Memo outlines Obama’s plan to use the military against citizens

From Washington Times:


President Barack Obama salutes military service members while watching the inaugural parade from the reviewing stand on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., Jan. 21, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

By Bill Gertz

-

The Washington Times

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

A 2010 Pentagon directive on military support to civilian authorities details what critics say is a troubling policy that envisions the Obama administration’s potential use of military force against Americans.

The directive contains noncontroversial provisions on support to civilian fire and emergency services, special events and the domestic use of the Army Corps of Engineers.

The troubling aspect of the directive outlines presidential authority for the use of military arms and forces, including unarmed drones, in operations against domestic unrest.

“This appears to be the latest step in the administration’s decision to use force within the United States against its citizens,” said a defense official opposed to the directive.

Directive No. 3025.18, “Defense Support of Civil Authorities,” was issued Dec. 29, 2010, and states that U.S. commanders “are provided emergency authority under this directive.”

“Federal military forces shall not be used to quell civil disturbances unless specifically authorized by the president in accordance with applicable law or permitted under emergency authority,” the directive states.

“In these circumstances, those federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the president is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances” under two conditions.

The conditions include military support needed “to prevent significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property and are necessary to restore governmental function and public order.” A second use is when federal, state and local authorities “are unable or decline to provide adequate protection for federal property or federal governmental functions.”

“Federal action, including the use of federal military forces, is authorized when necessary to protect the federal property or functions,” the directive states.

Military assistance can include loans of arms, ammunition, vessels and aircraft. The directive states clearly that it is for engaging civilians during times of unrest.

A U.S. official said the Obama administration considered but rejected deploying military force under the directive during the recent standoff with Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his armed supporters.

Mr. Bundy is engaged in a legal battle with the federal Bureau of Land Management over unpaid grazing fees. Along with a group of protesters, Mr. Bundy in April confronted federal and local authorities in a standoff that ended when the authorities backed down.

The Pentagon directive authorizes the secretary of defense to approve the use of unarmed drones in domestic unrest. But it bans the use of missile-firing unmanned aircraft.

“Use of armed [unmanned aircraft systems] is not authorized,” the directive says.

The directive was signed by then-Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn. A copy can be found on the Pentagon website: http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/302518p.pdf.

Defense analysts say there has been a buildup of military units within non-security-related federal agencies, notably the creation of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams. The buildup has raised questions about whether the Obama administration is undermining civil liberties under the guise of counterterrorism and counternarcotics efforts.

Other agencies with SWAT teams reportedly include the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Education Department.

The militarization of federal agencies, under little-known statutes that permit deputization of security officials, comes as the White House has launched verbal attacks on private citizens’ ownership of firearms despite the fact that most gun owners are law-abiding citizens.

A White House National Security Council spokeswoman declined to comment.

President Obama stated at the National Defense University a year ago: “I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen — with a drone or with a shotgun — without due process, nor should any president deploy armed drones over U.S. soil.”

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Senate Removes Drone Strike Disclosure From Intelligence Bill

From BenSwann.com:

• Politics
• International
• US

By: Annabelle Bamforth Apr 29, 2014 

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5

Washington-  The United States Senate has removed a vital section of a major intelligence bill that would have compelled the Obama administration to publicly disclose the number of people killed or injured by US drone strikes.

The removal of Section 312 from the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 was partially due to opposition from director of national intelligence James Clapper, who wrote in a letter to the Senate that such disclosures would “require context and be drafted carefully so as to protect against the disclosure of intelligence sources and methods or other classified information.” Clapper also wrote that “the Executive Branch is currently exploring ways in which it can provide the American people more information about the United States’ use of force outside areas of active hostilities.”

Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the originator of the drone disclosure provision but also agreed to remove it. Feinstein, a supporter of drone strikes, said in 2013 that the number of civilians killed by drones has been in the “single digits”.  That estimate has been challenged by many, including U.N. Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson, who told NBC News that civilian casualty numbers are in the hundreds.

