Is the U.S. Becoming a Police State?

[SpasticGramps]

Police State and a Banana Republic.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A state senator who authored gun control legislation asked for campaign donations in exchange for introducing an undercover FBI agent to an arms trafficker, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday.

The allegations against Sen. Leland Yee were outlined in an FBI criminal complaint that names 25 other defendants, including Raymond Chow, a onetime gang leader with ties to San Francisco's Chinatown known as "Shrimp Boy," and Keith Jackson, Yee's campaign aide. The affidavit accuses Yee of conspiracy to deal firearms without a license and to illegally import firearms.

Yee is also accused of accepting tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions and cash payments to provide introductions, help a client get a contract and influence legislation. He or members of his campaign staff accepted at least $42,800 in cash or campaign contributions from undercover FBI agents in exchange for carrying out the agents' specific requests, the court documents allege.

Yee discussed helping the agent get weapons worth $500,000 to $2.5 million, including shoulder-fired missiles, and explaining the entire process of acquiring them from a Muslim separatist group in the Philippines to bringing them to the U.S., according to the court document by FBI agent Emmanuel V. Pascua.

 

[GonBush]

As the gap between rich and poor grows steadinly wider, and it is, the police will become more extreme to protect the rich from the growing masses of poor.

 

[Scottish Research]

Besides the police state, what about the loss of workers rights? I'm tired of the government subsidizing big corporations. I'm tired of having a virtual anal probe every time I apply for a shit job that pays nothing! Oh, full time is now 30 hours a week? Yeah it's been like this for 3+ years! Greed is all that matters! The middle class is doomed.

 

[stoned-trout]

to harass and arrest

 

[TanzanianMagic]

Are you aware of the war in central Africa that has claimed 6 million lives?
45,000 per month...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jan/23/congo.international

Second Congo War, 1998-2008:5.4 million people killed, deadliest conflict since WWII.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War

It is correct that there have been several lengthy periods in history where countless millions have been slaughtered/starved/infected with diseases, however, it is important to note that with today's weapons, there are any number of countries who could wipe out billions, or even exterminate all life on earth with the push of a button. This has never been the case before. We possess bio-weapons that could kill the entire world's population several times over. So there is much more danger lurking out there than ever before. We have submarines that singly could destroy billions. If weapons exist, it is only a matter of time before they are used.
Here is an interesting list of deaths by wars, genocide/famine, etc.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll

I appreciate the effort, however what you read in the mainstream press is complete proganda. They never identify the perpetrators, because they're on our side, like Rwanda and Uganda.

Please do check out these excellent news sources:

www.anngarrison.com
www.consciousbeingalliance.com
www.blackagendareport.com
www.blackstarnews.com
www.monitor.co.ug
www.eastafrican.co.ke
www.postzambia.com
www.nyasatimes.com
maravi.blogspot.com
gowans.wordpress.com
landdestroyer.blogspot.com

We can sidestep the corporate media online.

 

[Hank Hemp]

correct me if I'm wrong

correct me if I'm wrong

It's been a police state for a long time, long before the the protests against the Vietnam war, when the national guard marched onto the campus of Kent State University and massacred unarmed student protesters. This was part of Operation Chaos, Lyndon Johnson's creation to squelch dissension regarding the war in Vietnam. It's only now that technology has put us all under surveillance that it's become more obvious. Our government has been involved in many dirty tricks against it's citizens in the ensuing years, not to mention foreign governments including experimenting on people by dosing them with LSD and other mind control techniques in Operation MK-ULTRA. But it began long before that. Truman created the CIA in 1947. The list of coups perpetrated by the CIA is long and bloody.
Links about the CIA for those interested:
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html
http://listverse.com/2013/05/25/10-dirty-secret-cia-operations/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/06/cias-deep-secre/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/
Our country is corrupt to the core, and has been for a long time.
The military industrial complex and their corporate partners rule, and technology has helped them to micromanage every facet of our lives.
What's even scarier than the police state that it's become, is that the police have become militarized.
Don't drone me bro.....

Wasn't Nixon President during most of the Viet Nam prostest?

 

[GonBush]

Americans have been getting fucked up the ass for a long time, but they have been too brainwashed about the purported evils of socailism to realize.
And now they are suddenly waking up with a dick up their ass and are trying to work out how it got there.

