Paul Joseph Watson | Prison Planet.com 

The Senate is attempting to sneak through the infamous Internet kill switch cybersecurity bill by attaching it to another piece of legislation that is almost guaranteed to pass – the defense authorization bill – in an underhanded ploy to avoid the difficult task of passing cybersecurity on its own.

“It’s hard to get a measure like cybersecurity legislation passed on its own,” Democratic Senator Thomas Carper, who is co-chair of a Senate subcommittee with cybersecurity oversight, told Government Information Security.

That’s why lawmakers pushing cybersecurity have resolved to introduce the legislation as a “rider” to a Senate defense bill that is likely to be easily passed before the midterm elections.

Senators are still working to merge two different versions of the cybersecurity bill, one sponsored by Senator Joe Lieberman and another sponsored by Democrat Jay Rockefeller, into a single omnibus package, in preparation for a final vote when the Senate returns to session in mid-September.

“We’re very close to where we need to be in developing a joint proposal,” said Carper.

Lawmakers are in a race to pass cybersecurity before the midterms because if they wait until Congress returns after the November 2nd vote, the chances of getting the bill through “would significantly dim should the Republicans pick up a significant number of seats”. That leaves a four week window from the middle of September to the start of election campaigning for Senators to sneak through the legislation.

Lieberman’s version of the cybersecurity bill includes language that would hand President Obama the power to shut down parts of the world wide web for at least four months with no congressional oversight in the event of a cyber attack on critical infrastructure systems in the U.S.

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It was a remarkable moment in the annals of corporate media television. During a Fox News segment on the staggering unemployment rate among the young, a former Obamanoid manages to sneak in the truth — there is no difference between Clinton, Bush and Obama, they are all puppets for elite bankers.

“Obama is an illusion of change,” said the former supporter. “He is a lot like Bush in many ways. It is a fallacy to believe he really cares about unemployment when he hired an economic team comprised of Volcker, Geithner… these men were in the last three administrations and they don’t really care for the poor and working class of this nation.”

Obama’s administration, of course, is packed like a sardine can with globalists from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg group. Following Obama’s election win, he named 14 top cabinet selections and nine of them were affiliated with the Bilderberg group, ten were affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations and five hailed from the Trilateral Commission.
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UPI.com

The Pentagon says it plans to spend $100 million on air base expansions in Afghanistan with construction efforts continuing into at least 2011.

Despite growing disaffection with the war and President Obama’s pledge to begin withdrawing U.S. troops in July 2011, many of the projected installations have extended completion deadlines, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

All three of the bases are for the sole use of U.S. forces.

The House and Senate Appropriations committees have approved requests for an additional $1.3 billion for multiyear construction of military facilities in Afghanistan, the Post reported. The vote has yet to go before the full Senate.

The United States has already set aside $5.3 billion to build facilities for the Afghan army and national police, with most of the “enduring facilities … scheduled for construction over the next three to four years,” a Pentagon release said.

Troop withdrawal in 2011 does not mean the end of combat operations, as the three new projected bases indicate, the Post reported.

The broader expansion of U.S. air facilities all over Afghanistan will be used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance using helicopters, manned and unmanned aircraft.

Pentagon Surprised to Hear Reports that War Ended

Jason Ditz | Antiwar.com

As Obama Administration officials and a willing mainstream media report that yesterday was the end of the Iraq War it would likely surprise many that 56,000 US troops remain on the ground engaging in combat operations.

But it seems like the spin is even more surprising to the Pentagon leadership, as Gen. David Petraeus was pressed today on whether this was the right time to have left Iraq, and he said what he most likely wasn’t supposed to say.

“First of all we are not leaving,” Petraues insisted, adding that “there are 50,000 US troops that are remaining in Iraq” and that they retain an “enormous capability.” It is a capability that is tough to reconcile with the official story that these are all just trainers.

Gen. Petraeus could perhaps be forgiven for not being on message. After all, he is still getting his bearings as the new commander in Afghanistan and probably didn’t have time to catch the news on MSNBC.

