Archive for the ‘Military’ Category
“Doubt the government plans to impose martial law and round up dissidents and other malcontents? Well, the Army National Guard is advertising for qualified personnel to work as Corrections Officers and Internment/Resettlement Specialists. ‘As an Internment/Resettlement Specialist for the Army National Guard, you will ensure the smooth running of military confinement/correctional facility or detention/internment facility, similar to those duties conducted by civilian Corrections Officers,’ a classified ad posted on the web states. ‘This will require you to know proper procedures and military law; and have the ability to think quickly in high-stress situations. Specific duties may include assisting with supervision and management operations; providing facility security; providing custody, control, supervision, and escort; and counseling individual prisoners in rehabilitative programs.
The term ‘rehabilitative programs’ is key. Glenn Beck and the corporate media may attempt to discredit the fact there are FEMA camps, but military documents demonstrate the government plans to herd people into internment camps. Army Regulation 210-35, entitled ‘Civilian Inmate Labor Program,’ provides ‘guidance for establishing and managing civilian inmate labor programs on Army installations. It provides guidance on establishing prison camps on Army installations.’
In Mao’s China, the government established a sprawling system of administrative detention centers — known as Laogai — designed to reeducate dissidents and other social misfits through forced slave labor. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, a network of gulags — a Russian acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies — were established, primarily for political prisoners and as a mechanism for repressing political opposition to the Soviet state.’”
source: infowars.com
“According to CNN, the Pentagon is ‘to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall, according to Defense Department officials.’
‘The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
The officials would not be identified because the proposal from U.S. Northern Command’s Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.
The plan calls for military task forces to work in conjunction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There is no final decision on how the military effort would be manned, but one source said it would likely include personnel from all branches of the military.
It has yet to be determined how many troops would be needed and whether they would come from the active duty or the National Guard and Reserve forces.
Civilian authorities would lead any relief efforts in the event of a major outbreak, the official said. The military, as they would for a natural disaster or other significant emergency situation, could provide support and fulfill any tasks that civilian authorities could not, such as air transport or testing of large numbers of viral samples from infected patients.
As a first step, Gates is being asked to sign a so-called “execution order” that would authorize the military to begin to conduct the detailed planning to execute the proposed plan.
Orders to deploy actual forces would be reviewed later, depending on how much of a health threat the flu poses this fall, the officials said.’ (CNN, Military planning for possible H1N1 outbreak, July 2009)
The implications are far-reaching. The decision points towards the establishment of a police State. The Pentagon is already planning on the number of troops to be deployed in the case of a pandemic. A nationwide vaccination program is is already planned for the Fall. The pharmaceutical indsutry is slated to deliver 160 million vaccine doses by the Fall…”
source: infowars.com
“Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano traveled to New York to deliver a speech to the boss today. She told the Council on Foreign Relations there will be no departure from the Bush administration in regard to homeland security. It will be the same agenda with a few minor changes — for instance, the color-coded threat advisory will be chucked.
‘Napolitano sang the praises of counter-terrorism intelligence being shared between federal, state and local agencies through arrangements known as fusion centers,’ writes Frank James for NPR. Napolitano said she plans ‘to make them a top priority for this department to support them, build them, improve them and work with them.’
Translation: the feds will continue the full-steam ahead effort to federalize state and local law enforcement, an effort that began in earnest under Bill Clinton and picked up critical momentum during the reign of George W. Bush. ‘Napolitano sounded just like her predecessors Ridge and Michael Chertoff,’ James continues. ‘And she talked about educating the populace about how to be the eyes and ears of counter-terrorism and also how to respond to the aftermath of man-made or natural disasters,’ or for that matter government contrived false flag operations. Napolitano told the internationalist cabal in New York that the American people suffer from ‘complacency’ and this is a ‘threat in the United States.’ In order to combat complacency, the government has to do more to ‘educate’ the public on the threat posed by terrorists and other miscreants. In other words, Napolitano admitted the incessant warnings of impending doom — from dirty bombs in major cities to bad guys taking out nuclear plants — have not worked…”
source: infowars.com
“Ever since the exit of George W. Bush from the White House, his admirers in India have been a worried lot. They have been wondering nervously about the fate of the “strategic partnership” and the future of dangerous regional rivalries promoted during his days. They are happier after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to the country. They seem less concerned on both counts.
What has dispelled their gloom is a document signed during her visit: an end-use monitoring (EUM) agreement on US military supplies to India. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government has not tabled the text of the agreement in Parliament or shared it with the public so far. But a fair idea of its content is available from disjointed statements, official and quasi-official, made in the course of discussions.
