In 2013, I was asked by the ACLU (Shasta Chapter) to give a one hour presentation about 'Government Secrecy', Drones, and Militarization of Police. Social media was not yet a hindrance to our liberties at that time, although it did plenty to interfere in other countries. So sadly, the issue of social media was never discussed. But it is not separate from the mainstream media/corporations and other issues discussed in that talk.
Given what has happened in the 2020 elections, I am posting my talking points (all of it, mistakes and all) in the hope that it may help us understand what the media did in all this.
Incidentally, Trump's maker, i.e. Murdoch and Fox abandoned him as early as early-mid October. See link here
ACLU talk April 13,
2013
I would like to thank the ACLU (Shasta chapter) for inviting
me to be here with you today – to talk about grave issues
which are of so much concern to us, our rights, and our country -- "Government
Secrecy, drones, and militarization".
A functioning democracy requires the
people to hold their government to account. Accountability, in turn, requires
knowledge about government activities.
Our fourth President, James Madison believed Knowledge would always govern ignorance; and the people must arm themselves with the power which
knowledge gives .
Surely then, Secrecy is disempowering cyber
security bill known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and
Protection Act, CISPA would create a loophole in all existing privacy laws,
allowing companies to share Internet users' data with the National Security
Agency, part of the Department of Defense, and the biggest spy agency in the
world — without any legal oversight. Increasingly, on a daily basis, while our rights are beign
trampled upon, such as with CISPA bill, government secrecy is increasing. There seems to be direct correlation between
government secrecy and our right to privacy!
A 2005 report
found that for every $1 spent on declassification, $148 is spent to classify.
In 2011, The federal government spent more than $11 billion to
protect its secrets, double the cost of classification a decade ago —and 1.2
billion dollars over the previous year. This sum does not include the costs incurred by the Central
Intelligence Agency, the National
Security Agency and other spy agencies, Pentagon, …. — classified..
It is
Moreover, the
government diminishes criticism by keeping information secret, and thereby
regulates criticism.
There is no statutory base to what should be stamped as
secret. , classification and declassification have
been governed by a series of executive
orders, with no legal framework.
Why should we
care/ Some may argue it is to protect us
and the country.
The liberties of a
people are not secure when government transactions
are concealed from them.
Excessive secrecy,
which is what we witness today, has significant consequences for the national
interest when we cannot engage in informed debate and so government is not held
accountable for its actions.
Politics carried out in our name, in secret and without our knowledge or
consent, have often – too often, led to blowback . the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret
from the American people.
Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a
mission. a secret force within the
U.S. military, the US special forces, taking operations in a majority of the
world’s countries. Some 120 of them.
CIA
coups
Iran
Contra,
cia
rendition flights, torture
Underwear
bomber - CIA operative
Drone base in Saudi Arabia – 9/11 Osama bin Laden, first
Gulf War…
Syria -
book The Foreign Policy Disconnect, Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton demonstrated that most of the crises in
post-1945 U.S. foreign policy could have been avoided if U.S. leaders had paid
more attention to the views of the public. But how can the public have any influence on secret
policy-making?
To understand why, or how, we should look at who is pushing
the buttons in Washington. In that the Powerful interests run today's America, there is no doubt. Identifying them is not always so easy – as
they seem separate, but often they are not.
Who and what is big business?
This is a question that can’t be
answered in one hour, or one day. But
there are some which immediately jump to
mind.
In 1935, a Major General
in the U.S. Marine Corps. Smedley Butler who died in
1940, and one of only two
Marines to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor twice and author of
a book called “War is a Racket – 1935) wrote: "I
spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that
period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business.
Today, the military is part
and parcel of big business.
Drones that can
become chemichal biological warfare weapons
Radiological
dispersal becomes possible and potentially effective with a UAV over large
urban areas, but only if the source material is cesium chloride--the one
radiological source that comes in powdered form.[18] Dispersal of chemical or
especially biological agent is ideally suited for a UAV; its flight stability
permits the release of agent evenly along a line of contamination
http://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/unmanned-air-vehicles-terror-weapons/
President Eisenhower spoke of
the military industrial complex. But
today, we are facing a greater danger -
the military-industrial-media complex.
Media
magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations have
close links with the military industry and Washington’s foreign-policy – no
longer separate from domestic policies.
Just to give an example - General Electric doesn’t
just make appliances. GE manufactures
weapons – and it owns The vast NBC network .
GE designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly
every major weapon system used by the U.S. during the Gulf War 1991—including
the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles.
Its media arm, NBC, then praised and justified the use of weapons made
by their parent company.
To the detriment of the public
interest, and the world at large, the military-media ties have grown extensively.
