Human Rights in Sudan – ("acting" like we are) Solving the Crisis

            On April 24, 2012 Anna Maria College hosted a demonstration (posed as a panel discussion) on two humanitarian efforts currently underway in Sudan:  TheInternational Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP).  The demo began with a brief introduction by the college’s president, Dr. Jack Calareso, as well as the reading of a letter from U.S. Congressman James McGovern by his secretary Gladys Rodriguez-Parker. 

            The opening dialogue gave a brief and very general overview of the current conflict in Sudan, related to the recent independence of South Sudan and the consequential continuous human rights violations being committed there since. 

Although this event was framed as a symposium on the crisis in Sudan, it was evident in the unfolding of the presentations that it was more of an impressive demonstration intended to recruit support of surveillance and intervention by NGOs in Africa. 

Following President Calareso’s introductory remarks, Susan Swanberg, an international law instructor for the American Red Cross in Massachusetts, gave an educational history of the organization and also provided some general background of the Red Cross’ role in the formation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) in relation to their contribution to the Geneva Conventions which legally allows for non-governmental groups to operate without interference anywhere in the globe under the banner of “humanitarian aid.”  Swanberg briefly discussed how the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is thriving in South Sudan.

After the Red Cross’ presentation, The Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) was introduced by

Nathaniel Raymond, its current director, who provided some background information of the initiative.  The SSP utilizes constant satellite surveillance and other information (including every single world-wide press releases involving Sudan in real time!) to produce up-to-date reports on the security situation in the newly-independent South Sudan. The project is supposedly sponsored entirely by American actor George Clooney, and is coordinated through the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

            Mr. Raymond introduced his colleagues who took part in discussing and demonstrating how SSP detects and documents actions in Sudan to focus world attention to the region’s need of humanitarian aid. 

Throughout the discussion, remarkable satellite images were displayed and the panel took turns explaining how the images are analyzed.   They revered that in 2011, the Satellite Sentinel Project detected images of freshly-dug mass grave sites in the Southern Kordofan state of South Sudan, where Sudan’s military has been targeting an ethnic minority. They explained how the SSP could use their intelligence to cite violations of International Humanitarian Law, although there were no mentions of such specific legal actions being pursued presently.

The presentation concluded with an invitation to Worcester College Consortium students to pursue an internship with The Satellite Sentinel Project who are incidentally actively looking to recruit a current Worcester college student.

I left the symposium contemplating the abundant conflicts, genocides, brutal tyrants, tribal wars and human rights calamities that have been occurring all over Africa going back since the days of European colonization yet the focus of attention has only shifted to this region recently (e.g. Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Omar al-Bashir, Kony).  It is evident through sudden interests that the oil, agricultural and pharmaceutical industries see massive potential in Africa.  (Sudan is oil rich, the UN is privatizing supply and production of seeds in Sudan, and Red Cross vaccinated over one million cattle.)

Considering that wars and conflict are what the media make them, I guess it’s fitting to employ America’s bestknown and romanticized actors to be the face of surveillance efforts in Africa.  Framing these actions under the banner of humanitarian aid manufactures consent and exemption from much interference and SSP Director, Nathaniel Raymond specifically said that “their surveillance does not fall under international laws of espionage simply because they are using satellite imagery located way above any claimed national airspace.”

There was no mention of Sudanese rights to privacy or any mention of problems and hostility to Western involvement from citizens there either.  I found that peculiar considering that many Africans perceive their modern problems as results of Western policies past and present.  Much to their chagrin since 2006, The United States Africa Command, (USAFRICOM or AFRICOM) in concert with other U.S. government agencies and international partners, conducts sustained security engagement through military-to-military programs, military-sponsored activities, and other military operations as directed to promote a stable and secure African environment in support of U.S. foreign policy.

