http://www.sploid.com/news/2006/03/freedom_of_wha.php

March 01, 2006 at 05:27 PM

'FREEDOM OF WHA?'



Good news is in short supply around the White House these days, which is why Bush supporters were thrilled by a new study proving not even 1% of Americans know the rights guaranteed to them by the First Amendment.

Far more people knew all five members of the Simpson family – Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart and Maggie – with 22% correctly identifying the cartoon characters.

“The Simpsons” have been bringing laughter and joy into American homes for more than 15 years.

Yet less than a tenth of a percent could identify the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

"We have our job cut out for us," said Joe Madeira of the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, which conducted the survey.

In stark contrast, the five First Amendment freedoms – speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances – have taken a beating as of late.

Rather than showing their knowledge of lost freedoms, Americans’ answers revealed their true concerns.

One in five believes the right to own a pet is protected by the Constitution, while 38% said the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination was a First Amendment right.

Experts say ignorance about constitutional rights has made it ever easier for the federal government to conduct warrantless wiretapping and spy on Internet search-engine users.

The freest press in history – the independent Internet – is already threatened by government attempts to police all political speech on Web sites.

And whether it’s banning parking along small country roads in Waco or blowing up a house full of religious nuts in Waco, the freedom to assemble with the cretins of your choice has been under assault for a decade.

Most Americans have wisely chosen to forget those quaint constitutional rights and would be far better off learning the names of all Simpsons’ characters.

"The plan is clearly to swallow up disenfranchised groups likes prisoners and Muslims at first and then extend the policy to include 'Fifth Columnists,' otherwise known as anyone who disagrees with the government or exercises their Constitutional rights."

http://www.prisonplanet.com



Gulags For American Citizens In Final Planning Stages

Halliburton sex slave trade criminals prepare camps for political dissidents

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet.com

March 1 2006

Bush administration and US army preparations to target American citizens and intern them in forced labor camps has vastly accelerated in the past month and commentators from all over the political spectrum are sounding the alarm bells that the round-ups may begin soon.

Once the bane of the media's stereotypical 'tin foil hat wearing' caricatures, concentration camps in America are now serious news and no one is laughing.

Following the news first given wide attention by this website, that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root had been awarded a $385 million dollar contract by Homeland Security to construct detention and processing facilities in the event of a national emergency, the Alternet website put together an alarming report that collated all the latest information on plans to initiate internment of political subversives and Muslims after the next major terror attack in the US.

The article highlighted the disturbing comments of Sen. Lindsey Graham, who encouraged torture supporting Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to target, "Fifth Columnists" Americans who show disloyalty and sympathize with "the enemy," whoever that enemy may be.

It is important to stress that the historical precedent mirrors exactly what the Halliburton camp deal outlines. Oliver North's Reagan era Rex 84 plan proposed rounding up 400,000 refugees, under FEMA, in the event of "uncontrolled population movements" over the Mexican border into the United States.



The real agenda, just as it is with Halliburton's gulags, was to use the cover of rounding up immigrants and illegal aliens as a smokescreen for targeting political dissidents. From 1967 to 1971 the FBI kept a list of persons to be rounded up as subversive, dubbed the "ADEX" list.

The current terrorist suspect list was recently revealed to contain the names of 325,000 people. The government claimed that only a tiny fraction were American citizens living in America but when compared to the potential terrorist list in the UK, which under section 44 of the terrorism act has ensnared at least 119,000 people, most of them innocent protesters, the number is likely to be far higher. Britain's population is only 60 million compared to the US at 295 million.

Halliburton, through their KBR subsidiary, is the same company that built most of the major new detention camps in Iraq and Afghanistan. KBR have been embroiled in a human sex slave trade that their representatives have lobbied to continue.

We have a company that has been handed a contract to build prison camps in America that is engaged in trafficking young girls and women. Can this horror movie get any more frightening?

A much discussed and circulated report, the Pentagon's Civilian Inmate Labor Program [PDF], has recently been updated and the revision details a "template for developing agreements" between the Army and corrections facilities for the use of civilian inmate labor on Army installations."



The plan is clearly to swallow up disenfranchised groups likes prisoners and Muslims at first and then extend the policy to include 'Fifth Columnists,' otherwise known as anyone who disagrees with the government or exercises their Constitutional rights.

Respected author Peter Dale Scott speculated that the "detention centers could be used to detain American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law."

Daniel Ellsberg, former Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense, called the plan, "preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters. They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."

