The Secret Plans To End American Democracy

It's been too long, but I finally got around to working on another thread about Jesse Ventura's book American Conspiracies, this one coming from chapter 14. I'm not going to include every detail from the book, but I will summarize the details which I see as the most important. Much of it will be copy and pasted from the document for the sake of convenience. For those who want to read the entire chapter or even the whole book, here is an online copy: American Conspiracies. Chapter 14 begins on page 81 of that document.

After his usual introduction to the chapter which consists of "The Incident", "The Official Word", and "My Take", he had a quote which perfectly sets the stage for what follows.

With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. American fascism will not be really dangerous uintil there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poiosoners of public information...They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution"

--Henry Wallace, vice president of the United States, 1944.


The Senate Armed Services Committee came out with a report in April 2009 that said:

“The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.” [1]

The ACLU recently uncovered some disturbing government documents, one of them being a CIA manual about "extraordinary rendition." It describes the "capture shock" that happened before a detainee got put on the flight to some overseas prison. Among the techniques are being shackled, blindfolded and hooded so you can't see or hear, stripped down and shaved, and "walling", defined as slamming somebody's head against the wall but with certain "protective measures" so they don't die [2].

The CIA admits to the destruction of hundreds of hours of "coercive interrogation" videotapes that took place in secret prisons [3].

Bush and Cheney pressured lawyers at the Department of Justice to produce memos authorizing them to do whatever they wanted and call it legal [5]. In the weeks before the invasion of Iraq, there were major spikes in the harshest torture techniques. Major Paul Burney, who was part of the Guantanamo interrogation team, told investigators:

"The more frustrated peoplegot in not being able to establish this link, there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results." [6]

The CIA captured and tortured Ibn Al-Shaykh Al-Libi into making a false confession that Saddam had gotten information about use of chemical and biological weapons from a couple of al-Qaeda operatives. He then supposedly committed suicide in a Libyan jail in May 2009 [7]. Ventura refers to an article which says the following:

"Should the members of the 9/11 Presidential Commission not have been informed that two of the ‘key witnesses’ upon whom their report was based had provided the information to the report’s conclusions only after being waterboarded a total of 266 times?” [8]

While we may never know how many detainees died in the secret prisons, there is some evidence of an "executive assassination ring" that was revealed by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in March 2009. An independent special wing called Joint Special Operations Command reported directly to Cheney's office. Supposedly a three-star admiral ordered it stopped because there were too many "collateral deaths". Among the unit's trainees were Navy SEALS. [10].

A CIA program to assassinate al-Qaeda members enlisted the private company called Blackwater. The Iraqi government kicked them out, but they're still under contract to our government for "black ops". We have more private soldiers (74,000) than uniformed troops (57,000) in Afghanistan, as of summer 2009 [12]. Blackwater changed it's name to XE Services, and set out to clean up it's reputation after mowing down 17 Iraqi civilians on a crowded street in 2007 [14].

The Partiot Act passed after 9/11 involved a number of assaults on the Constitution/Bill of Rights. Among those is a law which made it a crime for anybody to contribute money or material support for a group that appeared on the Terror Watch List. It allowed the FBI to monitor and tape-record conversations between attorneys andclients, once considered privileged. It let the FBI order librarians to turn over information about people’s reading habits. And it opened the door for government surveillance on our e-mails and snail-mails [19].

The Bush Administration also was involved in illegal wiretapping. The NSA tapped into AT&T's fiber obtic cables, which gave them a "complete copy of the data stream". It went through the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, where the agency has a "colossal Cray supercomputer", which is capable of scanning "millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails per hour...performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, [it] searches through and reassembles keywords and patterns, across many languages. [20]" They targeted certain journalists and basically vacuumed in all the domestic communications of Americans, including faxes, phone calls, and Internet traffic [21].

All of this was legalized when Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Snooping through our telecoms was just the beginning. The "Suspiciounless Surveillance" program developed by a new Total Information Awareness department gave law enforcement the right to inspect our credit cards and bank transactions in case we might be tied in to terrorists [23].

