THE COMING AMERICAN REBELLION PART TWO

THE COMING AMERICAN REBELLION PART TWO

Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion

David DeGraw

THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION

Part Two :: The Most Repressive Regime: US Police State

X Torture: Made in the USA
XI American Gulag: World’s Largest Prison Complex
XII Loss of Civil Liberties
XIII Internet Crackdown
XIV Silencing Dissent
XV Protected By Anonymous

PART TWO

THE MOST REPRESSIVE REGIME: US POLICE STATE

X TORTURE: MADE IN THE USA

It is extremely hypocritical when well-paid mainstream “news” people talk about how repressive and barbaric the Mubarak regime is in Egypt. Once again, I doubt they’ve been to inner city America recently.

If you want to report on Egypt participating in torture, it is vital to point out where they were getting their weapons, training and funding from. Who paid them to commit horrific crimes against humanity? Look in the mirror US taxpayers; you may not like what you see.

WikiLeaks revealed information on a US-Egyptian torture program:

WikiLeaks Docs: Torture-Linked Egyptian Police Trained in U.S.
“Newly released classified U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks have shed more light on the key U.S. support for human rights abuses under Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. The cables show Egyptian secret police received training at the FBI’s facility in Quantico, Virginia, even as U.S. diplomats in Egypt sent dispatches alleging extensive abuse under their watch.

Coincidentally, Quantico also hosts the military base where alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning is being held in solitary confinement.

A cable from October 2009 cites allegations from ‘credible’ sources that some prisoners were tortured ‘with electric shocks and sleep deprivation to reduce them to a ‘zombie state.’ One cable from November 2007 shows then-FBI deputy director John Pistole praised the head of Egypt’s secret police for ‘excellent and strong’ cooperation between the two agencies. Pistole currently heads the Transportation Security Administration in the United States.”

America the beautiful… The Transportation Security Administration, from electric shocks, sleep deprivation and zombie states in Egypt, to cancer causing, civil liberty-destroying Naked Scanners at an airport near you.

XI AMERICAN GULAG: WORLD’S LARGEST PRISON COMPLEX

If you want to report on Egypt putting their citizens in prison, again, the hypocrisy is astonishing. The US, by far, has more of its citizens in prison than any other nation on earth. China, with a billion citizens, doesn’t imprison as many people as the US, with only 309 million American citizens. The US per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000. In the Middle East, the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia imprisons 45 per 100,000. US per capita levels are equivalent to the darkest days of the Soviet Gulag.

The majority of prisoners are locked up for non-violent crimes, with tens of thousands in Supermax cells. In addition to the heinous torture programs that the US government has carried out in Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Gitmo, we have our own solitary confinement torture programs for Americans in Supermax Units throughout the country. As Jim Ridgeway from Solitary Watch explains:

“Solitary confinement has grown dramatically in the past two decades. Today, at least 25,000 prisoners are being held in long-term lockdown in the nation’s ‘supermax’ facilities; some 50,000 to 80,000 more are held in isolation in ‘administrative segregation’ or ‘special housing’ units at other facilities. In other words, on any given day, as many as 100,000 people are living in solitary confinement in America’s prisons. This widespread practice has received scant media attention, and has yet to find a place in the public discourse or on political platforms.”


The US prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A report from the Hartford Advocate titled “Incarceration Nation” revealed, “A new prison opens every week somewhere in America.” If you want to report on the brutal suppression of citizens, consider that somewhere in America, every week, a new prison is being built to literally “house the poor.”

A Boston Globe article by James Carroll shined a light on our repressive regime:

“… as federal corrections budgets increased by $19 billion, money for housing was cut by $17 billion, ‘effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the poor.’ State budgets took their cues from Washington in a new but unspoken national consensus: poverty itself was criminalized. Although ‘law and order’ was taken to be a Republican mantra, this phenomenon was fully bipartisan.”

Again, just because you don’t hear this reported on TV, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

XII LOSS OF CIVIL LIBERTIES

In addition to the record-breaking imprisonment of the American population, since 9/11 our civil liberties have been violated in unprecedented fashion. Tom Burghardt, in an article entitled, “American Police State: FBI Abuses Reveals Contempt for Political Rights, Civil Liberties,” summed up a new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation “documenting the lawless, constitutional-free zone under construction in America for nearly a decade:”

“As mass revolt spreads across Egypt and the Middle East and citizens there demand jobs, civil liberties and an end to police state abuses from repressive, U.S.-backed torture regimes, the Obama administration and their congressional allies aim to expand one right here at home.

Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released an explosive new report documenting the lawless, constitutional-free zone under construction in America for nearly a decade. That report, ‘Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001-2008,’ reveals that the domestic political intelligence apparat spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, continues to systematically violate the rights of American citizens and legal residents….
According to EFF, more than 2,500 documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that:

* From 2001 to 2008, the FBI reported to the IOB approximately 800 violations of laws, Executive Orders, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations, although this number likely significantly under-represents the number of violations that actually occurred.

* From 2001 to 2008, the FBI investigated, at minimum, 7000 potential violations of laws, Executive Orders, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations.

* Based on the proportion of violations reported to the IOB and the FBI’s own statements regarding the number of NSL [National Security Letter] violations that occurred, the actual number of violations that may have occurred from 2001 to 2008 could approach 40,000 possible violations of law, Executive Order, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations.

But FBI lawbreaking didn’t stop there. Citing internal documents, EFF revealed that the Bureau also ‘engaged in a number of flagrant legal violations’ that included, ‘submitting false or inaccurate declarations to courts,’ ‘using improper evidence to obtain federal grand jury subpoenas’ and ‘accessing password protected documents without a warrant.’

In other words, in order to illegally spy on Americans and haul political dissidents before Star Chamber-style grand juries, the FBI routinely committed perjury and did so with absolute impunity.

Reviewing the more than 2,500 documents EFF analysts averred that they had ‘uncovered alarming trends in the Bureau’s intelligence investigation practices’ and that the ‘documents suggest the FBI’s intelligence investigations have compromised the civil liberties of American citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than was previously assumed.’”


When the Egyptian regime shut down the Internet, they did so by using American made technology. Having been knocked offline here at AmpedStatus.com, we have firsthand experience in what it feels like to have your ability to communicate and First Amendment rights stripped away. We still don’t know who was behind the attacks on our website, but the situation in Egypt was an interesting case study. As it turned out, Obama’s new Chief of Staff, Bill Daley’s company provided the technology used to shut down the Internet in Egypt. No, I’m not referring to JP Morgan, it was the other company Bill Daley was a board member of up until last month, Boeing.

As media reform organization Free Press revealed:

“The Mubarak regime shut down Internet and cell phone communications before launching a violent crackdown against political protesters.

Free Press has discovered that an American company — Boeing-owned Narus of Sunnyvale, CA — had sold Egypt [Telecom Egypt, the state-run Internet service provider] ‘Deep Packet Inspection’ (DPI) equipment that can be used to help the regime track, target and crush political dissent over the Internet and mobile phones. Narus is selling this spying technology to other regimes with deplorable human rights records.

The power to control the Internet and the resulting harm to democracy are so disturbing that the threshold for using DPI must be very high. That’s why, before DPI becomes more widely used around the world and at home, the U.S. government must establish clear and legitimate criteria for preventing the use of such surveillance and control technology.”

It is probably just be an odd coincidence, but it was soon after we published the following report that we were knocked offline:

Obama Renews Commitment to Complete Destruction of the Middle Class – Meet the New Economic Death Squad


“…. Boeing certainly does love Wall Street. For those of you out of the loop, you may not recall that the most powerful and destructive WMD that Boeing executives ever helped develop was the CDO, that’s a Collateralized Debt (Damage) Obligation. Do you remember Edward Liddy? Liddy and Bill Daley were both Boeing board members, before Liddy temporarily moved to Goldman Sachs where he oversaw their Audit Committee. Liddy was the person who had the most knowledge of Goldman’s CDO exposure insured through, what was that company’s name?… Oh, AIG. Yeah, that was it. Then, Hank ‘Pentagon-Watergate-Goldman’ Paulson unilaterally made Liddy the CEO of AIG, before teaming up with Tim ‘Kissinger-Rubin-Summers-IMF’ Geithner to flush $183 billion tax dollars down the ‘too big to fail’ drain. And then… after the government was finished pumping our tax dollars to financial terrorists through the AIG SPV, Liddy scurried back to the board of Boeing where he could have cocktails with his ole pal Billy-Boy Daley. Yep, Goldman, JP Morgan, Boeing and the destruction of the US economy, birds of a feather…”

Within an hour of publishing that report, our site was knocked offline.

Something that has become very clear to me: when you accurately criticize the most powerful people, most people will ignore you, except the people who have the most power. They notice right away, and they let you know about it.

As I said, this is all probably just a coincidence.

However, this tangled web of interests between the Pentagon, Wall Street and the White House is fully exposed, yet again, with Obama’s special envoy to Egypt, Frank Wisner Jr.

