds willingness to fund big government which is promoting itself as essential to protect the country. The reality of American life post 9/11 suggests that fear of terrorism is in reality a largely contrived inside the Beltway phenomenon.

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Stephen Lendman

December 23, 1913 will live in infamy. Three days before Christmas, House members passed the Federal Reserve Act (FSA).

On December 23, Senate members did so. President Woodrow Wilson was a tool of big money. He was JP Morgan's man in Washington. He signed FSA into law straightaway. He acted disgracefully.

So did Congress. It passed FSA in the middle of the night. Most congressional members hadn't read it. They wouldn't have understood it anyway. It was cleverly worded to deceive them. Only its creators knew its purpose.

Ellen Brown explained what happened as follows:

"In plain English, the Federal Reserve Act authorized a private central bank to create money out of nothing, lend it to the government at interest, and control the nation's money supply, expanding or contracting it at will."

Weeks before FSA was enacted, the 1913 Revenue Act became law. It imposed a federal income tax. It did so to pay bankers interest on America's money. It let taxpayers do it.

The University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs calls itself a "nonpartisan research institute." It claims to seek "to expand understanding of the presidency, policy, and political history." It calls the Federal Reserve Act "one of the crowning achievements of President Wilson's New Freedom program." It lied claiming it helped "safeguard America's financial institutions, the American economy, and the supply of US currency." It turned truth on its head saying it let "a level of governmental control...monetary supply that was unprecedented in American history." It went further claiming it continues to provide "the framework for regulating the nation's banks, credit, and money supply."

Truth is polar opposite what the Miller Center's narrative suggests. Privately controlled Fed policy has been hugely destructive for 100 years. It's a financial weapon of mass destruction. More on this below.

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Ellen Brown

December 23rd, 2013, marks the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve, warranting a review of its performance. Has it achieved the purposes for which it was designed?

The answer depends on whose purposes we are talking about. For the banks, the Fed has served quite well. For the laboring masses whose populist movement prompted it, not much has changed in a century.

Thwarting Populist Demands

The Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913 in response to a wave of bank crises, which had hit on average every six years over a period of 80 years. The resulting economic depressions triggered a populist movement for monetary reform in the 1890s. Mary Ellen Lease, an early populist leader, said in a fiery speech that could have been written today:

Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master...Money rules...Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us...

We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the foreclosure system wiped out.

That was what they wanted, but the Federal Reserve Act that they got was not what the populists had fought for.

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John Pilger

In the late 1960s, I was given an usual assignment by the London Daily Mirror's editor in chief, Hugh Cudlipp. I was to return to my homeland, Australia, and "discover what lies behind the sunny face". The Mirror had been an indefatigable campaigner against apartheid in South Africa, where I had reported from behind the "sunny face". As an Australian, I had been welcomed into this bastion of white supremacy. "We admire you Aussies," people would say. "You know how to deal with your blacks."

I was offended, of course, but I also knew that only the Indian Ocean separated the racial attitudes of the two colonial nations. What I was not aware of was how the similarity caused such suffering among the original people of my own country. Growing up, my school books had made clear, to quote one historian: "We are civilised, and they are not". I remember how a few talented Aboriginal Rugby League players were allowed their glory as long as they never mentioned their people. Eddie Gilbert, the great Aboriginal cricketer, the man who bowled Don Bradman for a duck, was to be prevented from playing again. That was not untypical.

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Stephen Lendman

On December 18, The New Times ran a full-page anti-Iranian ad. It did so disgracefully. On December 19, the Wall Street Journal published it. It's an Elie Wiesel rant. It's hateful. It's racist. It's malicious misinformation.

It's typical Wiesel. It's titled "Iran Must Not Be Allowed To Remain Nuclear." Wiesel is no humanitarian. He's a shameless self-promoter. He's a holocaust exploiter. He made a career as a pseudo-official spokesman.

Norman Finkelstein calls him the "resident clown" of the holocaust circus. He described him as "vain, arrogant, gullible, naive about international affairs, (and defender of) the worst excesses of previous Israeli governments."

Noam Chomsky calls him "one of the major frauds of our time." He's an apologist for Israel's worst crimes. His "shameful subservience to the State of Israel (is) all the more grotesque in his case because of the pretense of saintliness," Chomsky explained.

He's a notorious Islamophobe. He ignores Palestinian suffering. "I cannot say bad things about Jews," he stresses. He claims Jerusalem "belongs (exclusively) to the Jewish people." He dismissively ignores its Islamic and Christian importance. He ignores history. Other times he reinvents it.

He perpetuates the myth about Arab nations attacking Israel in 1967. IDF forces launched premeditated aggression. It was planned long in advance. When it was too late to matter, Israeli generals admitted it.

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Michael Snyder

Would you be willing to give up what Edward Snowden has given up? He has given up his high paying job, his home, his girlfriend, his family, his future and his freedom just to expose the monolithic spy machinery that the U.S. government has been secretly building to the world. He says that he does not want to live in a world where there isn’t any privacy. He says that he does not want to live in a world where everything that he says and does is recorded.