The section of the intelligence bill that has been removed would have offered more transparency that Obama has promised in his campaign and throughout his presidency. Critics of the removal of the drone strike disclosure consider this action discouraging. “How many people have to die for Congress to take even a small step toward transparency?” asked Zeke Johnson, Amnesty International’s human rights program director. “It’s stunning that after all these years we still don’t know how many people the Obama administration has killed with drones.”

Amnesty International USA director Steven W. Hawkins said that “a basic report on the number of people killed shouldn’t be too much to ask.”

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Read more: http://benswann.com/senate-removes-drone-strike-disclosure-from-intelligence-bill/#ixzz30IWQ8NVz
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Snowden Reveals First Ever Public Disclosure Of Secret Black Budget Programs

From collective-evolution.com:

August 31, 2013 by Arjun Walia. 118 Comments.

18

Edward Snowden, a former intelligence contractor has leaked the very first documentation that proves the existence of clandestine black budget operations (1)(programs that are extremely classified dealing with technology, information and more.) Did we really need this leak in order to believe that black budget programs operate in secrecy? No, many people will tell you that the existence of black budget programs was obvious and that we didn’t need any official documentation to prove it, but this still helps. The United States has a history of government agencies existing in secret for years. The National Security Agency (NSA) was founded in 1952, its existence was hidden until the mid 1960′s. Even more secretive is the National Reconnaissance Office, which was founded in 1960 but remained completely secret for 30 years.

We are talking about Special Access Programs (SAP). From these we have unacknowledged and waived SAPs. These programs do not exist publicly, but they do indeed exist. They are better known as ‘deep black programs.’ A 1997 US Senate report described them as “so sensitive that they are exempt from standard reporting requirements to the Congress.” (0)(8)

The Washington Post revealed that the “black-budget” documents report  a staggering 52.6 billion dollars that was set aside for operations in the fiscal year 2013. Although it’s great to have this type of documentation in the public domain proving the existence of  these black budget programs, the numbers seem to be off according to some statements made by some very prominent people who have been involved in the defense sector for years. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that these programs are not using billions of dollars, but trillions of dollars that are unaccounted for. Here is a statement given by Canada’s former Minister of National Defence, Paul Hellyer in 2008:

It is ironic that the U.S. would begin a devastating war, allegedly in search of weapons of mass destruction when the most worrisome developments in this field are occurring in your own backyard.  It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars  allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects which both congress and the commander in chief no nothing about(2)

We are talking about large amounts of unaccounted-for money going into programs we know nothing about. There have been several congressional inquiries that have noted billions, and even trillions of dollars that have gone missing from the federal reserve system. On July 16, 2001, in front of the house appropriations committee, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated:

The financial systems of the department of defence are so snarled up that we can’t account for some $2.6 trillion in transactions that exist, if that’s believable (3)

We don’t really hear about black budget programs, or about people who have actually looked into them.  However, the topic was discussed in 2010 by Washington Post journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin. Their investigation lasted approximately two years and concluded that America’s classified world has:

Become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employes, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work (4)

Another person was aviation journalist Bill Sweetman. Within the Pentagon, he estimated that approximately 150 special access programs existed that weren’t even acknowledged. These programs are not known about by the highest members of government and the highest ranking officials in the military. He determined that most of these programs were dominated by private contractors (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc.) and that he had no idea as to how these programs were funded(5)(8).

Dwight Eisenhower, former 5 star U.S. general (highest possible rank) and President of the United States also warned us about  secrecy and the acquisition of unwarranted influence within the “department of defence” with his farewell speech:

In the council of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential disaster of the rise of mis placed power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes(6)

He warns us about the influence of the military industrial complex, and the influence and power it’s capable of. After Eisenhower the next and only other president that blew the whistle on secrecy beyond the government was president John F. Kennedy in one of his most famous speeches, he is also referring to the military industrial complex:

The very word secrecy is repugnant, in a free and open society. And we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence. On Infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumour is printed, no secret is revealed (7)

The amount that the US sets aside for sensitive operations each year is not allowed to be published for eyes outside of the intelligence community. We are in an age where the US is having a difficult time keeping sensitive information under wraps, and although there is an abundance of blatant information for the world to wake up to, that which is still kept under tight wraps has also become more transparent. Many phenomena previously labelled as merely a “conspiracy theory” are now surfacing as true and verifiable day after day.

