A Repeating History Of Indefinite Detention

What lessons has the United States learned from Japanese internment? Following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forced from their homes and incarcerated in military-guarded camps from 1942-1946. Although the majority of those interned were US citizens, they were not notified of their charges, nor were they guaranteed the right to a trial. 

Now the descendants of Japanese-American internees argue that the United States is repeating history with the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act and its provision for the indefinite detention of US citizens. 

Read more: 

NDAA & Incarceration of Japanese Americans - Repeating History 



Japanese Internment During WW II:



Japanese Relocation - U.S. Gov't Explanation 1942:



Understanding The 2013 NDAA: Part 2- Section 1029:



Chris Hedges: NDAA Lawsuit Update:

How U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan's Attack On Pearl Harbor

By Robert Higgs
Courtesy Of "The Mises Institute"

Many people are misled by formalities. They assume, for example, that the United States went to war against Germany and Japan only after its declarations of war against these nations in December 1941. In truth, the United States had been at war for a long time before making these declarations. Its war making took a variety of forms. For example, the U.S. navy conducted "shoot [Germans] on sight" convoys - convoys that might include British ships — in the North Atlantic along the greater part the shipping route from the United States to Great Britain, even though German U-boats had orders to refrain (and did refrain) from initiating attacks on U.S. shipping. The United States and Great Britain entered into arrangements to pool intelligence, combine weapons development, test military equipment jointly, and undertake other forms of war-related cooperation. The U.S. military actively cooperated with the British military in combat operations against the Germans, for example, by alerting the British navy of aerial or marine sightings of German submarines, which the British then attacked. The U.S. government undertook in countless ways to provide military and other supplies and assistance to the British, the French, and the Soviets, who were fighting the Germans. The U.S. government also provided military and other supplies and assistance, including warplanes and pilots, to the Chinese, who were at war with Japan.[1] The U.S. military actively engaged in planning with the British, the British Commonwealth countries, and the Dutch East Indies for future combined combat operations against Japan. Most important, the U.S. government engaged in a series of increasingly stringent economic warfare measures that pushed the Japanese into a predicament that U.S. authorities well understood would probably provoke them to attack U.S. territories and forces in the Pacific region in a quest to secure essential raw materials that the Americans, British, and Dutch (government in exile) had embargoed. [2]

Consider these summary statements by George Victor, by no means a Roosevelt basher, in his well documented book The Pearl Harbor Myth.

Roosevelt had already led the United States into war with Germany in the spring of 1941—into a shooting war on a small scale. From then on, he gradually increased U.S. military participation. Japan's attack on December 7 enabled him to increase it further and to obtain a war declaration. Pearl Harbor is more fully accounted for as the end of a long chain of events, with the U.S. contribution reflecting a strategy formulated after France fell. . . . In the eyes of Roosevelt and his advisers, the measures taken early in 1941 justified a German declaration of war on the United States—a declaration that did not come, to their disappointment. . . . Roosevelt told his ambassador to France, William Bullitt, that U.S. entry into war against Germany was certain but must wait for an "incident," which he was "confident that the Germans would give us." . . . Establishing a record in which the enemy fired the first shot was a theme that ran through Roosevelt's tactics. . . . He seems [eventually] to have concluded—correctly as it turned out—that Japan would be easier to provoke into a major attack on the Unites States than Germany would be. [3]

The claim that Japan attacked the United States without provocation was . . . typical rhetoric. It worked because the public did not know that the administration had expected Japan to respond with war to anti-Japanese measures it had taken in July 1941. . . . Expecting to lose a war with the United States—and lose it disastrously—Japan's leaders had tried with growing desperation to negotiate. On this point, most historians have long agreed. Meanwhile, evidence has come out that Roosevelt and Hull persistently refused to negotiate. . . . Japan . . . offered compromises and concessions, which the United States countered with increasing demands. . . . It was after learning of Japan's decision to go to war with the United States if the talks "break down" that Roosevelt decided to break them off. . . . According to Attorney General Francis Biddle, Roosevelt said he hoped for an "incident" in the Pacific to bring the United States into the European war.[4]