George Bush has declared himself to be dictator and to have supreme power over and above the limitations of the US Constitution. Bush administration officials like Alberto Gonzales have declared Bush to be "above the law." White House advisors are openly discussing the legality of crushing a child's testicles as part of the war on terror. Preparation for the internment of thousands of Americans who are 'disloyal' in times of emergency are afoot.

The next step is clearer than it has ever been. One more large scale staged terror attack in America and the result will be martial law. When even famous singers like Morrissey are being detained and questioned by the secret service for "speaking out against the American and British governments," we know we are in a lot of trouble.

ALSO READ...

"It is relevant that in 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced his desire to see camps for U.S. citizens deemed to be "enemy combatants." On Feb. 17 of this year, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the harm being done to the country's security, not just by the enemy, but also by what he called "news informers" who needed to be combated in "a contest of wills." Two days earlier, citing speeches critical of Bush by Al Gore, John Kerry, and Howard Dean, conservative columnist Ben Shapiro called for "legislation to prosecute such sedition.""

http://news.pacificnews.org

10-Year U.S. Strategic Plan For Detention Camps Revives Proposals From Oliver North

News Analysis/Commentary, Peter Dale Scott

New America Media, Feb 21, 2006

Editor's Note: A recently announced contract for a Halliburton subsidiary to build immigrant detention facilities is part of a longer-term Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists." Scott is author of "Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). He is completing a book on "The Road to 9/11." Visit his Web site at http://www.peterdalescott.net.

The Halliburton subsidiary KBR (formerly Brown and Root) announced on Jan. 24 that it had been awarded a $385 million contingency contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build detention camps. Two weeks later, on Feb. 6, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that the Fiscal Year 2007 federal budget would allocate over $400 million to add 6,700 additional detention beds (an increase of 32 percent over 2006). This $400 million allocation is more than a four-fold increase over the FY 2006 budget, which provided only $90 million for the same purpose.

Both the contract and the budget allocation are in partial fulfillment of an ambitious 10-year Homeland Security strategic plan, code-named ENDGAME, authorized in 2003. According to a 49-page Homeland Security document on the plan, ENDGAME expands "a mission first articulated in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798." Its goal is the capability to "remove all removable aliens," including "illegal economic migrants, aliens who have committed criminal acts, asylum-seekers (required to be retained by law) or potential terrorists."

There is no question that the Bush administration is under considerable political pressure to increase the detentions of illegal immigrants, especially from across the Mexican border. Confrontations along the border are increasingly violent, often involving the drug traffic.

But the problem of illegal immigration cannot be separated from other Bush administration policies: principally the retreat from traditional American programs designed to combat poverty in Latin America. In Florida last week, Democratic Party leader Howard Dean attacked the new federal budget for its almost 30 percent cut in development aid to Latin America and the Caribbean.

In truth, both parties have virtually abandoned the John F. Kennedy vision of an Alliance for Progress in Latin America. Kennedy's hope was that, by raising the standard of living of Latin America's poor, there would be less pressure on them to emigrate to the United States.

That vision foundered when successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican, contributed to the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Brazil, Chile and elsewhere, replacing them with oppressive dictatorships.

Since about 1970, the policies of the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund have also aggravated the problem of poverty in the rest of the world, especially Latin America. U.S. programs abroad, like programs at home, are now designed principally around the concept of security -- above all for oil installations and pipelines.

In consequence, the United States is being redefined as a vast gated community, hoping to isolate itself by force from its poverty-stricken neighbors. Inside the U.S. fortress sit 2.1 million prisoners, a greater percentage of the population than in any other nation. ENDGAME's crash program is designed to house additional detainees who have not been convicted of crimes.

Significantly, both the KBR contract and the ENDGAME plan are open-ended. The contract calls for a response to "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs" in the event of other emergencies, such as "a natural disaster." "New programs" is of course a term with no precise limitation. So, in the current administration, is ENDGAME's goal of removing "potential terrorists."

It is relevant that in 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced his desire to see camps for U.S. citizens deemed to be "enemy combatants." On Feb. 17 of this year, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the harm being done to the country's security, not just by the enemy, but also by what he called "news informers" who needed to be combated in "a contest of wills." Two days earlier, citing speeches critical of Bush by Al Gore, John Kerry, and Howard Dean, conservative columnist Ben Shapiro called for "legislation to prosecute such sedition."

Since 9/11 the Bush administration has implemented a number of inter-related programs, which had been planned for secretly in the 1980s under President Reagan. These so-called "Continuity of Government" or COG proposals included vastly expanded detention capabilities, warrantless eavesdropping and detention, and preparations for greater use of martial law.

