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The one thing that's been proven is the absolute fear-mongering that's being used to drive us is false. I've seen members turn to each other and say if we don't pass this bill, we're going to have martial law in the United States. -- Rep. Brad Sherman, October 1, 2008
We've had a bad feeling these past several years, as those of you who have read these pages may know, that the Iraq disaster wasn't so much a resource grab or to encircle Iran and Russia, nor just to protect Israel, but something more sinister: training soldiers to be mindless killers so that when they're brought back home they would have no problem killing their fellow citizens when martial law is declared and the cow pies really hit the fan.

In fact, a Blackwater mercenary said as much at the time:

Post-Katrina New Orleans: American police state is here
Corroborating and adding to mounting evidence of the militarization of New Orleans, investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill noted the following in a September 12 KPFA radio interview:
1. New Orleans is teeming with heavily-armed mercenaries, troops from the US military and national guard, and police from cities around the country.

2. Mercenaries, including Blackwater USA were deputized by Governor Kathleen Blanco. [Blanco's actions throughout this crisis, noted in a number of previous reports, appear increasingly suspicious and demand investigation.-LC] They are also working for Homeland Security, even though Homeland Security denies it.

3. Blackwater mercenaries were seen looting bars in the French Quarter. Blackwater has also taken over another bar in the French Quarter as their de facto headquarters.

4. Arrogant Blackwater mercenaries that were queried by Scahill boasted about their deputization, and their combat experience in Iraq, which included work for L. Paul Bremer.

5. Mercenaries, troops and New Orleans police are engaged in a terror campaign, intimidating remaining "holdouts," while continuing to withhold food, medicine and aid.

6. A Blackwater mercenary warned Scahill that the rest of the country will experience the same kind of hell in the future.
So when we read that an army combat unit, the first to storm Baghdad, has been deployed within U.S. and that they will be training with "beanbag bullets, Tasers, spike strips and roadblocks" and to use what they learned in crowd control to subdue angry Iraqis, well, we could see the writing on the wall. What is the point of having an army unit, supposedly deployed in the event of a "terrorist event" or "natural disaster" when perfectly good national guard troops are at hand by the governors of each state? Well, that's it exactly. The national guard answers to the governor and not the president. If you aren't scared at this point, you should be. Naomi Wolf reiterates the key points in this short interview:

Was Katrina a dry run?

Cynthia McKinney, the one time Congresswoman and presidential candidate has recently let the cat out of the bag on what really happened with Blackwater mercenaries in the days after hurricane Katrina struck:
In the wake of hurricane Katrina ... I had a mother to call me because her son had a very gruesome task. Her son's charge by the Department of Defense was to process 5,000 bodies that had received a single bullet wound to the head and these were mostly males and her son was afraid to talk because he had signed a silence agreement...He only complained to his mother but data about these individuals was entered into a Pentagon computer and then reportedly the bodies were dumped in the swamp of Louisiana. ... and I have verification from insiders who wish to remain anonymous at the Red Cross.
Wayne Madsen did a report from back then, but we don't have a direct link to it (he just put everything on his front page at the time). Here is an excerpt:
Under obvious pressure from FEMA, the state of Louisiana contracted with a Texas firm, Kenyon International (a subsidiary of Services Corporation International), to collect and properly arrange for the burial of the bodies of victims of Hurricane Katrina. Kenyon, a firm charged with illegal body dumping and which was tied politically to both George W. Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (Bush was Governor and Gonzales was his counsel), now stands to receive similar contracts to improperly dump the bodies of victims (we earnestly hope there will not be any) from Hurricane Rita. From an informed source in St. Tammany Parish and the city of Slidell comes this revelation: A week after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, small planes from around the country began delivering food, water, and medical supplies to outlying parishes in Louisiana and counties in Mississippi. However, according to the source, St. Tammany Parish made a startling request to one of the pilots: the parish needed well over 5000 body bags.
Then there were the doctors and nurses who killed hospital patients rather than leave them behind alive. Now, in a state of lawlessness who's to say if these patients were near death or not? Perhaps they were, if that makes you feel better:
'With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.'

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."
McKinney's testimony also gives more credibility to Farrakhan's claim that the levees were blown up:
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on Thursday fuelled a rumour that explosives, not Hurricane Katrina, broke New Orleans's dykes and flooded poor African-American neighbourhoods.

"A member of the army corps of engineers saw burn marks on the concrete," Farrakhan told reporters, describing an e-mail he had received.

"They found two types of explosives used by the military," he said, without naming the source, adding that an 8m crater had been blown in the dyke.

Farrakhan said locals had reported sounds of explosions, among other things, leading him to believe the rumours should be investigated.

"Wickedness exists in high places," he said.
Then there's this disturbing article which, if true, portends even more sinister developments. The US House of Representatives held a secret meeting back in March while discussing the passage of the surveillance bill which would give retroactive immunity to the telecom companies who participated in the illegal program.
Last week's session was only the fourth time in 176 years that Congress has closed it's doors to the public.

Word has begun leaking from last weeks special, closed-door session of the United States House of Representatives.

Theorists wrote "Not only did members discuss new surveillance provisions as was the publicly stated reason for the closed door session, they also discussed: The imminent collapse of the U.S. economy to occur by September 2008, the imminent collapse of US federal government finances by February 2009, the possibility of Civil War inside the USA as a result of the collapse and advance round-ups of "insurgent U.S. citizens" likely to move against the government.
Note that the author uses the word "theorists" when perhaps he's really referring to insiders who were there at the meeting, too afraid to leak the information to a US reporter perhaps.

