Amerika, A modern day East Germany

Amerika, A modern day East Germany

By Dark Politricks

The definition of a Police State is:

"A state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the people, especially by means of a secret police force."

History shows that mankind has been plagued by authoritarian governments since the dawn of collective governance. We have many instances of governments that fit the definition of a Police State from the East German Stasi, Soviet KGB to the current Chinese government who still utilise whole teams of agents to follow westerners of interest around when they visit the country.

However these countries have all been authoritarian one party states and it has always been presumed that within western democracies the idea of a police state only existed in the nightmares of those sections of society who mistrusted the government no matter what it did.

However with the recent Washington post investigation into the size of the intelligence community within the United States of America it may be successfully argued that the time for nightmares has arrived.

The Washington Post expose looked into the huge expansion of the security services and other intelligence agencies since the attacks of 9/11 and revealed some stunning facts such as:

Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counter terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

In case that second point escapes due attention it means that roughly 1 in every 150 adults within the USA has top secret security clearance and if that many people have the top level clearance how many more have one of the many lower levels? 

It does seem from this study alone that the USA is awash with spooks and spies and as we know from the past ten years of abuse they are not all engaged in fighting the war on terror and looking for the supposed architect of 9/11 Usama bin-Laden.

Instead the government has directed this huge intelligence apparatus onto the people they are supposed to protect and one can only wonder whether this was the original aim in the first place. No democratic country would have ever accepted such a huge intrusion of privacy, destruction of civil liberties and total disregard to the rule of law had the threat of terrorism not existed and been used as the excuse of the century to implement such draconian measures.

Like many governments throughout the ages from Roman times with Julius Caesar, to Hitler and the Reichstag fire, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were used by politicians to expand the power of the state at the expense of the citizenry using an outside enemy as the excuse. Whether you believe the attacks of 9/11 were staged or not is not the point as it is clear from succeeding events that they were used by the Bush government, and now the Obama administration to increase the power of the government to intrude into the lives of the public.

The main piece of legislation that started the ball rolling towards a Police State was the Patriot Act. This law was rushed through congress without proper consultation and debate and many senators later admitted that they didn't even read the bill. The very suspiciously timed Anthrax attacks on likely opponents of the bill  ensured that the politicians passed through a truly anti-libertarian bill that had been sitting around for years just waiting for the right "event" to occur.

The law expanded the definition of terrorism to include many domestic activities and it enabled the federal government to increase it's surveillance of the public through a systematic warrant-less wire-tapping campaign that trawled through every conceivable piece of electronic information from phone calls, emails, Internet traffic and credit card transactions whilst it built up a huge database of real time events in which it hoped to find signs of terrorist connections in a huge game of connect the dots.

The loosening of the terms that define what is and not terrorism should be a chilling warning to anyone concerned with the war on terror. We have seen here in the UK how the numerous anti terrorism laws have been misused by Police officers to prevent photographers from recording police assaults on the streets and in preventing legitimate protest. 

We have also seen our government abuse powers that were supposedly only there for exceptional purposes for non exceptional means such as when the UK froze the bank accounts of Iceland during the banking crisis.

The US government has now gone one step further in it's expansion of the war of terror against it's own citizens by enacting presidential powers that allow for the assassination of US born citizens throughout the world. The US government it seems is now perfectly willing to execute it's own citizens if they believe them to be linked to terrorism. No trial is required to contest any evidence that may or may not exist and the defendant is not allowed to answer any charges to a jury of his peers. If the government deems you to be a terrorist with it's newly relaxed definition of what constitutes terrorism then you may be assassinated.

Not only is the US government cranking up the war on terror by attacking those citizens it decides fall into the category of domestic or foreign terrorist it is also trying to crack down on the only forum in which free speech and dissent of government still exists e.g the internet.

In an age in which the dying print media is being deserted en mass and those that control it are scared of losing a major propaganda tool the attacks on the alternative media have increased tenfold. Claims that the old media is in the pocket of government and not doing it's job properly have increased since the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq. This was a war which was miss-sold to the public with the help of national newspapers prepared to look the other way as the government used them to drip feed false stories to a public who knew no better.