Wisner has just as many conflicts of interest as Bill Daley and Edward Liddy. Some reports have mentioned that Wisner was biased toward supporting the Mubarak regime because he is a longtime friend of Mubarak, and worked for a law firm that represented the regime, Patton Boggs. But that’s only part of the story. Wisner, like Bill Daley, is a Council on Foreign Relations member. He is the son of legendary CIA propaganda expert Frank Wisner Sr., who created and ran Operation Mockingbird. For those of you who haven’t heard of Frank Wisner Sr., he used to report on “his ‘mighty Wurlitzer,’ on which he could play any propaganda tune.”

Frank Jr. was also a board member of Enron, up until its collapse, and like Edward Liddy, he also worked for AIG, from 1997 until 2009. Wisner oversaw two of the greatest corporate catastrophes in American history, back to back. Given his track record, Barack “mighty Wurlitzer” Obama must have thought he was the perfect guy for a collapsing corporate puppet regime in Egypt. Wisner is a disaster capitalism expert, right up there with Edward Liddy and Chief of Staff Bill Daley. Birds of a feather…

XIV SILENCING DISSENT

The recent internal emails from cyber-security firm HB Gary, released by WikiLeaks, exposing online campaigns to crackdown on critical journalists, reveals some of the other common methods used by the financial elite, like the Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America, to target and silence political adversaries.

As one of the targets of the revealed campaign, Brad Friedman reported:

US Chamber of Commerce Thugs Used ‘Terror Tools’ for Disinfo Scheme Targeting Me, My Family, Other Progressive U.S. Citizens, Groups.

“The US Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful Rightwing lobbying group in the country, was revealed to have been working with their law firm and a number of private cyber security and intelligence firms to target progressive organizations, journalists and citizens who they felt were in opposition to their political activism, tactics and points of view.”

Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who was a constitutional law and civil rights litigator, was also a target of these planned attacks. In a report on the campaign to smear and discredit him, he focused on how common these illegal attacks are:

The leaked campaign to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters.

“The real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained the unified axis of government and corporate power is. As creepy and odious as this is, there’s nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns. The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous’ hacking. That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is. The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it’s being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is. “

Greenwald later added:

“Given the players involved and the facts that continue to emerge — this story is far too significant to allow to die due to lack of attention…. As the episode… demonstrates, simply relying on the voluntary statements of the corporations involved ensures that the actual facts will remain concealed if not actively distorted…. Entities of this type routinely engage in conduct like this with impunity, and the serendipity that led to their exposure in this case should be seized to impose some accountability… that these firms felt so free to propose these schemes in writing and, at least from what is known, not a single person raised any objection at all — underscores how common this behavior is.”

Dylan Ratigan recently interviewed Glenn Greenwald and they summed up the situation, here’s a brief excerpt:

DYLAN: Am I correct in understanding that substantial, legitimate, serious, powerful private security firms were pitching Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce a campaign for which they would be paid money, in which they would assassinate the reputations and intimidate and threaten the well-being of targeted private individuals. Is that true?

GLENN: Yes, the journalists, activists, political groups, and the like.

DYLAN: Whoever it may be. And that the law firm that brought these private security firms in was recommended by the U.S. Department of Justice. So it’s on a recommendation from the DOJ that private and substantial security firms are being brought in to pitch smear and intimidation campaigns against those who support transparency in information. Fair?

GLENN: Yes, exactly…

DYLAN: … they were saying, ‘You pay me money and those who are validating the efforts of WikiLeaks or the efforts of transparency, period, in the modern information world, we will threaten their careers such that they’ll give up the cause, if you pay us.’

GLENN: Right. ‘We’ll investigate them. We’ll find out dirt on them. We will destroy their reputation using all kinds of schemes and techniques.’

DYLAN: And this came out through another leak which is the ironic twist…

GLENN: Well, one ironic twist is that it came out through a leak and the other ironic twist is that these are internet security firms that held their expertise in providing internet security and yet their e-mail system was hacked.

XV PROTECTED BY ANONYMOUS

Propaganda doesn’t work as well when you have the Internet, a cyberspace Underground Railroad, a form of mass communication that allows citizens to interact without corporate gatekeepers effectively censoring critical thought. All of these attacks show the desperation of the ruling class, in attempting to maintain an obsolete propaganda system. Just look at how common and accepted unlawful practices have become in pursuit of their goals.

It is a strategic imperative that we protect Internet freedom from the forces of media concentration and censorship. Organizations such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous are playing a critical role in exposing information and protecting those who are critical of the most powerful and corrupt elements within society.