Top 10 media corporations share board director positions with the major
defense contractors . Example Disney (ABC), Boeing Alwyn Lewis: Disney
(ABC), Halliburton, Douglas McCorkindale: Gannett,
Lockheed-Martin ….
It is no accident that these giant weapons
contractors use the news media as the public relations arm for their primary
product - war and the
weapons of war... big media in
the United States effectively represent the interests of corporate America.
They are the
watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, responsible for manufacturing
consent - Their goal is to control the news and information available to
society. The two most prominent methods used to accomplish this task are
censorship and propaganda.
Not to left
unmentioned is the role of think tanks, and the Diaspora – the exiles and some NGOS – which Colin
Powell referred to as force multipliers.
No war, no coup, no regime change would
be possible without the Diaspora’s role in facilitating, or pushing for
same. To give a few recent examples, the Iraqi
National Council (Chalabi), The Libyan National Transitional Council, the
Syrian National Council,
Cubans, etc.
Grasping this dynamic will give us a clearer picture of the
rise of the drones!
The drone program cost
billions of dollars, until cost millions, flight hours thousands of dollars per
hour. Or drone wars, as they are called – there was
a program by the same name, rise of the drones, on PBS, in part, funded by
Lockheed martin!
You’ve probably heard of the Congressional Black
Caucus, or perhaps the Progressive Caucus, but we now have a
drone caucus! . Officially, it’s the Unmanned Systems Caucus and top
donors are Lockheed
Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman.
Drones are aerial robots – unmanned aerial vehincles - remotely
controlled, that carry visual sensors, navigation systems, and even weapons.
They come in all shapes and sizes and go by a variety of names. Since 2005,
the federal government has awarded at least $12 billion in contracts for drones
and drone supplies and maintenance. That includes at least $270 million for U.S.
Between 50 and 60
percent of the workforce of the CIA's most important directorate, the National
Clandestine Service (NCS), responsible for the gathering of human intelligence,
is composed of employees of for-profit corporations.
Amazing fact considering that drone makers
not only lobby to get drones approved,
but as importantly, Corporate intelligence professionals
from companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, and
others are thoroughly integrated into analytical divisions throughout the
intelligence community.
estimates as high
as 98% of drone
strike casualties being civilians (50 for every one "suspected terrorist"). The Bureau of
Investigative Journalism issued a report detailing how the CIA is deliberately targeting those who show up after the
sight of an attack, rescuers, and mourners at funerals as a part of a
"double-tap" strategy .
The drone war is carried out remotely, from the U.S. and a network of secret bases around the world – and we recently learnt that one of the drone bases is in Saudi Arabia - 9/11. blowback.
Where else?
When the United
States kills people in foreign, sovereign states, the world looks to
international law for the standard of justification. Use of drones
is illegal. There are Last monght, During a national press
conference in Atlanta, Jimmy Carter
expressed that Drone attacks are gross violations of international law
and human rights and are outright immoral. The claim that the President of the
United States has the ultimate power to determine who is guilty and therefore a
legitimate target of assassination is dangerous.
AT about the same time as Carter’s
speech, Attorney General Eric Holder did not entirely rule out a scenario under
which a drone strike would be ordered against Americans on U.S. soil, but says
it has never been done previously and he could only see it being considered in
an extraordinary circumstance.
"federal authorities have stepped up
efforts to license surveillance drones for law enforcement and other uses in US
airspace". Mayor Bloomberg, "Like
it or not, the eye in the sky will soon be following your every move".
Arkansas State Fusion Center Director
Richard Davis recently confirmed Americans’ fears: the center does in
fact spy on Americans – but only on those who are suspected to be
‘anti-government’. This
may well be interpreted to include all of us!
But there is much more to drones.
A drone named "Switchblade", described as "the ultimate
assassin bug", can worm its
way around buildings and into small areas, sending its surveillance imagery to
an i-Pad held by the operator, who can then direct the Switchblade to lunge
toward and kill the target by exploding in his face.
There are insect drones with
the ability to land on you and infect you with a virus, or take DNA, or plant a
tiny microchip. It
could land on you and stay, so that you take it with you into your home. Or it
could fly into a building through a window. There are well-funded research
projects working on such devices with such capabilities.
Aside from the
threat posed to our civil rights and liberties – in itself, of utmost
importance, there are untold dangers
posed by the drones.
Drones
can be easily hacked. In June last year, the University of Texas at Austin reportedly demonstrated in front of Department of Homeland
Security officials that it is relatively easy to take control of
an airborne drone by hacking into its GPS system.
So, if these drones were created to be spies, or to kill,
they can be hijacked and used against us. – turned on us.
