May 24 commentary "For links to the articles I read on the air, guest websites, archived shows, my commentaries, a listener's discussion forum, and the text of Mark Stanneart’s latest commentary, visit: www.rabblerousing.org."

First item: you want an example of brilliant propaganda, foisted upon the public by a govt with the willing complicity of the media? Look no further than the latest phony news of the govt release of pentagon security camera videos of something crashing into the pentagon on 911. The spin is that this highly secret video finally proves that it was indeed a boeing 757 piloted by demented muslim terrorists that flew into the pentagon. End of story. Proof positive. Well, I downloaded not one but 2 videos that were on a govt website emailed to me. Guess what? Mainstream media is lying to you. These videos don’t reveal dog doodoo. The videos are so unclear you have to be told that the building is the pentagon. In one videio A concrete parking stanchion obscures your view so you never really see the plane or missile at all. the second video is from a surveillance camera farther away and you briefly see a white object slam into the side of a building and then a glorious fireball and explosion that would fit right into any bruce willis movie. great footage of explosion and fireball, but no way to identify what caused it. The only clearly identifiable object in either video is a cop car that drives by just before this conclusive evidence of nothing. Excuse me. What is proven conclusively, to me at least, is that the govt, with full cooperation of the media is trying very hard to sell us a bunch of bs. Btw, still photos of these videos have been on the web since shortly after the event back in 2001. these videos were featured in the claims by the French author therry theissen that it could not have been a commercial aircraft that hit the pentagon. The videos or stills taken from the videos didn’t clearly establish that it was a missile then and they don’t clearly establish that it wasn’t a missile now. So, one has to ask why so many are making such a fuss over their release and their content. I claim that its all spin and disinformation. Here is proof that it was what we say it was, now shut up and stop bothering us with facts. One further point: the govt has claimed for years that they couldn’t release any survelance videos of the crash into the pentagon because it would compromise their case against nutcase wannabe terrorist zacarias mousari. I hearby offer a challenge to all listeners: if you can establish any connection whatsoever between surveillance videos of planes, missiles or flying popcorn boxes crashing into the pentagon and zacarias masouri or anyone else for that matter, I’ll send you a lottery ticket to win the pine st bridge. What an incredible load of garbage.

Next item: I don’t know if this next article is genuine or a spoof. And it’s an sign of the times we live in that after hearing it, you might not know either. Seems it was written the day after mothers day. Here is the article: The National Security Agency reported a sharp increase in long distance telephone usage yesterday, causing high-ranking intelligence officers in the Bush administration to fear that al-Qaeda might be planning a terror plot to coincide with Mother's Day.
Beginning Sunday morning and continuing throughout the day, Americans' long distance usage surged well beyond normal levels, sparking concerns that a terrorist event was either being planned or moving into an operational phase.
At the White House, national security adviser Stephen Hadley said that the troubling increase in chatter was "the strongest argument possible" for the Bush administration's policy of eavesdropping on millions of Americans.
"If we were not listening in on everyone's conversations, when there is a sudden increase in phone usage such as we have seen today we would totally miss it," Mr. Hadley said.
In addition to what he called "frighteningly normal-sounding phone calls to terrorists posing as mothers," Mr. Hadley reported that al Qaeda members or affiliates placed thousands of phone calls to florists in order to mask their terror plot.
When asked by a reporter why no terrorist event ultimately occurred on Sunday, Mr. Hadley replied, "I chalk that up to the success of our eavesdropping program."
In response to another reporter who asked if the increase in long distance usage could have been due to Mother's Day itself, the security adviser said, "That's exactly what the terrorists want us to think."

Next item; how do we know its an election year? Because cong john Doolittle has managed to do very little and yet the gv union slavishly reports it. Ready for this breathtaking news? Doolittle gets funding. House Republican Conference Secretary John Doolittle announced Friday that he has secured funding for the Fourth Congressional District in the Interior spending bill approved by the House Thursday. "I'm please to announce that I've been able to secure funding to help improve our district's environmental and cultural infrastructure, support our local timber industry and to prevent the risk of catastrophic forest fire," Doolittle, R-Roseville, stated in a media release. Why is it that I always get the feeling that If Doolittle stated in a media release that he had eggs for breakfast, I would read about it in the union. Question: wonder what his opponent, Charlie brown has to do to get his name mentioned in our local paper? Somehow I doubt that a media release by him would warrant the same coverage.