Writer and Director Zamo Mkhwanzi is one such critic of foreign intervention into Africa who put it most eloquently:

“No to aid, no to intervention. Leave Africa alone. That’s what we really want. Stop stealing our raw materials, stop coming here to trade your guns, stop using us to provide employment for your own people who come here as aid workers. No thanks UNICEF and Amnesty International and Angelina Jolie. Stop sending food packages that put our farmers out of work. In fact leave, leave Africa, never come back here again and we will be ok. We like you, so we’ll come and visit you if you like. But we can live without you. Every time you come here you leave us worse off, so thanks – but no thanks.”

Further Reading:

According to The Sentinal Project’s website, Clooney’s running mate in this Sudanese mission is John Prendergast.  Mr. Prendergast is not only a human rights activist as head of the NGO Enough Project, but perhaps more notably he is a former member of the National Security Council and State Department.  Prendergast left government in 2001 to become Special Adviser to the President of the International Crisis Group on Africa issues. The International Crisis Group is a branch of the World Bank who advises The U.N. 

Read this insightful article that argues the Enough Project actually made life harder in Congo:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/11/02/enough-project-and-global-witness-killing-people-in-congo/ 

For some further insight into the abuses of the Red Cross:   http://www.rense.com/general28/ddosb.htm

On Zionism

Lord Balfour addressed the Balfour Declaration to Lord W. Rothschild of the Zionist Federation. If one investigates deeper into who Lord Rothschild was, and the role that The House of Rothschild has maintained in the world throughout history and into current times, one might conclude that converting to Judaism and then stating you now have a right to land promised by God to the Jews seems like a very thinly veiled business plan, and a very underhanded attempt at playing on people's sympathies and emotions to manipulate ownership over a very key location in terms of geopolitics and economics.

On November 1918 a very large group of Palestinian Arab dignitaries and representatives of political associations addressed a petition to the British authorities in which they denounced the declaration. The document stated:

"...we always sympathized profoundly with the persecuted Jews and their misfortunes in other countries... but there is wide difference between such sympathy and the acceptance of such a nation...ruling over us and disposing of our affairs."

As mentioned in the above PowerPoint Presentation, Israel has a VERY strong lobby in the US. It has a powerful influence on American politics, economy, the military-industrial complex ($8.2 MILLION in military aid funnel from America to Israel PER DAY**), foreign policy, and of course The Media. This last element is the most important in terms of keeping the American people passively ignorant to their business in our affairs. After all, if the majority knew what an influence this foreign power has in us, and how much of our money supply is spent on Israel and the manufacture of their weapons (which include nuclear ones) - most would demand a change in policy.

There is a revealing short documentary on the manipulation of the American media by Israel titled "Peace, Propaganda And The Promised Land" and it is viewable free in its entirety here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2165626245072381061

Zionism has always been a topic that greatly interests me, primarily because it is a phenomenal example of the power of propaganda at its most powerful. The state of Israel has engaged in apartheid, colonialism, terrorism, and all types of genocide with the absolute support, protection and blessing of the United States. You and I support and pay for this, through our taxes and through the corporations we blindly hand our money to on a daily basis.

Israel has been successful in using sympathy of the Jewish diaspora and the holocaust in order to strike down critics and label them anti-semitic. But the fact is that Judaism is a religion and Zionism is a political movement. Church and State are important to see separately in the issue of a Zionist state, yet through very careful propaganda tactics this political movement has been successful in obtaining occupations that continuously spread and multiply.

As the journalist and documentarian John Pilger said, "Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America’s official enemies and to promote the West’s foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler."

More and more Palestinians are forced off their land over time, particularly in 1948, and again in 1967, but all the while there is less and less land and resources available for Palestinians. They have become refugees in their own land, controlled by Israel in the LONGEST MILITARY OCCUPATION IN MODERN TIMES. And when they rise up against Israel’s huge military regime, they are shown only as "terrorists" by Western media (although they, unlike Israel, have no army, no American tanks, no American planes and gunships or missiles).