 

[minds_I]

Wasn't Nixon President during most of the Viet Nam prostest?

Yes. It was a very strange time...."said with the soft sounds of Dylan playing in the distance

 

[Tudo]

Besides the police state, what about the loss of workers rights? I'm tired of the government subsidizing big corporations. I'm tired of having a virtual anal probe every time I apply for a shit job that pays nothing! Oh, full time is now 30 hours a week? Yeah it's been like this for 3+ years! Greed is all that matters! The middle class is doomed.

Comcast internet went down for several hours and of course I called customer service. My wife and I called a number of times and every single time was transferred to someone in the Philippines or in Colombia. I asked the guy in Colombia if he has cable ( which he said he did ), when he calls customer service does he get transferred to the usa? He laughed and said of course not, he's transferred to someone in Colombia.

The way it should be I said

 

[RetroGrow]

Wasn't Nixon President during most of the Viet Nam prostest?

There were 4 Presidents during the Vietnam War. It started with Dwight Eisenhower, then John F. Kennedy, then Lyndon Johnson, then Tricky Dick Nixon. Note: two Republicans, & two Democrats. It actually ended during Nixon's administration. The worst of it was during Lyndon Johnson's tenure. He was the one who presided over the Kent State Massacre. That was when we hippies were marching in the streets and shutting down universities. We stopped that war, but, alas, it is no longer possible, as these type demonstrations were banned by law by our police state.
War is a business, and they are not about to allow some peace loving hippies get in the way of their profits. Sick, but true. That was perhaps the final chance for the common man to have an effect on our country's policies, foreign or domestic. The "loophole" of protests and demonstrations has been closed. This is no longer a "free" country. We are all slaves to "the man".
http://personal.ashland.edu/~jmoser1/usfp/morris.htm

 

[bentom187]

CounterPunch Exclusive Investigation: Did the FBI Snuff Out a Boston Marathon Bombing Witness?

Dark Questions About a Deadly FBI Interrogation in Orlando

Ibrahim Todashev, 27, a Russian immigrant friend of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was shot and killed last May 22 in the middle of the night by the FBI at the violent end of a five-hour interrogation in his home in Orlando. Now the FBI, ten months later, is claiming that its agent was attacked by Todashev, and was justified in killing him. But a CounterPunch investigation raises grave questions about what happened in that apartment.



While it’s of course conceivable that this was just a hugely botched investigation by two inept FBI agents, our investigation suggests that Todashev may have been killed trying to flee a brutal interrogation, and that he may have even been deliberately executed by the FBI.

Questions raised in this case range from why FBI agents failed to follow Bureau’s long-established interrogation protocol, leaving just one agent to question the witness, to why a suspect known to be a competitive mixed martial arts expert was left unrestrained during a hostile and high-pressure interrogation, how Todashev was shot, including a bullet to the top of the head, and finally to how he could have been shot seven times, clearly with intent to kill given where he was hit, if he was considered by the Bureau to be a key witness in the Boston Marathon case.

The FBI and other law enforcement sources, as I reported earlier in the online publication WhoWhatWhy.com, have leaked a series of widely at odds explanations to selected mainstream news media organizations as to how and why Todashev was shot and killed. Initially Bureau sources leaked to reporters that he had variously grabbed a sword off the wall, or left the room and returned from the kitchen with a pipe or a broomstick, or alternatively with a knife.

All of those leaked stories foundered on common sense. The “sword” in question turns out to have been a decorative scmitar with no sharp edge, hung on the wall and with a broken handle. There was no explanation for how the agent, who may have been accompanied in the room by a Massachusetts State Trooper, could have allowed Todashev to leave his seat and go that sword, or alternatively to the kitchen area of the room to pick up any of the other alleged implements of destruction. Ultimately, the Bureau conceded that Todashev had actually been unarmed the whole time.