Prominent among the secret planners of this program in the 1980s were then-Congressman Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who at the time was in private business as CEO of the drug company G.D. Searle.

The principal desk officer for the program was Oliver North, until he was forced to resign in 1986 over Iran-Contra.

When planes crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Vice President Cheney's response, after consulting President Bush, was to implement a classified "Continuity of Government" plan for the first time, according to the 9/11 Commission report. As the Washington Post later explained, the order "dispatched a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington, activating for the first time long-standing plans."

What these managers in this shadow government worked on has never been reported. But it is significant that the group that prepared ENDGAME was, as the Homeland Security document puts it, "chartered in September 2001." For ENDGAME's goal of a capacious detention capability is remarkably similar to Oliver North's controversial Rex-84 "readiness exercise" for COG in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary "refugees," in the context of "uncontrolled population movements" over the Mexican border into the United States.

North's exercise, which reportedly contemplated possible suspension of the United States Constitution, led to questions being asked during the Iran-Contra Hearings. One concern then was that North's plans for expanded internment and detention facilities would not be confined to "refugees" alone.

Oliver North represented a minority element in the Reagan administration, which soon distanced itself from both the man and his proposals. But that minority associated with COG planning, which included Dick Cheney, appear to be in control of the U.S. government today.

Copyright © 2004 Pacific News Service

"...A New World Order of dominance by a global syndicate run by Bush cronies is on our doorsteps..."

http://www.crisispapers.org/guests/weinstein.htm

Welcome to the New World Order

By Rita Weinstein

February 28, 2006

The Project for The New American Century is widely accepted as the blueprint for what the neocons have been trying to accomplish ever since they "took" office in 2000. Founded in 1997, this think tank published its goals in the 2000 paper: "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century," a vision of global dominance by the American empire. This vision includes permanent bases in Southern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East; building up our military; putting a strategic missile system into place; and controlling cyberspace. The result is intended to be total global control. The PNAC document also includes preparation for, and actually launching, wars on multiple fronts throughout the globe. What the blueprint for empire does not explicitly state is a possibility that has begun taking hold of my awareness in recent weeks that one of those fronts is America itself.

Since this administration took office, the Constitution has been suspended, article by article. Unitary American Executive (read: dictator) Bush believes our founding fathers wrote a Constitution that grants him the right to kidnap, detain, torture, and even kill any person on the planet, simply by declaring that person an enemy combatant. UAE Bush now has a judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court, that will not oppose his grab for unlimited power over the life and death of the planet and every soul on it.

Since this administration took office, two major cities have been attacked, both with prior warning. Neither was defended. In fact, one (New Orleans) is still on a knife edge of existence. We now know that in both cases, criminal negligence of the executive branch took place, yet not a single person has lost a job for causing the loss of thousands of lives. In both cases, UAE Bush displayed a total unconcern for the outcome prior to catastrophes he knew were on the way.

THOSE "DETENTION CAMPS"

I had an uncle who, as a half-starved 15-year-old, was part of the uprising against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. He survived the concentration camp after he was captured. Since I read about Halliburton's immense contract to build a network of detention camps across the US, I have not been able to get him out of my mind.

According to the Halliburton web site, "The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs." In other words, at this moment, camps are being constructed for new programs that are being put into place.

Who are these camps being built for? What new programs? Have we the people been told? There never has been a dictator that did not have his secret detention camps. UAE Bush is not unique.

THE PORTS DEAL

The administration is now enveloped in a firestorm of criticism over the sale of our ports to the State of Dubai. At first, the deal was reported to involve six ports. The latest number making the rounds is 21. From the time the story broke, UAE Bush has vowed that the deal will go through. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice concurs. Both say that nothing can be done to stop the sale. Yet, curiously, after the firestorm exploded, Press Secretary Scott McClellan said that UAE Bush didn't know about the sale until he read about it in the media. (He only learned about the disaster in New Orleans after one of his staff made a 2-hour DVD of the news coverage to show him after the fact.)

Michael Chertoff, Head of Homeland Security, and Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, also said they didn't know anything about the sale until the story broke, a more than curious excuse since their offices require them to be knowledgeable about critical national security issues. They have joined UAE Bush in suggesting that all those who oppose the sale on security grounds must be closet racists who hate dark-skinned people from a certain part of the globe. Yet, they are the very ones who have been playing the fear card every since the attacks of 9/11. They include many who deliberately conflate those who flew planes into the WTC with Muslims in general.