Thanks to the United States, Israel is now one of the largest military powers in the entire world. Yet, when we hear about weapons of mass destruction, and "brutal terror regimes," and the "spreading democracy" in the world from our news sources and politicians - how often do they remain silent on Israel? ALWAYS. This is incredibly ironic considering the apartheid in Palestine and the very obvious genocide that is happening everyday. If Iran is a danger because of the development of nuclear weapons, how can the fact that Israel (who continuously ignore UN resolutions time and time again and even have violated several of the Nuremberg Principles,*** as well as the principles of the Geneva Conventions) is constantly receiving funding and support from the United States?

It has been time and time again by many, that there can never exist Peace in the World, until there is Peace in Palestine. By continuous evidence through the UN it seems that while most of the nations in the world wish to see that Peace manifest through a two state solution, the United States wishes to find peace only through the complete annihilation of the Palestinian people and the emergence of one single State of Israel, whose borders will continue to grow across the Middle East, through its steady abundance of American funding and weaponry.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Mandate_of_Palestine

** The source for US military aid to Israel during Fiscal Year 2011 is the Congressional Research Service’s “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel,” written by Jeremy M. Sharp, Specialist in Middle Eastern Affairs, updated September 16, 2010.

*** The source for these violations are outlined in the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict

http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/factfindingmission.htm

More info here:

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/settlements.html

Norman Finkelstein's documentary:

http://www.americanradicalthefilm.com/

If Americans Knew:

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/trailerq.html

PLO/Fatah's Nazi training was CIA-sponsored:

http://www.hirhome.com/israel/cia-fatah.htm

Here's One for all the Mindless Obama Supporters

good luck blaming this one on previous presidents:

(NaturalNews) One of the most extraordinary documents in human history -- the Bill of Rights -- has come to an end under President Barack Obama. Derived from sacred principles of natural law, the Bill of Rights has come to a sudden and catastrophic end with the President's signing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the U.S. military the "legal" right to conduct secret kidnappings of U.S. citizens, followed by indefinite detention, interrogation, torture and even murder. This is all conducted completely outside the protection of law, with no jury, no trial, no legal representation and not even any requirement that the government produce evidence against the accused. It is a system of outright government tyranny against the American people, and it effectively nullifies the Bill of Rights.

In what will be remembered as the most traitorous executive signing ever committed against the American people, President Obama signed the bill on New Year's Eve, a time when most Americans were engaged in the consumption of alcohol. It seems appropriate, of course, since no intelligent American could accept the tyranny of this bill if they were sober.

This is the law that will cement Obama's legacy in the history books as the traitor who nullified the Bill of Rights and paved America's pathway down a road of tyranny that will make Nazi Germany's war crimes look like child's play. If Bush had signed a law like this, liberals would have been screaming "impeachment!"

Why the Bill of Rights matters

While the U.S. Constitution already limits the power of federal government, the Bill of Rights is the document that enumerates even more limits of federal government power. In its inception, many argued that a Bill of Rights was completely unnecessary because, they explained, the federal government only has the powers specifically enumerated to it under the U.S. Constitution. There was no need to have a "First Amendment" to protect Free Speech, for example, because there was no power granted to government to diminish Free Speech.

This seems silly today, of course, given the natural tendency of all governments to concentrate power in the hands of the few while destroying the rights and freedoms of their own people. But in the 1780's, whether government could ever become a threat to future freedoms was hotly debated. By 1789, enough revolutionary leaders had agreed on the fundamental principles of a Bill of Rights to sign it into law. Its purpose was to provide additional clarifications on the limitation of government power so that there could be absolutely no question that government could NEVER, under any circumstances, violate these key principles of freedom: Freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, freedom from illegal searches, the right to remain silent, the right to due process under law, and so on.

