"It's TABOO"
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Topic: "It's TABOO"
Posted By: Dick
Subject: "It's TABOO"
Date Posted: 06 April 2012 at 8:36am
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WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE IDEA OF HAVING A FORUM TOPIC ON HOW TO IMPROVE THE IMAGE OF MUSLIMS IN THIS COUNTRY, AND COUNTER THE PROPAGANDA WAR BEING WAGED AGAINST MUSLIMS. WOULD THIS TYPE OF TOPIC BE TOO "RISQUE", OR TOO NAUGHTY OF A SUBLECT FOR GOOD MUSLIMS TO CONSIDER? I DON'T THINK THE FBI LISTENING WOULD MIND SEEING SUCH A TOPIC. IT WOULD MAKE IT EASIER FOR THEM TO COUNTER THE COUNTERS, AND MAKE THEIR JOB EASIER. BESIDES, MAYBE THEY COULD PUT THEIR INPUT ALSO. I'M SURE THEY WOULD HAVE SOME GOOD IDEAS TOO. I DOUBT IF YOUR IDEAS COULD BE ANY WORSE THAN MINE.
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Replies:
Posted By: Dick
Date Posted: 21 April 2012 at 6:56pm
Well, When are Muslims, Americans, etc. going to get serious and start really trying to do something. It just keeps getting worse. Any ideas yet? It's not just a propaganda war you know, it is a war on every freedom and right that we had. The bad thing is that in a year or two, we will be looking back at 2012 as "The good old days"
Cif America
The TSA's mission creep is making the US a police state
The out-of-control Transportation Security Administration is past patdowns at airports � now it's checkpoints and roadblocks
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Comments (283)
Jennifer Abel
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 April 2012 10.42 EDT
Article history
A TSA 'viper' (VIPR) team patrolling mass transit
Ever since 2010, when the Transportation Security Administration started requiring that travelers in American airports submit to sexually intrusive gropings based on the apparent anti-terrorism principle that "If we can't feel your nipples, they must be a bomb", the agency's craven apologists have shouted down all constitutional or human rights objections with the mantra "If you don't like it, don't fly!"
This callous disregard for travelers' rights merely paraphrases the words of Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano, who shares, with the president, ultimate responsibility for all TSA travesties since 2009. In November 2010, with the groping policy only a few weeks old, Napolitano dismissed complaints by saying "people [who] want to travel by some other means" have that right. (In other words: if you don't like it, don't fly.)
But now TSA is invading travel by other means, too. No surprise, really: as soon as she established groping in airports, Napolitano expressed her desire to expand TSA jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit. In the past year, TSA's snakelike VIPR (Visual Intermodal Prevention and Response) teams have been slithering into more and more bus and train stations � and even running checkpoints on highways � never in response to actual threats, but apparently more in an attempt to live up to the inspirational motto displayed at the TSA's air marshal training center since the agency's inception: "Dominate. Intimidate. Control."
Anyone who rode the bus in Houston, Texas during the 2-10pm shift last Friday faced random bag checks and sweeps by both drug-sniffing dogs and bomb-sniffing dogs (the latter being only canines necessary if "preventing terrorism" were the actual intent of these raids), all courtesy of a joint effort between TSA VIPR nests and three different local and county-level police departments. The new Napolitano doctrine, then: "Show us your papers, show us everything you've got, justify yourself or you're not allowed to go about your everyday business."
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee praised these violations of her constituents' rights with an explanation asinine even by congressional standards:
"We're looking to make sure that the lady I saw walking with a cane � knows that Metro cares as much about her as we do about building the light rail."
See, if you don't support the random harassment of ordinary people riding the bus to work, you're a callous ****** who doesn't care about little old ladies.
No specific threats or reasons were cited for the raids, as the government no longer even pretends to need any. Vipers bite you just because they can. TSA spokesman Jim Fotenos confirmed this a few days before the Houston raids, when VIPR teams and local police did the same thing to travelers catching trains out of the Amtrak station in Alton, Illinois. Fotenos confirmed that "It was not in response to a specific threat," and bragged that VIPR teams conduct "thousands" of these operations each year.
Still, apologists can pretend that's all good, pretend constitutional and human rights somehow don't apply to mass transit, and twist their minds into the Mobius pretzel shapes necessary to find random searches of everyday travelers compatible with any notion that America is a free country. "Don't like the new rules for mass transit? Then drive."
Except even that doesn't work anymore. Earlier this month, the VIPRs came out again in Virginia and infested the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, also known as the stretch of Interstate 64 connecting the cities of Hampton and Norfolk. Spokesmen admitted again that the exercise was a "routine sweep", not a response to any specific threat. Official news outlets admitted the checkpoint caused a delay (further exacerbated by a couple of accidents), but didn't say for how long. Local commenters at the Travel Underground forums reported delays of 90 minutes.
I grew up in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. When I was a kid, my dad crossed the bridge-tunnel every day while commuting to work. When I was in university, I did the same thing. The old conventional wisdom said "Get to the airport at least two hours early, so TSA has time to violate your constitutional rights before boarding." What's the new conventional wisdom � "Leave for any destination at least 90 minutes early, so TSA can violate your rights en route"?
Airports, bus terminals, train stations, highways � what's left? If you don't like it, walk. And remember to be respectfully submissive to any TSA agents or police you encounter in your travels, especially now that the US supreme court has ruled mass strip-searches are acceptable for anyone arrested for even the most minor offence in America. If you're rude to any TSA agent or cops, you risk being arrested on some vague catch-all charge like "disorderly conduct". Even if the charges are later dropped, you'll still undergo the ritual humiliation of having to strip, squat, spread 'em and show your various orifices to be empty.
