Sen. Dianne Feinstein is Sen. Goldface, as is almost every other senator whether donkey or elephant
The National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, was just renewed.
The scope of the American police state & the criminality which gave it birth is only dimly grasped by most citizens. Moreover the political players, all of them claiming along with the nation's mainstream news organizations that national security concerns justify every sort of loss of privacy & liberty - including one's life - are parties to the ongoing crime, in which the Constitution was among the first things members of congress silently allowed Bush & Obama to begin & continue shredding.
Pulitzer prize winner Chris Hedges, sometime university professor, sometime uncommonly courageous war correspondent for The New York Times, author of 10 books, Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute, 2002 recipient of the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism, described what is happening in his Dec. 23, 2012 essay published by Truthdig.Com, titled The Final Battle. Here is its concluding paragraph:
"The corporate state knows that the steady deterioration of the economy and the increasingly savage effects of climate change will create widespread social instability. It knows that rage will mount as the elites squander diminishing resources while the poor, as well as the working and middle classes, are driven into destitution. It wants to have the legal measures to keep us cowed, afraid and under control. It does not, I suspect, trust the police to maintain order. And this is why, contravening two centuries of domestic law, it has seized for itself the authority to place the military on city streets and citizens in military detention centers, where they cannot find redress in the courts. The shredding of our liberties is being done in the name of national security and the fight against terrorism. But the NDAA is not about protecting us. It is about protecting the state from us. That is why no one in the executive or legislative branch is going to restore our rights. The new version of the NDAA, like the old ones, provides our masters with the legal shackles to make our resistance impossible. And that is their intention."
• end of excerpts
I must add that in my opinion anyone who thinks anything said by Hedges or Greenwald is too shrill is helping my nation & the world (in which America is now relentlessly a corrupting influence & the deadliest force) in the hastening practice of Hell.
GOP and Feinstein join to fulfill Obama's demand for renewed warrantless eavesdropping
The California Democrat's disgusting rhetoric recalls the worst of Dick Cheney while advancing Obama's agenda .... Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein joined with GOP Senator Saxby Chambliss to extend Obama's warrantless eavesdropping powers.
By Glenn Greenwald, Constitutional Lawyer, writing for The Guardian, UK
28 December 2012
EXCERPTS:
1) ... many people identify mid-2008 as the time they realized what type of politician Barack Obama actually is. Six months before, when seeking the Democratic nomination, then-Sen. Obama unambiguously vowed that he would filibuster "any bill" that retroactively immunized the telecom industry for having participated in the illegal Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.
But in July 2008, once he had secured the nomination, a bill came before the Senate that did exactly that - the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 - and Obama not only failed to filibuster as promised, but far worse, he voted against the filibuster brought by other Senators, and then voted in favor of enacting the bill itself .... Jointly written by Dick Cheney and then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller, it also legalized vast new, sweeping and almost certainly unconstitutional forms of warrantless government eavesdropping .... the warrantless eavesdropping "scandal" that led to a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times reporters who revealed it ended not with investigations or prosecutions for those who illegally spied on Americans, but with the Congressional GOP joining with key Democrats (including Obama) to legalize most of what Bush and Cheney had done .... the Obama White House opposed all [modest modifying] amendments, demanding a "clean" renewal of the law without any oversight or transparency reforms.
2) ... Obama successfully relied on Senate Republicans (the ones his supporters depict as the Root of All Evil) along with a dozen of the most militaristic Democrats to ensure that he can continue to eavesdrop on Americans without any warrants, transparency or real oversight. That's the standard coalition that has spent the last four years extending Bush/Cheney theories, eroding core liberties and entrenching endless militarism: Obama + the GOP caucus + Feinstein-type Democrats. As Michelle Richardson, the ACLU's legislative counsel, put it to the Huffington Post: "I bet [Bush] is laughing his ass off."
3) .... Feinstein stood up on the Senate floor and began by heaping praise on her GOP comrade, Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, for leading his caucus to join her in renewing the FISA act without any reforms. She then unleashed a vile attack on her Democratic colleagues - Wyden, Merkley, and Udall, along with Paul - in which she repeatedly accused them of trying to make the nation vulnerable to a Terrorist attack.
Feinstein insisted that one could support their amendments only if "you believe that no one is going to attack us". She warned that their amendments would cause "another 9/11". She rambled about Najibullah Zazi and his attempt to detonate a bomb on the New York City subway: as though a warrant requirement, let alone disclosure requirements for the eavesdropping program, would have prevented his detection. Having learned so well from Rudy Giuliani (and Harry Reid), she basically just screamed "Terrorist!" and "9/11" over and over until her time ran out, and then proudly sat down as though she had mounted rational arguments against the transparency and oversight amendments advocated by Wyden, Merkley, Udall and Paul.
Even more notably, Feinstein repeatedly argued that requiring even basic disclosure about the eavesdropping program - such as telling Americans how many of them are targeted by it - would, as she put it, "destroy the program". But if "the program" is being conducted properly and lawfully, why would that kind of transparency kill the program? As the ACLU's Richardson noted: "That Sen. Feinstein says public oversight will lead to the end of the program says a lot about the info that's being hidden."
Please continue to the full text of this very well written, highly informed & impassioned plea for ridding ourselves of these 'leaders' & restoring human rights slowly acquired down the ages at a cost of property, lives & sorrows so kingsized that my bones shudder without option for relief while trying to imagine it:
➽ www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/28/fisa-feinste...