The question of our national security being harmed as a result of this sale is legitimate. Why should any foreign government have control of such critical strategic and economic assets? Why have we not created a Port Security Agency much like the agency that controls airport security? Why are we not recruiting loyal Americans to supervise and manage our docking facilities?

A CONTROLLED DEMOLITION

I believe that what we are witness to is the controlled demolition of the United States of America. Everything that has happened since December 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court appointed UAE Bush to the presidency, has been about setting this country up for a hostile takeover by the Bush global syndicate.

Remember George H.W. Bush, friend and business partner of the bin-Laden and Saudi royal families, former head of the CIA, well-versed in the strategies of destabilizing and overthrowing governments throughout the world? Remember his talking about "a New World Order"? What exactly was the New World Order supposed to look like? I'm thinking we're about to find out.

For six years, we've watched the Bush administration systematically gut the U.S. treasury, military, and security apparatus; destabilize the population by dividing it against itself and destroying the middle class; and facilitate the destruction of our manufacturing and corporate revenue base. Astronomical borrowing has turned America, once the world's greatest economic engine, into the world's greatest debtor.

Gearing up the factory lines to fight WWII ended the Great Depression. Our workforce contributed mightily to win that war. What happens now if we're attacked militarily? Do we outsource our tank and weapons orders to China?

MARTIAL LAW IN THE WORKS?

When Republican Congressman Ron Paul goes on the air to express his concern that foreign troops are being prepared to be mobilized outside and inside America to be used in a martial law takeover by the Bush administration, we need to take notice:

"It's a horrible precedent and it's all part of the NAFTA scheme and globalization and world government … Obviously they shouldn't be perrmitted. What I'd like to see is that we don't have our troops in foreign countries and if we needed a national guard that they were back here at home, that's the bigger problem. Then if there were foreign troops on our soil maybe our state officials could deal with that with their own national guard."

To what other foreign governments will UAE Bush sell the rest of our strategic resources? For what "rapidly developing programs" will we need all those detention camps?

On February 6, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared before the Senate Judiciary committee to discuss warrantless eavesdropping (read: spying) on American citizens. At that hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) suggested to the AG a new target for the administration -- fifth columnists, disloyal Americans who "sympathize and collaborate with the enemy." Graham said, "The administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue Fifth Column movements -- I stand by this President's ability, inherent to being Commander in Chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements, and I don't think you need a warrant to do that" Graham then volunteered to help draft guidelines to neutralize those who sympathize and collaborate with those UAE Bush considers to be the enemy.

NEEDED: A WEAKER AMERICA

What does that mean "sympathize"? I sympathize deeply with the innocent Iraqi parents of the innocent Iraqi children who were born deformed from depleted uranium exposure. Also with the families of people everywhere whose loved ones have disappeared into the global American gulag. And the more than 100,000 civilians we killed in our "shock and awe" attack. Jesus said to pray for our enemies. Is praying for someone the same as collaborating?

And I wonder when the National Guard, Army, and Reserves are all overseas fighting our permanent wars, what nationality will the camp guards be? Will Camp Guard become a great entry-level job for illegal aliens or foreign mercenaries?

A New World Order of dominance by a global syndicate run by Bush cronies is on our doorsteps. But it can't happen in a strong, democratic America. What it takes is a weakened America with all power consolidated in a unitary, monarchic executive, one who can sell off our strategic interests and lock up all dissenters. Are we there yet?

Rita Weinstein was a Media Consultant on the Kucinich for President campaign and now is assisting Mark Wilson in his challenge to Maria Cantwell in Washington State's Democratic primary. She is also a playwright.

http://www.chris-floyd.com

The Pentagon Archipelago

by Chris Floyd

Tuesday, 28 February 2006

When I read the passage below from Moazzam Begg's account of his years in Bush's Terror War prisons, I had a strange feeling of dislocation: it was as if 30 years had suddenly fallen away and I was back in high school, reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in stunned disbelief at the hideous cruelty inflicted on the prisoners -- deliberately, as a carefully calculated instrument of state policy. And all of it done in the name of national security, of course, to protect the nation against "terrorists" and "traitors."

Solzhenitsyn's books -- not just the factual Gulag but also the deep-delving fiction of his middle years, the powerful First Circle and Cancer Ward -- were enormous influences on my own understanding of politics, power and morality. Years later, I was in Moscow when he returned to Russia from his long exile, having outlasted the system of state terror that had consumed so many of his compatriots. However much I had come to disagree with some of his political positions on certain issues, it was a still a moment of triumph for the deeper truths and moral courage that he continued -- and continues -- to represent.