Next item: 'The phony threat of liberal drug laws' Steve Chapman, The Baltimore Sun
CHICAGO // Recently, Mexican President Vicente Fox vetoed a bill passed by the Mexican Congress that would have removed criminal penalties for people caught with small amounts of marijuana or other drugs. This came after the Bush administration vigorously complained, predicting it would encourage Americans to pour southward as "drug tourists."
But that option is off the table for the moment. So Americans who want to get high without fear of going to jail will have to go some other place where cannabis can be consumed with impunity. Such as Nebraska.
As it happens, no fewer than 11 states on this side of the border have made the decision not to bother filling their prisons with recreational potheads. Among them are not only such states as California and Oregon, which you might expect, but states such as North Carolina and Mississippi, which you might not. About 100 million Americans live in places where pot has been decriminalized.
Maybe there are planeloads of college kids who travel to Maine or Minnesota to spend each spring break hitting a bong, but if so, it's a well-kept secret. In fact, the most noticeable thing about states that have decriminalized marijuana is that they're not - noticeable, that is.
Looking at these places, "you can't tell the difference from how many people use marijuana," says University of Maryland, College Park economist Peter Reuter. A 1999 report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences found "there is little evidence that decriminalization of marijuana use necessarily leads to a substantial increase in marijuana use."
Not everyone is in complete agreement. Rosalie Pacula, co-director of the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp., says her research indicates decriminalization does tend to lead to higher use. But by her measures, the effect is small.
Laws are only a modest factor in the decision to use drugs or not - just as they are only a modest factor in the decision to smoke cigarettes or not. Most people don't even know if they live in a decriminalized state.
The evidence from abroad is not terribly scary either. The Netherlands has gone beyond decriminalizing pot: For years, the government has allowed the sale of small amounts of pot through special cafes known as "coffee shops." Yet easy accessibility hasn't made the drug any more tempting to the average person. Dutch adults and teens both are less likely to use cannabis than Americans.
So it's hard to see why the United States should mind if Mexico decides to go easy on potheads. A good deal of evidence indicates that the law wouldn't make much difference in the behavior of either Mexicans or Americans.
There are some clear advantages, though. By freeing cops from focusing on recreational marijuana users, governments can reallocate more resources to serious crime.
Of course, the Mexican measure would have decriminalized possession of other drugs too, including heroin, cocaine and amphetamines - something no American state has done. Wouldn't something so drastic produce an explosion of hard drug use?
Actually, no. Italy, Spain and Portugal have decriminalized personal use of all drugs, not just cannabis. But liberal laws don't necessarily lead to liberal behavior. Spain has one of the highest cocaine use rates in Europe - but lower than the rate in Britain, which has a much stricter approach. Italy, by contrast, is about average for the continent, but Portugal is well below average. On heroin, all three are on the high side, though not dramatically so.
That fact, however, may not reveal anything about the effects of drug policies. It's easy to assume that when you change the law, you change behavior with respect to drugs. But the process may go in the opposite direction. Spaniards may not tend to use more cocaine because they have a permissive law; they may have a permissive law because Spaniards tend to use more cocaine.
States and nations don't seem to lose anything when they stop treating drug use as a crime. But there are gains to be had: more police time to combat violent criminals, less need to build prisons and fewer young lives scarred by arrest and imprisonment for behavior that does no harm.
Some people are happy with Mexico exactly as it is. But it just might benefit from becoming more like Nebraska.
next item: 'Crisis shortage poses crisis for White House Beth Quinn, times herald record (Middletown, NY)
As George Bush's approval rating fell below 30 percent last week, the White House scrambled to locate a new crisis for the president to "face like a man," thereby perpetuating the charade that he's a leader.
Alas, it appears that Bush's spendthrift ways have caught up with him. He squandered all the crises at his disposal during his first five years in office. He's plumb out of crises with which to keep us from noticing that his tax cuts benefit only the rich.
In fact, Americans have grown crisis-weary and only a handful of people are still willing to believe the sky is falling every time Bush proclaims a new crisis.
