1. You SURE got that right!
“Spy chief: We risk a police state
Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, has warned that the fear of terrorism is being exploited by the Government to erode civil liberties and risks creating a police state.
Dame Stella accused ministers of interfering with people’s privacy and playing straight into the hands of terrorists.
“Since I have retired I feel more at liberty to be against certain decisions of the Government, especially the attempt to pass laws which interfere with people’s privacy,” Dame Stella said in an interview with a Spanish newspaper.
“It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state,” she said.
Dame Stella, 73, added: “The US has gone too far with Guantánamo and the tortures. MI5 does not do that. Furthermore it has achieved the opposite effect: there are more and more suicide terrorists finding a greater justification.” She said the British secret services were “no angels” but insisted they did not kill people.
Dame Stella became the first woman director general of MI5 in 1992 and was head of the security agency until 1996. Since stepping down she has been a fierce critic of some of the Government’s counter-terrorism and security measures, especially those affecting civil liberties.
In 2005, she said the Government’s plans for ID cards were “absolutely useless” and would not make the public any safer. Last year she criticised attempts to extend the period of detention without charge for terrorism suspects to 42 days as excessive, shortly before the plan was rejected by Parliament.
Her latest remarks were made as the Home Office prepares to publish plans for a significant expansion of state surveillance, with powers for the police and security services to monitor every email, as well as telephone and internet activity.
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Local councils have been criticised for using anti-terrorism laws to snoop on residents suspected of littering and dog fouling offences.
David Davis, the Tory MP and former shadow home secretary, said: “Like so many of those who have had involvement in the battle against terrorism, Stella Rimington cares deeply about our historic rights and rightly raises the alarm about a Government whose first interest appears to be to use the threat of terrorism to frighten people and undermine those rights rather than defend them.”
2. “The Draft: Just Say No
Much has been made by the new administration of the idea of national service and volunteerism. While service to one’s community is certainly admirable, it is not the federal government’s place to “encourage” or promote volunteerism. Moreover, there are troubling signs that national service could transition from voluntary to mandatory, or de facto mandatory, such as the requirement of service in order to be granted a diploma, or something along those lines.
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Nevertheless, some think recruiting for our military is too low and that the younger generation will not answer the call of duty willingly, and must be drafted by force. I take extreme exception to this characterization of young people today. First of all, I believe they correctly see that foreign policy, as unpopular as it has been under Bush, is not significantly changing under Obama, and has little, if anything, to do with defending the United States, and certainly not the Constitution. Second, many see friends and acquaintances who have voluntarily enlisted, and have taken note of how soldiers and veterans are treated. Perhaps rather than blaming younger generations for being selfish, older generations should remember their promises to those who volunteer for military service and be mindful of how they are treated. Every homeless vet by the side of the road, every suicide, every report of substandard conditions in veteran hospitals is a sign of how we let our military down. Perhaps we should look to those issues if we have problems with military recruitment, rather than trampling freedom in the name of protecting it.
If that is not enough reason, consider that most in the military are against a draft. There is a vast difference between serving alongside another volunteer and serving alongside a reluctant conscript. Americans need to be on the lookout for any propaganda trying to ease us back into the draft. Too often a flawed foreign policy prompts the need for a draft. Abolishing Selective Service is one thing we could do to counter those efforts.“
http://www.antiwar.com/paul/?articleid=14259
3. “Israel launches covert war against Iran
It is using hitmen, sabotage, front companies and double agents to disrupt the regime’s illicit weapons project, the experts say.
The most dramatic element of the “decapitation” programme is the planned assassination of top figures involved in Iran’s atomic operations.“
4. “The Love of Crises vs. the Love of Liberty
An important principle of power, vis-a-vis liberty, is the following: Crises are the friend of power and the enemy of liberty. It is during crises that government power expands and liberty contracts. Thus, while crises produce a lot of hand-wringing and worried brows among public officials, they also bring a sense of excitement to public officials over the prospect of wielding more power over the lives and fortunes of the citizenry.
A crisis causes people to get scared, sometimes to such a point that they’re practically begging the government to do whatever is necessary to keep them safe and secure. The mindset becomes, “Protect me. Take care of me. I don’t care what you have to do. It doesn’t matter.”
Government officials, ever on the alert for ways to satisfy their insatiable thirst for power, are not about to resist this opportunity for more power. As Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s new chief of staff, succinctly put it, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2009-02-16.asp
5. “Attack of the Killer Robots
The Pentagon’s dream of a techno army is doomed to fail.
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The hope that killer robots will lower U.S. casualties may excite military officials and a war-weary public, but the grave moral and ethical implications—not to mention the dubious strategic impact—associated with their use should give pause to those in search of a quick technological fix to our woes.
By distancing soldiers from the horrors of war and making it easier for politicians to resort to military force, armed robots will likely give birth to a far more dangerous world.“
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4243/attack_of_the_killer_robots/
6. Can’t say I’m surprised:
“Pervez Musharraf was playing ‘double game’ with US
Washington sent Special Forces into Pakistan last summer after intercepting a call by the Pakistani army chief referring to a notorious Taleban leader as a “strategic asset,” a new book has claimed.
The intercept was ordered to confirm suspicions that the Pakistani military were still actively supporting the Taleban whilst taking millions of dollars in US military aid to fight them, according to the “The Inheritance,” by the New York Times correspondent David Sanger.
In a transcript passed to Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence in May 2008, General Ashfaq Kayani, the military chief who replaced Pervez Musharraf, was overheard referring to Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani as “a strategic asset”. The remark was the first real evidence of the double game that Washington had long suspected President Musharraf was playing as he continued receiving US military aid while aiding the Taleban.“
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5747696.ece
7. “As Digby points out, the same Republican congressmen who never hesitated to vote more hundreds of billions of deficit spending on the Iraq War are now suddenly shy about running a necessary Keynsian deficit to get us back out of the 2009 Depression. Their friends and cronies stole much of the money they used to just hand out like free samples. And they are now suddenly wise stewards of money and fiscal conservatives?
Cockburn says the Iraq embezzlement is a ponzi scheme bigger than that of Madoff. But both gigantic swindles were made possible by the same philosophy, that the “private sector” needs no government oversight or auditing, since the Magic Hand will operate to ensure probity. As Alan Greenspan recently admitted, his conviction that bankers would not steal from us because it would be bad for the bank was naive; I guess that is what comes of never growing out of Ayn Rand when you move into your twenties and later.
As Bush and his henchmen forsaw, an Iraq conquered by the US would be the gift that gave on giving to the military-industrial complex. Baghdad has put in orders for $5 billion worth of US military equipment, which will keep arms factories humming. Of course, if you had just showered a trillion dollars on green energy instead of on Iraq, we’d have it by now.”
http://www.juancole.com/
