How not to relinquish your rights at a Department of Homeland Security citizenship profiling checkpoint located 40 miles inside the US border. Catch all the episodes at Roadblock Revelations.
What to do if you’re not being arrested
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Tag Archives: Department of Homeland Security
Trading Benjamins
My 14-year-old son is going to China next month, along with a group of classmates and chaperones. Yesterday I went to Wells Fargo to exchange $400USD for Chinese yuan. A small currency exchange, cash for cash, very routine. To accomplish the task, however, I was required to provide two forms of identification. This was not a glance-at-the-information kind of ID check, which would’ve been pointless to begin with. No, the clerk put the information into the bank’s data base before handing me the money.
I asked her, “Why on earth do you need my personal information to exchange currency?” She said, under her breath, “Have you ever heard of the Patriot Act? The government requires us to gather this information so they can identify potential terrorists.” She went on to tell me that Wells Fargo is the only bank in town still willing to deal in foreign currency. The other banks have opted out so they don’t have to jump through government hoops and engage in data mining to benefit our nosy and intrusive administration.
Walking out of the bank with my red notes, Chairman Mao watching me, gave me a creepy sense of foreboding.
She was just lucky that she didn’t have a pierced clit
Thank God that we have a Department of Homeland Security that is protecting us all from body piercings in airports. See… TSA Forces Woman To Remove Nipple Rings For Flight In fact, it’s like we have The Three Stooges loose in the airports these days.
And whatever did The Stooges do with their three light system? We haven’t herd from it in a long time now? Red, White, and Blue. Or wasn’t it Red, Yellow, and Green? Which was it, Moe?
The Department of Homeland Security. These guys are quite funny! Gomer, Goober, and Dubya. What security measure will they come up with next?
Operation OMG
NorthCom, Pacific Command and NORAD, along with the Department of Homeland Security, are planning an anti-terrorist training exercise called Operation Vigilant Shield. It will take place October 15-20 and will prepare the military for a martial law scenario. The exercise will be a mock up of a radiological weapons catastrophe. I’ve read elsewhere that the military will use members of the clergy to encourage cooperation in the event of martial law.
I called the telephone number on the Operation Vigilant Shield Fact Sheet(PDF) and spoke to one Tony Hill. I am not sure of his rank. NORAD is today in the process of moving desks and boxes to a new home at NorthCom and didn’t have the usual operator in place. He chatted amiably with me about Operation Vigilant Shield, assured me that it was going to take place, assured me that it wasn’t all that unusual.
On September 11, 2001, NORAD was conducting a training exercise called Operation Vigilant Guardian. This ensured that our military air fleet would be tied up over the Atlantic and that no adequate defense to hijacked airliners could be launched.
I think I’ll be a ghost come Halloween.
If people only knew how bad the breakdown of corporate medicine is getting
Most Americans don’t fully realize how bad the corporate model world medical system is actually doing. Here is Democracy Now in reportage about a man held in Arizona in solitary confinement within a hospital for almost a year, appropriately titled ‘Is Sickness a Crime?‘
The victim of a new strain of TB resistant to treatment is being held without any rights in a jail inside a hospital in Phoenix. As these new antibiotic resistant infectious diseases begin to spread, we can expect to see the public panic to spread like wildfire. And rightly so.
If we don’t stop the corporate world from further destroying the environment and putting much of the world in unhygienic living conditions full of disease and poverty, then all of us are in immediate danger ourselves. There is no gated community that will protect you no matter how many Border Walls get built.
Responding to these diseases must be done in a much more thoughtful way than in mere use of a nutty police mindset ‘Homeland Security’ model. Just yesterday, I was in a Colorado Springs community center where the ‘alert warning’ for terrorism was YELLOW. The public is being treated as if they were residents of a state institution for the mentally retarded, which is where they the Bush Klan seems to have gotten their 3 color scheme from!
We live in a world that needs much more effort than this US corproate governmental nonsense to address the real problems we all face. And yet I have not heard of one elected politician that has had the courage to call for the abolition of this nut case branch of the US government called the Department of Homeland Security.
Yes, we need ‘homeland security’, but with the corporate misleadership now running the country we’re not going to get it. Your average businessman at the upper levels is basically a corrupt buffoon. Most of them themselves need to be in jail unlike this young man now being held in a hospital in Atrizona. Speak out against this sort of abuse all you can. Before too long, you just might find yourself in the same sort of predicament.
Prosecute the Department of Homeland Security for its Boston buffoonery
When a federal agency engages in a blatantly stupid abuse of its power and interrupts an entire city like the Department of Homeland Security just did in Boston, then they should be prosecuted, not the 2 artists who set up the advertisements nor Turner Broadcasting who sponsored this innocent enough advertising campaign.