He's trying to crisis-up immigration right now - an issue that's rarely considered a crisis until an election is approaching, as it is now.
But immigration has proved to be such a dismal little crisis that Bush felt the need to jack up the fear last week by calling out the National Guard to help man the U.S.-Mexico border.
(Note to Bush: The National Guard is in Iraq right now fighting one of your previously made-up crises, so they aren't available for the Mexico gig.)
Even the border patrol announcement, though, elicited barely a yawn in a nation that has long since quit noticing what color the terror alerts are. Oh, that's right. There are no more terror alerts. They quit upsetting people long ago.
In fact, Bush is suffering a crisis in failed crises.
Remember the Social Security crisis? Seniors were entirely clear-sighted on that one and told him to take his crisis and shove it where the sun don't shine.
Then there was the prescription drug crisis that led to the kazillion-dollar Medicare plan - another failed crisis that senior citizens saw right through.
(Note to Bush: Seniors READ. They figured out that your plan lets insurers remove drugs from the drug plan without warning. That's a deal? You think old people are stupid?)
Then, of course, he demonized the homosexuals so he could conjure up a gay-marriage crisis. That worked for a while with his creepy base, but most Americans recognized that two gay people sharing a life together doesn't really qualify as a crisis.
Meanwhile, as Bush conjures up pretend crises, he's paid scant attention to the real crises. He ignored the Katrina crisis. He continues to ignore the health-care crisis and the 50 million uninsured Americans. He's ignoring the crisis of genocide in Darfur.
Global warming - probably the single greatest threat we face - isn't a crisis at all! It's not even real! We've got an oil crisis and no plan for developing alternative energy sources to save both the planet and our pocketbooks.
As for terrorism, the only thing Bush has done about that crisis is put two mentally ill men on trial, neither of whom attacked us - Saddam Hussein and the genuinely bipolar Zacarias Moussaoui.
But where is Osama? That man is a crisis-in-waiting, but instead of going after him, Bush conjured a crisis elsewhere and attacked Iraq.
In fact, his best skill is creating crises - both imagined and real. A needless war without end. A $300 trillion deficit. An attack on democracy here at home.
Bush's real crisis, of course, is the crisis in confidence that Americans are suffering. The rest of the world had his number long ago, but suddenly everyone in town is noticing that our president has the attention span and judgment of a lunatic 2-year-old.
There are still 974 days left 'til Inauguration 2009. A lunatic 2-year-old can create a lot of chaos in that much time.
And that's the scariest crisis of all.

Next item: every article I read about any of the presidential wannabes in the 2008 election I get more and more depressed. It seems each is worse than the last one the media told me to think about. Here is one guys take on sen john mccain. 'McCain's supporters trust that he's lying 'Michael Kinsley, The Baltimore Sun
All successful politicians must have at least some talent for lying about what's in their hearts and convincing people that it is the truth.
But Sen. John McCain has a unique genius for telling the truth from his heart and making people believe that he is lying. And these people are his supporters! They admire him as a straight talker and they forgive him for taking positions on big issues that they find repellent on the grounds that he doesn't really mean what he says.
"Oh, he has to say that to get the Republican nomination," explain many Democrats with a crush on the charming, funny, intelligent and heroic Republican senator from Arizona, and/or a special loathing of their party's own star, the junior senator from New York. "That" might refer to Mr. McCain's strong right-to-life stand on abortion, or his strong support for the war in Iraq.
These Democrats admire Mr. McCain as a straight shooter among sneaks, a truth-teller amid bull artists. They long, understandably, for some fresh air in the fetid atmosphere of politics.
In a presidential run, Mr. McCain would have the votes of millions who disagree with him on major issues. His challenge will be to get the votes of people who agree with him. Toward that end, Mr. McCain is delivering four university graduation speeches. He gave two this week, virtually identical. The texts (available online) are marvels of wit, honesty and surprise. It would be wonderful to have a president whose speeches were not a duty to listen to.
But how many Americans and Iraqis should die so that we can enjoy entertaining presidential speeches? If you support the war, that is a nonsense question. If you don't, it is more pressing.