 These facts and numerous others that point in the same direction are for the most part anything but new; many of them have been available to the public since the 1940s. As early as 1953, anyone might have read a collection of heavily documented essays on various aspects of U.S. foreign policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes, that showed the numerous ways in which the U.S. government bore responsibility for the country's eventual engagement in World War II—showed, in short, that the Roosevelt administration wanted to get the country into the war and worked craftily along various avenues to ensure that, sooner or later, it would get in, preferably in a way that would unite public opinion behind the war by making the United States appear to have been the victim of an aggressor's unprovoked attack.[5] As Secretary of War Henry Stimson testified after the war, "we needed the Japanese to commit the first overt act." [6]

At present, however, seventy years after these events, probably not one American in 1,000—nay, not one in 10,000—has an inkling of any of this history. So effective has been the pro-Roosevelt, pro-American, pro-World War II faction that in this country it has utterly dominated teaching and popular writing about U.S. engagement in the "Good War."

In the late nineteenth century, Japan's economy began to grow and to industrialize rapidly. Because Japan has few natural resources, many of its burgeoning industries had to rely on imported raw materials, such as coal, iron ore or steel scrap, tin, copper, bauxite, rubber, and petroleum. Without access to such imports, many of which came from the United States or from European colonies in Southeast Asia, Japan's industrial economy would have ground to a halt. By engaging in international trade, however, the Japanese had built a moderately advanced industrial economy by 1941.

At the same time, they also built a military-industrial complex to support an increasingly powerful army and navy. These armed forces allowed Japan to project its power into various places in the Pacific and East Asia, including Korea and northern China, much as the United States used its growing industrial might to equip armed forces that projected U.S. power into the Caribbean, Latin America, and even as far away as the Philippine Islands.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, the U.S. government fell under the control of a man who disliked the Japanese and harbored a romantic affection for the Chinese because, some writers have speculated, Roosevelt's ancestors had made money in the China trade.[7] Roosevelt also disliked the Germans in general and Adolf Hitler in particular, and he tended to favor the British in his personal relations and in world affairs. He did not pay much attention to foreign policy, however, until his New Deal began to peter out in 1937. Thereafter he relied heavily on foreign policy to fulfill his political ambitions, including his desire for reelection to an unprecedented third term.

When Germany began to rearm and to seek Lebensraumaggressively in the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration cooperated closely with the British and the French in measures to oppose German expansion. After World War II commenced in 1939, this U.S. assistance grew ever greater and included such measures as the so-called destroyer deal and the deceptively named Lend-Lease program. In anticipation of U.S. entry into the war, British and U.S. military staffs secretly formulated plans for joint operations. U.S. forces sought to create a war-justifying incident by cooperating with the British navy in attacks on German U-boats in the northern Atlantic, but Hitler refused to take the bait, thus denying Roosevelt the pretext he craved for making the United States a full-fledged, declared belligerent—a belligerence that the great majority of Americans opposed.

In June 1940, Henry L. Stimson, who had been secretary of war under William Howard Taft and secretary of state under Herbert Hoover, became secretary of war again. Stimson was a lion of the Anglophile, northeastern upper crust and no friend of the Japanese. In support of the so-called Open Door Policy for China, Stimson favored the use of economic sanctions to obstruct Japan's advance in Asia. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes vigorously endorsed this policy. Roosevelt hoped that such sanctions would goad the Japanese into making a rash mistake by launching a war against the United States, which would bring in Germany because Japan and Germany were allied.

The Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, accordingly imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan. In 1939, the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. "On July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials." Under this authority, "[o]n July 31, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted." Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo, effective October 16, "on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere." Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt "froze Japanese assets in the United States, thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as still were in commercial flow to Japan." [8] The British and the Dutch followed suit, embargoing exports to Japan from their colonies in Southeast Asia.

Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war. Having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the American leaders knew, among many other things, what Foreign Minister Teijiro Toyoda had communicated to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura on July 31: "Commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas."[9]

Because American cryptographers had also broken the Japanese naval code, the leaders in Washington also knew that Japan's "measures" would include an attack on Pearl Harbor.[10] Yet they withheld this critical information from the commanders in Hawaii, who might have headed off the attack or prepared themselves to defend against it. That Roosevelt and his chieftains did not ring the tocsin makes perfect sense: after all, the impending attack constituted precisely what they had been seeking for a long time. As Stimson confided to his diary after a meeting of the War Cabinet on November 25, "The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves." After the attack, Stimson confessed that "my first feeling was of relief . . . that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people."[11]

Notes

[1] See "Flying Tigers," Wikipedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Tigers.