And while the house was recently debating the passage of the $700 billion bankers bailout bill they passed the little debated, $634 billion spending measure:
The Department of Homeland Security will proceed with the first phase of a controversial satellite-surveillance program, even though an independent review found the department hasn't yet ensured the program will comply with privacy laws.

Congress provided partial funding for the program in a little-debated $634 billion spending measure that will fund the government until early March. For the past year, the Bush administration had been fighting Democratic lawmakers over the spy program, known as the National Applications Office.

The program is designed to provide federal, state and local officials with extensive access to spy-satellite imagery -- but no eavesdropping -- to assist with emergency response and other domestic-security needs, such as identifying where ports or border areas are vulnerable to terrorism.

Since the department proposed the program a year ago, several Democratic lawmakers have said that turning the spy lens on America could violate Americans' privacy and civil liberties unless adequate safeguards were required.

A new 60-page Government Accountability Office report said the department "lacks assurance that NAO operations will comply with applicable laws and privacy and civil liberties standards," according to a person familiar with the document. The report, which is unclassified but considered sensitive, hasn't been publicly released, but was described and quoted by several people who have read it.

The report cites gaps in privacy safeguards. The department, it found, lacks controls to prevent improper use of domestic-intelligence data by other agencies and provided insufficient assurance that requests for classified information will be fully reviewed to ensure it can be legally provided.
No eavesdropping? Who are we kidding? They've been doing it for decades.

As Nick Juliano from Raw Story writes,
Essentially, the bill only requires the Homeland Security Secretary to assure lawmakers that NAO programs comply with exisiting laws. Congress also has required the DHS Inspector General to provide quarterly classified reports on how much information has been collected by the domestic satellite surveillance, although the bill required those reports be made to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, not the Homeland Security Committees that are traditionally in charge of DHS oversight.

...

There are further concerns about whether the surveillance program would violate Posse Comitatus, which prohibits the military from participating in domestic law enforcement activities. It's "ridiculous" to think that's not what would be happening under this program, [Tim Sparapani, an American Civil Liberties Union lobbyist]1 says.
So we have an army brigade deployed on US soil answerable only to the president of the United States and a domestic surveillance system aimed at US citizens with an upcoming presidential election. Who's to say this army brigade won't be deployed at voting booths or inside Congress itself? And it's not just US citizens that should be concerned:
Germany's governing coalition partners want to change the constitution to allow for military deployment within the country if needed to combat terrorism, officials said Monday.

The proposal would allow use of the military only if police are overwhelmed and cannot properly respond to a situation themselves.
Government will spy on every call and e-mail
Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

GCHQ, the government's eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project.

Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country's biggest internet and mobile phone providers - thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers.

Ministers are braced for a backlash similar to the one caused by their ID cards programme. Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: "Any suggestion of the government using existing powers to intercept communications data without public discussion is going to sound extremely sinister."
But will be done anyway...

There's been a lot of the "October 7" event going around from the halfpasthuman.com people over at Urbansurvival.com. Supposedly it's bigger than 9/11 and it doesn't necessarily involve the current financial crisis. Well, if you lump the "October 14" contact people, specifically Blossom Goodchild's prediction that ETs will arrive in a very substantial "spacecraft", and will spend at least three days 'parked' over the "south of our hemisphere", Barry Warmkessel's High impact threat level, the Ulysess' galactic dust, an incoming newly discovered, but 'totally harmless' asteroid on an earth collision course, the noctilucent clouds and perhaps the lowest sunspot activity of the space age, and the not so subtle bilking of the US treasury similar to the put options just before 9/11 but on a far grander scale we can only speculate what it all means. A continental disaster and finally the troops would have to return home, only the entire US would get the Katrina treatment? Even if it's just a financial collapse and the troops are needed to return home to "restore order". Perhaps it's nothing. Perhaps It could all just be mass internet hysteria. Go back to sleep:
A small, newly-discovered asteroid named 2008 TC3 is approaching Earth and chances are good that it will hit. Steve Chesley of JPL estimates that atmospheric entry will occur on Oct 7th at 0246 UTC over northern Sudan [ref]. Measuring only a few meters across, the space rock poses NO THREAT to people or structures on the ground, but it should create a spectacular fireball, releasing about a kiloton of TNT in energy as it disintegrates and explodes in the atmosphere. Odds are between 99.8 and 100 percent that the object will encounter Earth, according to calculations provided by Andrea Milani of the University of Pisa.
Update:

The universe is full of synchronicities. Apparently, a confirming report comes from aviation meteorologist, Jacob Kuiper:
The following potentially confirming report comes from Jacob Kuiper, General Aviation meteorologist at the National Weather Service in the Netherlands: "Half an hour before the predicted impact of asteroid 2008 TC3, I informed an official of Air-France-KLM at Amsterdam airport about the possibility that crews of their airliners in the vicinity of impact would have a chance to see a fireball. And it was a success! I have received confirmation that a KLM airliner, roughly 750 nautical miles southwest of the predicted atmospheric impact position, has observed a short flash just before the expected impact time 0246 UTC. Because of the distance it was not a very large phenomenon, but still a confirmation that some bright meteor has been seen in the predicted direction. Projected on an infrared satellite-image of Meteosat-7 of 0300 UTC, I have indicated the position of the plane (+) and the predicted impact area in Sudan (0)."