On September 3rd, 2010
Courtesy Of "The Foreign Policy Journal"
On June 10, 2010, Mr. Lieberman, Ms. Collins and Mr. Carper introduced Bill S. 3480to the Senate for consideration. The bill was read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. If passed, Bill S. 3480 would “amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and other laws to enhance the security and resiliency of the cyber and communications infrastructure of the United States.”
Short titled as the Act of “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010,” the new bill defines “Cyberspace” as “the interdependent network of information infrastructure, and includes the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers in critical industries.” Similarly“Incident” means “an occurrence that – (A) actually or potentially jeopardizes – (i) the information security of information infrastructure; or (ii) the information that information infrastructure processes, stores, receives, or transmits; or (B) constitutes a violation or threat of violation of security policies, security procedures, or acceptable use policies applicable to information infrastructure.”
A more common term for “Incident” is “Cyberwar.” According to Howard Schmidt, the“Cybersecurity Czar” of President Barack Obama, “there is no Cyberwar.” Michael McConnell, the former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) promotes the opposite view: “The United States is fighting a Cyberwar today, and we are losing.” The conflict between these contrasting views does not spring from the disputes relating to the “vulnerability of the United States’ network infrastructure.” Rather, it underlies different perspectives on how much government supervision is allowed in the interest of protecting network infrastructure against cyber attacks.
Cyber security experts worry that “the NSA and the military will overstep privacy boundaries if all cyber attacks are considered to be Cyberwar.” The author of Inside Cyber Warfare, Jeffrey Carr believes that “a war cannot be fought entirely incyberspace, but rather that cyber warfare techniques are a tool that the military can use to gain the advantage in a conflict” – “any type of war occurs” when “metal is flying through the air.”
Similar views have been expressed by Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who summarizes the situation as follows: “Our argument is that we have to be very careful about allowing a single, secret, unaccountable government agency, which has been fighting for 25 years to take control of Internet security, to become the dominant authority for the Internet, which is what will happen if you accept the proposition that the threat of Cyberwar has not been grossly exaggerated.”
Grossly exaggerated or not, Jason Ditz thinks the introduction of Bill S. 3480 will allow “a massive power grab over the Internet under the guise of ‘national security’.” Given the broad range of meanings for “Incident,” and the popularity of another term dubbed as “Cyberwar,” one can imagine that a “National Cyber Emergency” can be induced and then used as a pretext to justify the power grab over the Internet.
Senator Joe Lieberman, the chairman of the U.S. Homeland Security Committee, and the co-sponsor of Bill S. 3480 considers the Internet a “dangerous place with electronic pipelines that run directly into everything from our personal bank accounts to key infrastructure to government and industrial secrets.” He argues that the Bill is necessary to “preserve those networks and assets and our country and protect our people.” Using selectively worded language – “cyber warriors, cyber spies, cyber terrorists and cyber criminals” – the architects of the Bill re-enforce the notion of Cyberwar, arguing that U.S. economic security, national security and public safety are “all at risk from new kinds of enemies.”
Another co-sponsors of Bill S. 3480, Senator Susan Collins declared: “We cannot afford to wait for a cyber-9/11.” Parallels to 9/11 – a false flag operation, no doubt – are very helpful in determining the true purpose of the Bill. Since the attacks of 9/11Joe Lieberman, the Independent senator from Connecticut has introduced legislation that has gradually “eroded constitutional rights” in the U.S. Maidhc Ó Cathaildescribes it thus: “If the United States looks increasingly like a police state, Senator Lieberman has to take much of the credit for it.” One month after 9/11, on October 11, 2001, Joe Lieberman introduced S. 1534 that established the Department of Homeland Security.
According to Maidhc Ó Cathail, Michael Chertoff, a Zionist faithful and the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division before and after 9/11, might have been behind the deportation for “immigration violations” of the 200 Israelis arrested for “suspicious activities.” Citing the DEA report, Ó Cathail writes: “These Israeli ‘art students’ had ‘recently served in the Israeli military, the majority in intelligence, electronic signal intercept, or explosive ordnance units’.”
Quoting Antiwar.com editor and the author of The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection Justin Raimondo – “the probability that these are graduates of the Mossad School of Art … is certainly high” – Ó Cathail concludes that as Benjamin Netanyahu stated a day after the attacks of 9/11, “the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans was ‘very good’ for Israel.” “The mass murder was very good for an emerging sector of the Israeli economy” – Israel’s “homeland security.”
