Never Forget: On this Day in 2001, Bush Ignored the Bin Laden Threat.
http://bluntandcranky.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/never-forget-on-this-day-in-2001-bush-ignored-the-bin-laden-threat/May he burn in Hell for his many failings. But for this one, he should be provided with an extra hod of brimstone.
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It was ignored (on purpose or through incomparable incompetence).
The present trillion-dollar-a-year "surveillance state" is nothing more than a pig's trough of contractors sucking up our tax dollars (ala' what Halliburton did in Iraq:
Halliburton bills taxpayers $45 per case of soda, $100 per bag of laundry
http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/news/whistleblower_hearings_denied.html
only it's being done to sell drones and security tech and to militarize police and to FUCKING SPY ON US CITIZENS WITHOUT WARRANTS.
Fuck the surveillance state and its cash lackeys who are killing the Bill of Rights for power and profit!
Meet the Contractors Turning America's Police Into a Paramilitary Force
http://www.alternet.org/meet-contractors-turning-americas-police-paramilitary-force?paging=off
The national security state has an annual budget of around $1 trillion. Of that huge pile of money, large amounts go to private companies the federal government awards contracts to. Some, like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, are household names, but many of the contractors fly just under the public's radar. What follows are three companies you should know about (because some of them can learn a lot about you with their spy technologies).
L3 is everywhere. Those night-vision goggles the JSOC team in Zero Dark Thirty uses? That's L3. The new machines that are replacing the naked scanners at the airport? That's L3. Torture at Abu Ghraib? A former subsidiary of L3 was recently ordered to pay $5.28 million to 71 Iraqis who had been held in the awful prison.
Oh, and drones? L3 is on it. Reprieve, a UK-based human rights organization, earlier this month wrote on its Web site:
“L-3 Communications is one of the main subcontractors involved with production of the US’s lethal Predator since the inception of the programme. Predators are used by the CIA to kill ‘suspected militants’ and terrorise entire populations in Pakistan and Yemen. Drone strikes have escalated under the Obama administration and 2013 has already seen six strikes in the two countries.”
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/
But why militarize our police forces if Ray Kelly would lead them (DHS controls PDs through "iWatch"
?
“I think Ray Kelly is one of the best there is,” Obama said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/07/18/would-obama-consider-ray-kelly-for-homeland-security-amid-stop-and-frisk-controversy/
However:
Occupy Wall Street @OccupyWallStNYC
Secret police recordings: "We're going to go out there and violate some rights." Disgusting.
#StopAndFrisk
http://ow.ly/ncTK0
NYC 'Stop and Frisk' Policy Ruled Unconstitutional
http://www.policymic.com/articles/22375/nyc-stop-and-frisk-policy-ruled-unconstitutional-conservatives-immediately-start-whining
Racial Profiling Muslims: NYPD is Violating Civil Liberties by Spying on Religious Groups
http://www.policymic.com/articles/24817/racial-profiling-muslims-nypd-is-violating-civil-liberties-by-spying-on-religious-groups
"Every year since 2003, blacks and Latinos have consistently accounted for around 85 percent of stop-and-frisk selectees."
http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/07/01/mayor_bloomberg_stop_and_frisk_yes_the_controversial_policy_is_really_really.html
Further reading:
CIA Agent Had "No Limitations" Working With NYPD After 9/11
http://gothamist.com/2013/06/27/cia_agent_had_no_limitations_workin.php
How LAPD are made into a tentacle of the DHS
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022154200
Bringing the argument home about domestic spying (Look no further than the Los Angeles Police Dept.)
http://upload.democraticunderground.com/10023101984
How America's Top Tech Companies Created the Surveillance State
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/how-america-s-top-tech-companies-created-the-surveillance-state-20130725
With Edward Snowden on the run in Russia and reportedly threatening to unveil the entire “blueprint” for National Security Agency surveillance, there’s probably as much terror in Silicon Valley as in Washington about what he might expose. The reaction so far from private industry about the part it has played in helping the government spy on Americans has ranged from outraged denial to total silence. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, he of the teen-nerd hoodie, said he’d never even heard of the kind of data-mining that the NSA leaker described—then fell quiet. Google cofounder Larry Page declared almost exactly the same thing; then he shut up, too. Especially for the libertarian geniuses of Silicon Valley, who take pride in their distance (both physically and philosophically) from Washington, the image-curdling idea that they might be secretly in bed with government spooks induced an even greater reluctance to talk, perhaps, than the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which conveniently forbids executives from revealing government requests for information.
But the sounds of silence from the tech and telecom sectors are drowning out a larger truth, one that some of Snowden’s documents might well supply in much greater detail. For nearly 20 years, many of these companies—indeed most of America’s biggest corporate sectors, from energy to finance to telecom to computers—have been doing the intelligence community’s bidding, as America’s spy and homeland-security agencies have bored their way into the nation’s privately run digital and electronic infrastructure. Sometimes this has happened after initial resistance, and occasionally under penalty of law, but more often with willing and even eager cooperation. Indeed, the private tech sector effectively built the NSA’s surveillance system, and got rich doing it.
Books have been written about President Eisenhower’s famous farewell warning in 1961 about the “military-industrial complex,” and what he described as its “unwarranted influence.” But an even greater leviathan today, one that the public knows little about, is the “intelligence-industrial complex.”
The saga of the private sector’s involvement in the NSA’s scheme for permanent mass surveillance is long, complex, and sometimes contentious. Often, in ways that appeared to apply indirect pressure on industry, the NSA has demanded, and received, approval authority—veto power, basically—over telecom mergers and the lifting of export controls on software. The tech industry, in more than a decade of working-group meetings, has hashed out an understanding with the intelligence community over greater NSA access to their systems, including the nation’s major servers (although it is not yet clear to what degree the agency had direct access). “I never saw come and say, ‘We’ll do this if you do that,’ ” says Rebecca Gould, the former vice president for public policy at Dell. “But the National Security Agency always reached out to companies, bringing them in. There are working groups going on as we speak.”
New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims
“I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released," an expert tells Salon
By Jordan Michael Smith
Salon.com
Tuesday, Jun 19, 2012 04:24 PM EDT
Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.
The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.
SNIP...
Former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has taken credit for the drone program that the Bush administration ignored. “Things like working to get an armed Predator that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important, working to get a strategy that would allow us to get better cooperation from Pakistan and from the Central Asians,” she said in 2006. “We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida.” Rice claimed that the Bush administration continued the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism policies, a claim the documents disprove. “If the administration wanted to get it done, I’m sure they could have gotten it done,” says Elias-Sanborn.
Many of the documents publicize for the first time what was first made clear in the 9/11 Commission: The White House received a truly remarkable amount of warnings that al-Qaida was trying to attack the United States. From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency. One from June called “Bin-Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” writes that “[redacted] expects Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days.” The famous August brief called “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” is included. “Al-Qai’da members, including some US citizens, have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure here,” it says. During the entire month of August, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas — which tied with one of Richard Nixon’s as the longest vacation ever taken by a president. CIA Director George Tenet has said he didn’t speak to Bush once that month, describing the president as being “on leave.” Bush did not hold a Principals’ meeting on terrorism until September 4, 2001, having downgraded the meetings to a deputies’ meeting, which then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has repeatedly said slowed down anti-Bin Laden efforts “enormously, by months.”
CONTINUED w LINKS...
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/19/new_nsa_docs_reveal_911_truths/
off the hook. 
off the hook.
And I will never forget the photograph of Dumbya at the ranch with Harriet Meiers SHOWING him the briefing. Ugggh! 