But then Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell declared, on MSNBC, “I don’t think anybody has declared the end of the war as far as I know.” He perhaps missed the headlines across the American press declaring exactly that, and the number of Obama Administration officials crowing about the “promise kept” to end the war.

President Obama’s decision to select yesterday as the official “victory” day for Iraq appears to have taken a lot of people by surprise, not the least being all those troops still in Iraq and still fighting. But the Pentagon’s break with them, admitting that the war is still going on while the media-friendly celebration is still going on, certainly complicates the already ill-defined message.

Jason Ditz | AntiWar.com

50,000 Troops To Be Renamed ‘Transitional’ Forces

To great fanfare, President Barack Obama has pledged to put an end to America’s “combat mission” in Iraq by the beginning of September “as promised and on schedule.” There may be no small measure of incredulity for those who remember his campaign promise to have all the troops out by May, but it seems the 50,000 figure, announced shortly after he took office, will be met, give or take a few thousand.

This will mark the formal end to America’s combat mission in Iraq, but the combat won’t actually end, nor will the troops stop engaging in it. Rather, the administration has decided to redefine the 50,000 combat troops that will still be in Iraq, still engaging in combat, as a “transitional” force.

The 50,000 were initially slated to be there “indefinitely,” but officially now seem to be pointing to the Bush Administration’s date, the end of 2011 as negotiated in the Status of Forces Agreement, as the presumptive end of this deployment. This comes with a couple of caveats, one being the prospect that the US may seek a new UN mandate to keep troops beyond the date.

The other, perhaps bigger caveat, is that the US State Department is already hard at work creating their own alternative military, planning to step in and take over all combat operations itself when (or rather if) the Pentagon is forced, by the terms of the treaty, to leave.

While we may be glad that the level of US soldiers in Iraq has dropped somewhat since President Obama took office, large portions of these troops were “transitioned” straight into Afghanistan, and with violence still on the rise the US role in Iraq doesn’t look to be ending any time soon.

Do we even have a red carpet?

Somebody better find one, because President Obama is due to visit Tuesday. Some highlights from his Experience Seattle itinerary:

• Quick ride down America’s Worst Freeway to campaign rally for Sen. Patty Murray, D-The Other White Meat.

• Deliver speech about “strengthening the economy and creating jobs” in Washington state, most of which presumably will include serving fries.

• City Hall handshake with some bicycle-riding guy named Mike.

• Afternoon white toast and warm milk tasting hosted by Bill and Melinda Gates.

• Air-guitar lesson from Paul Allen at Experience Music Project, aka the Wreck of the Partridge Family Bus.

• Brief private meeting with U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Baghdad, after having Secret Service sweep him for wires.

• Long, slow drive back to Air Force One behind idiot from Kent driving 45 mph in left lane.

Other big doings: Read the rest at Seattle Times.com

Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com 

Few issues highlight Barack Obama’s extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush’s most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world — far away from any battlefield — and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court.  Back in the day, this was called “Bush’s legal black hole.”  In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo.  Since then, detainees havewon 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention.

Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram — including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned.  Amazingly, the Bush DOJ — in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention — contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (underBoumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind.  In other words, the detainee’s Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged.  One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, asThe New York Times put it, Obama lawyers “told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.”

But last April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held thatBoumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram.  I reviewed that ruling here, in which Judge Bates explained that the Bagram detainees are “virtually identical to the detainees inBoumediene,” and that the Constitutional issue was exactly the same:  namely,“the concern that the President could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely.”

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Matthew Rothschild | Progressive.org

Noam Chomsky, the leading leftwing intellectual, warned last week that fascism may be coming to the United States.

“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.

Chomsky was speaking to more than 1,000 people at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, where he received the University of Wisconsin’s A.E. Havens Center’s award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship.

“The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,” he said.

He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than anyone else.

“Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” Chomsky said.

Their attitudes “are understandable,” he said. “For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy.”

There is class resentment, he noted. “The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels,” he said.

And Obama is linked to the bankers, Chomsky explained.
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Andrew McLemore | RawStory.com

If the Patriot Act hadn’t been approved for another year, Sunday would have looked much different.