[2] Robert Higgs, "How U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan's Attack on Pearl Harbor," The Freeman 56 (May 2006): 36-37.

[3] George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2007), pp. 179-80, 184, 185, emphasis added.

[4] Ibid ., pp. 15, 202, 240.

[5] See Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes (Caldwell, Id.: Caxton Printers, 1953).

[6] Stimson as quoted in Victor, Pearl Harbor Myth, p. 105.

[7] Harry Elmer Barnes, "Summary and Conclusions," in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1953), 682-83.

[8] All quotations in this paragraph are from George Morgenstern, "The Actual Road to Pearl Harbor," in Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 322-23, 327-28.

[9] Quoted in Morgenstern, "The Actual Road to Pearl Harbor," 329.

[10] Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Free Press, 2000).

[11] Quoted in Morgenstern, "The Actual Road to Pearl Harbor," 343, 384.

A Stasi For America

Illustration by Michael Hogue


Enemies: A History of the FBI, Tim Weiner, Random House, 560 pages


By JAMES BOVARD
May 30, 2012
Courtesy Of "The American Conservative"

A ripple of protest swept across the Internet in late March after the disclosure that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was teaching its agents that “the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” This maxim was inculcated as part of FBI counterterrorism training. The exposure of the training material—sparked by a series of articles by Wired.com’s Spencer Ackerman—spurred the ritual declaration by an FBI spokesman that “mistakes were made, and we are correcting those mistakes.” No FBI officials were sanctioned or fired for teaching lawmen that they were above the law.

At least the FBI has been consistent. Since its founding in 1908, the bureau has rarely let either the statute book or the Constitution impede its public service. Tim Weiner, the author of a superb exposé of the CIA (Legacy of Ashes) has delivered a riveting chronology of some of the FBI’s biggest crimes with his new book, Enemies.

The FBI was born in deceit. Congress had prohibited Theodore Roosevelt’s administration from creating a separate agency of federal investigators for fear that the new hirees would trample the Constitution. Rep. George Waldo, a New York Republican, warned that it would be a “great blow to freedom if there should arise in this country any such great central secret service bureau as there is in Russia.” But Attorney General Charles Bonaparte—a direct descendent of the French dictator—created the bureau by his own edict, shuffling funds from the Justice Department’s expense account to bankroll the new operation.

The bureau was small potatoes until Woodrow Wilson dragged the U.S. into World War I. With one fell swoop, the number of dangerous Americans increased by perhaps twentyfold. The Espionage Act of 1917 made it easy to jail anyone who criticized the war or the government. In September 1918, the bureau, working with local police and private vigilantes, seized more than 50,000 suspected draft dodgers off the streets and out of the restaurants of New York, Newark, and Jersey City. The Justice Department was embarrassed when the vast majority of young men who had been arrested turned out to be innocent.

In January 1920, J. Edgar Hoover—the 25-year-old chief of the bureau’s Radical Division—was the point man for the “Palmer Raids.” Up to 10,000 suspected Reds and radicals were seized. (The bureau carefully avoided keeping an accurate count of detainees.) Attorney General Palmer used the massive roundups to propel his presidential candidacy. The operation took a drubbing, however, after an insolent judge demanded that the Justice Department provide evidence as to why individuals were arrested. Federal judge George Anderson complained that the government had created a “spy system” that “destroys trust and confidence and propagates hate. A mob is a mob whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers, and the vicious classes.”

After the debacle of the Palmer raids, the bureau devoted its attention to the nation’s real enemies: the U.S. Congress. The bureau targeted “senators whom the Attorney General saw as threats to America. The Bureau was breaking into their offices and homes, intercepting their mail, and tapping their telephones.” The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was illegally targeted because the bureau feared he might support diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia.

After President Warren Harding died in August 1923, the bureau’s political espionage was exposed. The chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division urged Congress to “get rid of this Bureau of Investigation as organized.” The new attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, warned, “A secret police system may become a menace to free government and free institutions because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power which are not always quickly comprehended or understood.” Stone fired the bureau’s chief, and Hoover, who was number two in the agency, pledged to cease the abuses. But the FBI soon resumed its machinations.