The only real voices of opposition are to be found in the blogosphere and the powers that be hate that they cannot control the news in the same way as they could buy off newspaper owners, editors and journalists. Instead of only worrying about a dozen or so national newspapers the government has to contend with millions of blogs and alternative news sites and the only tactic that would work is one that limits ownership of such a site or makes the available content illegal in some way or other. This is why there are now calls to regulate Internet bloggers such as the bill being brought forward by Bruce Patterson.

Obama's Information Czar, Cass Sunstein, has already wrote about his desire to crack down on blogs and sites that dare discuss topics that the government deems as conspiracy theory. This would include discussion of alternative theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks, or concluding that the JFK assassination involved more hit-men than Lee Harvey Oswald on his own. In fact it would cover anything that the government might deem beyond the limits of discussion by those who want to look beyond the official story immediately rolled out whenever a high crime is committed.

Then there are bills being introduced such as Senator Joe Lieberman’s 197-page Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which aims to mimic China’s firewall and which would give the President powers to control IT networks and the flow of information in times of emergency such as a cyber attack.

Disabling the internet may be an extreme option to consider but deleting content that is deemed unsuitable is already a daily occurrence. With the merger of leading internet companies such as Google and the CIA it has become very easy for media deemed anti government to be pulled from sites such as YouTube or for search results to be tweaked to hide popular anti government search terms.

We already know how Google and the NSA are working together since the attack on Google by China earlier this year and there have also been claims that the CIA helped fund Google when it was starting up.

With all these links to the intelligence agencies it can safely be assumed that Google's massive database of user traffic, search terms, blogs, emails, videos and much more is seen as a prized asset by the intelligence community and who knows at what level they already co-operate when it comes to sharing data.

Whereas old school Police States were very obvious in their surveillance and monitoring techniques the modern day Amerika has no need to put half a dozen handlers onto someone they wish to monitor (not that they don't have the staff) as through their close links with Google and Microsoft and their new plans to access private information without a warrant they can literally let the information come to them.

We live in a semi virtual world where an online persona is just as important as your real one and due to the amount of social time people spend on social networking sites and the dependence of key infrastructure on the Internet means that control of the network literally can mean control over society.

We already know our governments monitor all our phone calls through the ECHELON system and there is no technical or it seems legal limitation preventing them from analysing every single packet of data transferred over the Internet if they so wished.

Therefore due to a political class that seems to be bought and paid for by those wanting to maintain the war on terror and the surveillance society it has sprung up at home there seems little hope of stopping the high tech police state we are now living in. The solutions are available to those with the means to implement them but in the end it comes down to a choice between a public uprising against the state or a change in the political class running it.

With elections in America due very soon it is a great opportunity to show the ruling elite that the public is not prepared to swap liberty and freedom for fear and the police state that enables it. Judge Napolitano always asks his guests the following question:

"which is more threatening to our way of live, terrorism or an ever increasing secretive and authoritarian state?"

The answer is clearly the latter and we need to elect officials that believe so too.

Only when the phony war on terror is seen for what it is can we start to rollback all the police state apparatus that has build up around us over the last decade. A large section of the population has fallen for the tricks played out by power hungry politicians throughout history and willingly handed over liberty in return for perceived security. 

The time has come to realise this was a false trade and that Thomas Jefferson was correct when he said:

“Those who would trade safety for freedom deserve neither.”

My end of year review - 2012

My end of year review - 2012

By Dark Politricks

Well the crazies who didn't bother to read the Mayan prophecy before declaring 2012 the end of the world were proved wrong.

However 2012 was certainly no reprieve from looming disasters that we seem to lurch drunkenly from like a Glaswegian drunk on Hogmanay. It has been an unmitigated disaster from all corners of perspective and from my own view point it doesn't seem to be getting better any time soon.

So if last year was Time magazines year of the protester what was 2012?

It was firstly the year that the Arab Spring turned into an Islamic winter.

