U.S. Senate to Pass Intelligence Reorganization Bill (Update1)

[nolabels]

U.S. Senate to Pass Intelligence Reorganization Bill (Update1)

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate will pass legislation today to reorganize the nation's intelligence agencies and create a national director of intelligence to oversee efforts to prevent terrorist attacks, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said.

``The intelligence bill we will pass today is the most sweeping reform of our intelligence community since the beginning of the CIA,'' Frist said on the Senate floor, referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, which was created in 1947.

The House approved the bill yesterday and the Senate, which passed an earlier version of the bill 96-2 on Oct. 6, will vote today. President George W. Bush wrote a letter to lawmakers urging passage. His signature on the bill would enact many of the recommendations the Sept. 11 commission said were needed to prevent terrorist attacks.

The legislation is based on the report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which investigated the 2001 attacks that killed 2,973 people in Washington, New York and Pennsylvania. The commission said faulty intelligence-gathering, law enforcement, border and airport security contributed to the failure to stop the attacks.
(snip)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aoxrUv1oroBo&refer=us

[nolabels]

1. Same Bill but with just a different name

My take is that after the Jan 22, 2005 the gloves will be off. The vote and the whole rest of it is just a way to keep people occupied.

If you don't now believe 9/11 was a set-up, when will you?


National ID/Patriot Act 2 Legislation On Verge Of Passing

Prison Planet | December 7 2004

At approximately 3:30pm today, Ron Paul's press secretary Jeff Deist called Alex Jones to warn him that the legislation that encompasses the national ID card and Patriot Act 2 provisions was on the verge of passing the House tonight.

Deist stated that the bill and what it means for America could be described in a word as 'tyranny'.

Deist's tone was the most concerned that Alex had ever known in his years of communication with Ron Paul's office. Alex made it clear how upset Desit was and that the situation reminded him of a 'war room atmosphere'. Deist and Ron Paul are desperate to mobilize the alternative media before the bill reaches the Senate tomorrow.

There is still a chance that we can shoot down the national ID card provisions before the bill is passed in full.

Deist went on to exclaim his disbelief at how the so-called conservative Bush administration had betrayed America and how Paul's colleagues on Capitol Hill were blindly going along with this and doing whatever Bush tells them to do without question.
(snip)
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2004/071204nationalid.htm

[nolabels]

2. Same reasoning but different country

You know if it is discribed that Bush cannot wait to sign this bill it must not be good x(

Sun, December 5, 2004
Uncle Sam has his own gulag
Behaving like the Soviet secret police won't make America safer, Eric Margolis says.
By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor

The Lubyanka Prison's heavy oak main door swung open. I went in, the first western journalist to enter the KGB's notorious Moscow headquarters -- a place so dreaded Russians dared not utter its name. When they referred to it at all, they called it "Detsky Mir," after a nearby toy store.

After interviewing two senior KGB generals, I explored the fascinating museum of Soviet intelligence and was briefed on special poisons and assassination weapons that left no traces. I sat transfixed at the desk used by all the directors of Stalin's secret police, on which the orders were signed to murder 30 million people
(snip)
According to a report leaked to the New York Times, the Swiss-based International Red Cross has accused the Bush administration for a second time of employing systematic, medically supervised torture against suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay, and at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The second Red Cross report was delivered to the White House last summer while it was trying to dismiss the Abu Ghraib prison torture horrors as the crimes of a few rogue jailers.
(snip)
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Eric_Margolis/2004/12/04/765847.html

[nolabels]

3. Just like the story how they spent hundreds of millions of dollars........

of taxpayer money to lobby the US public invading and occupying Iraq was a good and necessary thing. I see no difference in what ever they are doing at the present time and then. They are mostly are projecting swill for the general population's consumption as far as I can see.

When you get your national ID card please come back and explain to us conspiracy buffs (or what ever you think us to be), why you think that the people trying to share information about what others might be up to are worse than the ones helping to carry it out?

PSYOPS, Media and the Fog of War
The U.S. military's manipulation of the media demands more investigation

The Los Angeles Times revealed this week (12/1/04) that the U.S. military lied to CNN in the course of executing psychological warfare operations, or PSYOPS, in advance of the recent attack on Fallujah. This incident raises serious questions about government disinformation and journalistic credibility, but recent discussions of the government's propaganda plans have excluded some valuable context.

In an October 14 on-air interview, Marine Lt. Lyle Gilbert told CNN Pentagon reporter Jamie McIntyre that a U.S. military assault on Fallujah had begun. In fact, the offensive would not actually begin for another three weeks. The goal of the psychological operation, according to the Times, was to deceive Iraqi insurgents into revealing what they would do in the event of an actual offensive.

