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Max Forte's List: Empire at Home

    • KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press
    • Even near military bases, female veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't often offered a drink on the house as a welcome home.

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    • By      Mark Thompson / Washington    Monday, Dec. 14, 2009
    • Neither the U.S. military nor the American public would tolerate a conflict in which U.S. losses mounted for five straight years. Yet, that's what's happening in the Army's battle with suicides. The recently released figure for November show that 12 soldiers are suspected of taking their own lives, bringing to 147 the total suicides for 2009, the highest since the Army began keeping track in 1980. Last year the Army had 140 suicides.

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    • William Douglas, McClatchy Newspapers William Douglas, Mcclatchy Newspapers    –  Tue Dec 15
    • WASHINGTON — Opponents of the USA Patriot Act say that a congressional move to consider temporarily extending three key provisions that are due to expire at year's end opens the door to try to alter or eliminate some of the national security strategies implemented by former President George W. Bush and embraced by President Barack Obama .

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    • Maori objection - conscientious objection in the First World War
    • Maori resistance to conscription

       

      Native Contingent

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    • Anzac day: celebrating NZ wars for control of resources

         
       
       

      Tomorrow is Anzac day - whereby an increasing number of people are being fed the lie that thousands of New Zealanders died fighting for freedom and independence. What people forget, is that it was NZ that was invading Turkey. What had Turkey ever done to us? Well, John Minto has written a brilliant and striking riposte in the Press to all the false commemoration of war - especially in terms of Anzac day and the First World War. Minto correctly argues that World War I - like most wars that NZ has been involved in - was fought for control of resources and markets. Instead of dying in a moral fight, the NZ conscripts died on a giant Monopoly board of European struggle for the control of empires, driven by greed, envy and suspicion. Minto also corrects the myth that NZers are a peace-loving people, when in fact our warmongering governments send troops off to fight unjust wars about every 10 years. We should be shamed that NZ is one of the harshest in its treatment of conscientious objectors, and also by the fact that 'In the entire history of human warfare no country has proportionally sent a greater number of troops a greater distance to fight a war than this little country of ours did in 1914.' As Minto says, we should be honouring the dead by demanding 'No more wars'. See also: Matt McCarten's column, Anzac story a sordid tale of world domination and death.

    • Blueprints: Mapping US Muslim Communities          <!---->       
       
      The NYPD method for mapping home-grown terrorism is flawed and infringes on First Amendment rights, scholar argues.
       
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          Last Modified: 19 Sep 2011
    • On this ten-year anniversary of September 11, 2001, the media has reported a number of accounts on law enforcement’s broad-based surveillance of Muslim communities in the United States. The New York City Police Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation are being trained to conflate Islam and Muslims with violence and terrorism.

       

      Law enforcement is watching the day-to-day activities of thousands upon thousands of Muslims, with focus on mosques and hookah (waterpipe) bars, Pakistani cab drivers and the devout. Relying on informants, undercover cops, and a vast structure for information-sharing and joint policing, the FBI and NYPD - with assistance from the CIA - are working toward a cartography of Muslim communities.

       

      This mapping is being done in the name of national security. But on what theory?

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    • With CIA Help, New York Police Secretly Monitored Mosques, Muslim Communities Post-9/11
    • A new investigation by the Associated Press reveals how, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the New York City Police Department decided it could no longer trust other agencies to prevent terrorism and started expanding its own intelligence gathering. In the process, it became "one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies," targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government. The report, titled "With CIA Help, NYPD Moves Covertly in Muslim Areas," also finds that these operations "benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying." The report details how police used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even without any evidence of wrongdoing. Also falling under NYPD’s scrutiny were imams, taxi cab drivers and food cart vendors — jobs often done by Muslims. We speak with Matt Apuzzo, co-author of the Associated Press investigative report, and get response from Gadeir Abbas, staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. [includes rush transcript]

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    • AP Investigates NYPD Spying On Muslims Amid Tabloid Swipes, Scant NYC Media Follow-up

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    • NYPD Eyed US Citizens In Intel Effort
    • MATT APUZZO, EILEEN SULLIVAN and ADAM GOLDMAN   09/22/11

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    • Inside The Demographics Unit, The CIA Spy Team The NYPD Says Doesn't Exist
    • AP/The Huffington Post     By MATT APUZZO & ADAM GOLDMAN                  First Posted: 8/31/11

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    • September 22, 2011 7:33 AM

      More cases of NYPD ethnic spying exposed

    • NEW YORK - The New York Police Department put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Associated Press.