Hollywood teamed with the Roosevelt adminsitration to whip up support for a war on crime in the 1930s, and Hoover became the face of federal law enforcement. While Hoover stood as an icon of law and order, his men became experts at installing wiretaps and conducting “black bag” burglaries, often including the planting of listening devices. By the late 1930s, Weiner notes, “At the highest levels of power in Washington, an awareness dawned that Hoover might be listening to private conversations. This sense that the FBI was omnipresent was its own kind of power.” After the FBI tapped the home telephone of a Supreme Court clerk, “Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes suspected that Hoover had wired the conference room where the justices met to decide cases.”

While FDR welcomed the dirt the FBI delivered to him, Attorney General Robert Jackson noted in a secret memo, “The FBI is the subject of frequent attack as a Gestapo.” Shortly after taking office, President Harry Truman made a similar comment in his diary: “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail… . This must stop.” But Hoover outfoxed Truman and continued building his empire. Hoover correctly perceived that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations—especially the State Department—had been heavily infiltrated by Soviet spies. The FBI nailed some of the double-agents who provided Stalin with key information to build atomic weapons.

In 1950, three months after the start of the Korean War, Congress passed the Internal Security Act, which authorized mass detentions of suspected subversives. Hoover compiled a list of more than 20,000 “potentially or actually dangerous” Americans who could be seized and locked away at the president’s command. “Congress secretly financed the creation of six of these [detention] camps in the 1950s,” Weiner notes. Hoover specified that “the hearing procedure” for the detentions “will not be bound by the rules of evidence.”

The more power the FBI captured, the more craven Congress became. “Congress fawned over Hoover during his annual appearances before the leaders of the judiciary and appropriations committees,” Weiner notes. Hoover fed buckets of leaks to favored politicians, helping spur the rise of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy.

From 1956 through 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to smear innocent people by portraying them as government informants, to sic the IRS on people, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and other organizations. FBI agents also busied themselves forging “poison pen” letters to wreck activists’ marriages. FBI agents were encouraged to conduct interviews with antiwar protestors to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.” COINTELPRO was only exposed after a handful of activists burglarized an FBI office in a Philadelphia suburb, seized FBI files, and leaked the damning documents to the media.

 While Weiner’s history of the FBI’s first half-century is masterful, he downplays or excludes some of the bureau’s worst modern abuses. His less-than-a-paragraph thumbnail summary of Waco could have been written by the FBI Office of Public Affairs: “The FBI had used tear gas against the barricaded and heavily armed group, giving its leader the apocalypse he desired.” Weiner notes that 80 Davidians “died in the fire that followed.”

He neglects to mention that the CS gas was delivered via 54-ton tanks driven by FBI agents. The tanks smashed through much of the Davidians’ home and intentionally collapsed 25 percent of the building on top of the huddled residents. The FBI knew the Davidians were lighting and heating their residence with candles and kerosene lamps and had bales of hay stacked around the windows. The FBI also knew that “accumulating [CS] dust may explode when exposed to spark or open flame,” as a U.S. Army field manual warned. Six years after the assault, news leaked that the FBI had fired incendiary tear gas cartridges into the Davidians’ home prior to a fire erupting. Attorney General Janet Reno, furious over the FBI’s deceit on this key issue, sent U.S. marshals to raid FBI headquarters to search for more Waco evidence. From start to finish, the FBI brazenly lied about what it did at Waco—with one exception. On the day after the Waco fire, FBI on-scene commander Larry Potts explained the rationale for the FBI’s final assault: “Those people thumbed their nose at law enforcement.”

Weiner justly excoriates Louis Freeh as one of the FBI’s most inept directors. The FBI’s pervasive failures prior to 9/11 “contributed to the United States becoming, in effect, a sanctuary for radical terrorists,” according to a congressional investigation. Freeh had promised Congress in 1997 that he would “double the ‘shoe leather’” for counterterrorism investigations. But walking was no substitute for thinking.

The FBI’s ability to decipher terrorist plots was thwarted by its profound aversion toward modern technology. Though Congress had deluged the FBI with almost $2 billion to upgrade its computers, many FBI agents on 9/11 had eight-year-old machines that were incapable of searching the web or sending email. One FBI agent observed that the bureau ethos is that “real men don’t type. The only thing a real agent needs is a notebook, a pen and gun, and with those three things you can conquer the world… . The computer revolution just passed us by” because of that mindset. (FBI computer upgrades continue to flounder, billions of dollars and a decade later.) As usual, the FBI’s failures did not prevent the agency from receiving vastly more power and funding after the disastrous attacks.

