OT:getting sorta scary around here....

[red5angel]

U.S. Can Hold Citizens As Combatants


WASHINGTON - A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the government can hold U.S. citizens as enemy combatants during wartime without the constitutional protections afforded Americans in criminal prosecutions.

In overturning a lower court ruling, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites) in Richmond, Va., said the status of 21-year-old Yaser Esam Hamdi as a citizen did not change the fact he was captured in Afghanistan (news - web sites) while fighting alongside Taliban and al-Qaida fighters.

"Judicial review does not disappear during wartime, but the review of battlefield captures in overseas conflicts is a highly deferential one" to the government, the judges wrote.
Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites) hailed the decision, calling it "an important victory for the president's ability to protect the American people in times of war."

"Detention of enemy combatants prevents them from rejoining the enemy and continuing to fight against America and its allies, and has long been upheld by our nation's courts, regardless of the citizenship of the enemy combatant," Ashcroft said in a statement.

Hamdi was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 after a prison uprising by suspected Taliban and al-Qaida members. He was transported along with hundreds of other alleged enemy soldiers to a prison at the U.S. Navy (news - web sites) base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It was discovered Hamdi had been born in Louisiana to Saudi parents, who later returned with their son to Saudi Arabia.

He has been held in a naval brig in Norfolk, Va., since April.

Hamdi's case is seen by some as a major legal test case to determine the government's ability to hold citizens without access to a lawyer or the courts. If Hamdi can be imprisoned in a military jail with few of the constitutional protections afforded Americans facing criminal prosecution, critics say, then other U.S. citizens could be similarly held.

A federal judge in Norfolk, Va., agreed, ruling in August that Hamdi should at least have a right to a lawyer and a chance to see the government's evidence against him.

The circuit court agreed that the case raises serious questions about the rights of citizens but concluded that, in wartime, the government's authority is supreme in deciding who may be held indefinitely.

Hamdi, the judges said, was "squarely within the zone of active combat" when captured and is being lawfully detained. The courts, they added, have only limited authority to intervene in such national security matters.

"Any effort to ascertain the facts concerning the petitioner's conduct while amongst the nation's enemies would entail an unacceptable risk of obstructing war efforts authorized by Congress and undertaken by the executive branch," the 54-page opinion said.


___

[BeiKongHui]

I'm sure we'll get to hear all the apologists say: "He's an A-rab so screw him" I wish the US Citizenry could get as worked up over Dubya's total destruction of the constitution as they did over Clinton getting a hummer.

Here's an article I found:

Bush's Master Plan for the Internet
Kurt Nimmo, January 6, 2003
Bush and his Machiavellian minions will no longer put up with you roaming free into dangerous territory on the internet. You need to be corralled, electronically tethered, kept away from sites promoting conspiracy theories -- in other words, information the corporate media, the official U.S. Ministry of Disinformation, does not want you to read or see. It's now increasingly obvious the Bu****es want to lock us up in a hermetically sealed informational box and throw away the key. All the information they consider worthwhile will be pumped in through a one-way hole.


During war, as they say, the first causality is truth. And war -- all the time and everywhere people resist -- is what Bush will deliver. It will be easier for him to accomplish this if you can't read the truth, if you remain ignorant, or if you are obstructed from organizing and speaking out on the internet against war and madness. Bush knows this -- or, at least, those around him know this. The internet, regardless of its trashy and lame commercial characteristics, is a nearly perfect medium for organizing. It's a thorn in the side of neo-cons and fascists everywhere.


Enter Dubya's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board (CIPB), which the unelected one created with a flourish of his pen (another executive order, a most popular way to rule vassals). The men and women around Bush want to require internet service providers, ISPs, to build a centralized network capable of monitoring where you go, what you look at and read, what you write in your email -- and all in real-time. Of course, they don't say this. What they say is they want to protect you against viruses and terrorist attacks. They want to shield you from Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, who are everywhere, ready to attack, even on the internet (Osama's cave in Tora Bora, don't you know, bristled with computers and crack virus software programmers).


CIPB is working on a report, "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace," which it will release early next year. It is billed as a strategy for the Ministry of Homeland Security and -- this is the laughable part -- is subject to congressional review. Yeah, like Congress protected us from Bush's totalitarian Patriot Act and the Ministry of Homeland Security bill. What a joke. 99% of these folks are Bush co-conspirators. When Bush tells them to jump, they ask how high. Your right to travel through cyberspace without a snoop noting your every move is one of the next hoops Bush will wave before an obeisant Congress. The internet is one of the last bastions of resistance. Besides, some rabble-rouser posted the Anarchist's Cookbook on there.


Of course, converting the internet into a big Carnivore system is one thing, while denying you access is quite another. Bush's centralized system will make this a reality. Get labeled a malcontent, a "security risk," or even a "cyber-terrorist" and you can be easily barred from Bush's "secure, trusted, robust, reliable, and available infrastructure." Say the wrong thing on a bulletin board or forum and your ISP -- afraid of the government breathing down its neck, yanking its business license, or sicking the IRS on it -- may terminate your service. Hell, if things go as Bush and Clan envision most small ISPs will go out of business, replaced by AOL, Comcast, and other rich communications industry friends and big dollar contributors to Project Bush.