Could some of these black budget programs be dealing with UFOs? There is a large amount of evidence to suggest that they do, and possibly even extraterrestrials. Documents from the NSA prove that UFOs and extraterrestrials are of high interest to the agency(9)(10). In fact I would like to mention that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest that these black budget programs deal with matters beyond our world. Garry McKinnon has also shed light on this fact, as have thousands of previously classified documents and statements from high level government and military personnel. The world within our own world must be quite fascinating, the fact that we are living in the time of transparency must mean that the truth cannot stay hidden forever.

Worlds Within Worlds 

Excerpt from the book “A.D. After Disclosure” written by Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel (8).

Richard Dolan’s Thoughts on the “Breakaway Civilization”

By now, the classified world has moved far beyond the reach of the public world, and far beyond in its power and capabilities. Consider the story of a former NSA scientist who spoke with the authors. According to this individual, the NSA was operating computers during the mid-1960s with a processing clock-speed of roughly 650 megahertz(MHZ). To put that in perspective, it took 35 years for personal computers in the consumer market to reach that speed. Indeed, in 1965 there were no personal computers at all. Immediately, the near-fatal Apollo 13 mission in 1971 comes to mind, with its reliance on slide-rulers by mission specialist to guide the damaged NASA spacecraft back to Earth. When presented with this image, the NSA scientist shrugged and stated that secret computational capabilities were too important to share with NASA. So in, in computing, the National Security Agency was an amazing 35 years ahead of the rest of the world. This leads one to wonder what its computational powers are today.

Another example was the U.S. air strike against Libya in 1986. The raid employed f-111 fighter aircraft. Left out of the mission, however, was the F-117A Nighthawk, better known as the stealth fighter. It had been operational since 1983, but was still classified in 1986. In a form of logic both perverse and rational, the F-117A was so radically advanced that keeping it secret was more important than using it for this military mission.

Given the mixture of a treasure chest of government money, and private connections, the likelihood exists that six decades later there is a clandestine group that possesses:

• Technology that is vastly superior to that of the “mainstream” world.
• The ability to explore areas of our world and surroundings presently unavailable to the rest of us.
• Scientific and cosmological understandings that give them greater insights into the nature of our world
• A significant “built off the grid” infrastructure, partially underground, that affords them a high degree of secrecy and independence of action

This might well qualify them as a separate civilization – one that has broken away from our own, in effect, a breakaway civilization. Still interacting with our own, its members probably move back and forth between the official reality of what we are supposed to believe, and the other reality which encompasses new truths and challenges.

 Sources:

(0)http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CDOC-105sdoc2/content-detail.html

(1)http://rt.com/usa/snowden-leak-black-budget-176/

(2) Speech From Paul Hellyer

(3)http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=408

(4)http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america

(5) Sweetman, Bill. “In Search of the Pentagon’s Billion Dollar Hidden Budgets: How the US Keeps Its R&D Spending Under Wraps.” Janes International Defence Reporter, Janurary  5, 2000

(6) Eisenhower’s farewell speech

(7) JFK Speech

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html

(8) Dolan, M. Richard and Zabel, Bryce. A.D. After Disclosure. New Page Books. 2012

http://www.afterdisclosure.com/2011/04/breakaway.html

http://richarddolanpress.com/book-rd3-a-d-after-disclosure/

http://www.afterdisclosure.com

(9)http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/ufo/comint_part_j.pdf

(10)http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/ufo/key_to_et_messages.pdf

FBI Visiting Gun Shops to Investigate "People talking about Big Government"

From Activist Post:

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post

In keeping with the tradition of the FBI’s position on gun rights, it appears the Bureau is working overdrive to monitor and harass gun owners and the gun shops that sell to them.