Of course, today's runaway federal government utterly ignores the limitations placed on it by the founding fathers. It aggressively and criminally seeks to expand its power at all costs, completely ignoring the Bill of Rights and openly violating the limitations of power placed upon it by the United States Constitution. The TSA's illegal searching of air travelers, for example, is a blatant violation of Fourth Amendment rights. The government's hijacking of websites it claims are linking to "copyright infringement" hubs is a blatant violation of First Amendment rights. The government's demand that all Americans be forced to buy private health insurance is a blatant violation of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution -- the "commerce clause."

Now, with the passage of the NDAA, the federal government has torpedoed the entire Bill of Rights, dismissing it completely and effectively promising to violate those rights at will. As of January 1, 2012, we have all been designated enemies of the state. America is the new battleground, and your "right" to due process is null and void.

Remember, this was all done by the very President who promised to close Guantanamo Bay and end secret military prisons. Not only did Obama break that campaign promise (as he has done with nearly ALL his campaign promises), he did exactly the opposite and has now subjected all Americans to the possibility of government-sponsored kidnapping, detainment and torture, all under the very system of secret military prisons he claimed he would close!

"President Obama’s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Obama's signing statement means nothing

Even while committing an act of pure treason in signing the bill, the unindicted criminal President Obama issued a signing statement that reads, in part, "Moving forward, my administration will interpret and implement the provisions described below in a manner that best preserves the flexibility on which our safety depends and upholds the values on which this country was founded..."

Anyone who reads between the lines here realizes the "the flexibility on which our safety depends" means they can interpret the law in any way they want if there is a sufficient amount of fear being created through false flag terror attacks. Astute readers will also notice that Obama's signing statement has no legal binding whatsoever and only refers to Obama's momentary intentions on how he "wishes" to interpret the law. It does not place any limits whatsoever on how a future President might use the law as written.

"The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield," says the ACLU (http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-s...).

What this means is that the next President could use this law to engage in the most horrific holocaust-scale mass round-up of people the world has ever seen. The NDAA legalizes the crimes of Nazi Germany in America, setting the stage for the mass murder of citizens by a rogue government.

United States of America becomes a rogue nation, operating in violation of international law

Furthermore, the NDAA law as written and signed, is a violation of international law as it does not even adhere to the fundamental agreements of how nations treat prisoners of war:

"...the breadth of the NDAA’s detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war" says the ACLU (http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-s...).

In 1789, today's NDAA law would have been called "treasonous," and those who voted for it would have been shot dead as traitors. This is not a call for violence, but rather an attempt to provide historical context of just how destructive this law really is. Men and women fought and died for the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. People sacrificed their lives, their safety and risked everything to achieve the freedoms that made America such a great nation. For one President to so callously throw away 222 years of liberty, betraying those great Americans who painstakingly created an extraordinary document limiting the power of government, is equivalent to driving a stake through the heart of the Republic.

In signing this, Obama has proven himself to be the most criminal of all U.S. Presidents, far worse than George W. Bush and a total traitor to the nation and its People. Remember, Obama swore upon a Bible that he would "protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic," and yet he himself has become the enemy of the Constitution by signing a law that overtly and callously nullifies the Bill of Rights.

This is nothing less than an act of war declared on the American people by the executive and legislative branches of government. It remains to be seen whether the judicial branch will go along with it (US Supreme Court).

Origins of the Bill of Rights

The Bill of Rights, signed in 1789 by many of the founding fathers of our nation, was based on the Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted in 1776 and authored largely by George Mason, one of the least-recognized revolutionaries who gave rise to a nation of freedom and liberty.

Mason was a strong advocate of not just states' rights, but of individual rights, and without his influence in 1789, we might not even have a Bill of Rights today (and our nation would have slipped into total government tyranny all the sooner). In fact, he openly opposed ratification of the U.S. Constitution unless it contained a series of amendments now known as the Bill of Rights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George...)

SECTION ONE of this Virginia declaration of rights states:

"That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." (http://www.constitution.org/bcp/vir...)

Section Three of the declaration speaks to the duty of the Citizens to abolish abusive government:

"That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community; of all the various modes and forms of government, that is best which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety and is most effectually secured against the danger of maladministration; and that, when any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal."