Thanks to Snowden, we now know that the U.S. government has been spying on us to a degree that most people would have never even dared to imagine. Up until now, the general public has known very little about the U.S. government spy grid that knows almost everything about us. But making this information public is going to cost Edward Snowden everything.

Essentially, his previous life is now totally over. And if the U.S. government gets their hands on him, he will be very fortunate if he only has to spend the next several decades rotting in some horrible prison somewhere. There is a reason why government whistleblowers are so rare. And most Americans are so apathetic that they wouldn’t even give up watching their favorite television show for a single evening to do something good for society. Most Americans never even try to make a difference because they do not believe that it will benefit them personally. Meanwhile, our society continues to fall apart all around us. Hopefully the great sacrifice that Edward Snowden has made will not be in vain. Hopefully people will carefully consider what he has tried to share with the world. The following are 27 quotes from Edward Snowden about U.S. government spying that should send a chill up your spine...

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Israel Shamir

What really happened in the Ukrainian crisis: Putin scores a new victory in the Ukraine

It is freezing cold in Kiev, legendary city of golden domes on the banks of Dnieper River – cradle of ancient Russian civilisation and the most charming of East European capitals. It is a comfortable and rather prosperous place, with hundreds of small and cosy restaurants, neat streets, sundry parks and that magnificent river. The girls are pretty and the men are sturdy. Kiev is more relaxed than Moscow, and easier on the wallet. Though statistics say the Ukraine is broke and its people should be as poor as Africans, in reality they aren't doing too badly, thanks to their fiscal imprudence. The government borrowed and spent freely, heavily subsidised housing and heating, and they brazenly avoided devaluation of the national currency and the austerity program prescribed by the IMF. This living on credit can go only so far: the Ukraine was doomed to default on its debts next month or sooner, and this is one of the reasons for the present commotion.

A tug-of-war between the East and the West for the future of Ukraine lasted over a month, and has ended for all practical purposes in a resounding victory for Vladimir Putin, adding to his previous successes in Syria and Iran. The trouble began when the administration of President Yanukovich went looking for credits to reschedule its loans and avoid default. There were no offers. They turned to the EC for help; the EC, chiefly Poland and Germany, seeing that the Ukrainian administration was desperate, prepared an association agreement of unusual severity.

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Fred Mazelis

Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a 41-year-old Yemeni prisoner

One of the five Guantánamo detainees facing a possible death sentence was repeatedly ejected from the courtroom during the military commission hearing at the US base when he shouted that he had been tortured by the authorities.

Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a 41-year-old Yemeni prisoner, has been held for years by the US military, and was transferred to Guantánamo, along with other “high value” detainees, in 2006.

When asked by Col. James L. Pohl, the presiding judge, whether he understood his rights at the proceeding, bin al-Shibh said,

“I totally refuse to answer this question as long as the judge is taking positions against me and my allegations.”

According to the report in the New York Times, he shouted words to the effect that, “I am not a war criminal; you are a war criminal,” as he was removed from the courtroom.

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Stephen Lendman

Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) states:

"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights states:

"Everyone has the right to respect for his privacy and family life, his home and his correspondence."

Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence...Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

Various other international accords affirm privacy rights. So does the US Constitution. The Fourth Amendment protects against lawless searches and seizure.

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David Cole

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon’s decision on Monday finding that the NSA’s telephony metadata program is likely unconstitutional is a welcome and important recognition that advances in digital technology require advances in Fourth Amendment doctrine if we are to preserve the privacy that the framers sought to protect. In particular, Judge Leon reasoned that the Supreme Court’s analog-era ruling that the Fourth Amendment does not restrict the government’s access to phone “pen register” data – the numbers you call, when you call, and how long you talk – does not necessarily govern whether the NSA’s collection of all Americans’ phone records for five years constitutes an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. The sheer quantity of data that the NSA gathers – about every phone call and text that every American engages in every day, maintained in a massive NSA database for five years – coupled with the ease of collecting, storing, and analyzing that digital data by computer, makes the NSA program qualitatively different from the simple collection of phone data on a single user over a limited period of time that the Supreme Court addressed in 1979.

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Joseph Kishore

A report released Wednesday by the Obama administration’s hand-picked presidential advisory panel on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying programs consists of minor reforms intended to preserve and legitimize the government’s illegal operations, while strengthening safeguards against leaks like those from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The administration’s decision to expedite the public release of the report, which was presented to the president over the weekend, comes in the wake of a US federal court decision earlier this week that referred to one of the principal domestic spying programs as “almost Orwellian.” Judge Richard Leon said that the bulk collection of telephone records of almost all US citizens is an “indiscriminate” and “arbitrary” invasion of privacy rights. The program was initiated under the Bush administration and has been strongly defended by Obama.

While the report is being presented in the media as a call for major constraints on the National Security Agency (NSA), a core recommendation of the advisory panel is that this program should continue, if in a somewhat altered form. It calls for Congress to enact legislation to “end such storage [of telephone records] and transition to a system in which such meta-data is held privately for the government to query when necessary for national security purposes.” This transition should be carried out “as soon as reasonably possible.”