While government surveillance of gun purchases and gun owners is nothing new, a recent visit by an FBI Counterterrorism agent to a Columbia, South Carolina gun shop has only reinforced the knowledge that the U.S. government is growing more and more concerned by the prospect of a well-armed populace – particularly one that prefers to live without constant government interference in their personal lives.

While the narrative surrounding “counterterrorism” operations used to eviscerate civil liberties after 9/11 was initially based upon the threat of Muslim fundamentalists, that narrative has clearly shifted to a focus on gun owning, law-abiding American citizens - both those who are politically active and those who are blissfully ignorant of current events.

For many, this shift of focus has been quite the surprise. Thus, when the Columbia, South Carolina gun shop in question was approached by an FBI counterterrorism agent on Monday, April 14, the individuals who spoke with him were somewhat alarmed to realize that the agent's concern was not fundamentalist Muslims but Americans who promote small government.

According to an individual who was present during the visit (this person will remain anonymous for obvious reasons), the agent pulled up in a regular vehicle in plain clothes and took a look around the shop as if he were considering a purchase before approaching the staff and announcing that he was with the FBI Counterterrorism unit.

“Never in a million years would I have thought this guy was a fed,” said the witness. “He was in a completely normal vehicle. Regular clothes. Everything. I would have thought this guy was just some downhome country boy.”

After showing proper identification, the agent told the shop owners that he was tasked with all the gun shops in the general area and that he was charged with investigating “suspicious purchases” in accordance with counterterrorism operations.

The suspicious purchases he mentioned, however, were completely normal transactions. This included, paying with cash, purchasing long guns, and other similarly innocuous behavior.

However, what surprised the owners the most was his statement regarding what he was most interested in tracking.

According to the witness, the agent stated, “If you see some Middle Eastern guy come in. You don’t have to be so worried about that. What we’re really looking for are people talking about being sovereign such as sovereign citizens or people talking about Big Government.”

The agent also mentioned that he had a spreadsheet of all the gun shops in the area.

After this brief chat, the agent left a flyer with the shop that listed some of the more generic and normal behaviors which they were expected to view as suspicious.

Some of these trigger behaviors are:

• Payment in cash or someone else’s credit card.
• Reluctant or unwilling to produce valid I.D.
• Large purchases or unusual inquiries into buying in bulk
• Lack of knowledge involved in firearms or product usage
• Hints at illegal or misuse of explosives
• New or unknown customers
• Nervousness or evasiveness

In the end, while the visit to a local gun shop by an FBI Counterterrorism agent is no surprise, it should serve as a stark reminder that the U.S. government is vastly concerned about a well-armed populace. Gun rights have been gradually eroded in the United States for decades but the assault on gun rights has been ratcheted up to a new level by the Obama administration.

Still, those expecting a public declaration of total gun illegality and martial law confiscation will be wringing their hands in anticipation for a very long time. Of course, while they wring their hands and anticipate the declaration of outright war against gun owners, their guns are being slowly stripped from their hands in an incremental fashion. Slight rule changes and isolated confiscations will continue to take place over time until the public has been properly acclimated to them as a fact of life, at which point the public’s line in the sand will be moved slightly forward once more. Again, the line will be crossed, but only slightly. Eventually, Americans will wake up to find themselves completely disarmed and neutered in a land in which they once believed they were free. At that point, with a completely defenseless population, the thin veneer of freedom will be lifted.

It is time for gun owners and gun rights activists to go on the political offensive. In 2014, it is no longer a legitimate mode of activism to be content to defend your already attenuated freedoms. It is time to make demands. It is time to throw compromise out the window.

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I'm not a gun guy, but the whole point of the 2nd Amendment was for the people to defend themselves from tyranny. And going back to the point once again: The problem with these "antiterror" laws is that those in power can define "terrorist" however they want. Just having this blog could have me labelled a terrorist.

