No one wants to think of their country as a fascist Fourth Reich, but then, hiding from the truth has never accomplished anything either. Americans today, so anesthetized by TV and videos, should really give some thought to this piece by John Pilger, the Australian journalist and documentary maker who has twice won Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award as well as academy awards in both Britain and the US. Pilger might not be entirely right in his views but he is not entirely wrong either.

Jim

The war on democracy

By John Pilger
NewStatesman
January 19, 2012

From the Chagos Islands to Pakistan, innocent civilians are pawns to America, backed by Britain. In our compliant political culture, this deadly game seldom speaks its name.

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos Islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in phenomenal natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling, girls!”

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said: “I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving, [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitised” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lisette. “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying.”

Lisette, her family and hundreds of the other islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a journey of a thousand miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser – bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two of the women on board miscarried.

Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lisette’s youngest children, Jollice and Regis, died within a week of each other. “They died of sadness,” she said. “They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home for ever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness.”

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading “Maintaining the Fiction”, the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by “reclassifying” the population as “floating” and to “make up the rules as we go along”. Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says the “deportation or forcible transfer of population” is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime – in exchange for a $14m discount off a US Polaris nuclear submarine – was not on the agenda of a group of British “defence” correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. “There is nothing in our files,” said the MoD, “about inhabitants or an evacuation.”

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America’s and Britain’s war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders’ abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the “bunker-busting” bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets on two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its “rendition” victims and called it Camp Justice.

Wipe-out

What was done to Lisette’s paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole political culture behind its democratic façade, and the scale of our own indoctrination in its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis”. Longer and bloodier than any other war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, “It never happened . . . Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening.” Last July, the American historian William Blum published his updated “summary of the charming record of US foreign policy”. Since the Second World War, the United States has:

1) Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically elected.
2) Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
3) Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
4) Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
5) Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name – from communism to Islamism – but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power, or a society occupying strategically useful territory and deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to the 11 September 2001 attacks, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy (in “Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists, but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed “our man” by Margaret Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered in what the CIA described as “the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century”. This estimate does not include the third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine-guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of uncoercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of advertising to soundbites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. “For almost the first time in two centuries,” wrote Terry Eagleton, “there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.” No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that “disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue”. And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in “American Football”:

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things . . .
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust . . .

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama’s drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers sitting in front of their computer-game screens type in “Bugsplat”. Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Pre­dator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines as Brand Obama was elected: “Momentous, spine-tingling” (the Guardian). “The American future,” Simon Schama wrote, “is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed with anticipation.” The San Francisco Chronicle saw a spiritual “Lightworker . . . who can . . . usher in a new way of being on the planet“. Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America’s corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America’s largest creditor and the new “enemy” in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia, Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long-planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama’s permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Surveillance state

Obama’s most “historic” achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year’s Eve, he signed the National Defence Authorisation Act, a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens secretly and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only “associate” with those “belligerent” to the US. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeas corpus (the right to due process of law) and, in effect, repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to “secure territory and populations” overseas but to fight in the “homeland” and “support [the] civil authorities”. In other words, US troops are to be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inev­itable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons – the consequence of a “market” extremism that, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14trn in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young, jobless, homeless, incarcerated African Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will feature “a clash of phil­osophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy”. This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe, where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron’s “big society”, the theft of £84bn in jobs and services exceeds even the amount of tax “legally” avoided by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but with a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen and which, as Hywel Williams wrote following the 9/11 attacks, “can itself be a form of self-righteous fanaticism”. Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claimed to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain in order to “protect the intelligence agencies” – the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos Islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London. “Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed,” Lisette said. “And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others.” Such is the eloquent answer to those who still ask, “What can I do?”

I last saw Lisette’s tiny figure standing in driving rain next to her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.

When your friends and neighbors explain to you that America has to attack every nation that we don’t like to bring them freedom, just consider this Washington Post piece. Perhaps this is why some refer to the USA as “the arsenal of hypocrisy.”

Jim

10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free

By Jonathan Turley
The Washington Post
January 13, 2012

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.

The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.

Assassination of U.S. citizens

President Obama has claimed, as President George W. Bush did before him, the right to order the killing of any citizen considered a terrorist or an abettor of terrorism. Last year, he approved the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaqi and another citizen under this claimed inherent authority. Last month, administration officials affirmed that power, stating that the president can order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists. (Nations such as Nigeria, Iran and Syria have been routinely criticized for extrajudicial killings of enemies of the state.)