How sickening, then, to find myself last Saturday reading of the precisely the same kind of state terror that Solzhenitsyn described (and survived) once again being inflicted on innocent people -- and this time in my name, under the flag of my country, at the express order of the leaders of my government. Bush is trying to turn us all into the kind of quiet collaborationists and cowed enablers of atrocity that we habitually decry when speaking of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany: "Oh, how could they have let such awful things go on? Why did they stand silently by? How could they swallow all those monstrous lies? I would never have stood for that kind of thing!"

Well, tens of millions of Americans are standing for it right now –- every bit as quiescent as the most head-down, eyes-averted Soviet citizen or German burgher: countenancing, condoning, even celebrating brutal acts of state terror, and swallowing the tyrant's eternal lie that his crimes are committed to protect the people. For a few crumbs of prosperity from the elite's banquet table, for a few flattering fairy tales about national greatness, national goodness and historical destiny, for a few comforting murmurs to chase away the craven fear of madman monsters across the sea, they have sold their priceless birthright of liberty. It's no longer a matter of what crimes Americans will swallow; now the great question of the day is: what won't they swallow? They've walked this far down the road of darkness – how much farther will they go? Will we one day need a Solzhenitsyn to catalogue our shame, our cruelty and our cowardice?


Excerpt from My Years in Captivity, from The Guardian: After that first heavy interrogation they took me into another room and left me there. Guards tied my hands behind my back, hog-tied me so that my hands were shackled to my legs, which were also shackled. Then they put a hood over my head. It was stuffy and hard to breathe, and I was on the verge of asthmatic panic. The perpetual darkness was frightening. A barrage of kicks to my head and back followed. Lying on the ground, with my back arched, and my wrists and ankles chafing against the metal chains, was excruciating. I could never wriggle into a more comfortable position, even for a moment. There was a thin carpet on the concrete floor, and a little shawl for warmth - both completely inadequate.

I lost track of day and night - not only was I usually in the hood but, in any case, the window was boarded up. Eventually, someone came in and removed the hood. I was there in isolation for about a month. Once they kept me from sleeping for about two days and two nights. A guard kept coming in and if I nodded off he woke me. By the end of that I was completely drained and disoriented.

I never knew what was going to happen. Sometimes they'd take me to an outside toilet - used by the military as there wasn't one upstairs. But even then I was hooded, and the hood came off only when I was in the latrine area. There on the wall, in big black letters, were the words "Fuck Islam".

For days on end I was alone in the room. Then they'd come for me and go over and over exactly the same ground: the camps, my role in training, my role in al-Qaeda, my role in financing 9/11. Sometimes it was the CIA, sometimes the FBI; sometimes I didn't even know who they were. All of them wanted a story that didn't exist. There are no words to describe what I felt like. [End excerpt]


And yet, underneath the massive slab of state terrorism, tendrils of human understanding and sympathy do survive between individuals, as was widely evident in the Soviet Union and even in Nazi Germany. Begg describes one such thread formed with what he considered the most unlikely suspect: an old, Bible-reading Alabama redneck, one of the guards responsible for holding him captive – away from his family, away from his life, for no reason, without any evidence, save for wild accusations most likely extracted by torture – for weeks, for months, for years on end.


Excerpt: I made a huge discovery during incarceration, about relating to people. When I first saw Sergeant Foshee, I thought, "He's too old to be in the army; they must be desperate." And when he asked me, in his Alabama drawl, if I was English, I thought, "Another typical raghead-hating, stars-and-bars, KKK-type redneck."

Most of the time, when he was in my room, Foshee sat there reading the Bible, and we didn't speak. I'd heard from other guards that Foshee was racist, didn't like women in the army, hated JFK, lost his temper quickly and ordered people about.

Back in the US he worked as an undercover narcotics agent. But he was also a Vietnam veteran. "Excuse me, Sergeant, do you mind if I ask you something about Vietnam?"

As a teenager I'd been fascinated by the Vietnam War, and even then I'd identified with the underdog. I felt compelled to ask this vet from Nam about his experiences. I must have asked the right question. Foshee loved giving me his recollections, and I couldn't get enough. He described graphically the assaults he'd been in, the friends he'd seen killed, the civilian massacres, and the stress he'd suffered on return to the US. Several of his comrades had been POWs. Then came the inevitable comparison between them and us. Foshee was deeply disturbed by our treatment as detainees. He couldn't understand why we weren't treated as POWs. For us he had a soldier's respect.