AA

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier" Is About Obama's Terror-Suspect Kill List, Say the Film's Directors

From MotherJones:

—By Asawin Suebsaeng

| Fri Apr. 4, 2014 7:23 AM PDT

Marvel Studios

There are currently no plans to screen Captain America: The Winter Soldier at the White House, as far as the film's directors have heard. But if it makes it to the White House family theater, President Obama would be watching one big-budget, action-packed, and Scarlett Johansson-starring critique of his controversial terror-suspect "kill list."

This isn't me reading things into a mainstream comic-book movie. It's what the directors themselves will tell you.

"[Marvel] said they wanted to make a political thriller," Joe Russo, who directed the film with his brother Anthony, tells Mother Jones. "So we said if you want to make a political thriller, all the great political thrillers have very current issues in them that reflect the anxiety of the audience...That gives it an immediacy, it makes it relevant. So [Anthony] and I just looked at the issues that were causing anxiety for us, because we read a lot and are politically inclined. And a lot of that stuff had to do with civil liberties issues, drone strikes, the president's kill list, preemptive technology"—all themes they worked into the film, working closely with screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

In The Winter Soldier, Captain America and the rest of the heroes (played by Chris Evans, Anthony Mackie, Samuel L. Jackson, Cobie Smulders, and so on) confront the government program Project Insight, which involves three Helicarriers (gigantic autonomous killer drones, basically) that are fed large amounts of data and intel. The Helicarriers process the data to identify and preemptively eliminate potential threats to national and global security. And though the film's topical parts were all crafted prior to the NSA revelations, the directors say it's no accident that data mining is a key element of the plot: "It was all leading up to Snowden," Joe says. "It was all in the ether [already], it was all part of the zeitgeist. The Snowden stuff actually happened while we were shooting."

"If there are 100 people we can kill to make us safer, do we do it? What if we find out there's 1,000? What if it's a million?"

The politics of The Winter Soldier fit comfortably into the Russo brothers' oeuvre, which has included plenty of political satire and commentary. Prior to The Winter Soldier, the duo was best known for directing episodes of Arrested Development, which produced some of the finest satire of the Bush era and Iraq War, and Community, which is also peppered with solid political humor and jabs. (As for their go-to sources for news and politics, Anthony's top two are the the New York Times and NPR, while Joe's are Digg and Reddit.) The day I interviewed them, they happened to be in Washington, DC, to meet with the Congressional Creative Rights Caucus.

According to Joe, the brothers pushed to make their Captain America political thriller even more political and topical than it initially was. "There were already things in the script that just needed to be pulled out to make it more [relevant]," he recalls. One of the film's stars, Robert Redford, was approached for the role in large part because he starred in the 1975 political thriller Three Days of the Condor.

"[That film] was a big influence on this movie," Joe says. "You could really call this movie 'Three Days of Captain America,' if you wanted to. The structure is so similar...We felt like we had a decent shot at getting [Redford] because the script had a political component to it and we thought that might motivate him."

But don't take any of this to mean the film is a stern lecture on American foreign policy. It's thrilling as hell, and also the best to emerge in the recent string of Marvel movies. "We're action fetishists," Joe says. "And we love '70s thrillers." The brothers drew on the influence of some of their favorite action-flick moments: The famous bank heist and shootout in Michael Mann's Heat. William Friedkin's The French Connection. John Schlesinger's Marathon Man. John McTiernan's Predator. Gareth Evans' The Raid: Redemption. (And for the Washington, DC-set car chase in The Winter Soldier, the brothers consulted YouTube, searching for videos of actual car chases. One video—wherein two escaped convicts in Brazil get stuck in traffic and plow through cars as police pursue them on foot—was especially helpful.) "Choreographing action, it's like choreographing a Broadway show," Anthony says.

But at the heart of the explosion and melee -filled film are the political themes, includingtargeted killing. "The question is where do you stop?" Joe says. "If there are 100 people we can kill to make us safer, do we do it? What if we find out there's 1,000? What if we find out there's 10,000? What if it's a million? At what point do you stop?"