This operation raises obvious questions about the government's use of media to broadcast disinformation at home and abroad-- not to mention questions about journalistic gullibility and reluctance to question official claims. But the CNN story has received little pick-up so far from other news outlets-- and when it is covered, it's treated like an isolated episode, even though recent history shows that U.S. government plans to deceive journalists and the public are widespread and systematic, not aberrational.

Shortly before the launch of the "war on terror," an unnamed Pentagon war planner seemed to warn journalists everywhere when he told Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz: "This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine... We're going to lie about things." (9/24/01)

In February 2002, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) was "developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations" in an effort "to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries."
(snip)
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=199894&rel_no=1

[nolabels]

4. I suspect this story will kind of disappear or get reinvented with.......

with a new euphemism to muffle the critics.

Homeland Insecurity:
Phoenix, Chaos, The Enterprise,
and The Politics of Terror In America

Prior to the 11 September terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, two conditions defined American politics. In regard to foreign affairs, the United States was universally recognized as the world's only super power. And today that condition remains unchanged: no other nation comes close to matching America's military might.

But domestic politics was defined by doubts about the legitimacy of the Bush Administration. Al Gore had won the popular vote by an overwhelming majority, and Bush had acquired his presidential powers through a combination of nepotism and voter fraud in Florida, blatant media bias, and a judicial coup d'etat by the right wing of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Before the terror attacks, the stench of venality clung to Bush like cigarette smoke and stale beer after a night of bar hopping. Since the attacks, his standing in the polls has nearly doubled, and there's been no more talk of an oil crunch, or the ailing economy, or of the looting of pensions plans down ten to twenty percent, or of looting of Social Security and Medicare to pay for the war of revenge, or of Republicans losing Congress in 2002.

This second, overarching condition--the inherent illegitimacy of the Bush Administration--must be remembered when considering how the apocalyptic events of 11 September changed the domestic political landscape. Symbolically, they wiped the slate clean. The U.S. remains the most powerful nation in the world, but Bush's legitimacy is no longer an issue. As a result, all the moral and psychological prohibitions on the reactionary right have been lifted, and all the anger and frustrations it cultivated during the Vietnam War, and the Carter and Clinton Administrations, is poised to be unleashed under the aegis of counter-terrorism, not only on the usual suspects--foreign enemies sitting on vast oil reserves, suspected terrorists, and domestic dissidents--but on the unwitting, flag-waving American public as well.
(snip)
http://www.counterpunch.org/homeland1.html

[Just Me]

8. Although my concern was re: DOD control, I do take yours to heart.

People still fail to acknowledge the ambition of this power.

Our representatives still FAIL TO DO THEIR JOB and keep a reign on these neofascist power-mongers.

Both sides of the aisle will regret their choices.

Unfortunately, humanity will pay for their choices,...in blood, life and treasure.

Nevertheless, keep the faith knowing that there is a far more informed and passionate people for humanity,...than ever before. These may be painful times,...but they are better than those times which preceeded us.

[genius]

6. Feinstein's office said Senate bill was different than House bill

Was she correct? She has a history of not reading bills she votes for .

[realFedUp]

5. We've lost our minds in this country

snip

Bush would have to nominate someone to fill the intelligence director post, and the Senate must confirm Bush's choice. Senator John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage would be his choice.

[Zorra]

7. Dennis Kucinich voted against this bill. He also voted against the IWR

and the Patriot Act.

This strongly indicates that this bill will not be a good thing for the people of the US.

[Just Me]

9. Fascism, particularly imperialist fascism,...has NEVER been good,...

,...for "the people". Animals live far better in the natural world than people do in a fascist state.

[Freddie Stubbs]

10. Kucinich also voted to ban partial birth abortion

75 members of the House voted against this bill (67 most conservative Republicans and 8 Democrats).

[Judi Lynn]

11. Rockefeller, Durbin, Levin, and Wyden refused to sign. Good for them.

Posted on Wed, Dec. 08, 2004


Lawmaker: Spy Project Threatens Security

TED BRIDIS

Associated Press


WASHINGTON - Congress' new blueprint for U.S. intelligence spending includes a mysterious and expensive spy program that drew extraordinary criticism from leading Democrats, with one saying the highly classified project is a threat to national security.

In an unusual rebuke, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, complained Wednesday that the spy project was "totally unjustified and very, very wasteful and dangerous to the national security." He called the program "stunningly expensive."

Rockefeller and three other Democratic senators - Richard Durbin of Illinois, Carl Levin of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon - refused to sign the congressional compromise negotiated by others in the House and Senate that provides for future U.S. intelligence activities.

The compromise noted that the four senators believed the mystery program was unnecessary and its cost unjustified and that "they believe that the funds for this item should be expended on other intelligence programs that will make a surer and greater contribution to national security."
(snip/...)

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/politics/10370879.htm
(Free registration is required)