Indefinite detention

Under the law signed last month, terrorism suspects are to be held by the military; the president also has the authority to indefinitely detain citizens accused of terrorism. While the administration claims that this provision only codified existing law, experts widely contest this view, and the administration has opposed efforts to challenge such authority in federal courts. The government continues to claim the right to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion. (China recently codified a more limited detention law for its citizens, while countries such as Cambodia have been singled out by the United States for “prolonged detention.”)

Arbitrary justice

The president now decides whether a person will receive a trial in the federal courts or in a military tribunal, a system that has been ridiculed around the world for lacking basic due process protections. Bush claimed this authority in 2001, and Obama has continued the practice. (Egypt and China have been denounced for maintaining separate military justice systems for selected defendants, including civilians.)

Warrantless searches

The president may now order warrantless surveillance, including a new capability to force companies and organizations to turn over information on citizens’ finances, communications and associations. Bush acquired this sweeping power under the Patriot Act in 2001, and in 2011, Obama extended the power, including searches of everything from business documents to library records. The government can use “national security letters” to demand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens — and order them not to reveal the disclosure to the affected party. (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan operate under laws that allow the government to engage in widespread discretionary surveillance.)

Secret evidence

The government now routinely uses secret evidence to detain individuals and employs secret evidence in federal and military courts. It also forces the dismissal of cases against the United States by simply filing declarations that the cases would make the government reveal classified information that would harm national security — a claim made in a variety of privacy lawsuits and largely accepted by federal judges without question. Even legal opinions, cited as the basis for the government’s actions under the Bush and Obama administrations, have been classified. This allows the government to claim secret legal arguments to support secret proceedings using secret evidence. In addition, some cases never make it to court at all. The federal courts routinely deny constitutional challenges to policies and programs under a narrow definition of standing to bring a case.

War crimes

The world clamored for prosecutions of those responsible for waterboarding terrorism suspects during the Bush administration, but the Obama administration said in 2009 that it would not allow CIA employees to be investigated or prosecuted for such actions. This gutted not just treaty obligations but the Nuremberg principles of international law. When courts in countries such as Spain moved to investigate Bush officials for war crimes, the Obama administration reportedly urged foreign officials not to allow such cases to proceed, despite the fact that the United States has long claimed the same authority with regard to alleged war criminals in other countries. (Various nations have resisted investigations of officials accused of war crimes and torture. Some, such as Serbia and Chile, eventually relented to comply with international law; countries that have denied independent investigations include Iran, Syria and China.)

Secret court

The government has increased its use of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has expanded its secret warrants to include individuals deemed to be aiding or abetting hostile foreign governments or organizations. In 2011, Obama renewed these powers, including allowing secret searches of individuals who are not part of an identifiable terrorist group. The administration has asserted the right to ignore congressional limits on such surveillance. (Pakistan places national security surveillance under the unchecked powers of the military or intelligence services.)

Immunity from judicial review

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has successfully pushed for immunity for companies that assist in warrantless surveillance of citizens, blocking the ability of citizens to challenge the violation of privacy. (Similarly, China has maintained sweeping immunity claims both inside and outside the country and routinely blocks lawsuits against private companies.)

Continual monitoring of citizens

The Obama administration has successfully defended its claim that it can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review. (Saudi Arabia has installed massive public surveillance systems, while Cuba is notorious for active monitoring of selected citizens.)

Extraordinary renditions

The government now has the ability to transfer both citizens and noncitizens to another country under a system known as extraordinary rendition, which has been denounced as using other countries, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, to torture suspects. The Obama administration says it is not continuing the abuses of this practice under Bush, but it insists on the unfettered right to order such transfers — including the possible transfer of U.S. citizens.

These new laws have come with an infusion of money into an expanded security system on the state and federal levels, including more public surveillance cameras, tens of thousands of security personnel and a massive expansion of a terrorist-chasing bureaucracy.

Some politicians shrug and say these increased powers are merely a response to the times we live in. Thus, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) could declare in an interview last spring without objection that “free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war.” Of course, terrorism will never “surrender” and end this particular “war.”

Other politicians rationalize that, while such powers may exist, it really comes down to how they are used. This is a common response by liberals who cannot bring themselves to denounce Obama as they did Bush. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), for instance, has insisted that Congress is not making any decision on indefinite detention: “That is a decision which we leave where it belongs — in the executive branch.”

And in a signing statement with the defense authorization bill, Obama said he does not intend to use the latest power to indefinitely imprison citizens. Yet, he still accepted the power as a sort of regretful autocrat.

An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.