The agreement is based on section 40 (a) of the US Arms Export Control Act, which asks the US administration to ensure, ‘to the extent practicable, (that) such program shall be designed to provide reasonable assurances that the recipient is complying with the requirements imposed by the United States Government with respect to the use, transfers, and security of defense articles and monitoring of U.S. arms transfers, and security of defense articles and services’…”
source: truthout.org
“Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, ‘all the way until that day of September 11.’
These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies. As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from ‘actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’) as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.”
source: infowars.com
“There’s a McDonald’s on the high street, suburban houses, rats the size of dogs and 229 of the world’s most high-profile prisoners. Six months after President Obama declared that he would close it down, Naomi Wolf heads to Guantánamo Bay to see whether anything has changed.
Six months ago this week President Obama, on his second day in office, promised to close the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, and to undo the secretive and coercive detention and interrogation policies of George W. Bush. But has Obama been as good as his word…”
source: truthout.org
“The Obama administration says it will release Mohammed Jawad, who has been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp since 2002. Earlier this month officials admitted that there was no military case for Mr Jawad’s continued detention. But government lawyers had said they wished to keep him in detention pending a possible criminal prosecution…
Mr Jawad was arrested in Afghanistan in December 2002, after being accused of throwing a grenade at a jeep and injuring two US soldiers and their interpreter. His lawyers say he was 12 years old at the time of his arrest, although Pentagon officials say a bone scan indicates that he was actually 17. Shortly after his arrest, he was transported to the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, where he is still being held.
His lawyers campaigned for his release, arguing that his confession had been obtained by Afghan officials using torture. In October 2008, a military judge ruled the confession inadmissible and on 16 July, Judge Huvelle described the US government’s case against Mr Jawad as ‘an outrage’ that was “riddled with holes”. On Friday US authorities said they no longer considered him to be a military prisoner. But they also said that they intended to construct a criminal case against Mr Jawad, and that he should remain in detention while they did so…”
“We live in an era defined by its brutality. Our challenge is whether to accept this – or to take the risks necessary to transform our world commons in beloved community.
A year ago this August, forty-four ordinary people from seventeen different countries sailed to Gaza in two, small wooden boats. We did what the world would not do – we broke through the siege of Gaza. Over the last year the Free Gaza Movement has organized seven more voyages, successfully arriving to Gaza on five separate occasions. Ours remain the only international ships to reach the Gaza Strip in over forty-two years.
In the Middle-East, the struggle for justice is an uncertain endeavour in the best of times. On all sides human rights workers are beset with difficulties and distress. The Arab states are tyrannies, their peoples subject to secret police, arbitrary arrest, torture, and oppression. Within their societies, the Arab world is equally fractured by ethnic and class tensions, poverty, and political stagnation. From the outside, from the West, the Middle-East faces both open and covert acts of intimidation, intervention, economic destabilization, and even war, invasion, and mass killings…”
source: counterpunch.org
“Britain may need to send more troops to Afghanistan despite the success of Operation Panther’s Claw, military chiefs admit.
The scale of the challenge was revealed yesterday as it emerged that British soldiers have faced nearly 1,000 roadside bombs in the past three months. Although 3,000 troops managed to drive out about 500 Taleban during the five-week offensive, they will be fully deployed holding an area in Helmand province about the size of the Isle of Wight, their commanding officer admitted.
Brigadier Tim Radford, commander of Task Force Helmand, said that the existing troops could not be expected to mount further significant operations without reinforcements. Gordon Brown hailed the offensive as an ‘heroic’ military success, saying it had made Britain safer and ‘pushed back the Taleban’. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, however, called for renewed efforts to engage the Taleban politically…”
source timesonline.co.uk
“Israel is a democracy, we are told. We have freedom of speech to prove it. Aside from a few pesky details of a permanent state of emergency which allows the government and security forces to impose censorship of the media, we really are free to speak our minds – to an extent.
The legal limits on personal expression are draconian, but not very often invoked. It is the unspoken limits of freedom of speech which are more binding. Even as I write I hear the clinking of the chains in my mind: how much do I dare expose? What might be the repercussions of this word, or that sentence?
I, like most young Israeli Jews, went to the army at the age of 18. At the time I barely even questioned this. Going to the army here is a fact of life, merely another step in the standard ‘natural’ order: six years of grade school, six of high school, three in the army and so forth. In the army I was exposed to matters of varying levels of secrecy. Divulging them is, of course, illegal. But even that is not what I feel constrains me and so many others. What security clearance deems secret is not, as a general rule, an interesting subject for conversation other than in very specific circumstances, almost never occurring outside the army.”
source: guardian.co.uk