      The documents describe in extraordinary detail a secret program intended to catalog life inside Muslim neighborhoods as people immigrated, got jobs, became citizens and started businesses. The documents undercut the NYPD's claim that its officers only follow leads when investigating terrorism.

      It started with one group, Moroccans, but the documents show police intended to build intelligence files on other ethnicities.

      Undercover officers snapped photographs of restaurants frequented by Moroccans, including one that was noted for serving "religious Muslims." Police documented where Moroccans bought groceries, which hotels they visited and where they prayed. While visiting an apartment used by new Moroccan immigrants, an officer noted in his reports that he saw two Qurans and a calendar from a nearby mosque.

      It was called the Moroccan Initiative.

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    • First Published: 2011-09-08

                            

      The Long Life of Profiling, Ten Years After 9/11

              

      A decade ago, there was near universal acknowledgement that profiling was unethical and ineffective. Yet the practice continues, notes Moustafa Bayoumi.

    • The Associated Press has been doing some good investigative reporting lately. On August 24, the AP broke the news that the CIA and the NYPD are combining forces to spy on Muslims in New York City. Since the CIA is prohibited by law to collect intelligence on American citizens, this is more than newsworthy. It’s probably unconstitutional, which explains why the NYPD has, according to the report, kept these activities secret.

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    • How the NYPD Turned Itself Into a Little CIA
    • By John Cook 

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    • NYPD and CIA spy on Muslims

       
           

      Published: 24 August, 2011

    • The latest scandal surrounding the New York Police Department suggests that the Big Apple’s boys in blue were targeting Muslims in undercover operations, working outside of their jurisdiction and profiling ethnic communities with aid from the CIA.

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      The NYPD are denying allegations reported by The Associated Press that the Police Department has been sending undercover informants into mosques, minority neighborhoods, hookah bars and other hangouts frequented by Muslims in order to gather intel, despite having no probable cause to suspect crimes were being hatched.

      A federal judge overruled a law in 2002 that kept cops from waiting for “specific information” before gathering intelligence, and ever since the NYPD has used this to their advantage to infringe on the constitutional rights of Muslims by spying on them in what is being suggested as an anti-terrorism initiative.

      Retired-CIA Chief David Cohen tells the AP that he helped overrule that legislation nearly a decade ago, and with the help of the NYPD installed a “Demographic Unit” within the Police Department. The undercover police officers involved were then sent to houses of worship and other locales in order to get an insight into what followers of Islam were up to. If these “mosque crawlers,” as Cohen calls them, were conducting operations, the surveillance they carried out could be highly illegal.

      Cohen tells the AP that it’s no racial profiling, however. He says that in a post-9/11 New York City, measures are necessary to keep another terror attack from taking the city by storm.

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    • Last Wednesday August 24, New York City’s Muslim and Middle Eastern residents experienced yet another low blow. According to an investigative report by the Associated Press, the New York City Police Department (NYPD), with help from the CIA, set up dozens of “surveillance stations” around mosques, bookstores, cafes, nightclubs and hookah bars.

          

      Undercover NYPD officers, called “rakers” were sent into several locations to listen to conversations, in hopes of finding evidence of terrorist activity. There were also “mosque crawlers” who infiltrated mosques and served as informants to the police department.

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    • Undercover Work Deepens Police-Muslim Tensions
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      Published: May 27, 2006

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    • With CIA help, NYPD moves covertly in Muslim areas

       
      Wednesday, August 24, 2011
    •  By MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN

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    • Feb 2013
    • Microserfs, by Justin Clemens

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    • Fracking and Psychological Operations: Empire Comes Home   

          <!-- Date created -->    Thursday, 08 March 2012 05:10     <!-- Item Author -->  <!-- span class="itemAuthor">  Written by   <a rel="author" href="/news/itemlist/user/54-2013-09-04-00-08-06"></a>  </span -->      By Steve Horn, Truthout | News Analysis
    • When among friends, you're far more likely to air your dirty secrets.

       

        A corporate conference held in Houston, Texas, on October 31 to November 1, 2011, titled "Giving Communications Professionals At Unconventional Oil & Gas Companies The Tools To Design A Comprehensive Media & Stakeholder Relations Strategy For Engaging The Public On A Positive Image For The Industry" provides perfect evidence of this.

       

        The goal at the conference was a simple one: communications professionals in the natural gas industry sharing with one another the optimal communications strategies and tools to fight back against media and community opposition to what is inherently a toxic product, natural gas.

       

        Natural gas, obtained through the hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" process, was brought into the limelight by the Academy Award-nominated documentary film "Gasland," directed by Josh Fox.

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