Mr. McCain is admirably clear: He supported going to war and he supports continuing it until ... well, not so clear, but longer than most Democrats would care for. His discussion of the Iraq war is a bit of a cop-out. It's mostly about how we all have the duty to express our beliefs and the right to disagree.
Mr. McCain is like another larger-than-life character in American politics: Colin L. Powell. Both men are so admirable and so likable that people convince themselves against all evidence that Mr. Powell or Mr. McCain must agree with them on the big issues.
In Mr. Powell's case, the theory always was that he was speaking truth to power from within while telling the necessary public fibs to hold onto the privileged position this service required.
With Mr. McCain, something more magical is going on. He says plainly that he is for the war, or against abortion rights, and people hear the opposite. It's a gift, I guess.

Ok, lets to from bad to worse: Jan Frel: 'Why are Gore and Kerry polling worse than Bush?' writing in alternet.com
Be pragmatic. Take a good, long look at reality, and recognize that even though there isn't a Democrat in Washington who will admit that our political system is profoundly sick and obsolete, in the real world, the Democratic Party is currently all we have. So support it anyway.
That's what I've been telling myself, but boy can it be hard to swallow. Take, for example, the sea of problems Hillary Clinton poses to any political idealist. Hillary Clinton may represent many awful things -- Iraq, corporatism, insane military spending -- but the truth is, millions of Americans may well have health care if she becomes president, and they won't if she loses to a Republican in the next election.
I know it's good when Jack Abramoff sinks six congressmen and a senator; I know it's good when Bush's ratings hover in the 30s. I choke down my speeches about how both of these things are symptomatic of systemic problems and not due to the virtue of elected Democrats. And I am intrigued and hopeful at the prospect of Al Gore running for president, even though I think it's bizarre to engage in the dominant political language surrounding presidential contests -- where the every little move of one human being is treated as representative of the political desires of 300 million. Still, that's all there is. So I'm going with it.
This kind of "pragmatism" isn't any easier when the wider public thinks there's something deeply wrong as well. They clearly aren't buying "John Kerry" or "Al Gore" at this point. A recent New York Times poll has both of them ranking below the worst president in history. Kerry is at 26 percent, and former vice president and presidential candidate Gore is at 28 percent. George W. Bush is pulling in at 31 percent.
There are a lot of numbers in the recent poll that would normally give me cause for joy -- the public hates everything about Bush. Only 13 percent think he's done a good job addressing rising gas prices. Twenty-nine percent are still favorably shocked and awed by his performance on Iraq. The surface-level political analysis making the progressive rounds on Bush's bad poll numbers is that they will automatically translate into success for Democrats: takeovers in Congress in 2006, etc.
But if that were the case, it would be fair to expect that a guy like Al Gore would look like the shiniest red apple in the basket. But to repeat, the same poll has Gore polling below George Bush. The Times called Gore one of "Bush's most vocal critics." What does that mean? Let's be pragmatic.
These bipartisan absurdly low numbers for our national politicians mean to me that there's something more profound going on in American society than our national politicians are willing to fess up to. I think it's something very close to what writer Matt Taibbi once explained about why he wanted to pack the 10 Democrats vying for the Democratic nomination in the 2004 election "into a missile and shoot them into space":

Salim Muwakkil, writing for In These Times, the articles title: 'Science is the drug war's latest victim'. The war on drugs is an attack on rationality. Reason lost yet another skirmish recently when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on April 20 that "no sound scientific studies" supported the medical use of marijuana.
The announcement flatly contradicts the conclusion of virtually every major study on the efficacy of medical marijuana, including two performed by the government. In a New York Times article the following day, Dr. Jerry Avorn of Harvard Medical School said "this is yet another example of the FDA making pronouncements that seems to be driven more by ideology than science."
Avorn's criticism is one regularly leveled at the Bush administration, namely, that it is using politics to trump science. Last year, for example, the ACLU released a report titled "Science Under Siege" that detailed efforts by the Bush administration to hamper scientific inquiry in the name of ideology and national security.
The report found the administration has censored and prescreened scientific articles before publication, suppressed environmental and public health information, and increased restrictions on materials commonly used in basic scientific research.