From the dictator swap in Egypt from Mubarak to Mohamed Morsi to the Syrian civil war that see's the western backed Islamic rebels murder and massacre Christians and Muslims alike it seems that "the Western axis of war" hasn't learnt from their mistakes in Libya and are still trying to impose democracy (whatever that is) by the gun and the bomb.

It was not enough that Libya was an unmitigated failure with the country still caught up in under reported rebel gangs, armed with NATO weapons, fighting it out among each other, desecrating World War 2 British graveyards and murdering US ambassadors.

It seems that we have learnt nothing and are still backing the enemy of our enemy, even if that means supporting Islamic extremists linked to terrorists and our supposed mortal enemy al-Qaeda.

Syria is being torn apart by Western and Saudi backed rebel groups as extreme as any dictator we might be justified in other-throwing.

Even though Saddam Hussein, Col Qaddafi, Mubarak and Assad were or in the case of President Assad, still nasty dictators  The people of their countries were not worrying daily about car bombs or NATO planes blowing their houses to bits. Christians lived alongide Muslims and Sunnis lived alongside Shiites in peace.

They may have had to keep their mouth shut when it came to politics but in the case of Libya they had high standards of living and life expectancy in comparison to their neighbours plus they were doing well economically even if they were not "free" as they now supposedly are.

How free are the thousands of protesters in Tahrir square who are still hoping that their earlier revolution against the western backed Hosni Mubarak is not lost as they fight on against the new democratically elected "pharaoh" Mohamed Morsi.

The head of the Muslim Brotherhood, a Western intelligence linked group, that took power in an election before granting himself dictatorial like powers that liberal minded Egyptians are outraged about.

There has been no slowing down of the torture, imprisonment without trial and police brutality that occurs almost nightly as Tahrir square once again becomes the focus of change versus the establishment. The only difference is that this is now an Islamic establishment and one that I suspect the West has been wanting to be implanted for years.

Why?

Well the long predicted Culture War between Western Judo/Christianity and Islam has been on the cards for a long time. It is in these eyes that we can see that the West is not too bothered about the Middle East becoming an Islamic Caliphate as it will give them the perfect excuse to continue feeding the Military Industrial Complexes pockets before preparing for the next big war with Iran.

From Afghanistan to the United States we have seen tensions between the two religions of "the book". Both offshoots of the first books of the Bible and both linked by history and commonly shared religious beliefs.

As western backed Syrian rebels ransack Christian Churches and Christian ministers burn Korans, the fires that are slowly burning away underneath a groundswell of anti-immigration furor in Europe are gently being stoked until the general population are ready for all out war. The next big war is coming - how bad it will be is up to us.

Apart from the upcoming battles that will thin the herd we have spent the year watching people hand over their privacy as if it was an antiquated concept in return for gadgets, applications and the latest phone or computer tablet.

Google, Amazon, Twitter and the rest of the big Internet companies have already been caught out avoiding paying their fair share of tax by using 1 man offices in tax havens. However the bigger news is their links to the new American Security State Apparatus and how the upcoming generation are being conditioned to accept a world of total surveillance.

We have people selling their private information to these corporations just so that they can watch their own house or car on Google maps or tell the world of Twitter users what they had for breakfast that morning. 

In 50 years George Orwell's 1984 nightmare of a state camera in every room of your house will be an old fashioned concept.

We already have surveillance states in the UK and USA where city walls are adorned with CCTV cameras linked to huge city sized databases and the TRAPWIRE system that uses facial recognition technology to link up with other super computers and store, analyse and log every "person of interests" move for the new 1 million strong - super spies that already have top level security clearance in the USA.

Amerika is no longer a fear but a reality.

The NDAA allows the President to lock up Americans for eternity without trial on his say so alone. If he wanted to he could even have you killed as he has already shown with the assassination of American born Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen by a done strike.

You know onne of those deadly accurate drone strikes that treat every male over the age of 8 as enemy combatants (unless proven otherwise) and kill 49 innocent civilians for every "terrorist".