At times, Weiner is like a prosecuting attorney who marshals a vast array of evidence of perfidy—and then suddenly announces that the defendant’s good intentions absolve all his crimes. Weiner declares, “Over the decades, the Bureau has best served the cause of national security by bending and breaking the law.”

But many of the FBI’s illicit operations were complete disasters. Hoover perpetually falsely assured presidents that the Soviets or other communist regimes were bankrolling the civil rights movement. Hoover’s reports also fed the fantasies and paranoia of both LBJ and Nixon that the communists were behind the antiwar movement, thereby helping deepen and perpetuate the Vietnam quagmire.

Hoover pioneered the art of assuming that the bureau was entitled to use any powers that had been delegated to it by a president or attorney general. The Supreme Court repeatedly ruled that warrantless wiretaps were unconstitutional. Hoover found one shady pretext after another to continue breaking the law. FDR authorized Hoover to use any means necessary to go after fascists, communists, or other subversives, and Hoover ever after cited that “authority” for black-bag jobs, bugging bedrooms, and other abuses.

Former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach explained to a Senate Committee in 1975 how the FBI justified scorning the law:

As far as Mr. Hoover was concerned, it was sufficient for the Bureau if at any time any Attorney General had authorized [a particular] activity in any circumstances. In fact, it was often sufficient if any Attorney General had written something which could be construed to authorize it or had been informed in some one of hundreds of memoranda of some facts from which he could conceivably have inferred the possibility of such an activity.

Hoover conveyed this attitude to his agents, and they acted accordingly. After COINTELPRO abuses were exposed, two top FBI officials were convicted for “black bag” jobs and other abuses. (President Reagan gave them full pardons.) Weiner recounts the justification offered by the FBI’s chief of intelligence, Edward Miller, who “took his argument from the common law of centuries gone by. A man’s home is his castle, he conceded. But no man can maintain a castle against the King.”

It was bizarre that any American could attribute such a doctrine to the common law. The English in the 1600s fought a civil war, executed one king, and deposed another to banish that notion from their land. William Pitt, speaking in Parliament in 1763, famously declared: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. … [T]he storm may enter—the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter.” The English common law was adapted as the foundation of American jurisprudence at the time of this nation’s founding, and Pitt’s dicta helped guide American courts.

But the FBI long operated on a presumption that the law did not apply to the king—or anyone the king designated to break the law. FBI badges were presumed to provide the same exoneration that Cardinal Richelieu reputedly gave agents sent on dastardly deeds: “The Bearer of This Letter Has Acted Under My Orders and for the Good of the State.”

The “except for the king” theory of law has mightily expanded since 9/11. Justice Department lawyer John Yoo assured the Bush White House that the president was “free from the constraints of the Fourth Amendment” and its prohibition of unreasonable, warrantless searches. The Obama administration has taken up the same tune with its contortions on the president’s prerogative to order the killing of Americans without a trial or other judicial niceties.

 The biggest surprise in Enemies is Weiner’s lionization of current FBI director Robert Mueller, who took over in 2001. Mueller earned his halo from Weiner for his refusal in April 2004 to rubberstamp the extension of the post-9/11 wiretapping regime. Bush purportedly modified his “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” and Mueller stayed contentedly on the job. Without knowing the details of the policy change, it is unclear why Mueller is sainted. The revised system continued vacuuming up thousands of Americans’ phone calls and emails and was widely condemned as illegal after the New York Times exposed it in December 2005.

Mueller is portrayed as a steadfast defender of liberty in part because of the just-released 460-page FBI guideline for running intelligence operations, which Weiner labels the “first realistic operating manual for running a secret intelligence service in an open democracy.” The new rules require “rigorous obedience to constitutional principles.” Sounds good—but at the same time, the FBI was teaching its agents behind closed doors that they have “the ability to bend or suspend the law.”