Sunday could have meant the government was no longer given permission to wiretap the phones of Americans and seize their records and property.

But since the bill was approved by Congressional Democrats earlier this week and signed into law by President Obama on Saturday, this Sunday is just another Sunday for Americans living with the Patriot Act.

To be fair, many Democrats asked for additional protections for the privacy rights of American citizens.

But Republicans said that would detract from the ability of the country’s intelligence agencies to track down terrorists. Lacking a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate to pass the bill with the extra provisions, Democrats left them out.

Democratic Rep. Jane Harman opposed the House’s approval of the extension, citing abuses during the administration of President George W. Bush.

“While I strongly support using the most robust tools possible to go after terrorists, Congress must revise and narrow — not extend — Bush era policies,” Harman said.

Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com had the following to say of the overwhelming support of the law’s extension:

One of the strangest prongs of conventional Beltway wisdom is the lament that there is not enough  bipartisanship.  The opposite is true:  many of the most damaging acts inflicted on the country by Washington are enacted on a fully bipartisan basis — the most destructive political act of this generation, the invasion of Iraq, was fully bipartisan, as were most of the post-9/11 civil liberties abuses and other Bush-era initiatives– and, at least in certain areas, the harmonious joining together of Republicans and Democrats continues unabated.

Most publications and politicians expected Obama to sign the Patriot Act.

Helen Thomas | CommonDreams.org 

President Barack Obama does have a foreign policy. It’s called war.

The President has not defined any real difference between his hawkish approach to international issues and that of his predecessor, former President George W. Bush.

Where’s the change we can believe in?

Bush left a legacy of two wars, neither of which was ever fully explained or justified. Obama has merely picked up the sword that Bush left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the struggle against terrorism, one might say, “Who cares?”

One group that cares consists of Americans who follow the rules and think we should honor all the treaties we have promoted and signed over the years.

The President gave short shrift to foreign policy in his State of the Union address, mentioning neither the lives lost nor the cost of the global hostilities that the U.S. has involved itself in. He also didn’t mention U.S. policies in the Middle East, though those are the root cause of many of our problems.

While U.S. special envoy George Mitchell has a hopeful outlook for the resumption of the stalemated talks between the Israelis and Palestinians after a year of trying, Obama seems to have temporarily thrown in the towel.

Obama said he was keeping his promise to leave Iraq by the end of August.

Meanwhile, frequent suicide bombings continue in that beleaguered country.

Afghanistan is a different story. U.S. forces there are involved in manhunts of al-Qaida and Taliban leaders. But the cost in civilian life is heavy when drones are used and whole families have been wiped out to get one suspected leader.

The U.S. seems to have convinced the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan that it’s their war too. The Washington Post said the loss of Hakimullah Mehsud has dealt a fatal blow to his followers.

The U.S. military web has spread to Yemen, where American intelligence teams have joined Yemeni troops in planning missions against al-Qaida elements. Scores have been killed there.

Then there’s the ramped-up U.S. saber-rattling toward Iran.

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Daniel Tencer | RawStory.com

In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama’s appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated “cognitive infiltration” of groups that advocate “conspiracy theories” like the ones surrounding 9/11.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine” those groups.

As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Sunstein is in charge of “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs,” according to the White House Web site.

Sunstein’s article, published in the Journal of Political Philosphy in 2008 and recently uncovered by blogger Marc Estrin, states that “our primary claim is that conspiracy theories typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a ‘crippled epistemology,’ in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources.”

By “crippled epistemology” Sunstein means that people who believe in conspiracy theories have a limited number of sources of information that they trust. Therefore, Sunstein argued in the article, it would not work to simply refute the conspiracy theories in public — the very sources that conspiracy theorists believe would have to be infiltrated.

Sunstein, whose article focuses largely on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, suggests that the government “enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories. It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts.”

Download a PDF of the article here.

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gMelvin A Goodman | Truthout.org 

The Obama administration quietly announced Friday the appointment of John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, to head the internal investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Delta airliner headed for Detroit as well as the events leading to the shootings at Fort Hood in November.