It suggests a “general rule” that any programs involving the government collection and storage of “mass, undigested, non-public personal information about individuals” should be “narrowly tailored to serve an important government interest.”

In other words, mass data collection in violation of Constitutional rights, including the telephone records program, should be carried out when possible by private companies working for the government, and the government should collect this information directly only when it is in its “interest” to do so.

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Andrew P. Napolitano

Donetsk, Ukraine graffiti reads "Big Brother is watching you,"
a reference to government surveillance in George Orwell's dys-
topian classic "1984." (CC/Борис У)

“Almost Orwellian” – that’s the description a federal judge gave earlier this week to the massive spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on virtually all 380 million cellphones in the United States.

In the first meaningful and jurisdictionally grounded judicial review of the NSA cellphone spying program, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee sitting in Washington, D.C., ruled that the scheme of asking a secret judge on a secret court for a general warrant to spy on all American cellphone users without providing evidence of probable cause of criminal behavior against any of them is unconstitutional because it directly violates the Fourth Amendment.

Readers of this page are familiar with the purpose of that Amendment and the requirements it imposes on the government. The Framers intended it to prevent the new government in America from doing to Americans what the British government had done to the colonists under the king.

The British government had used general warrants – which are not based on individualized probable cause and do not name the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized – to authorize British soldiers to search the colonists wherever they pleased for whatever they wished to seize.

The reason for the Fourth Amendment requirement of individualized probable cause and specificity in the warrant is to prevent the very type of general warrant that the NSA has claimed is lawful. The reason for preventing general warrants is that they have become an instrument of tyranny.

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Stephen Lendman

On December 16, Federal District Court of the District of Columbia Judge Richard Leon issued a damning 68-page ruling. He called NSA spying unconstitutional. It's "almost Orwellian," he said.

"The threshold issue is whether plaintiffs have a reasonable expectation of privacy that is violated when the Government indiscriminately collects their telephone metadata along with the metadata of hundreds of millions of other citizens without any particularized suspicion of wrongdoing, retains all of that metadata for five years, and then queries, analyzes, and investigates that data without prior judicial approval of the investigative targets."

"I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary' invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval." "Surely, such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment."

It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Doing so violates core constitutional law. Mass NSA surveillance does it writ large. It has nothing to do with national security. America's only enemies are ones it invents. NSA spies globally. It watches everyone. It monitors allies. It's about control. It's for economic advantage. It's to be one up on foreign competitors. It's for information used advantageously in trade, political, and military relations.

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Gilad Atzmon

In the Palestinian Solidarity Movement we really love celebrities – those famous, rather special people who write great books, play musical instruments (drums included) or even just think great thoughts. We like those people to stand up for Palestine and denounce ‘Zionism’, ‘Israeli Colonialism’ and ‘Apartheid.’ We love them - as long as they don’t say what they really think.

Here’s the problem. Celebrities are often famous and successful because they’re clever and independent. Unlike our progressive, dysfunctional activists, who in most cases lives on income support and repeat our ‘party line’, the celebrity is a confident, career-oriented, self-sufficient subject and, because of their capacity to make autonomous decisions, he or she is assertive and thriving . In short, the activist and the celebrity are made of very different stuff – so a collision is inevitable.

Time after time it happens to us in the Palestinian Solidarity Movement. We manage to pull in a great human being, we tell them what to say and they comply. For a while, they call to boycott Israel and, like parrots, they repeat our slogans. But then, against all odds, these damn, self-centred stars start to speak their minds.

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Eva Bartlett

Photos and updates from Gaza paint one of the most dire scenarios the Palestinians locked in the Strip have faced, Israeli bombing campaigns aside.

For over a month Palestinians in Gaza have endured 18 or more hours/day power outages. Now, with unusually heavy rains, cold temperatures, Israeli-released torrents of water (suddenly opening of dams along the border with Gaza), and even snow, Gaza is under water, under siege, and people are suffering freezing conditions. According on one international in Gaza, a baby has frozen to death in one of Gaza’s refugee camps.

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Stephen Lendman

Weeks of Ukraine street protests continue. Washington's dirty hands are involved. They're manipulating things disruptively. Imperial ruthlessness operates this way. International law is clear and unequivocal. Meddling in the internal affairs of other countries is illegal. Doing so is longstanding US policy.

■ It's to eliminate independent sovereign states. It's about replacing them with pro-Western vassal ones.
■ It's about weakening major rivals. It aims to eliminate them altogether if possible. It's for unchallenged global dominance.
■ It's to make the world safe for corporate American profiteers.

John Perkins was an "economic hit man." He explained, saying:

"(H)ighly paid professionals cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, (IMF, and other international lending agencies, as well as) other foreign aid organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization."

Their mandate is plundering nations for profit. It's controlling their resources. It's impoverishing and bankrupting them. It's trapping them debt bondage. Nations refusing terms face major reprisals. Washington stops at nothing to achieve [its] goals. Tactics include bullying, intimidation, punishing sanctions, assassinations, coups and lawless aggression.

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