But the FBI has later claimed, in leaks to selected reporters, that Todashev, left unrestrained that night (in marked contrast to other occasions when he had been cuffed) had lunged across the interview table at the interrogating agent, causing the agent to fear for his life and to shoot him in self defense, by one leaked account firing first four times, dropping his alleged assailant, and than three more times when, surprisingly, he attempted to stand again.
A 10-Month “Investigation”

For ten months, the FBI, claiming it was “investigating” this shooting by its agent, took the unusual step of blocking a Florida coroner’s report on the shooting death — one that was completed within days last May by the Orange County/Orlando Medical Examiner’s Office. The FBI also sought, unsuccessfully, to prevent Todashev’s family from recovering and burying the body, insisting there would have to be permission obtained from his parents in Dagestan, as well a presentation of hard-to-obtain documents like his Soviet-era birth certificate. The Bureau in that instance was overruled by the Medical Examiner who, on humanitarian grounds, handed over Todashev’s bullet-riddled body to his widow and mother-in-law, which is why we have photos of his injuries available, which were taken by a family friend.

But an exclusive interview last week by this journalist of Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Gary Utz, who personally conducted the Todashev autopsy, confirms that Todashev was shot seven times by FBI bullets, four times in the torso, two times in the left arm (he was right-handed), and once in the top of the head, slightly towards the back of the head. A significant bruise and contusion over the cheekbone showed he also had been “forcefully struck” on the left side of the head, in Utz’s words — a point that had never been mentioned by the FBI.

Bruising does not occur to a significant extent once a person is dead — especially if the heart has been destroyed by bullets and there has been significant loss of blood — since there is no blood pressure to push blood out of damaged blood vessels into surrounding tissue. This means it is likely the blow suffered by Todashev came before he was shot.

An Open Homicide Case

Coroner Utz, who has classified Todashev’s death as a homicide, while not determining whether it was justified or not, says he “cannot understand” why the FBI has blocked the Medical Examiner’s Office from releasing his report. He called the Bureau’s hold order “somewhat unusual.”

He added, “It just makes everyone suspicious.” It’s apparently a sentiment he shares, as he also said, “If the FBI didn’t have a problem with our report, it would already be released.”

Cyril Wecht is a renowned forensic pathologist, former Allegheny County Coroner and also head of the advisory board of the Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law at Duquesne University. In an interview with this reporter last week, he said he agrees with Utz, saying, “The FBI’s investigation of the shooting should have been released long ago, and the coroner’s report, too.”

Meanwhile, photos of the room taken on the day that the FBI unsealed the apartment as a crime scene, and provided by Todashev’s mother-in-law, Elena Teyer, appear to show that the only significant bloodstains in the room are at the point where a foyer leads out of the room to the front door of the ground-floor apartment. There is no blood visible in the photos in other parts of the room, including by or on the table where the interrogation occurred, which is at the opposite side of the room from where the exit and the blood are. Significantly, there is no sign of blood in the photos, either on the carpets covering the floor or on the room’s white-painted walls. Where there is blood, there is a copious amount of it, making it clear that one spot just before the foyer is where Todashev was shot and where he died, moving no further.

Teyer says the photos were taken exactly as they found the roughly 10-foot-by 24-foot room. Since the FBI claimed Todashev had been seated across a table, and the table in the photo is up against the wall, with no chairs at it, this means that the FBI had tampered with the crime scene before unsealing it and allowing the family’s investigator in. She adds that the agency had a list of 61 items it had removed from the room.

The rest is at the site ............ http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/24/dark-questions-about-a-deadly-fbi-interrogation-in-orlando/

 

[armedoldhippy]

police state? oh, hell yes, we live in a police state. the police have been more polite than in most, but yes. and I think the gloves are coming off soon, too....it will end in gunfire & blood in the streets.

 

[D. B. Doober]

The new sirens on the cop cars here sound like they're from that future movie with tom cruise who died yesterday in New Zealand falling off a cliff
Precog movie

 

[stihgnobevoli]

is? turning? what are you using future tense? the u.s. was bought and sold long ago.

 

[trichrider]

The new sirens on the cop cars here sound like they're from that future movie with tom cruise who died yesterday in New Zealand falling off a cliff
Precog movie

what crap!
do those sirens sound as convincing?

 

[dddaver]

I heard he's still alive, but he fell off that cliff directly onto the coke bottle that was stuck up his ass. At least that was the story he told the emergency room doc.

 

[Midnight Tokar]

The new sirens on the cop cars here sound like they're from that future movie with tom cruise who died yesterday in New Zealand falling off a cliff
Precog movie

Hell, I thought he died last year in Australia in a car crash......... and then the time in 2012 when he died.

