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MAJOR FINDING
The Committee finds that domestic intelligence activity has been overbroad in that (1) many Americans and domestic groups have been subjected to investigation who were not suspected of criminal activity and (2) the intelligence agencies have regularly collected information about personal and political activities irrelevant to any legitimate governmental interest.
Large numbers of law-abiding Americans and lawful domestic groups have been subjected to extensive intelligence investigation and surveillance.
Some domestic intelligence activity has focused on specific illegal conduct or on instances where there was tangible evidence that illegal conduct was likely to occur. But domestic intelligence has gone far beyond such matters in collecting massive amounts of data on Americans. For example:
FBI Domestic Intelligence. -- The FBI has compiled at its headquarters over 480,000 files on its "subversion" investigations and over 33,000 files on its "extremism" investigations. 2 During the twenty years from 1955 to 1975, the FBI conducted 740,000 investigations of "subversive matters" and 190,000 investigations of "extremist matters." 3
The abusive techniques used by the FBI in COINTELPRO from 1956 to 1971 included violations of both federal and state statutes prohibiting mail fraud, wire fraud, incitement to violence, sending obscene material through the mail, and extortion. More fundamentally, the harassment of innocent citizens engaged in lawful forms of political expression did serious injury to the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and the right of the people to assemble peaceably and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The Bureau's maintenance of the Security Index, which targeted thousands of American citizens for detention in the event of national emergency, clearly overstepped the permissible bounds established by Congress in the Emergency Detention Act of 1950 and represented, in contravention of the Act, a potential general suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus secured by Article 1, Section 9, of the Constitution.
External forces/sources 'frame' your entire decision-making process and it's beautifully illustrated by a joke which offers a commentary on why some of us will be 'ready for what's next', but many won't be. It's called the "Bath tub test"
During a visit to the mental asylum, a visitor asked the Director "How do you determine whether or not a patient should be institutionalized?"
"Well," said the Director, "we fill up a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the patient and ask him or her to empty the bathtub."
Oh, I understand," said the visitor. "A normal person would use the bucket because it's bigger than the spoon or the teacup."
No." said the Director, "A normal person would pull the plug. Do you want a bed near the window?"
ARE YOU GOING TO PASS THIS ON, OR DO YOU WANT THE BED NEXT TO MINE? This is not really a sanity test. It's a test to determine if you have been in the public school system which, for the purpose of social control, gets people in the mode of following suggestions instead of thinking for themselves.
Getting your head into a different kind of reality than the 'spoon-fed' stuff that is passed out on corpmedia is a little challenging at times: friends won't believe you, and when you call BS on the high consumptive/ego-driven/conspicuous consumption lifestyle, you're bound to lose a few friends along the way who will cling to the old paradigm like their life depends on it. In return, you'll get scorn, denial, and a much smaller circle of friends. But, as times change... (do) not get sucked into the 'framed decisions' that will be put before you.
The news and entertainment we consume, and thus our thoughts and opinions, are shaped not just by the media and entertainment corporations but by governments, their agencies and the military-industrial complex...The United States is the most media-saturated country in the world. We are bombarded daily with thousands upon thousands of images and sounds designed to get our attention, entertain, and inform us of everything from shoes to food to celebritydom to political ideology. Its been estimated that the average American is exposed to more than 3000 advertisements every day, but on top of that, there are the news programs, sitcoms, films, radio and other forms of media that we choose to consume. All of this works to shape our opinions of the world and a great deal of time, effort, and money is spent to guide our opinions down particular avenues. This used to be called "propaganda". Today, with the negative, Nazi-esque connotation which comes with that word, euphemisms such as misinformation, disinformation, image consulting, political consulting, news consulting, advertising, infomercials, public relations, damage control, and the art of spin have taken its place in the English lexicon, all but concealing its true nature and omnipresence. And omnipresent, it is. The industries that deal with information control – in both the commercial and governmental sectors—work with hundreds of millions of dollars annually, for Schoolhouse Rock was right on target when it said, "Knowledge is Power!" Is it any wonder that our schools are suffering so badly while corporate CEOs and members of our government continually allot themselves raises? Uninformed, ignorant masses are far easier to manipulate then educated, thinking masses.
"The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.
In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent."
"A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism [or "terrorism" in our recent time - Ed. note]. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.
The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable."
Originally posted by Dallas
Originally posted by kosmicjack
Sigh... The ATS forum board: Tom Cruise, demons, skinwalkers, aliens...it would all be hilarious if it wasn't so very sadly proving the point of this manual - the one that few ATS members have bothered to educate themselves about much less participate in any meaningful discussion about the consequences.
Not often do I get worked up over a post, but I must admit I believe from what's written, your not happy here. Or mayhap's your not happy with the quality, subject matters or ATS people not reading or not commenting on threads you feel qualify. Would you mind explaining the above or should it be understood for what it is? I really enjoyed reading the posts above until I got to this one.
Thanks,
Dallas