We have probably not seen the tip of the iceberg of the FBI’s post-9/11 abuses. The FBI has almost always been more abusive than it appeared. It took decades before Americans learned of Hoover’s secret list with the names of tens of thousands of people who would vanish into federal stockades at the drop of a presidential memo. Americans did not learn of the breadth of COINTELPRO’s outrages until almost 20 years after the program started. We have no idea what personal info has been vacuumed up by the 400,000-plus National Security Letters the FBI issued in the past decade. Weiner notes that the FBI has more than 700 million terrorism-related records and a suspected terrorist list with more than a million names.

For most of its history, the FBI has been one of the most venerated of federal agencies. The FBI has always used its “good guys” image to keep a lid on its crimes. There are many competent, courageous FBI agents who do fine work and make America a safer place. But the bureau’s vast power and pervasive secrecy guarantee that more FBI scandals are just around the bend.

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy.

All Human Rights Activists Should Be Imprisoned & Sent To Camps

By Jason Ditz,
May 31, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

“All human rights activists should be imprisoned and transported to camps we are building.”

It’s a stark quote made all the starker by coming during an immigration committee meeting in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. The quote is from MP Yulia Shamalov-Berkovich, a member of the ruling coalition with the Kadima Party.

MP Shamalov-Berkovich

Israel has been caught up in the latest of its myriad imagined “existential threats” lately, this time centering around illegal immigration. Black migrants are the targets, and in Tel Aviv MPs whipped up a riot that had ralliers beating Africans in the streets.

Since then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for the mass arrest of the black “infiltrators,” saying that they could “cause the negotiation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,”even though their numbers are estimated at less than 1 percent of Israel’s overall population. Israel started building prison-work-camps based on a 2009 proposal, that would have them trading manual labor for food and “shelter” inside the prison.

And this is where Shamalov-Berkovich enters into things, as a member of the “Lobby for Citizens Affected by Illegal Infiltrators.” She blasted human rights groups today on the floor of the Knesset who have been criticizing both the camps and the riots, terming them “hypocrites” and insisting that given half a chance they’d create a massive work camp system of their own to imprison the Ultra-Orthodox. “I would imprison them all for incitement and for pitting Jews against Jews,” she added.

Shamalov-Berkovich insisted that Israel’s illegal blacks “are living like animals” and that they are “compromising the security of the state and its citizens.” Even given the Israeli government’s extremely far-right positions, it would be politically difficult (and diplomatically costly) for them to mass arrest every single human rights activist and force them into work camps.

“We Are Preparing For Massive Civil War”

Says DHS Informant

Courtesy Of "Beacon Equity"

In a riveting interview on TruNews Radio, Wednesday, private investigator Doug Hagmann said high-level, reliable sources told him the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is preparing for “massive civil war” in America.

“Folks, we’re getting ready for one massive economic collapse,” Hagmann told TruNewshost Rick Wiles.

“We have problems . . . The federal government is preparing for civil uprising,” he added, “so every time you hear about troop movements, every time you hear about movements of military equipment, the militarization of the police, the buying of the ammunition, all of this is . . . they (DHS) are preparing for a massive uprising.”

Hagmann goes on to say that his sources tell him the concerns of the DHS stem from a collapse of the U.S. dollar and the hyperinflation a collapse in the value of the world’s primary reserve currency implies to a nation of 311 million Americans, who, for the significant portion of the population, is armed.

Uprisings in Greece is, indeed, a problem, but an uprising of armed Americans becomes a matter of serious national security, a point addressed in a recent report by the Pentagon and highlighted as a vulnerability and threat to the U.S. during war-game exercises at the Department of Defense last year, according to one of the DoD’s war-game participants, Jim Rickards, author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis.

Through his sources, Hagmann confirmed Rickards’ ongoing thesis of a fear of a U.S. dollar collapse at the hands of the Chinese (U.S. treasury bond holders of approximately $1 trillion) and, possibly, the Russians (threatening to launch a gold-backed ruble as an attractive alternative to the U.S. dollar) in retaliation for aggressive U.S. foreign policy initiatives against China’s and Russia’s strategic allies Iran and Syria.

“The one source that we have I’ve known since 1979,” Hagmann continued.  “He started out as a patrol officer and currently he is now working for a federal agency under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security; he’s in a position to know what policies are being initiated, what policies are being planned at this point, and he’s telling us right now—look, what you’re seeing is just the tip of the iceberg.  We are preparing, we, meaning the government, we are preparing for a massive civil war in this country.”