Ventura describes being in downtown Minneapolis, and seeing four camera's on every single street corner. He found that private corporations provide the money to buy the cameras, which are all run by computer. One thing that automatically triggers them is when four or more people are together. Big Brother is watching.

A company called InfraGard's brochure describes a "collaborative effort" between government and private industry to protect our "critical infrastructures" like banking and finance, agriculture and food, tele-communications, transporatation systems, and so on. "An Infragard members is a private-sector volunteer with an inherent concern for national security", says the brochure. Their members connect to a national network of Subject Matter Experts, and communicate through local chapters with federal law enforcement and government agencies [24].

As of early 2008, InfraGard had 86 chapters around the country, representing more than 23,000 figures in private industry. InfraGard has a few meetings a month, and every group has it's own "handler", who is an FBI agent. Over 350 of the Fortune 500 companies are said to be involved. A whistleblower said that in the event martial law was ever declared, they could protect whatever aspect of the infrastructure they were involved with, and have permission to shoot and kill, without fear of prosecution [25].

A month after Bush left office, a memo entitled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States” came to light. Soon after 9/11, the Justice Department secretly gave the go-ahead for the military to attack apartment buildings or office complexes inside the country and, if necessary to combat the terror threat, suspend press freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. “Military action might encompass making arrests, seizing documents or other property, searching persons or places or keeping them under surveillance, intercepting electronic or wireless communications, setting up roadblocks, interviewing witnesses or searching for suspects.”

As Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies think tank, put it bluntly: “In October 2001, they were trying to construct a legal regime that would basically have allowed for the imposition of martial law." [26]

Constitutional scholar Michael Ratner was even more blunt. He called the legal arguments “Fuhrer’s Law” and added: “The memos revealed how massive the takeover of our democracy was to be.... [they] lay the groundwork for a massive military takeover of the United States in cahoots with the president. And if that’s not a coup d’etat then nothing is.” [27]

In 1968 the Pentagon came up with Operation Garden Plot, which was updated in 1991. The idea was for flexible "military operations in urban terrain", using various kinds of high-tech weaponry and in concert with "elite" militarized police units, that would be ready to stop "disorder", "disturbance", and "civil disobedience" in America [28].

During the Reagan years, Oliver North organized Rex-84, which envisioned using FEMA to round up and detain in camps as many as 400,000 "refugees" in case of "uncontrolled populations movemens" coming across our border from Mexico [29]. When he was asked during the Iran-Contra hearings about his work on "a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution," chairman Daniel Inouye ruled that this "highly sensitive and classified" matter shouldn't be discussed in an open hearing [30]. Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and VP Poppa Bush were doing the top-level planning under something called the National Program Office [31].

Under the new Homeland Security office, another plan called ENDGAME was established. Its goal was to place "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists" in detention facilities [37]. In January 2002, the Pentagon submitted a proposal for deploying troops on our streets, and the Northern Command was set up to implement this [38]. "The command will provide civil suport not only in reponse to attacks, but for natural disasters" according to the Pentagon's announcement [39].

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 specifically outlaws the military acting like cops on our own soil. Bush put through an executive order that changed the 1807 Insurrection Act, giving himself much greater powers in the event of something he labeled as "insurrection". The Constitution lets habeas corpus be suspended during such an occurence.

Early in 2006, as part of ENDGAME, Homeland Security awarded a $385 million contract to KBR (a subsidiary of Cheney's company Halliburton) to get going on "temporary detention and processing facilities" in case there was "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs" with a natural disaster [43].

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 made it through Congress, and it permits the indefinite imprisonment of anybody who happened to give money to a charity on the Terror Watch List, or even someone who spoke out against these kinds of policies [44]

The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorist Prevention Act of 2007 aimed at setting up a commission to "examine and report upon the facts and causes" of domestic extremism. The National Counterterrorism Center already has more than 775,000 "terror suspects" on its list.