For two years the Union of Concerned Scientists has circulated a petition statement which now contains the signatures of 9,000 U.S. scientists, including 49 Nobel Prize winners and 63 National Medal of Science recipients. The statement complains that the Bush administration advocates "policies that are not scientifically sound," and sometimes has "misrepresented scientific knowledge and misled the public about the implication of its politics." This comes on the heels of a host of other accusations against the administration--charges of censoring a NASA scientist on issues of global warming and burying data on the morning-after Plan B contraceptive.
But the FDA announcement on marijuana is perhaps the most blatant effort to ignore scientific reality. Critics charge that the statement was issued to bolster opponents of various medical marijuana initiatives that have passed in 11 states.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and John P. Walters, the director of national drug control policy (the Drug Czar) oppose the use of medical marijuana. The Times quoted Walters' spokesman Tom Riley, who said the FDA's statement would put to rest what he called "the bizarre public discussion" that has helped legalize medical marijuana. But Riley failed to note that some of that discussion was sparked by an exhaustive DEA investigation into cannabis (the scientific name for marijuana) from 1986 to 1988. The comprehensive study examined evidence from doctors, patients and thousands of documents regarding marijuana's medical utility.
Following a hearing on the study's findings, the DEA's administrative judge Francis L. Young released a ruling on Sept. 6, 1988, that noted, "Nearly all medicines have toxic, potentially lethal effects. But marijuana is not such a substance ..." Marijuana in its natural form, he said, "is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis, marijuana can be safely used within a supervised routine of medical care."
He recommended that "(The) provisions of the (Controlled Substances) Act permit and require the transfer of marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for the DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance."
The New England Journal of Medicine, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Public Health Association, AIDS Action Council and dozens of other medical groups have endorsed medical marijuana. Anecdotal evidence from Oregon, one of the states that legalized marijuana's medical uses,"adds to the mountain of data supporting the medicinal value of pot," according to a May 1 editorial in the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard.
Despite this and a growing wealth of new information (particularly new research on cannabanoid medicine by Dr. Raphael Mechoulam out of Hebrew University in Jerusalem) regarding the therapeutic potential of marijuana and its various analogues, the U.S. government refuses to alter its prohibitionist restrictions on marijuana use or research.
Although the Bushites' rejection of scientific reality is particularly egregious, governmental irrationality about marijuana has been bipartisan. Indeed, more people suffered pot arrests during the Clinton administration than in any other before or since. Washington, in general, seems particularly susceptible to distorted reasoning or magical thinking when considering this ancient herb.
Isn't it a sign of mental disorder when distorted reasoning is unchanged by empirical evidence? What is it about marijuana that drives our politicians insane?

'A slow-motion coup 'Rowan Wolf, Project For The Old American Century  

"A coup d'etat ... or just coup ... for short, is the sudden overthrow of (taking over from) a government. Unlike a revolution, which usually takes large numbers of people to take over, a coup can be done by a small number of people, or even one person, if they, for example, control the country's army,"
-- Wikipedia Generally, a coup is seen as the overthrow of those in power by another - usually with support of at least part of the military. Often this is imagined as a swift move followed by a consolidation operation (kill or expel those who were previously in power). However, a coup seems to be occurring in the United States, but it is a slow coup. It may be culminated by one drastic move that consolidates the plan, but the pieces are being clearly put in place for a coup of the entire government with the eradication of democracy and the Constitution. I will constrain my discussion to three areas: executive power, intelligence, and military reach.
Executive Power  Bush has consistently operated under the philosophy of the unitary executive.
"This theory argues that the executive branch of government, held in the hands of the President, has the sole right to ignore all law (including the Constitution and international agreements), and without oversight by Congress, or checks by the Supreme Court. In short, the President is above the law and has all the authority of government, and the right to order without challenge all branches of government. This includes the ordering of the U.S. military into war without authorization by Congress. In short, the "unitary executive," as vested in the person of the President, is a king, an emperor, or a dictator. It represents one individual with total control of the full resources of the United States to take any action Bush sees fit. Wolf   Many are raising alarm about Bush's use of "signing statements." While Bush has not vetoed any legislation that has come his way, he has used the signing statement to exempt the executive branch from obeying the laws he has signed. While many of Bush's signing statements have, and are being challenged in court, the signing statements "function as directives to executive branch departments and agencies as to how they are to implement the relevant law" (John Dean, 1/13/06).
