Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Why Does George Bush Want to Cut Law Enforcement’s Budget?



“There is something terribly seductive about the notion of a mercenary army. Perhaps it is the inevitable response of a market economy to a host of seemingly intractable public policy and security problems.” - Ted Koppel, “These Guns For Hire”, May 22, 2006
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/opinion/22koppel.html?_r=3&hp=&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin


When George W. Bush last week presented on a cute little laptop notebook his budget for 2009, hardly a hue and a cry was raised about him slashing the national budget for law enforcement and Homeland Security, including a program that would keep illegal aliens in American prisons. Not only did this proposed hatchet job go unnoticed outside of law enforcement circles, no one even bothered to ask how George Bush could expect them to be our first line of defense in the event of a national emergency.

The answer’s simple: Because he no longer needs them. He no longer needs the National Guard. He no longer needs to worry about violating posse comitatus. Indeed, as FBI Director Robert Mueller put it in a 2005 InfraGard meeting, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act

Via Digby, God bless her, via Cossack and crossposted on Alternet is Matthew Rothschild’s trouser-shitting story about InfraGard, an organization that, quite rightly, is giving my girl Digby cold sweats and flashbacks of the East German Stasi.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/informants-r-us-by-digby-speaking-of.html

InfraGard isn’t a company per se as is it an allied collection of private industrialists that, so far, number nearly 24,000 strong (with a membership of less than 1700 two months after 9/11), with 350 of the country‘s Fortune 500 companies represented. They’ve been collected and deputized by the FBI and Homeland Security and plan to be utilized in the event of martial law. What’s even more surprising than this is the fact that InfraGard’s been around since 1996, smack dab in the middle of the Clinton administration. Since co-operating with federal authorities back then to combat terrorism (shades of the telecom giants and Western Union), InfraGard now has 86 chapters from coast to coast. They’re supposedly supervised by the FBI but they have some extraordinary powers and latitude. For instance…

Well, this is the part that Digby had emboldened and for damned good reason:

"Then they said when -- not if -- martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn't be prosecuted," he says.

This is the understanding among all InfraGard executives. They freely admit being given the latitude to use terminal force, if they deem necessary. However, one would be hard-pressed to imagine corporate executives toting M16’s and using them against our nation’s citizens. So the question one must ask themselves is, Who will do their killing for them?

Isn’t Blackwater USA in the private sector? And haven’t they already taken it upon themselves to patrol our nation’s streets (New Orleans) before being invited to by the FBI and Homeland Security? You’d have to be a gullible fool to think that that psychopath Erik Prince and his Blackwater goons wouldn’t be charter members of InfraGard.

One needs, also, to look at ChoicePoint, the Alpharetta, GA-based “data aggregation company” which, as with InfraGard, is fully prepared to literally murder us in cold blood during martial law and to do so with absolute impunity, is presenting itself as a warm and fuzzy public service company that just wants to have a Coke and a smile with all of us. In point of fact, ChoicePoint’s official website slyly makes no mention of the fact that they’ve already collected literally billions of bits of information on American citizens, quietly funded by those very same taxpayers, on matters ranging from our consumer spending habits, credit history, criminal records, if any, all the way down to our DNA profiles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChoicePoint

They specialize in obtaining, as they call it, “actionable intelligence.” Well, gee, why the fuck don’t we send them to Gitmo to extract “actionable intelligence” from “the worst of the worst”?

The problem with ChoicePoint, which has gotten virtually no press whatsoever except from investigative BBC journalist Greg Palast (who goes into detail about the company in Chapter One of Armed Madhouse), is that not only are they invading your privacy with the help and money of the FBI and the CIA, they’re not even very good at safeguarding it, as this article reminds us.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/05/fbi_choicepoint.html




Also, this relates to something I’d mentioned last September in Assclowns of the Week #65 (spot #3): Homeland Security using ministers to preach Romans 13 to dissident citizens who may have a problem with federal troops marching down our streets under the pretext of martial law.
http://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com/2007/09/assclowns-of-week-65-labor-day-edition.html

Ever since the Rothschild article came out a couple of days ago, certain InfraGard members have already begun ripping the tinfoil hats off our heads, starting with Jim Lippard, who runs a blog:

Nonsense. I've been a member of the Phoenix InfraGard Members Alliance for years. It's a 501(c)(3) organization sponsored by the FBI whose members have been subjected to some rudimentary screening (comparable to what a non-cleared employee of the federal government would get). Most InfraGard meetings are open to the general public (contrary to Rothschild's statement that "InfraGard is not readily accessible to the general public"), but the organization facilitates communications between members about sensitive subjects like vulnerabilities in privately owned infrastructure and the changing landscape of threats.

In other words, we have meetings for the proles that don’t reveal anything threatening but when we have real serious shit to discuss, like national security matters to which we’re more privy than you and even your elected officials, then we keep it internal.

Jim Lippard and his ilk must think that we’re truly gullible fools if they expect us to believe for a minute that a deliberately under-publicized corporate police state that’s more in the loop than the citizenry and even its public officials regarding national security threats would nonetheless be open and honest in their so-called public meetings, especially since it’s a given among InfraGard members that martial law is a matter of when, not if, and that they reserve the right to murder American citizens if they even think that their infrastructure is threatened.

And how much you wanna bet that this autonomous-sounding organization already has its 007 license to kill legally indemnified because Uncle Sam’s Justice Dept. has already designated InfraGard as apart from the government since they’re “contractors”?

A thing that Paul Bremer had made abundantly clear with his last-second Order 17 to which Blackwater’s been clinging like grim death ever since we raised a ruckus about them murdering 17 civilians in Baghdad on September 16th, a war crime for which not a single Blackwater mercenary still has not seen the inside of a jail cell.

http://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com/2008/02/why-does-george-bush-want-to-cut-law.html