printThe Surveillance State has metastasized under Barack Obama. Bush must be proud. Released under a freedom of information request are lists of humdrum words and phrases used by Department of Homeland Security “analysts” in patrolling “the internet and searching for domestic and external threats.”
Examples are “death, looting, riot, threat, radiation” and many more.
I wonder if keywords that appear in reports about the keywords are scanned too by big brother THE FUCKER?
Big Media have discovered what “BHO: Uncle Sam’s Assassin” revealed quite some time ago: Obama is a serial killer. “The POTUS’s growing fleet of armed Predators and Reapers is operated by both the CIA and the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command, each, evidently, with its own Kill List, and all under, ‘a complicated web of overlapping authorities.’”
The New York Times has framed the assassinations-sans-due-process pursued by the president with zeal as something the Great Man has had to do despite moral misgivings.
“‘How old are these people?'” asked the Great Man. (Or so his stage managers claimed.) “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.”
This, as he perused pictures of teenagers (“terrorists”) whose time was up.
The NYT, whose time in print is also drawing near, notes that the “the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture“ “has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve.”
Reserve? “Deep reserve”? Obama should have no problem eliminating his latest 17-year-old Kill-List targets. He already killed an innocent teen in Yemen without blinking. The boy was Anwar “Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver.”
In contrast to the NYT, Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” doesn’t finesse the facts: “President Obama personally oversees a ‘kill list’ containing the names and photos of individuals targeted for assassination in the secret U.S. drone war. According to the Times, Obama signs off on every targeted killing in Yemen and Somalia and the more complex or risky strikes in Pakistan.”
UPDATE I: In an editorial the NYT tries to redeem itself, conceding that, “The logic, such as it is, is that people who hang around places where Qaeda operatives hang around must be up to no good. That’s the sort of approach that led to the false imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis, including the ones tortured at Abu Ghraib. Mr. Obama used to denounce that kind of thinking.”
UPDATE II (June 1): INCLUSIVITY IS THE WORD. Via RT:
…there’s also been some dispute over the way civilian casualties are counted. The CIA often counts able-bodied males, military-age males who are killed in strikes as militants, unless they have concrete evidence to sort of prove them innocent, and some folks at the State Department and elsewhere have questioned that kind of a process.”
This should come as no shock to any of us. I suspect that I’ve been on one of those lists for some time. Why? Because I can’t keep my mouth shut. I’m an NRA life member. I subscribe to subversive periodicals like “Boar Hunter” and “Off Road” magazine. Make no mistake about it folks they probably know if we check out “certain” library books. Beaver Cleaver and Lucy Ricardo are dead. It’s a whole new country.
What disgusts me even more is that if Obama added a signature line to the list, the top Republicans would be fighting each other for the privilege of approving the kill list. There is no honor in Washington today.
Having made a point of ignoring the nature of Obama the NYT now finds him inscrutable – I wonder if they too hate it when that happens.
There may never have been a public figure so taken by pretty things said of him, as has BHO. Mr. President may be the first human ever to have jettisoned all his nature to be entirely made over from pure nurture. Convinced that he is indeed the smartest president ever and that he has, as David Cameron so magnificently put it, “pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world” he has now only to convince some confused sycophants.
I hate it that I will not be around to read the history of our interesting times – as recorded by psychoanalysts.
Anna and I just watched “The Mortal Storm” on TCM which is based on a book written in 1937 prior to World War II and “The Holocaust”. Rather than the comic buffoon Nazis or focusing on sadistic piles of corpses, it focused on one family falling apart while a nation of sheep mostly went along with national insanity. Neither Bush or Obama are Hitler or Stalin but liberty erodes little by little just as in that movie. Why bother with due process of law??? As one of the Nazi characters in the Mortal Storm said “anyone who is not for us is against us” – oops, sounds just like Bush!
I see no reason why one cannot use the American judiciary as well as letters of Marque and Reprisal via Congress (e.g. all 3 branches of government) as well as extradition requests. The bad guys and gals know who they are so why the super-secrecy (except from the American people?). After that, one can think about abduction or assassination.
Israel has done targeted assassinations but its circumstances have been much more dire than America’s. Turning this into a routine for America is just one more very bad precedent.
[Anna has a wonderful dad. Give her our best.]
Extra “food for thought” on the President’s Praetorian Guard – the Special Ops:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175547/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich%2C_the_golden_age_of_special_operations/
Given the multiple revelations of Obama’s willingness to detain, torture, assassinate and wage war on a whim, one would think the Nobel committee might be a tad embarrassed by its laughable pick for their “Peace” prize in 2009. One would be wrong.
Being a leftist sociopath means never having to admit an error or acknowledging hypocrisy. All crimes, no matter how egregious, can be excused away in the quest for some sort of distorted social justice.
It really defies description that millions of zombies will line up in November to re-elect this lying, thieving, war-mongering despot. It also says something about the sad state of the Republican party that their appointed candidate will likely lose in the general election.
The good news: the economic and social collapse will occur on Obama’s watch. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Zero’s just practicing abroad for Civil War II at home. But the regime’s killer-drones can be hacked into and re-directed, they are very expensive, and produced in only a very few specific places. I don’t expect they’ll be a factor for more than a month or two. Ordinary tooth and claw after that.
Good Morning!
1. Myron, always remember the 80 /20 Rule…80% of a given population are sheep.
2. On a List sorted by certain words? No worries…the U.N. will clear-up that intrusion as soon as it takes-over control of the Internet. Duh.
3. Hogan, I am approaching 90% certainty you are correct (up from 75%).
4. RWAC…Start watching all the TERMINATOR movies. The BOTS are already being used.
Dennis
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you anyway.