Naomi Klein, in her July 2, 2007 article “Laboratory for a Fortressed World,” connects the boom in some sectors of Israeli economy to the events of 9/11: “Within three years, large parts of Israel’s tech economy had been radically repurposed. … Israel now sends $1.2 billion in ‘defence’ products to the United States – up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defence products – well over a billion more than it received in U.S. military aid.”
According to Klein the growth is more evident in the sector of “homeland security”: “Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion – an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems – precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.”
Israel’s expanding “homeland security” sector means much more than sheer increase in the sale of technology. Besides “tools and technologies,” it exports the mentality of a police state. Klein puts it very eloquently: “Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the ‘flat world’ to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom – a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.”
It is no coincidence that Michael Chertoff, the author of the Patriot Act, Senator Joe Lieberman the sponsor of Bill S. 1534 that established the Department of Homeland Security and Senator Arlen Specter, the co-sponsor of Bill S. 1534 were all Jewish Zionists. “The Department of Homeland Security, the Lieberman- Specter brainchildthen headed by Michael Chertoff, had become one of Israel’s most reliable markets.”
Naomi Klein, using Friedman’s pronouncement, writes: “Israel had discovered oil.”“The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target ‘suspects’.” The “field-testing” of these devices took place in the Occupied Territories, often compared to “open-air prisons.” Klein calls these “laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security state are being field-tested.” She explains that “Palestinians – whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling “Hamasistan” – are no longer just targets; they are guinea pigs.”
One has to agree with Klein’s evaluation – “fear … is the ultimate renewable resource” in a fortressed state. Maidhc Ó Cathail’s observation – “In order to exploit that resource to the full, Israel needed the likes of Chertoff, Lieberman, Schumer and Specter to hype the concept of ‘homeland security’ in the United States” – is very fitting. But his concluding questions – “Americans … should have been asking a couple of pertinent questions: Which homeland? And whose security?” – are more appropriate.
That these questions were never asked, can be deduced from Bill S. 3480 , “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010,” introduced to the Senate on June 10 by Lieberman, Collins and Carper. The “merchants of fear” now hope to create a fortressed state against imaginary “cyber warriors, cyber spies, cyber terrorists and cyber criminals” in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” But will they succeed? To answer this question, one has to examine the basis of American democracy.
In a resolution authored by James Madison in collaboration with Thomas Jefferson, passed by Virginia legislature on December 24, 1798, against the “Alien and Sedition Acts” passed by Congress the previous year, the General Assembly protested against “the palpable and alarming infractions of the Constitution.” The first infraction related to the “power nowhere delegated to the federal government, and which by uniting legislative and judicial powers to those of executive, subverts the general principles of free government; as well as the particular organization, and positive provisions of the federal constitution.”
The second infraction related to the “power not delegated by the constitution, but on the contrary, expressly and positively forbidden by one of the amendments thereto; a power, which more than any other, ought to produce universal alarm, because it is levelled against that right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed, the only effectual guardian of every other right.”
Free examination of “public characters and measures” and “free communication” were rightfully deemed as the “effectual guardians of every other right.” But since the“Global War on Terror” these rights have been suppressed through consistent attacks at the highest level. The shroud of executive secrecy has enveloped consecutive administrations in an invisible cloak that cannot be penetrated by Congress or the public. Pertinent information is hidden away from public scrutiny through red tape and bureaucracy.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), signed into law on July 4, 1966 by President Lyndon Johnson should have given additional guarantees for rights already enshrined in the constitution. But as Bill Moyers, President Johnson’s Press Secretary states, despite his “almost lyrical” language – Johnson expressed “a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people’s right to know is cherished and guarded” – President Johnson “had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony.”
According to Moyers, President Johnson “hated the very idea of the Freedom of Information Act; hated the thought of journalists rummaging in government closets; hated them challenging the official view of reality. He dug in his heels and even threatened to pocket veto the bill after it reached the White House. Only the courage and political skill of a Congressman named John Moss got the bill passed at all, and that was after a twelve-year battle against his elders in Congress who blinked every time the sun shined in the dark corridors of power. They managed to cripple the bill Moss had drafted. And even then, only some last-minute calls to LBJ [Lyndon Baines Johnson] from a handful of newspaper editors overcame the President’s reluctance; he signed ‘the damned thing’, as he called it … he signed it, and then went out to claim credit for it.”
Moyers evaluates the recent restraints on the people’s right to know: “It’s always a fight, to find out what the government doesn’t want us to know. It’s a fight we’re once again losing. Not only has George W. Bush eviscerated the Presidential Records Act and FOIA, he has clamped a lid on public access across the board. It’s not just historians and journalists he wants locked out; it’s Congress … and it’s you, the public and your representatives.” From Lyndon B. Johnson to George W. Bush, every president attempted to cut government transparency. But what is it that they want to hide?