This is only an extension of the emergency act implemented after 9.11 and still exist to this day - something most American's know nothing about and literally give the President the power to do what he wants to defend the country.

Whether that means grope or virtual strip machines at airports, bombing Afghan and Pakistani weddings or just starting wars without the consent of Congress as he did in Libya. He has more powers than previous Presidents and all because of the events of 9.11 and the endless war on terror we are still feeling the effects of 11 years on.

A case can be made that the right wing in America have it totally wrong when they call Obama a communist but in reality he is more of a dictator who has continued the George W Bush's policy of  stripping American citizens of their liberties with laws like the PATRIOT ACT and he has taken them a whole mile further down the road to dictatorship with laws like the NDAA.

The only socialism on show at the moment is the one in which banksters take hard earned tax dollars from the public as state handouts to be used to make even more money in the rigged game that is Wall St through front running and high frequency trading.

As Europe teeters on the brink of self-collapse and America countries printing it's way to self destruction the BRIC countries are growing in strength.

China is collecting gold bars at the same rate their slave workers throw themselves off the US corporation balconies that were offshored. Workers working for companies that make their goods overseas, pay hardly any tax and care not a jot for the quality of life that the makers of their products have to endure.

So when you next open your iPhone to send a Tweet about how your Facebook profile has been updated just remember that some poor soul in China has worked 18 hour days for a pittance just so that you can throw your privacy away to companies that are in cahoots with America's new global surveillance society and that your email, contact info and other personal information is just another commodity to be sold and re-sold by these companies.

Just don't scratch your head when your inbox fills up with spam or every web page you seem to visit seems to show adverts targeted especially for you.

What can we hope for 2013 then?

Well the end of the world isn't being booked for this year as the Mayans don't have anything planned so far.

Therefore if the world does end it will be of our own making. We are already being cajoled into believing Iran is on the brink of nuking us all despite any evidence from the IAEA and it is only Israeli pressure on the US congressmen they own and the blackmail they have probably collated on the President that will force any pointless war.

It might be all the assassinations and military base attacks by US/Israeli backed terrorist groups (or freedom fighters in this case) that has changed Iran's mind.

Or it might be the first cyber warfare weapon STUXNET that changed it by almost destroying their nuclear program through multiple zero day exploits only a nation state would have the manpower and knowledge to use.

Or it might just be the fact that Iran wasn't making a bomb in the first place - it is un-Islamic after all.

On the one hand Iran is called a fanatical Islamic state but when it comes to the part of Islam that says nuclear weaponry is against God's will then that seems to get overlooked.

However what cannot be overlooked is the total hypocrisy of an apartheid state like Israel, a country that unlike Iran isn't a member of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Agency but still has 200+ nuclear bombs calling Iran a threat for "maybe" thinking about building one without proof.

This is after all a country that only recently assassinated the Hamas military commander who had brokered a cease fire that stopped Hamas firing rockets into Israel and then sat back as Hamas fell into their trap firing hundreds of firecracker rockets into Israel.

Some of these were long range ones that got lucky almost reaching Tel Aviv, others were not so lucky and almost hit their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank.

However this battle was once again one sided and whilst the world waited for Israel to once again enter Gaza and massacre over  a thousand innocent people as they did in Operation Cast Lead they instead blew up children playing football and attacked journalists from the air in a short but powerful onslaught that stopped short before any Israeli troops entered Gaza city.

Therefore if we are to see the next year out without another middle eastern war it is only going to be if someone reigns in the Likud war party and brokers some kind of peace deal in the Middle East.

This bleeding sore on the face of the world has been leaking for too long and the longer it goes on the more chance there is of a catastrophe occurring.

The more Middle Eastern states that turn from their ex Western backed dictators  to new Islamic governments the more chance we have of the perfect trigger to start the culture war that ne-cons and ex cold war warriors have been planning for decades.

9.11 did the job of getting America fighting Muslims on Israels terms, and with their dumbed down public they don't even realise that 92% of Afghans have never even heard of this event they are supposed to be fighting America for. Instead it's sold to American's that it's all because they "hate our freedoms" of course!