With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. McLaughlin has participated in and sought to cover-up many of the CIA’s most egregious failures and misdeeds of the past decade. When he left the CIA, he then served as the agency’s chief apologist.

So, who is John McLaughlin? Most of official Washington and the mainstream media view McLaughlin as the mild-mannered, professorial CIA bureaucrat, who former CIA director George Tenet called the “smartest man he had ever met.”

Few people understand, however, that McLaughlin played the most important role in making sure that the Bush administration received the intelligence that would be used and misused to justify the use of force against Iraq in 2003.

Washington insiders remember that it was CIA director Tenet who told President George W. Bush, “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk,” in response to the president’s demand for stronger intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to provide to the American people. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the “slam-dunk” briefing to the president in January 2003.

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Kurt Nimmo | InfoWars.com

Read the entire executive order here (in PDF format).

Obama has issued another executive order, this time establishing a so-called “Council of Governors.”
The order, signed on January 11, further diminishes the sovereignty of the states and builds on a framework for possible martial law. The executive order was completely ignored by the corporate media.

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1822 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 (Public Law 110-181), and in order to strengthen further the partnership between the Federal Government and State governments to protect our Nation and its people and property,” the order reads.

The Council shall meet at the call of the Secretary of Defense or the Co-Chairs of the Council to exchange views, information, or advice with the Secretary of Defense; the Secretary of Homeland Security; the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; the Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement; the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs; the Commander, United States Northern Command; the Chief, National Guard Bureau; the Commandant of the Coast Guard; and other appropriate officials of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, and appropriate officials of other executive departments or agencies as may be designated by the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of Homeland Security.
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Michael McAuliff | NYDailyNews.com

Angry Sept. 11 responders say President Obama has offered sympathy but no support for their appeal to champion their cause in Congress.

A group of 9/11 widows and rescue workers recently wrote Obama, asking his help to pass a bill that would fund care for ailing responders over the next 30 years.

Obama wrote back Tuesday, the Daily News has learned, saying he understands their plight and values their heroism.

“The individuals suffering health ailments from Sept. 11 and its aftermath deserve proper medical attention,” the President wrote. “You served selflessly, and your concerns are of great importance to our country. I remain committed to supporting the heroes of Sept. 11.”

But he left out whether he’d get behind the bill.

“It’s a nice letter, and I will put it in my scrapbook,” said former construction worker John Feal, who lost half a foot at Ground Zero. “But it’s no more than a souvenir unless he supports that bill.”
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RethinkAfghanistan.com

Sign the petition to tell Congress we cannot afford a war that does not make us safer.

Jason Leopold | truthout.org

After months of deliberations, President Barack Obama finally outlined his revised strategy for the Afghanistan war in a nationally televised address Tuesday night. The commander-in-chief repeatedly invoked 9/11, attempting to justify his plan to escalate the eight-year-old war, which calls for the rapid deployment of 30,000 additional US troops to the region by next summer.

Obama’s decision to step-up the war effort in Afghanistan comes two weeks before he heads to Oslo, Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

Speaking at the US Military Academy at West Point to thousands of uniformed cadets, many of whom will likely be shipped off to Afghanistan when they graduate, Obama appeared somewhat subdued when he began his speech by saying that it is “important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place.

“We did not ask for this fight,” the president continued. “On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women and children without regard to their faith or race or station. Were it not for the heroic actions of the passengers on board one of those flights, they could have also struck at one of the great symbols of our democracy in Washington, and killed many more.
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AP | RawStory.com 

President Barack Obama announced Tuesday he was dispatching 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, accelerating a risky and expensive war buildup, even as he assured the nation that U.S. forces will begin coming home in July 2011. The first new Marines will join the fight by Christmas.

The escalation — to be completed by next summer — is designed to reverse significant Taliban advances since Obama took office 10 months ago and to fast-track the training of Afghan soldiers and police toward the goal of hastening an eventual U.S. pullout. The size and speed of the troop increase will put a heavy strain on the military, which still maintains a force of more than 100,000 in Iraq and already has 68,000 in Afghanistan.