At the very least, Michael Chertoff, the acting head of that agency, should be promptly removed from his position. His stupid group of buffoons interrupted an entire city to the cost of untold millions of dollars, not just the 1/2 million plus in salaries of cops and feds that has been officially calculated.
Michael Chertoff and the Boston charade remind us of Michael Brown, another totally incompetent Bush crony who was forced out of his position at FEMA, during the Katrina Hurricane hit on New Orleans. FEMA bungled the whole hurricane victim relief operation just like Michael Chertoff’s Homeland Insecurity offices bungled security in Boston. Why ius this country tolerating without much comment these charades by Bush’s ‘security’ Klan? It’s like having the Three Stooges in charge of our country. Except Bush has put together many more more than just 3 stooges in charge of our country’s affairs.
If the Boston fiasco is what the Bush and cheney call guarding national security post 9/11, then we are all in big, big trouble. Shouldn’t we all rather be out on a bird hunting trip with the Big Dick himself than entrust further this crowd with any of our security at all.
US National Surveillance State issues out the national ID cards to us
There used to be a lot of worry about the government issuing a national identification card to all of us and then requiring us to carry it all the time so that they could monitor us, The People, all the time. Well now that they are actually slipping that noose half around our neck, the population of the US is without a bleep of protest against it. Maybe it is because the name of the national ID card sounds so familiar and appears as nothing much new? The national ID card is called a passport, and it will soon be required for all travel outside the US, even to Mexico and Canada.
What? Don’t think of the passport as a national ID card? Well that’s what it is becoming in graduated steps. When you apply for one, you are registering with the federal government. They already have a list of grading people on supposed ‘flight risk’, and it will be an easy task to meld this to the passport. And what’s to stop an ‘overland travel risk’ list from being added on now? After all, one can hijack a bus and do some major damage with it if one wants. All America must be protected from that, they will say.
These new passport requirements were slipped in by the Bush Administration without even the most minimal discussion and with zero protest within the House and Senate. Millions of people (Canadians, Americans, and Mexicans) who never had passports are now being herded into having to obtain one. Our whole county is being turned into a gated community, all under the excuse of bettering our own security. In fact, much of the North American continent is being turned into a high security zone, where people will travel between countries while under a secret surveillance pegged to their passports.
This secret surveillance does not now, and certainly will not in the future, have any due process as to who gets to go, and who is made to stop at the series of gates that will be put into effect. That will be a military decision, since the Department of Homeland Security and MIGRA really are part of the military model, not civilian one. If this reminds you of Palestinians within the areas controlled by Israel, then you get the picture of the model being used by this passport system of surveillance. It is all quite arbitrary and beyond the reach of legal rules and observations.
We are only now in the first steps of this new, comprehensive surveillance system being put into place. but the fact that we don’t even recognize much what is really being done is not promising for stopping and reversing course. All the blame for ‘inconveniences’ will be placed on Osama bin Laden, and not our own misleaders. We will be told that it is wartime and that our liberties must be compromised. We will be told that there are certain elements of our society that are high risk to the rest of us. Wait! Did I say we WILL be told that? We are already being told all this, and most of us nod our heads in acquiesence.
An Iron Curtain is Descending is a good article at the counterpunch site about the already occurring effects of this new surveillance system upon people. Check it out!
New Orleans- the city George lost
New Orleans will go down as the American city that Dubya lost, and that will be his place in history, along with having blown the Middle East apart. Now that New Orleans slipped by the hurricane season, this Southern city has virtually disappeared from public view once again, as the press kept quiet during the elections. Too troubling for Americans to know that over $100 billion dollars later, the levee system there in Louisiana is still in shambles. On the scale of American corporate corruption, FEMA (a branch of the hilariously named Department of Homeland Security) ranks #3 top dog, right behind #1 Pentagon and #2, the US healthcare system. Here is what the New Orleans daily has to say about the partially constructed new levees.
Department of Homeland Security Department
I attended a symposium at UCCS to address Defense Department funding of the University of Colorado school system. Throughout, the science professors generally disavowed understanding of direct military funding. In addition, they stressed that Near-Space research was being pursued for two civilian benefits: communications and imaging. Due to the nascent payload limitations, they explained, current military interests do not involve weaponry and focus instead on two congruent areas of research: communications and imaging. Marvelous synchronicity might describe their self-reflection on the matter.
I asked the panel to defend the school’s new PHD program in, would you believe it, Homeland Security. The government has just endowed the CU Denver campus with its very own DHS building, but most of the classes will be taught in Colorado Springs. Homeland Security is not a field of study, I offered, it’s a political phrase coined by the Germans the last time they were the center of attention.
There were no takers, so the dean gave it a try. In this new age of global community, we have to explore contemporary subjects with equanimity. Etc.
Really?