By any honest measure, today's U.S. government, of course, has overstepped the bounds of its original intent. As Mason wrote over 200 years ago, the People of America now have not merely a right but a duty to "reform, alter or abolish it," to bring government back into alignment with its original purpose -- to protect the rights of the People.

Obama violates his Presidential Oath, sworn before God

Article II, Section I of the United States Constitution spells out the oath of office that every President must take during their swearing in:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

In signing the NDAA law into office, Obama has blatantly and unambiguously violated this sacred oath, meaning that his betrayal is not merely against the American people, but also against the Divine Creator.

Given that the Bill of Rights is an extension of Natural Law which establishes a direct heritage of sovereign power from the Creator to the People, a blatant attack upon the Bill of Rights is, by any account, an attack against the Creator and a violation of universal spiritual principles. Those who attempt to undermine the Bill of Rights are attempting to invalidate the relationship between God and Man, and in doing so, they are identifying themselves as enemies of God and agents of Evil.

Today, as 2012 begins, we are now a nation led by evil, and threatened with total destruction by those who would seek to rule as tyrants. This is America's final hour. We either defend the Republic starting right now, or we lose it forever.

Read the language analysis of WHY and HOW the NDAA applies to American citizens

Many people have been fooled by the obfuscated language of the bill, and they wrongfully believe the NDAA does not apply to American citizens. They have been hoodwinked!

In this follow-up article, I parse the language of the NDAA and explain, in plain language, how and why the NDAA does apply to American citizens:
http://www.naturalnews.com/034538_N...

Also, read this explanation by Rep. Justin Amash, who voted against the bill:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?no...

Make no mistake, folks: The U.S. government has just declared all Americans to be "enemy combatants," and that the USA is now a "battleground" over which the military has total control. We are now a nation living under military dictatorship, whether you realize it or not.

Post-9/11, NSA 'enemies' include us by James Bamford

Post-9/11, NSA 'enemies' include us
Politico - Opinion
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62999_Page3.html
By: James Bamford
September 8, 2011 09:34 PM EDT

Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide.

Within weeks of the attacks, the giant ears of the National Security Agency, always pointed outward toward potential enemies, turned inward on the American public itself. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established 23 years before to ensure that only suspected foreign agents and terrorists were targeted by the NSA, would be bypassed. Telecom companies, required by law to keep the computerized phone records of their customers confidential unless presented with a warrant, would secretly turn them over in bulk to the NSA without ever asking for a warrant.

Around the country, in tall, windowless telecom company buildings known as switches, NSA technicians quietly began installing beam-splitters to redirect duplicate copies of all phone calls and email messages to secret rooms behind electronic cipher locks.

There, NSA software and hardware designed for “deep packet inspection” filtered through the billions of email messages looking for key names, words, phrases and addresses. The equipment also monitored phone conversations and even what pages people view on the Web — the porn sites they visit, the books they buy on Amazon, the social networks they interact with and the text messages they send and receive.

Because the information is collected in real time, attempting to delete history caches from a computer is useless.

At the NSA, thousands of analysts who once eavesdropped on troop movements of enemy soldiers in distant countries were now listening in on the bedroom conversations of innocent Americans in nearby states.

“We were told that we were to listen to all conversations that were intercepted, to include those of Americans,” Adrienne Kinne, a former NSA “voice interceptor,” told me. She was recalled to active duty after Sept. 11.

“Some of those conversations are personal,” she said. “Some even intimate. … I had a real problem with the fact that people were listening to it and that I was listening to it. … When I was on active duty in ’94 to ’98, we would never collect on an American.”

Despite his hollow campaign protests, President Barack Obama has greatly expanded what President George W. Bush began. And through amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Congress largely ratified the secret Bush program.