 

[TheAfficianado]

To Weird's Dead concert statement, we know the best of them "will steal your face right off of your head." The reason security and law and order ALWAYS take precedent over Peace and Love and Open-Mindedness is because no matter how evolved some free society or even a small population is, if it cannot defend itself in a manner that those who are less-evolved understand, that society and all that they espouse will be wiped from the Earth right after they finish up raping the kids and eating the tastier organs.

And to Hank Hemp, this is the rationale behind the Johnson and Nixon Presidencies. Quite simply, Vietnam was an unethical event before the shooting war ever started and we only mistakenly backed the French for no better reason than we were WWII allies. By being extremely hard-headed, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Nixon-Kissinger bombed Indochina "back to the stone age" then got us out of Vietnam.

The most intelligent sentients hide in plain sight, and manage to achieve their personal goals no matter what society they live in. It must be far more difficult to achieve goals in Syria than in the U.S. currently, but the ideal stands as stated.

What makes me think we currently live in a police state is the fact that our government through military intelligence and the CIA, makes promises to overthrow "corrupt" regimes to make problems for "ruthless dictators," then do nothing to install anyone else - preferring mass death to order. We saw this with the Marsh Arabs and Kurds in Iraq, Darfur, South Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, the shipping of guns to Mexico and the massive outbreak of violence there.

While we have been spoon-fed a new hatred for the Russians, it was our own diplomatic corps making plans and promises to violent protesters who were paid to overthrow Ukraine, but when the money was needed to insure free and fair elections some 5 years earlier, no one put up the cash- and the Russians did- and that was after the Orange Revolution. It was no oversight on the part of the U.S. So who are these unnamed people who are not elected, and hold high office through multiple U.S. Presidencies, and continually work black ops in the name of "freedom" while repeatedly spying on their own people and foreign leaders like Angela Merkel, Chinese company Huawei Technologies Co., our own Congressional reps and senators like Dianne Feinstein, recording every cell phone call and email through metadata tracking in the name of "marketing"? It might not be so bad if they weren't always getting caught, but that too works to undermine U.S. credibility. Yet this is the freedom our diplomatic corps promised the Ukrainians? Basically our diplomats got caught on video deciding who should be in a new government that was taken by masked men by force. Why is everyone vilifying Vlad for insuring Russian interests and the safety of ethnic Russian people as he watches officials of the U.S. say who could and couldn't be in the new illegal Ukrainian government?

In my opinion, what ever and whoever these un-elected decision makers are in control of the vast wealth of US taxpayers without an iota of responsibility to the General Accounting Office where we can see what the money is spent on, they are basically only interested in mass death, genocide, and human extinction. While it may sound hyperbolic, the facts that the news does cover- when stripped of commentary-- shows that genocides have increased over the last 250 years, and have become less far apart and closer together geographically.

While the Russians are in no way perfect-- the United States can no longer show proof of any type of informed foreign policy other than spend stolen tax payer money in the interests of genocide and human extinction. We talk a really good game about "Freedom," but unless your progenitors owned a plantation, a shipping company, an oil company, a railroad, or was some kind of monarchist royal, they aren't interested in you being "free."

The police just do their part so they can be last in line or get lucky and raised up.

just my 2 cents....

 

[Bennyweed1]

This country will become anything we allow it and we deserve it for letting it happen.

There is no more patriotism left, the shit left a long time ago with those twin towers full of thermite.

Truth is we are all pussies; it takes the right crisis to precipitate change and bring on a new world order.

America is not shit without the whining opinion that sits back and allows it to happen.

Remember, the government is representative of its people, and this is what we represent.

America, land of the snakes, home of the banks. Just ask David rockafeller.

Until a couple million of us are ready to die fighting these fucks, then we better be content taking up arms behind our keyboards.

 

[Bennyweed1]

The tree of liberty, from time to time, must be restored by the blood of patriots.

Let the patrol dollar collapse, let freedom live on. Strengthen your local government by means of civil force, it will be the only means to cease the martial law set out before us.

Grab your neighbor and remind him that it is terrorism that motivates him the most and controls his thoughts, lay your foot before he can step into FEMA. Food and water can be abundant if civil disobedience is sustained.