Eviscerating the Constitution Since 1978

The passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001 is by now an all-too-familiar story. The American people, already suffering from the trauma of 9/11, were pushed into outright panic by the anthrax attacks, a series of anthrax-laced mailings that killed five, injured 17 and shut down Congress for the first time in modern history. The Act itself was introduced on a Tuesday and signed into law on Friday, before anyone had read let alone understood the sweeping changes it would introduce to American law.

Some of those changes were amendments to a little-known and little-used FBI instrument called National Security Letters, which allow the FBI and other agencies to issue businesses and institutions requests for private data on citizens, including financial transactions and communications records, regardless of whether or not they are even suspected of any crime, and to hold that data indefinitely. One of the most worrying aspects of the letters is the non-disclosure clause, which not only prohibits recipients from disclosing the contents of the letter, but even the fact that they have received a letter at all.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting the FBI’s National Security Letters and its predecessor- the 1978 Right to Financial Privacy Act, the aggressive expansion of the program’s scope with the passage of PATRIOT ACT, the gag order accompanying the letters – the non-disclosure clause, the collusion between the FBI, CIA and DOD in the issuance and implementation of these letters, and exposing the macrocosm of the police state control grid as a whole through this tyrannical tool.

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*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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This is Part II of our interview series on the Makings of a Police State. You can listen to Part I here.

Coleen Rowley joins us to share her views and thoughts on the state of the misleadingly named ‘criminal justice system’ in the United States today, and the extent to which the apparatus has been transformed into a police state. She discusses the recently signed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the implications of this law for American citizens, and the troubling fact that many Americans are not aware of the serious threats to their liberties and rights posed by this police state enabling new law. Ms. Rowley talks about the Obama Administration’s increasing control of all information outlets together with the constant use of fear-hate-greed-false pride and blind loyalty propaganda to manufacture consent for the war machine as well as a panoply of other government-corporatocracy crimes, the escalating retaliation against government whistleblowers and government secrecy, FBI abuses and Director Mueller’s quietly extended term, and more!

Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for almost 24 years, was legal counsel to the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. She came to national attention in June 2002, when she testified before Congress about serious lapses before 9/11 that helped account for the failure to prevent the attacks. She now writes and speaks on ethical decision-making and on balancing civil liberties with the need for effective investigation.

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Here is our guest Coleen Rowley unplugged! (Subscribers only)

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This is Part I of our interview series on the Makings of a Police State.

Shahid Buttar joins us to discuss the continuous erosion of our civil liberties from illegal domestic surveillance to Guantanamo, NDAA and its discretionary detention provision authorizing the President to detain Americans accused by the government of supporting terrorism. Mr. Buttar talks about the many abuses committed by the unchecked Federal Bureau of Investigation, the extension of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s Term quietly and readily by Congress, its significance and troubling implications, the capacity of the FBI to be used for political purposes established since the Hoover days, the US media’s silence on this significant issue, and more!

Shahid Buttar is the executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the People’s Campaign for the Constitution (PCC). He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 2003, where he served as executive editor of the Stanford Environmental Law Journal and as Professor Lawrence Lessig’s teaching assistant for Constitutional Law. In addition to his work leading BORDC, Shahid serves on the advisory bodies of the Rights Working Group, the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, and the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights. He also supports populist constitutionalism as a civil rights lawyer, independent columnist, community organizer, and hip-hop and electronica MC. In his creative capacities as a poet and musician, Mr. Buttar has performed around the world, co-founded several grassroots art and culture groups around the country, facilitated workshops for young people and emerging artists.

Here is our guest Shahid Buttar unplugged! (Subscribers only)

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Another Case of Convenient US Media Amnesia as War Propagandists

For the past few months on a daily basis we have been forced to read, watch and listen to the awful deeds of select dictators here and there, but not everywhere. Our war-drummer TV networks suddenly found an atrocious dictator in Libya, and at lightning speed lined up victim after victim of this long-ruling but suddenly popular dictator called Gaddafi. Remember this CNN episode? Yes I am sure you do. How could anyone erase these horrifying images from memory? Our public was far too horrified and disgusted to stop and wonder why now; why so suddenly. No. For years while our government and corporate partners supplied this dictator with an expansive array of deadly war and police tools, while they basked in the profit’s glow, no one in our media showed the slightest interest in or desire for widely and readily available atrocity documents, victims and witnesses. They waited until their government-corporate masters gave them the expedited green light for manic-continuous coverage. Oh how the majority longed for and anticipated our government’s regime change there…How they clamored for the barbaric ridding of this ruthless evil dictator. One down. A few more to go. Only here and there. Certainly not everywhere.

In recent months we have been presented daily, perhaps more accurately, hourly, with another dictator’s atrocious deeds. Every hour seems to be ‘the Syria Hour’ in our media. Oh, those poor freedom fighters falling one after another…The innocent people up against the heavily armed ferocious army…The daily massacres …all televised, intensely written about, loudly talked about; everywhere. That evil Bashar Assad and his regime. That evil dictator…

Granted on and off we’ve been hearing about the Assad regime’s evilness and its status on our decade-ago designated axis of evil list. But now, well now it is a different deal. Out of the blue, suddenly, this regime and its deeds have become the center of our focus, and it has been forced into our living rooms, newspaper baskets, and car radios; on an hourly basis. Oh how our people’s hearts are bleeding for those freedom-seeking revolutionary rebels…How we despise this stinky mean dictator … We can’t wait to see the bastard taken out and beheaded; preferably live on TV.