Thank you.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein is Sen. Goldface, as is almost every other senator whether donkey or elephant
The National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, was just renewed.
The scope of the American police state & the criminality which gave it birth is only dimly grasped by most citizens. Moreover the political players, all of them claiming along with the nation's mainstream news organizations that national security concerns justify every sort of loss of privacy & liberty - including one's life - are parties to the ongoing crime, in which the Constitution was among the first things members of congress silently allowed Bush & Obama to begin & continue shredding.
Pulitzer prize winner Chris Hedges, sometime university professor, sometime uncommonly courageous war correspondent for The New York Times, author of 10 books, Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute, 2002 recipient of the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism, described what is happening in his Dec. 23, 2012 essay published by Truthdig.Com, titled The Final Battle. Here is its concluding paragraph:
"The corporate state knows that the steady deterioration of the economy and the increasingly savage effects of climate change will create widespread social instability. It knows that rage will mount as the elites squander diminishing resources while the poor, as well as the working and middle classes, are driven into destitution. It wants to have the legal measures to keep us cowed, afraid and under control. It does not, I suspect, trust the police to maintain order. And this is why, contravening two centuries of domestic law, it has seized for itself the authority to place the military on city streets and citizens in military detention centers, where they cannot find redress in the courts. The shredding of our liberties is being done in the name of national security and the fight against terrorism. But the NDAA is not about protecting us. It is about protecting the state from us. That is why no one in the executive or legislative branch is going to restore our rights. The new version of the NDAA, like the old ones, provides our masters with the legal shackles to make our resistance impossible. And that is their intention."
• end of excerpts
I must add that in my opinion anyone who thinks anything said by Hedges or Greenwald is too shrill is helping my nation & the world (in which America is now relentlessly a corrupting influence & the deadliest force) in the hastening practice of Hell.
GOP and Feinstein join to fulfill Obama's demand for renewed warrantless eavesdropping
The California Democrat's disgusting rhetoric recalls the worst of Dick Cheney while advancing Obama's agenda .... Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein joined with GOP Senator Saxby Chambliss to extend Obama's warrantless eavesdropping powers.
By Glenn Greenwald, Constitutional Lawyer, writing for The Guardian, UK
28 December 2012
EXCERPTS:
1) ... many people identify mid-2008 as the time they realized what type of politician Barack Obama actually is. Six months before, when seeking the Democratic nomination, then-Sen. Obama unambiguously vowed that he would filibuster "any bill" that retroactively immunized the telecom industry for having participated in the illegal Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.
But in July 2008, once he had secured the nomination, a bill came before the Senate that did exactly that - the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 - and Obama not only failed to filibuster as promised, but far worse, he voted against the filibuster brought by other Senators, and then voted in favor of enacting the bill itself .... Jointly written by Dick Cheney and then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller, it also legalized vast new, sweeping and almost certainly unconstitutional forms of warrantless government eavesdropping .... the warrantless eavesdropping "scandal" that led to a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times reporters who revealed it ended not with investigations or prosecutions for those who illegally spied on Americans, but with the Congressional GOP joining with key Democrats (including Obama) to legalize most of what Bush and Cheney had done .... the Obama White House opposed all [modest modifying] amendments, demanding a "clean" renewal of the law without any oversight or transparency reforms.
2) ... Obama successfully relied on Senate Republicans (the ones his supporters depict as the Root of All Evil) along with a dozen of the most militaristic Democrats to ensure that he can continue to eavesdrop on Americans without any warrants, transparency or real oversight. That's the standard coalition that has spent the last four years extending Bush/Cheney theories, eroding core liberties and entrenching endless militarism: Obama + the GOP caucus + Feinstein-type Democrats. As Michelle Richardson, the ACLU's legislative counsel, put it to the Huffington Post: "I bet [Bush] is laughing his ass off."
3) .... Feinstein stood up on the Senate floor and began by heaping praise on her GOP comrade, Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, for leading his caucus to join her in renewing the FISA act without any reforms. She then unleashed a vile attack on her Democratic colleagues - Wyden, Merkley, and Udall, along with Paul - in which she repeatedly accused them of trying to make the nation vulnerable to a Terrorist attack.
Feinstein insisted that one could support their amendments only if "you believe that no one is going to attack us". She warned that their amendments would cause "another 9/11". She rambled about Najibullah Zazi and his attempt to detonate a bomb on the New York City subway: as though a warrant requirement, let alone disclosure requirements for the eavesdropping program, would have prevented his detection. Having learned so well from Rudy Giuliani (and Harry Reid), she basically just screamed "Terrorist!" and "9/11" over and over until her time ran out, and then proudly sat down as though she had mounted rational arguments against the transparency and oversight amendments advocated by Wyden, Merkley, Udall and Paul.
Even more notably, Feinstein repeatedly argued that requiring even basic disclosure about the eavesdropping program - such as telling Americans how many of them are targeted by it - would, as she put it, "destroy the program". But if "the program" is being conducted properly and lawfully, why would that kind of transparency kill the program? As the ACLU's Richardson noted: "That Sen. Feinstein says public oversight will lead to the end of the program says a lot about the info that's being hidden."
Please continue to the full text of this very well written, highly informed & impassioned plea for ridding ourselves of these 'leaders' & restoring human rights slowly acquired down the ages at a cost of property, lives & sorrows so kingsized that my bones shudder without option for relief while trying to imagine it:
➽ www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/28/fisa-feinste...
Thank you.