“There’s no hyperbole here,” he added, echoing Trends Research Institute’s Founder Gerald Celente’s forecast of last year.  Celente expects a collapse of the U.S. dollar and riots in America some time this year.

Since Celente’s ‘Civil War’ prediction of last year, executive orders NDAA and National Defense Resources Preparedness were signed into law by President Obama, which are both politically damaging actions taken by a sitting president.

And most recently, requests made by the DHS for the procurement of 450 million rounds of hollow-point ammunition only fuels speculation of an upcoming tragic event expected on American soil.

These major events, as shocking to the American people as they are, have taken place during an election year.

Escalating preparatory activities by the executive branch and DHS throughout the last decade—from the Patriot Act, to countless executive orders drafted to suspend (or strip) American civil liberties  “are just the beginning” of the nightmare to come, Hagmann said.

He added, “It’s going to get so much worse toward the election, and I’m not even sure we’re going to have an election in this country.  It’s going to be that bad, and this, as well, is coming from my sources.  But one source in particular said, ‘look, you don’t understand how bad it is.’  This stuff is real; these people, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), they are ready to fight the American people.”

TruNews‘ Wiles asked Hagmann: who does the DHS expect to fight, in particular?  Another North versus South, the Yankees against the Confederates?  Hagmann stated the situation is far worse than a struggle between any two factions within the U.S.; it’s an anticipated nationwide emergency event centered on the nation’s currency.

“What they [DHS] are expecting, and again, this is according to my sources, what they’re expecting is the un-sustainability of the American dollar,” Hagmann said.  “And we know for a fact that we can no longer service our debt.  There’s going to be a period of hyperinflation . . . the dollar will be worthless . . . The economic collapse will be so severe, people won’t be ready for this.”

US Army Internment, Resettlement & Re-Education Camps

Can Americans Be Sent To Propaganda Prisons?

Army Manual For Re-Education Camps Applies To US Citizens

By "Russia Today"


Posted by "Sayf Maslul"

After reporting this week on a Pentagon-created plan for interning activists at re-education camps, questions were asked about the US Army manual that allegedly outlines the resettling of US citizens. Can Americans be sent to propaganda prisons?

Now as more and more news organizations are investigating the recently unearthed military manual, FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations, verification is coming in that the callous plans to populate military camps in the US and abroad are not only authentic, but indeed establishes blueprints for putting the country’s own citizens into guarded Army detainment centers.

“They always tell the media that it’s for disasters — domestically — or foreign wars and putting people in camps like Abu Ghraib in Iraq or Camp X-Ray in Cuba, but now more and more documents are coming out confirming what I’ve already had from sources and my researching into this,” radio host Alex Jones tells RT. According to Jones, he has seen the Pentagon refit old military bases into camps through the Emergency Centers Establishment Act “to prepare them for, quote, ‘emergencies,’” but there is way more than the government isn’t saying.

“I’ve been to the drills and I noticed that they were training with the role players to put American political dissidents in them,” Jones says about sending US civilians into the camps.

“I witnessed marines training to confiscate firearms on the West Coast and to put Americans both on the left and the right into camps and even segregate them according to their different political persuasions,”adds Jones.

Jones continues that Pentagon officials have informed him in the past about plans to re-educate political activists by armed enforcers, but the leaking of the elusive document confirms what he has been cautioned of in the past.

“Now we have an Army document that dovetails with huge increased spending, hiring tens of thousands of people in the military to specifically be internment camp officers.”

After combing through the 300-plus pages of 3-39.40, the website Infowars also addresses questions over whether or not the manual would make it so that the US government could send its own citizens to reeducation camps. In their own analysis, the site singles out certain sections of the manual that specifically discuss not just “The authority to approve resettlement such operations within US territories,” but how, also, “US citizens will be confined separately from detainees” by being booked and processed according to their Social Security number.

“Last time I checked, the United States Social Security Administration was not responsible for handing out social security numbers to people in Afghanistan or Iraq,” explains Infowar’s Paul Joseph Watson.

As if the text of the paper wasn’t enough, Watson breaks it down for those that are still skeptic that the American military would want to imprison its own citizens and install in them an “appreciation of US policies and actions.”