Now, here is what you won’t be hearing from our corporate-government-owned mainstream and corporate-foundation-owned pseudo alternative media. Up until very recently, as recent as two years ago, our government, our military and intelligence agencies worked hand-in-hand with this dictator and his regime. After 9/11 this dictator and his regime became one of our top choices for outsourcing our illegal torture and detention practices. In fact, our government always coordinated its bashing and name-calling of this dictator directly with him to help him boost his public standing and popularity in Syria. You see, there are ways to support dictator regimes, and then there are other ways. In ‘certain’ cases it is strategically beneficial to a dictator, or a military regime, or a kingdom, to be outwardly bashed and be cosmetically antagonized by ‘certain’ superpowers, or Israel. Those cosmetically issued bashing-threats go a long way towards improving a dictator’s popularity at home. You know what I’m talking about, right? Think the Saudi Kingdom and Israel. The Kingdom, while best friend and partner with Israel, prefers to be shown and known as Anti-Israel. It is a matter of survival … for ‘certain’ dictators. Now back to Syria. Read more È

‘US-NATO-Chechen Militia Joint Operations Base’

Here is an exclusive interview I gave to James Corbett on my recent article, “US-NATO-Chechen Militia Joint Operations Base.� We discuss the American financing, funding and protection of Islamic terrorists in Central Asia, the history of Turkish links with the CIA, the heart of my whistleblower story and the State Secrets Privilege, and the real endgame for the competing world powers in the Caucasus.

You can listen to the interview here at Corbett Report.

As you know I am a big fan of my partner James Corbett and his brilliant work. If you are not familiar with him check out his website here for great podcast interviews, video reports and analyses. He now has an extensive collection of his interviews available on DVDs, and you can check them out and purchase them here.

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 In his recent book The Black Banners, former FBI agent Ali Soufan portrays a key 9/11 Commission staff member, Doug MacEachin, as believing the CIA deliberately withheld information from the FBI in January 2001. This is in contrast with the Commission’s final report, which states that the CIA failed to pass on intelligence to the FBI on multiple occasions, but puts it down to honest failings.

MacEachin was one of the best-known of the Commission’s staffers before its formation. He was a career CIA officer and even served as Deputy Director for Intelligence between 1993 and 1996.

According to Soufan, MacEachin believed that the CIA purposefully withheld information placing al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash at the Malaysia summit, a gathering of top al-Qaeda figures in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000 that was monitored by the CIA. This intelligence was especially significant because it linked bin Attash, then known to be a mastermind of the October 2000 USS Cole bombing, to future Flight 77 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi.

Had the FBI learned what the CIA knew of the Malaysia summit at this time, its Cole investigators would have focused on Almihdhar and Alhazmi eight months before 9/11, giving them plenty of opportunity to stop the plot.

In his book, Soufan describes a meeting between himself and some Commission staffers, evidently Soufan’s second interview with the Commission on September 15, 2003.

Soufan says he started the interview by discussing a source inside al-Qaeda that he and his partner Steve Bongardt had helped recruit some time before the Cole bombing. In late 2000, the source had been shown a passport photo provided by the Yemeni authorities of a person the FBI thought to be bin Attash, and had identified him as such to a CIA officer known only as “Chris� and FBI agent Michael Dorris. This was another plank in the case being built against bin Attash for the Cole bombing.

Shortly after, in murky circumstances Soufan does not discuss, the CIA sent pictures of Almihdhar and Alhazmi taken at the Malaysia summit for the source to try to identify. While Dorris was out of the room, Chris showed the pictures to the source, who said he did not know Almihdhar, but identified the photo of Alhazmi as bin Attash; the two men had similar facial features. Read more È

This is part III of our interview series based on the recently released book -The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State, edited by Dr. Philip Zwerling.

Professor Roberto Gonzalez joins us to discuss the high school “Spy Camp� program as part of a pilot grant from the US Office of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to create an “Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence� (IC Center) with the goal to increase the pool of future applicants for careers in the US intelligence community such as the CIA, FBI and DIA. He explains the intentions behind the program being consciously directed at schools in low income regions and where minority students are the majority. Dr. Gonzalez talks about the ethical implications of involving universities with intelligence agencies like CIA, intellectual and moral dilemmas caused by militarized culture, the highly troubling cloak of secrecy surrounding scholarships provided to target students, the impact of funding and grants on university and college educators and administrators and more!

Roberto J. Gonzalez is an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University whose work focuses upon the relationship between humans and their environment; science, technology, and society; militarism and culture; and anthropological ethics. He has published four books: Zapotec Science: Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca, Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power, American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, and Militarizing Culture: Essays on the Warfare State.

Here is our guest Professor Roberto Gonzalez unplugged!

Interview with Roberto Gonzalez [ 52:16 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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