John Perkins, the former chief economist for Chas. T. Main Inc. and the author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, explains that the present political system imitates the workings of an empire with a single difference: instead of an emperor, we have elected officials that represent the interests of banks and corporations. This“clandestine empire” is run by individuals, in charge of a “Corporatocracy” – to use Perkins’ term. The “Corporatocracy” that includes the World Bank, the IMF, the Federal Reserve, JP Morgan Chase, the World Trade Organization, the CIA, Halliburton, Exxon Mobil, among others, forges government policies, controls the media, and the politicians.
The banks, the corporations and the governments they support are the true masters of the people that “basically work under one primary assumption” – “they must maximize profits, regardless of the social and environmental cost.” The common people, “the wage slaves” are kept in line through “economic slavery,” “running on a hamster wheel, with millions of others, in effect powering an empire that truly benefits only the elite at the top of the pyramid.” Of the world’s top100 economies – as based on annual GDP – 51are corporations, and 47 of those 51 are U.S.-based. Wal-Mart, General Motors and Exxon Mobil “are more economically powerful” than Poland, Norway, Indonesia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Finland and many others.
According to Jim Garrison, the president of the State of the World Forum, “Taken cumulatively, the integration of the world as a whole, particularly in terms of economic globalization, and the mythic qualities of ‘free-market’ capitalism, represents a veritable ‘empire’ in its own right … Few have been able to escape the ‘structural adjustments’ and ‘conditionalities’ of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the arbitrations of the World Trade Organization, those international financial institutions that, however inadequate, still determine what economic globalization means … Such is the power of globalization that within our lifetime we are likely to see the integration, even if unevenly, of all national economies in the world into a single global, free market system.”
As globalization integrates national economies into a single free market system, “the world is being taken over by a handful of business powers who dominate the natural resources we need to live, while controlling the money we need to obtain these resources. The end result will be world monopoly based not on human life but financial and corporate power.” The movers and shakers of globalization, the elite at the top of the pyramid, are the “self-appointed guardians of the status quo.” They hold on to power by the “process of manipulation,” through the use of “debt,” “bribery,” “political overthrow” and more recently, the fear of terrorism.
Pierre-Henry Bunel, who worked for French Military Intelligence writes: “The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity … The country behind this propaganda is the U.S.” Thanks to the so-called Global War on Terrorism, in 2007, the Department of Defence (DOD) received $161.8 billion. Just as Israel enjoyed a boom in the “homeland security” sector of its economy, the Department of Defence in the U.S. greatly benefited from the most profitable business ever –the “Global War on Terror.” In reality, the number of people killed through terrorist acts – “68 Americans [are] killed each year by terrorism” – is twice as low as the number of people dying from “peanut allergies.”
Concomitant to the “Global War on Terror,” is Homeland Security’s Advisory System that keeps the public busy by colourful signs signifying different levels of “danger”: Red – Severe, Orange – High, Yellow – Elevated, Blue – Guarded, Green – Low. Ironically, with the exception of orange, the other colours are borrowed from Newton’s Rainbow model of 1672 that included Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and Violet in that order. However, Homeland Security’s twisted Rainbow is costly. Declaring war “against a fantasy” means that the war can go on for as long as the elite at the top of the pyramid, chooses it to go on.
Unlike conventional threats, the threat of terrorism is created through fantasy. But“the fear of imagined threats” can push the agenda of politically powerful special interests. The fear of non-existent Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) prompted the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Similarly, “the idea of a hidden organized web of terror” – also a fantasy – pressed the invasion of Afghanistan. As for “the first bin Laden myth” and “the first Al-Qaeda myth,” these were created through the help of Jamal Ahmed Mohamed al-Fadl, an ex-associate of bin Laden, who had stolen over a $100,000 from bin Laden and was asked for a reimbursement.
The systematic use of terror-fantasies intimidate, frighten and prepare the ground for more terror. The 9/11 terror-fantasy – now recognized as a false flag operation – “intended to authorize the doctrines and funds needed for a new level of imperial globalization,” which is exactly what it achieved. The politicians that disseminated the notion of terrorism, sold their hallucinations to the world creating “today’s strange fantasy of fear,” while promoting the agenda of something far more sinister. By “hypnotically repeating” the words “terrorism,” “terrorist threat,” “Al-Qaeda” and the like, “the U.S. ruling class, the ruling elite” propagated – to use historian Webster Tarpley’s words – a “monstrous myth” that created “an enemy image,” designed to provide social cohesion in a police state.