Can I call America a police state now, without being accused of hyperbole?
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Posted By: Dick
Date Posted: 27 April 2012 at 8:56am
You Are All Suspects Now. What Are You Going To Do About It?
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By John Pilger
Source: Johnpilger.com
Friday, April 27, 2012
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You are all potential terrorists. It matters not that you live in Britain, the United States, Australia or the Middle East. Citizenship is effectively abolished. Turn on your computer and the US Department of Homeland Security�s National Operations Center may monitor whether you are typing not merely �al-Qaeda�, but �exercise�, �drill�, �wave�, �initiative� and �organisation�: all proscribed words. The British government�s announcement that it intends to spy on every email and phone call is old hat. The satellite vacuum cleaner known as Echelon has been doing this for years. What has changed is that a state of permanent war has been launched by the United States and a police state is consuming western democracy.
What are you going to do about it?
In Britain, on instructions from the CIA, secret courts are to deal with �terror suspects�. Habeas Corpus is dying. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five men, including three British citizens, can be extradited to the US even though none except one has been charged with a crime. All have been imprisoned for years under the 2003 US/UK Extradition Treaty which was signed one month after the criminal invasion of Iraq. The European Court had condemned the treaty as likely to lead to �cruel and unusual punishment�. One of the men, Babar Ahmad, was awarded 63,000 pounds compensation for 73 recorded injuries he sustained in the custody of the Metropolitan Police. Sexual abuse, the signature of fascism, was high on the list. Another man is a schizophrenic who has suffered a complete mental collapse and is in Broadmoor secure hospital; another is a suicide risk. To the Land of the Free, they go -- along with young Richard O�Dwyer, who faces 10 years in shackles and an orange jump suit because he allegedly infringed US copyright on the internet.
As the law is politicised and Americanised, these travesties are not untypical. In upholding the conviction of a London university student, Mohammed Gul, for disseminating �terrorism� on the internet, Appeal Court judges in London ruled that �acts � against the armed forces of a state anywhere in the world which sought to influence a government and were made for political purposes� were now crimes. Call to the dock Thomas Paine, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela.
What are you going to do about it?
The prognosis is clear now: the malignancy that Norman Mailer called �pre fascist� has metastasized. The US attorney-general, Eric Holder, defends the �right� of his government to assassinate American citizens. Israel, the protege, is allowed to aim its nukes at nukeless Iran. In this looking glass world, the lying is panoramic. The massacre of 17 Afghan civilians on 11 March, including at least nine children and four women, is attributed to a �rogue� American soldier. The �authenticity� of this is vouched by President Obama himself, who had �seen a video� and regards it as �conclusive proof�. An independent Afghan parliamentary investigation produces eyewitnesses who give detailed evidence of as many as 20 soldiers, aided by a helicopter, ravaging their villages, killing and raping: a standard, if marginally more murderous US special forces �night raid�.
Take away the videogame technology of killing � America�s contribution to modernity � and the behaviour is traditional. Immersed in comic-book righteousness, poorly or brutally trained, frequently racist, obese and led by a corrupt officer class, American forces transfer the homicide of home to faraway places whose impoverished struggles they cannot comprehend. A nation founded on the genocide of the native population never quite kicks the habit. Vietnam was �Indian country� and its �slits� and �gooks� were to be �blown away.
The blowing away of hundreds of mostly women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 was also a �rogue� incident and, profanely, an �American tragedy� (the cover headline of Newsweek). Only one of 26 men prosecuted was convicted and he was let go by President Richard Nixon. My Lai is in Quang Ngai province where, as I learned as a reporter, an estimated 50,000 people were killed by American troops, mostly in what they called �free fire zones�. This was the model of modern warfare: industrial murder.
Like Iraq and Libya, Afghanistan is a theme park for the beneficiaries of America�s new permanent war: Nato, the armaments and hi-tech companies, the media and a �security� industry whose lucrative contamination is a contagion on everyday life. The conquest or �pacification� of territory is unimportant. What matters is the pacification of you, the cultivation of your indifference.
What are you going to do about it?
The descent into totalitarianism has landmarks. Any day now, the Supreme Court in London will decide whether the WikiLeaks editor, Julian Assange, is to be extradited to Sweden. Should this final appeal fail, the facilitator of truth-telling on an epic scale, who is charged with no crime, faces solitary confinement and interrogation on ludicrous sex allegations. Thanks to a secret deal between the US and Sweden, he can be �rendered� to the American gulag at any time. In his own country, Australia, prime minister Julia Gillard has conspired with those in Washington she calls her �true mates� to ensure her innocent fellow citizen is fitted for his orange jump suit just in case he should make it home. In February, her government wrote a �WikiLeaks Amendment� to the extradition treaty between Australia and the US that makes it easier for her �mates� to get their hands on him. She has even given them the power of approval over Freedom of Information searches � so that the world outside can be lied to, as is customary.
What are you going to do about it?
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Posted By: schmikbob
Date Posted: 29 April 2012 at 10:59am
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Clearly, what I'm going to do about it is stop reading these *****ic rants that belong in the "conspiracy" section along with other impressive theories like "America faked the moon landings" and "George Bush planned the demolitiion of the World Trade Center"
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