“The time for denial is over. People spent weeks arguing over the ‘indefinite detention’ provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act, ignoring assertions by top scholars and legal experts that the kidnapping provisions did apply to U.S. citizens,” writes Watson. Sure enough, when US President Barack Obama signed the NDAA into law on December 31, he acknowledged that he had his own reservations about the provisions that provide for the indefinite detention of his own citizens without charge.

Now coupled with a leaked copy of the Internment and Resettlement Operations guide, it looks as if not only can the US imprison its own citizens that disagree with the government — but it has already laid out the rules.

“This isn’t just some contingency plan,” Alex Jones tells RT. “This is the manual.”

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US military Camp Carroll in Chilgo (AFP Photo / Jung Yeon-Je)

Alleged US Army Doc: Re-Education Camps and Psy-Op Missions Aimed At Activists

Published: 03 May, 2012, 22:01

Courtesy Of "Russia Today"

An American military document just uncovered appears to detail an US Army plan that calls for detaining “political activists” at re-education camps staffed by military-hired “PSYOP officers” in both America and abroad.

The website Infowars.com has unearthed the smoking gun, a copy of a United States military manual entitled FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations, which appears to offer Defense Department insiders instructions on dealing with the imprisonment of anyone considered an enemy to the American way of life and how to go about indoctrination them with an “appreciation of US policies and actions” through psychological warfare.

The PDF made available is dated February 2010 but has only now been leaked online. A copy of the document has been uploaded to the website PublicIntelligence.net for viewing, and additionally a version appears to be hosted on the US Military’s Doctrine and Training Publications page at armypubs.us.army.mil, although access to papers published there are unavailable to those without the Pentagon’s authorization, therefore making it impossible to verify the authenticity of the manual at this time. The military site that appears to host a copy has also implemented security measures on its servers that it cautions visitors are “not for your personal benefit or privacy.”

Further, the title page of the manual warns that the material contained in its 326 pages is be distributed to US Defense Department and its contractors only, and that must be “destroy[ed] by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or construction of the document.”

“This manual addresses I/R [Internment and Resettlement] operations across the spectrum of conflict, specifically the doctrinal paradigm shift from traditional enemy prisoner of war (EPW) operations to the broader and more inclusive requirements of detainee operations,” the paper’s authors explain in the first paragraph of the documents preface. From there, it goes on to explain that the methods of psychological warfare and brainwashing of persons applies to“US military prisoners, and multiple categories of detainees (civilian internees [CIs], retained personnel [RP], and enemy combatants), while resettlement operations are focused on multiple categories of dislocated civilians (DCs).”

The manual continues by describing categories of personnel whom are certain guidelines of the manual apply. A detainee, for example, is any person captured by an armed force, but does not include personnel held for law enforcement purposes — except where the US is the occupying power. Civilian internees are described as anyone“interned during armed conflict, occupation, or other military operation for security reasons, for protection, or because he or she committed an offense against the detaining power.”

“An adaptive enemy will manipulate populations that are hostile to US intent by instigating mass civil disobedience, directing criminal activity, masking their operations in urban and other complex terrain, maintaining an indistinguishable presence through cultural anonymity and actively seeking the raditional sanctuary of protected areas as defined by the rules of land warfare,” reads the paper. “Commanders will use technology and conduct police intelligence operations to influence and control populations, evacuate detainees and, conclusively, transition rehabilitative and reconciliation operations to other functional agencies.”

On their own part, Infowars.com details the manual by writing, “We have exhaustively documented preparations for the mass internment of citizens inside America, but this is the first time that language concerning the re-education of detainees, in particular political activists, has cropped up in our research.”

Throughout the manual, the DoD outlines methods to go about detaining US military prisoners captured for both“battlefield and nonbattlefield confinement,” how to rehabilitate them to “ensure a successful return to society” and “psychological operations (PSYOP), practices and procedures to support I/R operations.”

Fifty-six pages into the manual, its authors explain the role of psychological operations officers regarding internment and resettlement, and explain that they will be responsible for developing methods designed “to pacify and acclimate detainees or DCs to accept U.S. I/R facility authority and regulations.” PSYOP officers, the manual adds, identify “malcontents, trained agitators, and political leaders within the facility who may try to organize resistance or create disturbances.”

The manual also demands that the PSYOP officers overseeing the detainment camps identify “political activists” for indoctrination.