"I don't know if you've done anything, but they say this is a war. You should all be sent home, 'cos the war's over. Or you should be treated like POWs. I know there are people here who fought the Soviets for years and even I'm a baby compared with them -- in age and experience. I get so pissed when I see those punkass kids treating y'all that way, when they ain't done a thing for this country." He was talking about soldiers in Echo who had soaked detainees with water, then left the air conditioning on full. To me Foshee was an enigma: his attitudes were clearly Republican, and yet he did not like what he was seeing…

When Foshee heard about the incident [an episode when Begg, maddened by years of pointless confinement, exacerbated by the invasion of his room by a stream of maggots, lost control and trashed his cell] , he was very upset and tried to comfort me with stories of the Hanoi Hilton, how some of his friends had survived torture and solitary - and some hadn't. I had. I made a few friends with guards over the years in US custody, but only one ever earned my respect. [End excerpt]


Moazzam Begg was kidnapped in Pakistan in January 2002. As the Guardian notes in an accompanying story: "During his internment, he spent virtually two years in solitary, was kicked and beaten, suffocated with a bag over his head, stripped naked, chained by his hands to the top of a door and left hanging, and led to believe he was about to be executed." The only "evidence" against him was the statement by a Pakistani captive that his instructor in an al-Qaeda camp had been named "Abu Umamah." This is a common Arabic construction, whereby parents are called after the names of their children: "Abu Umamah" means, "father of Umamah," which was the name of Begg's oldest daughter. (Similarly, the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is usually referred to as "Abu Mazen." Although this is often called his "nom de guerre" in the Western press, as if it were the kind of sinister nickname that Bolshevik terrorists took to cloak their true identity – "Stalin," the man of steel, "Molotov," the hammer, etc. – it is in fact just a homely way of saying that Abbas is the father of a boy named Mazen.)

From this tidbit of meaningless information -- there are countless Muslims known as "Abu Umamah" – American interrogators spun a wild fantasy of Begg – a British teacher born and raised in Birmingham, where his secular parents sent him to the Jewish King David School for years – as an international mastermind, a veritable Doctor Evil: "Two FBI agents began the questioning, convinced I was involved in some nefarious web of plots, from planning to assassinate the Pope to masterminding al-Qaeda's finance operation in Europe, or being an instructor in one of its Afghan training camps. They had their perceptions about me and were searching for ways to confirm them - preferably from my own mouth. By now I'd been raised to the status of some rogue James Bond-type figure. They thought I was a graduate from some prestigious British university, that I was fluent in a dozen languages, that I was an expert in computers and several martial arts….Had it not been for this ludicrous situation I'm in, I would have been flattered," I once said to them. "I should ask you to write my résumé - I'd find a job anywhere."

But it was no joke, of course. One of the tools they used to torment Begg was photos of Umamah herself, which they had somehow obtained – stolen from his family home perhaps? – shortly after his capture. When that didn't work, the beatings and bindings described above began.

As I wrote two years ago, describing the plight of three other innocent British Muslims who'd been ensnared in Bush's global net: "The treatment of these three innocent men, chained and beaten for two years, is not just a crime, but also – like that other crime, the invasion of Iraq – an enormous waste of time and resources in the "war on terrorism." We saw the grim fruit of this waste in Madrid on March 11.

"But of course, the Pentagon Archipelago wasn't designed to fight terrorism; it's designed to advance terrorism – state terrorism. Its purpose is to establish the principle of arbitrary rule – in the name of "military necessity" – above the rule of law, in America and around the world. It's part of an overarching system of terror – aggressive war, assassination, indefinite detention, torture – employed to achieve the Regime's openly-stated ideological goal: "full spectrum dominance" of global politics and resources, particularly energy resources. Al Qaeda has the same goal, and uses the same methods, albeit on a smaller, "asymmetrical" scale.

"Now we are all at the mercy of these entwined terrorist factions – both led by fundamentalist sons of two financially linked elitist clans. We will see more Guantanamos, more Madrids, before this long, dark night is over."

Moazzam Begg was released from captivity in January 2005, with all the false charges against him dropped.

As things seem to get more dire by the day in this country and around the world, perhaps a music video, as the one I'm posting a link to here, is a good way to reach people who may not have the time or interest to read. ~ EOTS

SEE...

DEATH STAR

From The Arab League

Courtesy of InfoWars.com



Click on Image Above for Video