Must we endow each inquiry with a department? I’ll agree we should study state sponsored terror, but should it be a major? The School of the Americas is already one institution too many for that vocation.
But I took issue with the other part of the dean’s answer. Because it was a phrase that turned up later in every panelist’s rationale: this New Age.
What UCCS needed was a history professor on their panel. New age my foot! Every dawn is a new age, if you want to be literal. Otherwise, there is only the New Age utopia dreamed of in incense shops. Thinking there is a new age is really just an excuse to toss off the lessons of the past. Global Community? The globe has always been one earthbound community, since Alexander thought he’d conquered it all, to when Caesar and Genghis thought they could administrate it. Certainly transportation and communication have amplified the cohesion, but nothing’s changed under the sun. The thinking from the top is still imperial.
Do not tell me technology has changed everything. There’s always been technology. The wheel, the plow, technology’s role is unchanged. Whether Pong or Xbox, it’s still technology, still an agent of transformation, not change. Science, technology’s more noble companion, increases understanding, as understanding approaches -shall we say- infinity. If our self perception of human nature grows by such increments, how can we assert there is any net change? From the Cave of Lascaux to the MOMA, the artist is the same.
To define a Department of Homeland Security as a field of education, is to give credence to ignoble propaganda. Repeating the New World Order mantra as a justification is to give inanity credulity that academics must not countenance. I’m all for freedom of academic pursuit, but certainly there must be standards, be they rational or humanist. I’d even accept standards of IQ or hairstyle to keep this crew out.
Celebrities to soothe airport terror anxiety
In an airport the other day I overheard Connie Chung making an announcement. Our national threat level is elevated to Orange apparently, further precautions are necessary, etc, etc, please report any suspicious activity to the TSA.
Was that Connie Chung’s voice? Why? What was wrong with the usual anonymous voice paging John Smith, paging Mister John Smith? Was a celebrity voice necessary? Did her publicist get Connie the gig, was it a court ordered community service, or did the Department of Homeland Security feel a familiar yet authorative voice was a necessary means to ease passenger suspicion that they are the dupes?
So here was Connie Chung doing her part to calm the travelling masses being led to their ignoble fate of unreasonable suspicion. I don’t know why, I thought of Judas Goats in the slaughterhouses. Does Connie have to Fedex a recording to the TSA at each elevation of the Threat Level?
Now I remember seeing Homeland Security TSA infomercials starring a variety of famous comedians, playing on monitors above the first post-911 lines awaiting the beefed-up airport security. So you laugh off, or shrug off while laughing, the indignity of being told to take off your shoes for the inspectors. Most people bring flip-flops to the gym navigate the few steps from the locker room to the showers lest they contract someone else’s athlete’s foot. These same people are being forced to share foot fungus with thousands more public soles than they are accustomed.
As I was about to board the airplane, I was called out for an additional search by a TSA officer. By called out, I do not mean approached, nor addressed. He simply barked “Sir. Step over here.” He may have said please, I do not remember it in his abruptness. Instead I was looking beside me to see to whom he might have been addressing his command. Maybe I had come in after he had begun with a salutation as is customary when strangers initiate communication. Having seen no one beside me, I looked back at the uniformed TSA guy in time for him to shout “STEP OVER HERE!”
I’m of course only about to respond “Who? Me?” but he’s already talking over me shouting his order again. I was left with no option but to offer my hasty compliance.
I’d have to say I was too startled to fuss about his manners, and I was eager to get aboard the plane, but I would otherwise have loved to mess with this little tin-pot jerk.
I had no objection to being frisked again, or to having my bag searched once more for whatever items I may have purchased from Southland Corporation in the terminal after the last security check. But I will not be shouted at. No.
And my thoughts return to the celebrities trying to facilitate our compliance. I’m reminded of Tadeusz Borowski’s memoir of the concentration camps “This way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.”
Restarting economy with repurchased toiletry items
Never mind that the London plotters never got beyond plotting. Never mind that the likely success of their bomb smuggling strategy is yet unproved. Already the Department of Homeland Security has decreed that no one can take liquids or gels aboard a plane.
If the NSA should eavesdrop upon another group of dark skinned men discussing the smuggling of incindiary devices made out of toothpicks, no matter how improbable, would toothpicks then be banned?
To combust a passenger aircraft with explosives stored in contact cleaning fluid bottles would require two soccer teams of suicide brethren pooling their resources in a probably pretty conspicuous Islamic in-flight Tupperware party.
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And now the foiled terrorist plot is looking like it was a hoax. This latest Neocon fear-mongering looks more like a baby steps approach to increasing consumer spending. They’re giving up on the everybody-buy-a-hybred industrial initiative. Instead they’re forcing airline passengers to repurchase the personal products they need at each destination. Are the conservatives thinking they will bolster consumer spending one plane load of toiletry items at a time? |
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