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act expands that definition of terrorism to include those who "engage in sit-ins, civil disobedience, tresspass, or any other crime in the name of animal rights".

Section 1042 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act provided the excutive branch power to impose martial law in response to "a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack, or any other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occured to the extent that state official cannot maintain public order".

The White House put in place National Security Presidential Directive 52 to make sure Continuity-of-Government was intact, providing authority to cancel elections or suspend the Constuitution in the event of a national emergency [45].

The 3rd Infantry Division 1st Brigade Combat team was trained to do crowd control in Iraq, but on October 1st, 3,000 - 4,000 of them got deployed in the US, ready to manage "unruly individuals" in case of a national emergency [46]. One scenario envisioned by the Pentagon was civil unrest as a result of financial meltdown. They'd cooperate with FEMA on plans with code names like Vibrant Repornse and EXCALIBUR [47].

In November 2008, the US Army War College came out with a study saying the military should be ready for a "violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States" that could be provoked by "unforeseen economic collapse", "purposeful domestic resistance", "pervasive public health emergencies", or the "loss of functioning political and legal order". The "widespread civil violence would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.... Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups.” [48].

A story in the Washington Post tells of how the military anticipates having 20,000 uniformed troops inside the US by 2011, trained to help state and local officials response to a nuclear terror attack or some other domestic catastrophe. This is part of a "long-planned shift in the Department of Defense's role in homeland security" [50]. Already, an active-duty unit called the Chemical, Biological, Radiological/Nuclear and Explosive Consequence Management Response Force is stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia. [51]

There are about 70 "fusion centers" around the US, places where local law enforcement, the private sector, and the intel community can share information the fight against terrorism. One in Texas finds it "imperative" to report on lobbying groups, and another in Virginia has declared that American universities have become "radicalized nodes" for potential terrorist activity. In September 2009, Homeland Security announced that it would now have access to classified military intelligence in Pentagon databases [52].

James Bamford, an author who specializes in what the NSA is up to, says they're even developing an articfical intelligence system designed to know what people are thinking (Thought police, anyone?) [59].

Early in 2009, the National Security Archive in DC obtained an "Information Operations Roadmap" under a Freedom of Information Act request. This was signed by Rumsfeld in 2003, and calls for electronic warfare, in the form of computer networok attack specialists and Psyops troops whose speciality is manipuating the beliefs of an enemy. At the Pentagon's request, a private company called the Lincoln Group placed hundreds of articles in Iraqi newspapers in support of US policy.

"Information intended for foreign audience, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly being consumed by our domestic audience. Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American people". (CIA and FBI computers have already been used to edit Wikipedia entries on things like the Iraq War and Guantanamo) [60].

The document closes with the recommendation that the Pentagon ought to pursue an ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum...disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum.” Which translates into being able to KO every telephone, networked computer, and radar system anywhere on the planet [61].

Under the radar, a provision was slipped into the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization bill at the end of 2005. It's the DNA Fingerprint Act, meaning that if you get arrested at a demonstration on federal property, they can take a sample of your DNA and keep it on permanent file [62].

This fits nicely with a billion-dollar FBI project to have a massive computer database containing individuals’ physical characteristics. They call this biometrics, and it gives the government a brand-new opportunity to identify folks at home and abroad. They’re storing digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm types in a climate-controlled underground facility in Clarksburg, West Virginia [63].

At some airports, people who aren’t line-standers at the metal detectors are taking advantage of the “opportunity” to have their irises scanned to prove they’ve passed a background check (that’s called Next Generation Identification). [64].

In 2008, a three-juge appeals court, revising a lower court's finding, ruled that federal border agents don't need any special reason to search laptops, cell phones, or digital cameras for evidence of crimes [65].