“The techniques used by Governments to manipulate public opinion in order to further an agenda” become transparently clear when one compares the Embassy bombings in Kenya to other terrorist acts that followed. Ted Gunderson, a former FBI Chief of LA, Dallas and Memphis operations, thinks that the number of people killed in these incidents was “not enough to pass the [anti-terror] legislation.” On April 19, 1995 during the Oklahoma City bombings, 168 people were killed – a number large enough to prompt anti-terror legislation that took away many of the “constitutional rights and civil liberties.”
On July 7, 2005 three trains and a bus were bombed in London England, killing 56 people. The same morning an “Anti-Terror Exercise” was taking place, as well, dealing with “the exact same bombing scenario, at the exact same train stations, at virtually the same time.” David Shayler, a former British Intelligence Agent (MI-5), does not think these were coincidences. He thinks, similar to the 9/11, the Anti-Terrorist drill in London was simply “a cover” for “operations orchestrated … by the state.”
Since September 11, “military spending has increased by 100 billion a year in the U.S. Nearly all of the Bill of Rights has been subverted. Two ‘pre-emptive’ wars, killing over 800,000 civilians … have been waged.” But there is more – “they have used the war to justify the restriction of congressional power and the assumption of dictatorial procedures on the part of the president and his appointees. … We cannot allow thenatural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.” But who are these “other people”?
Theodore Roosevelt explains: “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.” John F. Hylan, a former Mayor of New York City further clarifies the issue: “The real menace of our republic is the invisible government … the little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually runs the United States government for their own selfish purposes.” Franklin D. Roosevelt elaborates on the matter as well: “The real truth of the matter is that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government since the days of Andrew Jackson.” If James A. Garfield is right: “Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.”
One of the most lucrative ventures for bankers is war. Smedley D. Buttler writes: “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” Smedley D. Buttler estimated that WWI “yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits” and that amount “went into a very few.” Similarly, during WWII Union Banking Corporation of New York City partly financed Hitler’s rise to power and laundered money for the Nazis. The director and vice-president of this bank was President George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Sheldon Bush, who later (from 1952 to 1963) represented Connecticut at the Senate.
The Vietnam War that claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans and 3,000,000 Vietnamese was financed by David Rockefeller, who “funded both sides of the conflict.” In reality, “the Vietnam War was never meant to be won.” It was designed to be sustained for as long as possible – the loss of life was of no consequence, and the profits were immense. American leaders have learnt their lesson from the most vicious of men – Adolf Hitler. After burning down the German parliament building, the Reichstag and blaming it on “communist terrorists,” Hitler then passed the Enabling Act, which eradicated the German Constitution. Many years later, the Americans passed the USA Patriot Act, an Anti-Terror legislation in response to 9/11 that took away the civil liberties of the American people.
As Hitler had argued the necessity of creating the Gestapo, the elite at the top of the pyramid justified its actions by virtually the same rhetoric: “An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation. We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland.” Whether George W. Bush borrowed from Adolf Hitler or not is of little significance. The use of the same phrase signifies something deeper than simple plagiarism; it means that both men operated on similar principles.
While the public at large is intentionally misinformed and kept in utter darkness through controlled media and lack of transparency, “the men behind the curtain” strip the people of their “constitutional rights and civil liberties.” Aaron Russo, a one-time close friend of Nicholas Rockefeller, revealed the real plan behind the war on terror: “By having this war on terror, you can never win it … so you can always keep on taking people’s liberties away. The media can convince everybody that it’s real.” Mr. Rockefeller’s ultimate goal is “to get everybody in this world chipped with an RFID chip.” The chip, an essential element of control, will allow the manipulators to identify and eliminate potential opposition to their unlimited power over the world. The “fear campaign” will make the act of chipping seem necessary, thus enabling a voluntary mass chipping of the population.
“The last thing the power establishment wants is a conscious, informed public, capable of critical thinking.” Useful methods of preventing this are mass entertainment, drugs, alcohol, and above all, declining educational standards. The elite does not want the public to question, to demand accountability, to think. In a letter of August 4, 1822 addressed to W. T. Barry, James Madison wrote: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
The power of knowledge is denied to the people. Unless we understand the consequence of deliberately perpetuated ignorance, “the men behind the curtain” will continue manipulating the public, and new wars will be drawn up behind closed doors at the peril of common people and the benefit of the elite. A fortressed state and anapartheid planet will soon become a reality. As for the people, the RFID chip will transform everyone into a guinea pig, living not in “the land of the free and the home of the brave” but in a world modeled after “Hamasistan.”
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