The framers lived under autocratic rule and understood this danger better than we do. James Madison famously warned that we needed a system that did not depend on the good intentions or motivations of our rulers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

Benjamin Franklin was more direct. In 1787, a Mrs. Powel confronted Franklin after the signing of the Constitution and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” His response was a bit chilling: “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely.

The indefinite-detention provision in the defense authorization bill seemed to many civil libertarians like a betrayal by Obama. While the president had promised to veto the law over that provision, Levin, a sponsor of the bill, disclosed on the Senate floor that it was in fact the White House that approved the removal of any exception for citizens from indefinite detention.

Dishonesty from politicians is nothing new for Americans. The real question is whether we are lying to ourselves when we call this country the land of the free.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University.

Source: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/is-the-united-states-still-the-land-of-the-free/2012/01/04/gIQAvcD1wP_story.html?tid=pm_pop

What can you do to support our troops — those valiant young men and women who are risking their lives to protect you and your family? To start with, you can listen to what they say, then act on it. Watch this video and learn both true history as well as the foreign policy crafted by wealthy and powerful insiders that has resulted in the so-called War on Terror. (How about a War on Fear? They’re both nouns meaning about the same thing.) You won’t see this in the corporate mass media but contemplate how much better off America would be without spending the bulk of our budget on war. Remember the Defense Department for more than 100 years was the War Department. Don’t let the words confuse you.

Jim
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=I8NhRPo0WAo#!

BIG BROTHER IS COMING FOR YOU DEPT.

Pastor Martin Niemoeller experienced  all this during Hitler’s Third Reich.When the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late. It’s not too late in America just yet. But you had better start doing something.

Jim

Preppers Are Now Considered To Be Potential Terrorists?

If you and your family store up lots of food, will you be identified as “potential terrorists” by law enforcement authorities?  That sounds like an insane question, but sadly it has gotten to the point where “preparing for the worst” has become a “suspicious activity”.  Today, there are millions of preppers all across the United States, and the vast majority of them just want to be left alone and do not want the government to interfere in their lives.  Storing up food is a completely peaceful activity, and preppers are generally some of the most patriotic and law-abiding people that you could ever hope to meet.  Unfortunately, prepping has become associated with “extremism” by many in the government, and lately we have seen some very disturbing signs that authorities are actively seeking to gather information on preppers.  So are preppers now considered to be potential terrorists?  Well, read the evidence posted in the rest of this article and decide for yourself.

The other day, U.S. Senator Rand Paul gave a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate during which he suggested that having “more than seven days of food” in your house could potentially get you branded as a “potential terrorist” by the federal government.  The following is an excerpt from that speech….

Know good and well that someday there could be a government in power that is shipping its citizens off for disagreements. There are laws on the books now that characterize who might be a terrorist.

Someone missing fingers on their hands is a suspect according to the Department of Justice. Someone who has guns, someone who has ammunition that is weatherproofed, someone who has more than seven days of food in their house can be considered a potential terrorist.

If you are suspected by these activities do you want the government to have the ability to send you to Guantanamo Bay for indefinite detention?

You can see video of this speech right here.  It is incredibly chilling to hear a defender of liberty such as Rand Paul warn of such things.

But just because a politician says something that does not always mean that it is true.

So is there any evidence that Americans that are storing up food are being watched by the federal government?

Unfortunately, there is.  In fact, Oath Keepers has posted a report about one incident in which federal agents actually visited a food production facility and demanded the names of anyone that has been “purchasing bulk food”.  The following come from an article about this incident that was recently written by Rand Cardwell, the president of the Tennessee chapter of the Oath Keepers….

A fellow veteran contacted me concerning a new and disturbing development. He had been utilizing a Mormon cannery near his home to purchase bulk food supplies. The man that manages the facility related to him that federal agents had visited the facility and demanded a list of individuals that had been purchasing bulk food. The manager informed the agents that the facility kept no such records and that all transactions were conducted on a cash-and-carry basis. The agents pressed for any record of personal checks, credit card transactions, etc., but the manager could provide no such record. The agents appeared to become very agitated and after several minutes of questioning finally left with no information. I contacted the manager and personally confirmed this information.

Why in the world would federal agents be so interested in Americans that are “purchasing bulk food”?

Don’t they have anything better to do?

As I have written about previously, authorities are also now using a tool developed by the CDC to conduct “door to door disaster preparedness assessments” in some areas of the United States.

The following comes from a local news report in Tennessee….

The Metro Public Health and the Tennessee Department of Health will be using a tool designed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to go door to door and check to see how disaster ready you are.

The door to door assessment will take place from 3:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Thursday and from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday. It will be in 30 neighborhoods in Davidson County that have been randomly selected to be the target of a door to door assessment.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want anyone coming to my door to “assess” how “prepared” I am.