A company called Verichip came up with Radio Frequency Identification Tags. encapsulated in glass and injected hypodermically into your skin. The ID number can be read right through your clothes, by radio waves, from close range. Tommy Thompson, who headed up Health and Human Services under Bush, joined VeriChip’s board after he left the administration and soon was out there extolling the merits of getting chipped as a means for Americans to link up to their medical records. The Pentagon has been entertaining talk of the RFIDs taking the place of the old military “dog tags.” It’s also being marketed as a possible future way to make payments by combining the chip with your credit card.[66].


More on the chips:

Microchips are already everywhere. They’re putting chips in our credit cards, our cars, department store clothing tags, library books, literally everything but us—and I figure we’re not far behind. I disconnected the North-Star on my vehicle as soon I bought it. I’d rather have to break my window to get my keys, rather than have them know my location every time I drive anywhere. The RFID technology enabling both objects and people to be wirelessly tagged and tracked is on the edge of being a billion-dollar industry. Back in 2003, the Defense Department and Wal-Mart teamed up to move RFID along by mandating their suppliers to put these radio tags on all their crates and cartons. Unlike barcodes, RFID chips don’t fall under federal regulations—and they can be read, without knowledge of the holder, through just about anything except metal and water.

[quote continued]

Big corporations are excited about using miniaturized computers along with radio antennaes to electronically “sniff” you.

In 2005, American Express applied for a patent describing how RFID-embedded objects that shoppers carry could send out “identification signals” picked up by electronic “consumer trackers.” In return, the shoppers could be sent video ads offering them “incentives” to buy the products they’d seemed interested in. In 2006, IBM received patent approval for an invention it dubbed “Identification and tracking of persons using RFID-tagged items.” Yet another patent (NCRCorporation) described using camouflaged sensors and video cameras to film your facial expression at counter displays, “which allows one to draw valuable inferences about the behavior of large numbers of shoppers.” Proctor & Gamble went so far as to seek a patent to check out what you’re examining on a lower shelf of the store.

Under our Constitution and Bill of Rights, the government is not allowed to do certain things, however corporate America doesn't fall under those restrictions and can't be held accountable. So the corporations can take the information they've acquired, and pass it onto the government.

"Those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"

--Benjamin Franklin

"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing [a people] to slavery"

--Thomas Jefferson


Sources:
American Conspiracies, Jesse Ventura, chapter 14.
Sources are on page 110 of this document.

That's all?

If the plans are secret, why do we now know about them?

Because it's you that's posting this, I will go through it all, I'm sure I will be agreeing with most of it, kind of just reinforcement of what we already know I'm sure. Thanks for the effort 2Pac.

EDIT:

The document closes with the recommendation that the Pentagon ought to pursue an ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum...disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum.” Which translates into being able to KO every telephone, networked computer, and radar system anywhere on the planet

I like this one in particular, why are they ratting themselves out here? Their intentions seem quite insecure in their "security" of their cattle, so why do people feel so secure giving them our trust to take care of business? I don't think many people are paying any attention to what's being built up all around them.

Even when the majority of the people opposed, our Governments still went to war in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

I wonder, did we ever have this thing called "democracy" when it came to the big issues?

2nd.

Quite the long list of "usurpations and abuses", wouldn't you say?
How people can still not believe that our government is nefarious and underhanded is beyond me.
I think most peoples' denial is due to the fear they will have to deal with if they dare recognize all this for what it truly is - a blueprint for enslavement.
I heard Obama plans to get all our troops out of Iraq by the end of the year.
They will need them here at home to defend them from the wrath of the American people

Nice write up Tupac

american democracy has ended. the presidency, the senate and supreme court have been hijacked by two political parties.

who represent less than half of the total population. while the msm portrays them like the peoples majority.

only a small fraction of the members of both parties hold real power. and they hold the key's to political office.

and the only reason they don't merge, is to keep the illusion of a democracy.

what, if anything would anybody do if they did just that and formed one giant party. it would be like any totalitarian government through out history.

the most recent ones being nazi germany, communist russia and now communist china.

you think you have choice, because they present candidates like flavours at baskin robbins, but it's still baskin robbins.

everybody's saying ron paul for president. but do you think he would even be a nominee if he was any different from the rest.

he would have been ejected a long time ago if he wasn't willing to follow party lines on the major issues.

sure he could pull a kennedy. use the powers that to be gain the presidency and then do a 180. but you have to deceive the devil to pull that off.

america can use a Catholic, like kennedy, to steer america back on a course that values righteousness, strength and courage.