Nothing to do with the army bases in their holy lands or their biased one sided support for Israel - no it was American freedom they hated.

The sad thing is a mud hut dwelling Afghan probably has more freedom than any American ever had.

They certainly don't have to worry about CCTV or TSA gropers it's only drones blowing up their weddings and soldiers going on killing sprees for fun that they have to deal with on a daily basis.

Add to that pertinent point that America has thrown away most of their freedoms anyway and the people the US are fighting in the Stan are just Taliban/civilians who see the US/UK soldiers as just another group of invaders they have been putting up with for centuries. It  seems that they don't actually have much left to do to "win the war" by defeating all that American freedom they hate so much.

Plus seeing that there is hardly any "real" al-Qaeda in Afghanistan anymore.

The rest of them are being funded and backed by the US/UK axis of war in Syria doing their next de-stabilisation job after we already supported them in Libya. It looks like the world is on it's head and needs a dose of reality shoved down it's throat.

That doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon.

Therefore if we end 2013 without another war we will have done well indeed and I reckon that is the best we can hope for!

View the original 2012 end of year review by Dark Politricks at the main site www.darkpolitricks.com.

Are you happy about President Obama getting a second term?

Are you happy about President Obama getting a second term?

By Dark Politricks

Now President Obama has been re-elected as President of the USA does the thought fill you with joy or dread or is it more a case of choosing the least bad option of a bad bunch.

It seems that the 3rd party candidates from the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Justice and Constitution Party hardly made a dent in the political system that seems to be sewn up tightly by the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans who control the Presidential process.

If you voted for President Obama do you honestly believe he will finish off, or even start, the "Hope and Change" that he promised the first time round. Or will he just continue business as usual.

Allowing the banksters of Wall St to continue to steal money from the tax payers, devaluing any savings people may have by continuing to have incredibly low interest rates and allowing any reforms of Wall St such as the Dodd-Frank act to be watered down by the powerful lobbyists. People who seem to be able to control the levers of power to their advantage whoever sits behind the oval desk.

Will he continue building the high tech police surveillance state in which more than a million people have top secret clearance and the war on terror is expanding constantly filling the military industrial complexes pockets with more cash with every civil right crushing, constitution ignoring act he signs into power.

Acts such as the PATRIOT ACT and the NDAA that give him dictatorial powers to kill and indefinitely detain US citizens or start wars without having to pay attention to congress as he did in Libya.

Will he continue to back Jihadists and al-Qaeda linked rebels fighting in Syria as he did in Libya all because the enemy of his enemy is his friend or will he actually grow a pair of balls and decide that morals and ethics are something that America should be an example to the rest of the world who used to believe America was the "good guy".

Will he continue to back Israel as they break international law, execute on tape American citizens, and subjugate the Palestinian people by blocking any bill in the UN with a veto and then attack countries such as Russia and China who do the same when they try to prevent another NATO war in Syria.

Will he even dare to cut the bloated and gigantic Defence budget that is bigger than most of the other countries in the world put together.

A budget that means huge military bases and missile shields that are more of a political statement than any proper aim to defend the US public and only again serve to fill the military industrial complexes coffers.

Just imagine all the things that could be bought with that money - you could even pay for a proper health care system instead of creating a mandatory purchase from insurance companies - a system hated by liberals and conservatives alike.

Does anyone think Obama is a true liberal or as many Republican message boards and blogs like to call him a Marxist or Communist - people who have never obviously read a dictionary. Or is he just a slightly less right wing version of the Republicans. 

Both are big government parties, the only thing that differs is how much they move the line and what the big government spends the money on.

Whoever won the election we can be sure that the continuation of the Amerika we have all grown to fear will continue and systems like the TSA's porno scanners and TRAPWIRE that monitor US civilians wherever they go will continue to feed into the rising police state system that seems to be expanding forever.

A true liberal would be curtailing these excesses not expanding them.

Let me know what you feel about the result of the election with this poll below and leave your comments in the comment section if possible.

View the original article at www.darkpolitricks.com.