This is all very, very disturbing.

Lately, the federal government seems absolutely obsessed with the distribution of food.

As author Brandon Turbeville noted recently, “the U.S. government has publicly raided organic food shops, raw milk distributors, and the Amish with guns drawn” in recent years.

Aren’t there bigger threats to national security than the Amish?

Unfortunately, we now live in a “Big Brother” police state where just about anything can be considered a “suspicious activity”.

In fact, according to the FBI a bulk purchase of “meals ready to eat” is now considered to be “suspicious activity” that should be reported to them.

When the “war on terror” started a decade ago, we were told that we needed to fight the terrorists “over there” so that they would not come over here.

Well, now we are being told that the United States itself is part of the “battleground” and that the “terrorists” might just be our neighbors.

We are being told that if we “see something” that we should “say something” to the government.

In essence, the federal government wants us all to “inform” on one another.

Now that most of the big name terrorists have been removed from the picture, the Obama administration and the mainstream media are really hyping the idea that “homegrown terrorism” is a grave danger.

Just check out these headlines from the past few days….

ABC News: “White House Unveils New Strategy to Fight Homegrown Terrorism”

USA Today: “White House unveils new strategy to combat homegrown terror”

CNN: “Measuring the homegrown terrorist threat to U.S. military”

The entire focus of the “war on terror” has shifted.  According to FBI Director Robert Mueller, “homegrown terrorists” represent as big a threat to American national security as al-Qaeda does at this point.

America is rapidly changing, and not for the better.  All of this paranoia is going to rip this country apart.

In addition, have you noticed how they have taken the word “Islamic” out of their description of the terrorists and have replaced it with words like “extremist” and “extremism”?

Well, the truth is that just about anyone can be considered an “extremist” in one sense or another.

In fact, a recent Salon article asked this question: “Are Evangelicals A National Security Threat?”

These days, if you support an “alternative” political candidate there is a good chance that you will be labeled as an extremist.

During the 2008 election, one law enforcement report identified supporters of presidential candidates Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr as potential terrorists.

Today, if you have a religious or political ideology that differs from the “orthodoxy” of the federal government then you are probably considered to be an “extremist”.

Beliefs that were once considered normal are now considered to be “dangerous” and “radical”.

For example, one unclassified Department of Homeland Security report published a couple of years ago entitled “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” claimed that a belief in Bible prophecy “could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition and weapons.”

During a Congressional hearing earlier this year, U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee warned that “Christian militants” might try to “bring down the country” and that such groups need to be investigated.

Back on February 20, 2009, the State of Missouri issued a report entitled “MIAC Strategic Report: The Modern Militia Movement”.  That report warned that the following types of people may be potential terrorists….

*anti-abortion activists

*those that are against illegal immigration

*those that consider “the New World Order” to be a threat

*those that have a negative view of the United Nations

As I have written about previously, a very revealing document obtained by Oath Keepers shows that the FBI is actually instructing store owners to report many new forms of “suspicious activity” to them.

So what does the FBI consider “suspicious activity” to include? According to the document, the FBI now considers “suspicious activity” to include the following….

*paying with cash

*missing a hand or fingers

*”strange odors”

*making “extreme religious statements”

*”radical theology”

*purchasing weatherproofed ammunition or match containers

*purchasing meals ready to eat

*purchasing night vision devices, night flashlights or gas masks

All of this is completely and totally ridiculous.

Law enforcement authorities should quit worrying about preppers.  The vast majority of us that are preparing for the hard times that are coming truly love this country, are completely and totally non-violent, and just want to be left alone.

There are real threats to national security out there, but the federal government refuses to address them.  For example, our border with Mexico is wide open and it has been documented that terror groups are working in northern Mexico and have been coming across the border on a regular basis.

But instead of securing the border, the Obama administration is granting “backdoor amnesty”  to illegal aliens instead.

In addition, law enforcement authorities should look into the massive breach of national security that the “Fast and Furious” scandal represents.  With the full knowledge of the Department of Justice, ATF agents facilitated the sale of thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels and dropped all surveillance on those weapons once they crossed the border.  Those guns will be used to kill people (including Americans) for many years to come.

In fact, there is so much corruption and so many “potential terrorists” in Washington D.C. that it should be more than enough to keep law enforcement officials busy for a very long time.

So leave preppers alone.

Preppers are not a threat.  They are not going to hurt anyone.  They just want to store up food and prepare for the difficult times that are coming.

Source: http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/preppers-are-now-considered-to-be-potential-terrorists