Jesse heard the same intelligence briefing I heard. Long before "Al Quaeda" existed the military's number 1 threat in the world was "America's Armed Militias".....their threat was armed citizens.

They went on to say the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania has the highest number of "militias" than anywhere's else on Earth. I LAUGHED at them. They were talking about old Pennsylvania hunters who had "Gun Clubs" which they created as a place to drink and get away from their wives.

The only threat they posed was the bottom of beer cans.

But then who brought in all those muslims to Eastern PA? The Federal Government.....hoping they'd arm up and the US Military could end citizens having firearms.

The biggest threat to the Federal Government is its citizens......the Royal Families of this Republic have a feeling the people are going to end their robbery.....and they've been getting ready to kill you to keep their wealthy lives going.

We've NEVER been a Democracy. We're a REPUBLIC. As Georgy Bush said, "you're either with us...OR AGAINST US"

And Obama saying HALF the country is HIS enemy

on the camera issues, i've never met a camera that couldn't be disabled with a can of $5 spray paint tied onto a stick.

reply to post by JibbyJedi

If the plans are secret, why do we now know about them?

The secrecy comes from the scapegoat "terrorism" that is always used to justify the violations of the Constitution and the next step towards a police state. Plus you don't hear politicians saying "Yeah, we're passing this bill, because it infringes on your Constitutional rights, and we want you to be completely hopeless and oppressed".

reply to post by CasiusIgnoranze


Good point, in a true democracy, if the majority of people say "end the wars" or "tax the rich", it would be done. But not with our fake democratic system. The electoral vote is another good indication that our opinions often don't mean crap.

reply to post by Asktheanimals

Quite the long list of "usurpations and abuses", wouldn't you say?

That's probably just the tip of the iceberg, imagine all of the other things that weren't included.

How people can still not believe that our government is nefarious and underhanded is beyond me.
I think most peoples' denial is due to the fear they will have to deal with if they dare recognize all this for what it truly is - a blueprint for enslavement.

Oh dude people are so conditioned to accept whatever the government does and follow along, that anything which challenges the status quo is seen as intimidating, silly, or just outright crazy to them. I say get the corporate controlled media out of millions of Americans lives, let them educate themselves, and see how their perception of the government changes.

reply to post by randomname


Yeah the two party system has definitely caused lots of trouble in our government. Off the top of my heads I can't name which ones, but I know that some of the Founding Fathers completely opposed the idea of a two party system. And they had the right idea, look where it's got us to today.

reply to post by Pervius

[color=limegreen]The biggest threat to the Federal Government is its citizens......the Royal Families of this Republic have a feeling the people are going to end their robbery.....and they've been getting ready to kill you to keep their wealthy lives going.

That's the way it should be, the government fearing the people.

"When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
--Thomas Jefferson

reply to post by randomname


I'm sure doing that would get you on a terrorist watch list

reply to post by CasiusIgnoranze


The USA is a Republic. It never has been a Democracy. It was never intended to be a Democracy. We have a Government run by supposed Representatives of the people. But what happens is that we the common people elect them by popular vote to office but then our Reps are beholden to their campaigns largest financial contributors; an individual or the Corporations. Common People esp. those of us in the Occupy Movements need to have at least this one cohesive message: We don't want "Regime" change. We don't want to choose our oppressors any longer...WE WANT SYSTEMIC CHANGE, that is a "True Democracy". We want what President Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address during the Civil War: ".....a government of the people, for the people, OF the people..." and We want it peacefully......without another.....Civil War......

thisnation.com...

Here is another thing related to this thread that isn't mentioned in the book: TSA. Some nice fourth amendment violations in the name of security.