Bush has utilized the signing statement an estimated 750 times to effectively overrule legislation that has come before him. The statements have been attached to everything from certain aspects of the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), to anti-torture legislation, to reporting to Congress. As John Dean notes, "Bush is using signing statements like line item vetoes. Yet the Supreme Court has held the line item vetoes are unconstitutional." However, this back door approach to the line item veto is to selectively exempt the Executive Branch from complying with the laws written by Congress. In effect, Bush is creating a "unitary executive" which is effectively a dictator above the law of the land and the constraints of the Constitution.
Intelligence  Some call it "intelligence" and others "spying." Regardless of the nomenclature, the Bush Administration's commitment to massive data collection approaches zealotry. The old adage that "knowledge is power" has been taken to heart in a twisted way by this group. The power resides in knowing everything about everyone else and not letting anyone know anything about you.
The drive to know everything was brought to light with the uncovering to TIAS (Total Information Awareness System) in November 2002. The purpose of the program run by John Poindexter out of the DoD Information Awareness Office was to collect every piece of information on every person in the United States in one database and then "datamine" it. The database would include a running data collection from primary documents to school records to pictures of you as you stood at the checkout line in the grocery store. It was truly a "Big Brother" idea. Aside: Poindexter came to fame in the Iran-Contra debacle during the Reagan administration when he served as Deputy National Security Advisor and National Security Advisor. He was brought back into the Bush Administration for his unique skills - as was John Negroponte among others formerly "under a cloud." TIA was defunded, but the program (or parts of it) have made their way into other agencies - such as Homeland Security, HUD, and the NSA.
The President and the National Security Agency drew attention with its "terrorist" spying program where all calls originating outside the country, or from the U.S. with a foreign destination, were "captured." This was done without a FISA warrant, and the Bush Administration (including Bush, Gonzales, and General Hayden) have all argued that what they did was legal. Their perspective seems to be a minority view. However, executive authority has once again come into play as the NSA stymies Justice Dept. spying probe attempting to uncover the scope of the program.
Now, an even larger spying operation by the NSA has been uncovered. As reported in USA Today, the ongoing phone records of over 200 million people in the US have been turned over by most of the major telecommunication companies to the NSA. There are potentially trillions of records that have been captured. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, has filed a suit against AT&T for providing phone logs to the NSA, but the Bush administration has moved to quash the suit. There are reports that the indiscriminate spying on Americans is even wider, and that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has brought satellite surveillance to bear on the US for domestic spying.
The public response to the NSA programs has been mixed depending on what poll you read. A Washington Post poll found that most Americans don't mind being spied on. They attributed their results to the public's willingness to give up privacy for safety. However, both a NewsWeek poll and a USA Today poll have opposite results. The comments of "If you're talking to al Qaeda we want to know about it," are patently distracting. In order for this comment to make any sense, the NSA would have to know the phone numbers (and email addresses) of al Qaeda members (and who the members are). If they know those then they can place a trap/tap on them and "capture" the numbers of those calling. Hence, no need for indiscriminate phone and email "captures." If they don't know that information, then looking at trillions of phone and email communications is unlikely to get them.
As a researcher, I am totally unconvinced that such massive data collection increases the effectiveness of finding terrorists - or uncovering their plots. The information to prevent the events of 9/11/01 were there and "missed." Increasing the amount of spurious data to be "mined" in order to spot particular threats is like trying to find a needle in a haystack by adding a trillion haystacks. What it does do is provide domestic information of high specificity for their purposes. The mass monitoring of the population.
While Bush, and others in the administration issue calming statements that these programs are of limited scope, legal, and necessary for security, to anyone with some historical background, or a halfway decent memory, such promises and assurances have consistently been hollow in the past. For those who have forgotten, or never knew, Ron Hutcheson has written an excellent reminder - US Government has Long History of Abusing Personal Information.