Dubya wants to essentially authorize a Department of Approved Internet Use within the Ministry of Homeland Security. This new department will create and demand implementation of new network protocols, take over the task of verifying IT vendors (so much for the conservative idea of getting rid of big government), and issue security assessment and policy tools (maybe Dubya can roll Microsoft into the Ministry of Homeland Security, demand everybody use Windows instead of Mac or Linux because Windows will be "secure" and adapt, at taxpayer expense, the latest government mandated protocols). Don't worry about the cost -- this idea comes from the guys who think a $200 billion war is nothing to sweat, even if it wrecks the economy. Plus, a lot of the cost will be picked up by the ISPs, which is to say you, the subscriber. Nothing like paying through the nose to have the government turn your computer into a Carnivore box.


Just in case you think I'm playing fast and loose with the word "Carnivore," consider what an official with a major data services company who has was briefed on several aspects of the government's plans told John Markoff of The New York Times the other day, "Part of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time analysis is to be able to track incidents while they are occurring... Am I analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely. But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet." OK, I inserted the required quote from a "respected" source, so I guess we can all rest easier now. The idea of Bush squashing a (relatively) free and unhampered internet has now broken free of the besmeared realm of conspiracy theory. Hallelujah!

So there you have it, in a nutshell. You can't be trusted and you will never have privacy again -- not on the internet, not with your bank or credit card transactions, medical records, not when you fly on a plane or cross the border, and certainly not if you decide Bush and his neo-con fascists are wrong about forever war and you decide you want to do something about it. As it looks now, things are moving in a bleak direction rather quickly. But even Russians under the yoke of Soviet communism managed to publish samizdats -- typed on manual typewriters with multiple carbons, since the photocopying machines were locked up and closely watched by the state -- and news thus disseminated, people learned the truth.


Somewhere buried in a box in the closet of my apartment is BBS software on an old, dusty floppy disk. In the days before the web -- when the internet was mostly confined to computer students, faculty, government types, and other such privileged geeks -- a few of us dialed into computers running BBS software. If Bush and his Critical Infrastructure Protection Board bureaucrats have their way, we may be forced to return to those less sophisticated days. Call it a dial-up samizdat where information remains free. Of course, sooner or later, Bush will get around to making this illegal, too. But where there's a will, there's a way. We may even be reduced to sending CD-ROMs via snail-mail in the future. Or passing them hand-to-hand under the cover of darkness. Truth refuses to be suppressed. It will always break out, regardless of the technology.

[GLW]

Unfortunately, people in this country have become sheep.

Things get repeated so often that they become "fact"

The assault on the Constitutional rights of the American people is one of the biggest issues we have...not Iraq....and we are just a few steps away from setting up a police state...all in the name of homeland security.

Scary thing is that much of the rhetoric sounds a lot like what the Nazi party was saying int 1930's Germany.

[red5angel]

BKH - Where are the facts behind those ideas? what gives him the idea this is true and is being or will be enforced?

[ewallace]

I laugh at people who are still saying Bush wasn't elected. It's obvious that whoever wrote the article BKH posted was not of a neutral position and that alerts me to take it with a GOS.

However, it is getting a little bit frightening what is happening to some folks. Just makes me a little more alert to what is going on up on the hill.

[BeiKongHui]

red-

This has been in the news since at least November. It's not exactly new. I did a search on Google and this was the very first thing that popped up so if you want to verify it just do a search.

Note that this article comes from the Propaganda wing aka The Corperate Media.

December 20, 2002


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/te...gy/20MONI.html


White House to Propose System for Wide Monitoring of Internet
By JOHN MARKOFF and JOHN SCHWARTZ

The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service
providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of
the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users.

The proposal is part of a final version of a report, "The National Strategy
to Secure Cyberspace," set for release early next year, according to several
people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort
to increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board is preparing the
report, and it is intended to create public and private cooperation to
regulate and defend the national computer networks, not only from everyday
hazards like viruses but also from terrorist attack. Ultimately the report
is intended to provide an Internet strategy for the new Department of
Homeland Security.
Such a proposal, which would be subject to Congressional and regulatory
approval, would be a technical challenge because the Internet has thousands
of independent service providers, from garage operations to giant
corporations like American Online, AT&T, Microsoftand Worldcom.

The report does not detail specific operational requirements, locations for
the centralized system or costs, people who were briefed on the document
said.
While the proposal is meant to gauge the overall state of the worldwide
network, some officials of Internet companies who have been briefed on the
proposal say they worry that such a system could be used to cross the
indistinct border between broad monitoring and wiretap.

Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who represents some of the nation's
largest Internet providers, said, "Internet service providers are concerned
about the privacy implications of this as well as liability," since
providing access to live feeds of network activity could be interpreted as a
wiretap or as the "pen register" and "trap and trace" systems used on phones
without a judicial order.
Mr. Baker said the issue would need to be resolved before the proposal could
move forward.