“The 30,000 additional troops that I am announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 the fastest pace possible so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers,” Obama was to say in his Tuesday night prime-time speech. The White House released excerpts in advance.

The increased troops, Obama said, “will increase our ability to train competent Afghan security forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight. And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.”

Looking to America’s experience in Iraq, Obama put said a U.S. withdrawal would be executed “responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground.”

“We will continue to advise and assist Afghanistan’s security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul. But it will be clear to the Afghan government and, more importantly, to the Afghan people that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country,” Obama said.

Obama also leaned heavily on NATO allies and other countries to join in escalating the fight.

“We must come together to end this war successfully,” the president said. “For what’s at stake is not simply a test of NATO’s credibility. What’s at stake is the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.”

Obama’s Tuesday evening speech to cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., to be broadcast nationally, ends three months of exacting deliberations that won praise from supporters and criticism from opponents. Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Obama was “dithering,” too inexperienced to make a decision on the troop buildup requested in September by commanding Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Senior officials said Obama also would underscore his commitment to stabilizing Afghanistan and scouring corruption out of the government of President Hamid Karzai. Obama has vowed to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a safe haven for al-Qaida boss Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization.

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Josh Gerstein | Politico.com

Americans who are troubled by the decision to send alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York for trial will feel better about it when he’s put to death, President Barack Obama said Wednesday.

During a round of network television interviews conducted during Obama’s visit to China, the president was asked about those who find it offensive that Mohammed will receive all the rights normally accorded to U.S. citizens when they are charged with a crime.

“I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him,” Obama told NBC’s Chuck Todd.

When Todd asked Obama if he was interfering in the trial process by declaring that Mohammed will be executed, Obama, a former constitutional law professor, insisted that he wasn’t trying to dictate the result.

“What I said was, people will not be offended if that’s the outcome. I’m not pre-judging, I’m not going to be in that courtroom, that’s the job of prosecutors, the judge and the jury,” Obama said. “What I’m absolutely clear about is that I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors from New York who specialize in terrorism.”
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Jason Ditz | AntiWar.com

Though officials in the Obama Administration have been publicly neutral about the new round of sanctions against Iran moving its may through the House and Senate, the administration is quietly supporting the efforts, despite the deleterious affect they may have on negotiations.

Iran is in the process of negotiating with the P5+1 on a draft deal for third party enrichment of its uranium for medical isotopes. The House and Senate measures would punish corporations that import refined petroleum to Iran in an effort to punish Iran for refusing US demands to abandon its program entirely.

But while there seems to be very little resistance within the US to moving forward with more unilateral sanctions against Iran, the ability to push forward more sanctions in the UN Security Council is very much in doubt, and Russia says such moves are virtually impossible, at least for the time being.

Though America’s own National Intelligence Estimate confirms that this is not the case, the Obama Administration has repeatedly accused Iran of having an active nuclear weapons program, and Congress is eager to act against the illusory threat.

Paul Joseph Watson | InfoWars.com

Fall Of The Republic has exploded onto the Internet as millions of people worldwide take the red pill and discover the antidote to the establishment’s lies about what caused the financial collapse and their agenda to deceptively claim that empowering the very culprits of the crime will solve the problem, as America is frog-marched into a tyrannical system of world government.

The consequence of The Obama Deception receiving tens of millions of views earlier this year manifested in the form of a key contribution to the burgeoning grass roots resistance that has dominated 2009, a nationwide movement against the big government agenda, as the globalists attempt to use their new front man Barack Hussein Obama to rapidly accelerate their new world order.

Now we are calling on you, the Infowarrior, to help us make Fall Of The Republic go viral and in doing do dismantle the contrived perception that only by surrendering to nightmare levels of regulation and centralized control bossed by an ultra-powerful architecture of global governance will we avoid another great depression.

Fall Of The Republic has the potential to outstrip even The Obama Deception in reaching millions more people, and early indications just over a week after the film was released are that this indeed happening. The You Tube version below already has over 300,000 views and this is just one of thousands of different versions that are floating around the web.

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