Hutcheson reminds us of the 1976 Church Commission investigation which resulted in the legal leash being put on the intelligence community, a leash that was dropped with the USA PATRIOT Act. "In time of crisis, the government will exercise its power to conduct domestic intelligence activities to the fullest extent. The distinction between legal dissent and criminal conduct is easily forgotten," the committee wrote. "In an era where the technological capability of government relentlessly increases, we must be wary about the drift toward `big brother government.''             Hutcheson goes before that to 1912 when waiters, "well-placed" people, and others were recruited to "eavesdrop on conversations." He enumerates some of the violations of rights and privacy in the 1920s "Red Scare" though he leaves out the McCarthy era. He reminds us of the spying on Martin Luther King, and other activists and activist groups of the day.
In other words, the government does not have a good track record when it comes to recognizing the boundaries of Constitutional protections when they perceive a threat. Further, all too frequently security issues end up being extended to those who are seen as a political threat or even dissident voices. I see no reason to assume that this situation is any different than any other "infringement" in the name of "security." It is not comforting that the Vice President is purportedly one of the primary supporters of expanding "eavesdropping" even further. To say that such programs "blur the line" is an understatement.
Military Reach            At some point, we have to question the reach of the military into domestic affairs. We have created a monstrosity that eats up massive amounts of economic resources. It is therefore not surprising that the military appears to be the "most prepared" to handle a number of tasks from emergency response, to guarding the borders, to engaging in domestic intelligence gathering and control measures. However, there are good reasons - particularly in a democracy - to constrain the power and scope of the military. Perhaps the largest is the issue of the potential of the military control of a free population.
There has been an ongoing struggle for "intelligence" funding and the Pentagon has been a key player in that competition. Certainly in the aftermath of 9/11/01, the succeeding "wars," and reorganization of the intelligence community and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the role and position of the military has expanded. It had already expanded prior to that during the "war on drugs" which transferred both technology and forces to those efforts. This has dramatically expanded in the current environment.
The question of domestic deployment of US forces came clearly into play in the response to Hurricane Katrina. The mobilization of the National Guard, and who was to control them came to the forefront. It dramatically highlighted the issue of the use of the military domestically. When President Bush proposed that the military be the initial and primary federal responder in an emergency, then alarm bells rang for many (for example Baldwin and 12/13/05 Sappenfeld, CSM, Sappenfeld,Wolf). The most recent decision to deploy the National Guard in support of the southern Border Patrol raises the possibility of Historic changes possible in military's role in domestic emergencies.
The competition for a domestic intelligence role was in part mentioned earlier with the issue of TIA, however, that is not the only plan that the Pentagon has been involved in. In 2002, Robert O'Harrow, Jr. discussed the creation of a cyber-surveillance system that would access "government and commercial databases around the world." One has to assume that this includes U.S. databases.
There has likely always been a tug of war between the military and its competitors (CIA, FBI, NSA, NGSP, etc) since each of those agencies came into existence. However the competition has particularly been with the CIA since both of their foci is purportedly international (Schmitt). The retirement of Porter Goss from the CIA, and the nomination of General Hayden to fill the post, brings the ongoing power struggle to center stage Buncombe). However, it may also "resolve" the conflict in favor of the Pentagon. General Hayden is military after all. Protestations that he is his own man, pale when he is directly under the military command of both Rumsfeld and Bush. It does not calm fears of the Pentagon "capturing" the CIA, particularly when Rumsfeld offers enthusiastic support for Hayden.
Gathering the Pieces For a Slow Motion Coup     So we have an administration attempting to institutionalize their vision of a "unitary executive." It is also an administration which has directly supported eroding the Constitutional protections of the people as well as fighting any oversight or transparency. It is an administration which has supported, and dramatically increased the role of the military in domestic operations, intelligence and direct intelligence gathering (spying on people in person), technology transfer, and enforcement tasks. This raises the prospect of a coup, and few seem to see this as anything more threatening than a "temporary" situation.
When George W. Bush was "elected" in 2000, I commented that it I would not be at all surprised to see another Bush in the Presidency - Jeb Bush. It therefore came as no surprise to read that George W., George H.W., and Jeb all thought it would be a great thing if Jeb became the third President from the Bush family (Political dynasties: Bush the third?).
Rowan Wolf is a columnist for Project for the Old American Century, and the editor of Radical Noesis and Uncommon Thought Journal. Her email is rowan@uncommonthought.com
Source: Project For The Old American Century
http://oldamericancentury.org/rowan_050.htm