So much intercepted information is now being collected from “enemies” at home and abroad that, in order to store it all, the agency last year began constructing the ultimate monument to eavesdropping. Rising in a remote corner of Utah, the agency’s gargantuan data storage center will be 1 million square feet, cost nearly $2 billion and likely be capable of eventually holding more than a yottabyte of data — equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

By Sept. 11, 2011, the words of George Orwell in his novel “1984” will have become prophetic. “Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,” he wrote in 1949, long before the Internet. “You have to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.”

On Sept. 10, 2001, however, Winston would have found a radically different society. The NSA, the surveillance equivalent of a nuclear bomb, was allowed to point its massive antennas and satellites only away from the country. Before an American could be targeted, a judge from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would first have to find a link to terrorism or espionage in order to issue a warrant. And installing permanent taps on all of the country’s major communications links would have been impossible.

More than 35 years earlier, one person warned of such a possibility. On Aug. 17, 1975, as America was enjoying a lazy summer watching “Jaws” and “The Exorcist” at the movies, Idaho Sen. Frank Church took his seat on “Meet the Press.” For months, as the first chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Church had been conducting the first in-depth investigation of America’s growing intelligence community.

When he looked into the NSA, he came away shocked by its potential for abuse. Without mentioning the agency’s name — almost forbidden at the time — he nonetheless offered an unsolicited but grave warning:

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter,” Church said. “There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

“I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

Church’s warning then has even more resonance today. In 1975, most people communicated only by telephone and the mail. While the NSA had the technical capability back then to intercept the limited telephone calls sent by satellite, it lacked the capability to monitor the millions of calls transmitted around the country over wires, the predominant method used, or anything sent through the mail.

Today, with everyone constantly communicating over cellphones and email, and spending hours on the Internet, the agency has the ability not just to hear and read what someone says but even to understand what and how they think.

America crossed Church’s proverbial bridge not because of the attacks. It’s been clearly shown that Sept. 11 could have easily been prevented with just the technology at hand — it was caused by human failure, not technological failure.

Rather, it was years of fearmongering that sent everyone rushing across the bridge. Without these draconian measures, we were told, we were in imminent danger of death by terrorist. For the Bush administration, the constant drumbeat of fear was necessary to launch and support the war in Iraq since no real danger existed.

From the outside, America began resembling Deputy Barney Fife from “The Andy Griffith Show,” shaking and trembling and constantly pointing a gun in every direction. There was Homeland Security with its rainbow of colors for security alerts; the weekly warnings of dire attacks, with no indication of time or location, none of which ever turned out to be credible; messages plastered on buses and billboards warning members of the public to keep a close eye on their neighbors and even their family; and body frisks at airports by security thugs looking for forbidden tubes of toothpaste.

Church was also right in his warning that once over the abyss, there is no return. Laws put in place stay in place — even if the reason for the fear is gone or never existed in the first place. And technology always moves forward; it never recedes.

A surveillance system capable of monitoring 10 million people simultaneously this year will be able to monitor 100 million the next year — at probably half the cost. And every time new communications technology appears on the market, rest assured that someone at the NSA has already found a way to monitor it. It’s what the NSA does.

What Church likely never anticipated was the rise of the security-industrial complex, a revolving door between those generating the fears and those profiting from them.

When warning the country of the dangers of an unchained NSA, Church may have been thinking of a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche when he spoke of the abyss:

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that

In the process he does not become a monster

And when you look long into the abyss

The abyss also looks into you.”

James Bamford writes frequently on intelligence and produces documentaries for PBS. His latest book is “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.”

You can give bankers all of the money, but dont you dare feed a hungry person on the street?

Three arrested, accused of illegally feeding homeless
Orlando police say they violated a city ordinance restricting the feedings.

Members of Orlando Food Not Bombs were arrested Wednesday when police said they violated a city ordinance by feeding the homeless in Lake Eola Park.


Read the full story at the Orlando Sentinel site here:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/crime/os-homeless-feedings-arrests-20110601,0,7226362.story