Tiffany Olson, the deputy chief of staff for the President's Critical
Infrastructure Protection Board, said yesterday that the proposal, which
includes a national network operations center, was still in flux. She said
the proposed methods did not necessarily require gathering data that would
allow monitoring at an individual user level.

But the need for a large-scale operations center is real, Ms. Olson said,
because Internet service providers and security companies and other online
companies only have a view of the part of the Internet that is under their
control.

"We don't have anybody that is able to look at the entire picture," she
said. "When something is happening, we don't know it's happening until it's
too late."
The government report was first released in draft form in September, and
described the monitoring center, but it suggested it would likely be
controlled by industry. The current draft sets the stage for the government
to have a leadership role.

The new proposal is labeled in the report as an "early-warning center" that
the board says is required to offer early detection of Internet-based
attacks as well as defense against viruses and worms.
But Internet service providers argue that its data-monitoring functions
could be used to track the activities of individuals using the network.
An official with a major data services company who has been briefed on
several aspects of the government's plans said it was hard to see how such
capabilities could be provided to government without the potential for
real-time monitoring, even of individuals.

"Part of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time analysis is to be able
to track incidents while they are occurring," the official said.
The official compared the system to Carnivore, the Internet wiretap system
used by the F.B.I., saying: "Am I analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely.
But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller
feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet."
One former federal Internet security official cautioned against drawing
conclusions from the information that is available so far about the Securing
Cyberspace report's conclusions.

Michael Vatis, the founding director of the National Critical Infrastructure
Protection Center and now the director of the Institute for Security
Technology Studies at Dartmouth, said it was common for proposals to be cast
in the worst possible light before anything is actually known about the
technology that will be used or the legal framework within which it will
function.
"You get a firestorm created before anybody knows what, concretely, is being
proposed," Mr. Vatis said.

A technology that is deployed without the proper legal controls "could be
used to violate privacy," he said, and should be considered carefully.
But at the other end of the spectrum of reaction, Mr. Vatis warned, "You end
up without technology that could be very useful to combat terrorism,
information warfare or some other harmful act."

[red5angel]

Ah, thanks for the read BKH. I am surprised however because in my understanding the government had already tagged a majority of questionable websites.....

[BeiKongHui]

I think that this is going beyond questionable websites and into the monitoring of everyone's daily net usage. It's like what they've done to libraries. The once valued right to read whatever you want without fear of government harrasment has been squashed and now Librarians are forced by law to tell "law enforcement" what you've been reading. Remember our country is being run by a guy who is on record as saying that "things would be so much easier if this was a dictatorship, as long as I was dictator". So what do we do when he won't leave office is my question?

[The Willow Sword]

We still have a lot of roaming room and sandboxes to play in,,within the confines of the high government fence that is all around us in this country.

[BeiKongHui]

ha, yes you are free to walk around your cage.

[red5angel]

BKH, I am sensing a lot of frustration. Are you in the US?

I think we still have alot of freedoms. Who cares what they are monitoring really, they have been monitoring phones, radio, etc for years. It's normal really, I just think most of this is alarmist.
I definitely wouldn't consider america a cage.

[BeiKongHui]

It's sad that fascism doesn't bother you Red. Attitudes like yours is what facilitates the birth of tyranny. Yes, I am in America and I'm trying like heck to get out but no one seems to want Americans. When I was trying to get out I was sharing my academic credentials with the local bureaucrat thinking I could teach for a job, but no. He said they didn't want more American's because we destroy everything we touch and are trouble makers. It's sad but I have to agree.

[red5angel]

BKH, Im calling you out on your story. I don't buy it. It sounds more a reflection of your view then someone elses and it reflects the bitterness you express. I don't think the conversation went that way, and honestly I am not even convinced the conversation you speak of actually ever happened. I say this because all your words drip with anger and frustration for america, I am not sure what america did to you but your free to have your own opinions. As for trying to get out, I am calling your bluff on that as well. everyone I know who has ever wanted to get out, has, so what are you waiting for?
As for Fascism, it will never happen in this country because of people like me. A few choice words on a website the espouses roughly the same views you have does not make a fascist country. We have quite a few freedoms, always have and I don't see them going away. As a matter of fact I would say you will put up and tolerate fascism more so then I will because I will stay and fight it if that time comes.

[Colin]

Thing is, you can't do anything about any of it!
So why worry.

Over here PM Blair is saying that there is a massive terrorist threat from chemical/biological weapons already in the country, or being brought in now.
He says that there is a real threat to the population, yet the Gvt still allows hundreds of Iraqi and Afgan refugees into the UK every day.
Any one of which could be carrying the weapon that kills us!
Try and explain that logic.

And yes we are all free to walk around our cages!
But if someone opened the cage door what would you do?

Colin.......
http://www.laugar.org.uk

[chingei]

Originally posted by BeiKongHui
Yes, I am in America and I'm trying like heck to get out but no one seems to want Americans.

keep trying