This is the short version of this video, which showcases the training video without interruptions from Alex Jones. For the full portion of the show, with Jones’ comments, click here.
With the introduction of recent legislation used to legitimize the use of internment camps in the United States, many Americans are asking the question, What country do we live in? Department of Homeland security reports combined with once secret MIAC reports reveal the targets that will be rounded up and placed into these camps. Will You Go Quietly?
Too often now when people voice fear of the American government, whether it is homeland security or health-care reform, one is accused of being irrational or paranoid. It is that familiar “It can’t happen here” syndrome at work. But there are good reasons not to dismiss such concerns under current circumstances.
When society is considered a collective — akin to a team, only not voluntarily established like most sport teams — those who see themselves as its leaders and charged with selecting goals everyone must pursue can quite easily slip into a mode of thinking that construes all opposition a form of betrayal. If, for example, the federal government is understood along these lines, setting goals for us all for which resources and hard work are needed, and dissent from which may threaten the ability to collect those resources and secure such work, the dissenters will naturally be perceived as traitors to the cause. Indeed, their obstreperousness will easily be perceived as dangerous obstruction of justice! After all, those who lead us toward a goal they consider vital to the public interest do understand themselves to be promoters, champions of social justice. How else are they to understand wealth redistribution, for example?
In all the literature I have run across in my now quite long career in the field of political philosophy, insisting on the idea that the rich must not be allowed to keep their wealth, the poor must be made to share in the wealth of the nation, the indigent are legally entitled to support obtained by taking from those who have it — all these views are defended mainly as varieties of social or economic justice. And is it not even a crime today to obstruct justice? Sure, that means obstructing law, but it is called obstruction of justice, is it not? Because if the law itself is deemed as just, then those who oppose it are in cahoots with criminals who obstruct it. And by the lights of the collectivists, laws promoting their idea of the public interest are indeed just.
How can a bona fide promoter of social justice tolerate serious, persistent dissent? It is not possible unless one is firmly committed to the idea of individual rights, the right, for example, to campaign against and even withdraw from various projects government officials consider vital to the public interest. And when a country’s government is administered by officials who do not believe in individual rights, as for instance President Obama is not — judging by his close association with and reliance on the advice of legal theorists who denigrate such rights as fictitious — the concern that dissent will land one in hot water with government officials is quite rational.
OK, for a while there is the protection afforded by the First Amendment to the Constitution but with sufficient savvy the defenders of the public interest as they see it could very well see full warrant for weakening such protection. This is one of the lessons of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to pack the Supreme Court when that court would not go along with his plans for the country, plans that involved breaching the principles of the Constitution. Roosevelt did not believe in the Bill of Rights as traditionally understood in America’s legal history but crafted, instead, a Second Bill of Rights. It wasn’t only that some of the older interpretations of the Bill of Rights needed to be straightened out but that the very idea of citizens having basic, unalienable rights stood in the way of his aggressive statism.
Today, the legal team of President Obama is of the same mind as FDR was when he launched the New Deal. What is needed, they argue, is the reaffirmation of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, with its emphasis on entitlements and the coerced services needed from everyone so as to deliver on these. So when one opposes this policy, one is clearly an obstructionist. One is breaking ranks from an army that needs all the soldiers to be dedicated and loyal. Patriotism is then defined as falling in line with the government’s plans.
Why is it such a surprise, then, that the Obama administration is attacking those American citizens who voice opposition to, for example, its plan for the virtual nationalization of the health-care profession in America? Why be surprised that opponents of bailouts and stimulus programs are denigrated and marginalized instead of argued with? Such people are seen as vicious opponents of social and economic justice, and such opposition is quite intolerable to anyone who cares for such justice, is it not?
Once the bulwark against this kind of tyranny — namely the basic rights of individuals and the legal system that rests on those rights — is rejected as ultimately mythical, what will stand in the way of treating dissenters as traitors?
The fear of the American government becoming more and more tyrannical is not irrational but completely justified by the logic of the current administration’s attitude about political and legal theory. What we are seen as, all of us, is tools and resources for carrying out the government’s plans. Anyone who disagrees may well need to be neutralized.
Former Bush administration officials are vehemently denying Ridge’s statements.