They also be duplicated.
Chinese are making drones
at a fraction fo the cost of US drones.
And looking for clients.
No American safe.
The other public concern is the inability of drones to detect other aircraft (or each other!) in the area, creating safety problems in busy airspace. Law-enforcement
agencies could use them to illegally monitor Americans.
Drones are big business.
What are the implications?
Historians and political scientists have warned us about dangerous war fever sweeping the United
States. Today we have gone beyond that.
The
"Global War on Terror" - A war
indefinite in duration, against an ill-defined and shifting enemy, al-qaeda the enemy, now being armed in Syria - and
without a clear explanation of American strategy, a specific definition
of victory, or even a way to measure progress in the struggle has taken its
toll on civil liberty. The problem of
militarization poses a danger to the very character of American government and
society.
General Tommy Franks - in his first public interview after retiring from active duty in 2003,
identified the single most dangerous possibility offered by an endless war on
terrorism. An attack with weapons of mass destruction "just to create casualties ... to terrify"
could lead "the western world, the free
world" to forfeit its "freedom and liberty," to lose its
democracy, and "begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another
mass-casualty event, ... to potentially unravel the fabric of our
Constitution.
Over half a century ago, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson concluded "by giving way to the passion,
intolerance and suspicions of wartime, it is easy to reduce our liberties
to a shadow, often in answer to exaggerated claims of security.".
That
day is here. Not only are we under
constant surveillance , Take for example the kill list. A list
which began under the Bush administration as a rationale for murdering suspect
citizens of countries with which the United States was not at war has become Obama’s kill list and the scope of the list
has been expanded to include the execution, without due process of law, of U.S.
citizens accused, without evidence presented in court, of association with
terrorism. Blood ties to a suspect places you in the
kill list.
And this is accepted by the people. Robert.
The framers of the Constitution
recognized such dangers when they carefully subordinated the military to
civilian authority and attempted to limit the power of the President to
initiate war.
Gregory Foster, a former
Army officer and West Point graduate who now
teaches national security studies at the National
Defense University in Washington said that principle of civilian control of the military—an early
building block of American democracy-
has become the civilian
subjugation to the military.
Today, the degree to which society's institutions, policies, behaviors,
thought, and values are devoted to military power and shaped by war are
alarming.
The incursion of
military recruiters and teachings into the public school system is well
known.. . Presidents favors speaking to captive
audiences at military bases, defense plants, and on aircraft carriers. lawmakers’ constant use of “support our troops”
to justify defense spending, to TV programs and video games like
“NCIS,” “Homeland” and “Call of Duty,” to reality show “Stars
Earn Stripes,” Americans are subjected to a daily diet of stories that valorize
the military while the storytellers pursue their own opportunistic political
and commercial agendas
Former secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld acknowledged publicly in an October 24, 2003, interview in the
Washington Times:
"We are in a war of ideas, as well as a
global war on terror. Ideas are important, and they need to be marshalled, and
they need to be communicated in ways that are persuasive to the listeners."
Embedded journalists in Iraq
and Afghanistan –
This was part of his information operations
roadmap. As part of the plan, “public affairs officers
brief journalists”. In 2005 it came to light that the Pentagon
paid the Lincoln Group (a private company) to plant ‘hundreds of stories’ in
Iraqi papers in support of U.S. Policies
The war has been internalized, whether you
look at drones, kill list, or militarization of the police force, or in the
classrooms.
During the Clinton
administration, Congress
passed what's now known as the "1033 Program," which
formalized Reagan administration's
directive to the Pentagon to share surplus military gear with
domestic police agencies. Since then, millions of pieces of military equipment
designed for use on a battlefield have been transferred to local cops -- SWAT
teams and others -- including machine guns, tanks, armored personnel carriers,
The
Pentagon's 1033 program has exploded under Obama.
Clinton also created the "Troops to
Cops" program, which offered grants to police departments who hired soldiers
returning from battle, contributing even further to the militarization of the police force.
David
Grossman 2005
Retired US Army
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/heart/interviews/grossman.html
the
law enforcement groups, worldwide to
kill.
Law enforcement should be for protection of
the civilians.
most of what I do is I train
military and law enforcement in what I call the bulletproof mind
Prior preparation is that one
variable in the equation that we can control ahead of time, and one of the key things is embracing
the responsibility to kill.
So when I teach, one of the things
I believe we need to do is embrace this word "kill."
Bloomberg and Kelly are the proud autocrats who brag of “hav(ing) my own
army in the NYPD” and who used that army to spy on peaceful
Occupy Wall Street protestors.
Radiation