“We went over backwards repeatedly and with great discipline to make sure politics did not influence any national security and homeland security decisions,” former White House chief of staff Andy Card told Politico. “The clear instructions were to make sure politics never influenced anything.”
“Under no circumstance was Tom Ridge or anyone else directed to change the threat level,” former homeland security adviser Frances Townsend said. “It didn’t work that way, and it certainly didn’t work that way in 2004. It was always an apolitical process.”
It seems that no other former top Bush political and national security officials were willing to respond.
* * * * *
In a new book, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge reveals new details on politicization under President Bush, reports US News & World Report’s Paul Bedard. Among other things, Ridge admits that he was pressured to raise the terror alert to help Bush win re-election in 2004.
Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.
Dave Weigel, writing for the Washington Independent, notes that in the past, Ridge has denied manipulating security information for political reasons. In 2004, for example, he said, “We don’t do politics in the Department of Homeland Security.”
“What Tom Ridge disclosed confirms our worst suspicions,” said Sen. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who criticized the color-coded system back in 2003. “Just like they did in Iraq, the Bush Administration manipulated intelligence to cause fear in the public to further its political goals.”
The Bush administration was forced to admit in the days after the 2004 alert that it was based on intelligence three or four years old. Officials then claimed there was a previously unmentioned “separate stream of intelligence” that justified the warning — but offered little tangible information to support their new story..
ThinkProgress recalls, the AP reported that “even ‘some senior Republicans’ privately questioned Ridge’s timing of a terror alert that came just three days after the Democratic National Convention.”
Ridge’s book, “The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…and How We Can Be Safe Again,” comes out September 1.
The Federal Protective Service (FPS) is a component of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE was established in March 2003 as the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE is comprised of five integrated divisions with broad responsibilities for a number of key homeland security priorities.
The Government Accountability Office told a congressional panel Wednesday that its investigators were able to carry bomb-making materials through 10 security checkpoints monitored by the Federal Protection Service, which guards nearly 9,000 facilities throughout the country.
According to preliminary findings of a GAO study, the investigators assembled the bomb components — which were in concentrations low enough that they wouldn’t explode — in restrooms, put the devices in briefcases and walked freely around the buildings.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, called the hearing after learning of the GAO’s initial findings. He called the security lapses “the broadest indictment of an agency of the federal government that I’ve heard.”
The FPS has 1,236 employees and more than 13,000 contracted security guards. The 67 private companies that employ those guards are responsible for their supervision, training and equipment.
Although the specifics were classified, the GAO said, the devices involved in the tests included two parts — a liquid explosive and a low-yield detonator — that could be purchased at stores or over the Internet for less than $150.
Investigators placed their briefcases on conveyor belts, but the guards and X-ray machines failed to detect anything suspicious, the GAO said. At three of the 10 security checkpoints tested, guards were not looking at the X-ray screens as the bomb-making materials passed through.
The tests were carried out in four cities in major metropolitan areas. Eight of the 10 buildings were government-owned. They included the district offices of a U.S. senator and a U.S. representative, as well as agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, of which the FPS is a part, and the State and Justice departments. The tests were conducted in April and May, and only those 10 sites were tested.
The GAO would not identify the buildings or their locations publicly but said they were randomly selected “Level 4″ facilities, which house more than 450 federal employees, have a high volume of public contact and could be considered a “likely target.” Level 4 is second only to Level 5, which includes the White House and the CIA headquarters.
The GAO’s full report is not expected until September. Among the initial findings:
* In one region, the FPS has not provided the required eight hours of X-ray or magnetometer training to its 1,500 guards since 2004.
* In another region, 62% of contract guards had expired certifications in at least one of the following areas: weapons, CPR, first aid and baton use.
* At one high-security facility, an armed guard was found asleep at his post after taking the painkiller Percocet.
* In one major city, an improperly trained guard sent an infant in a carrier through an X-ray machine.
* A guard who was supposed to be standing watch was caught using government computers to further his for-profit adult website.
* A guard failed to recognize or did not properly X-ray a box containing handguns at the loading dock of a facility.
Gary Schenkel, the FPS director, accepted responsibility for the findings but noted challenges his agency has experienced since he arrived in 2007, including budget constraints. In response to the GAO findings, he said the FPS needed to be “much more involved” in standardizing the agency and its training procedures in all 50 states.
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