Barack Obama at the head of anti-Second Amendment movement in the United States

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | DECEMBER 18, 2012

Barack Obama has pledged to lead a new national crackdown on firearms, with some prohibitions, greater legal controls and a new approach to personal safety that requires a profound transformation of the dominant culture in the United States. For the first time in decades, the tragedy of Newtown, different from previous ones in several circumstances, is being used to launch a massive attack on the second amendment, which clearly states that every citizen has the right to keep and bear arms and that the government cannot legislate against that constitutional right in any way, shape or form.

The issue of gun ownership is one that is little understood by most Americans. After the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, people all over the United States showed up at police departments to hand in their guns and according to recently taken polls, upwards of 50 percent of the population now believes that the idea of limiting gun rights is a positive thing. Perhaps they have been overwhelmed by the fear instigated by the main stream media, which have used the shooting at the Sandy Hook school to call for massive gun restrictions. People cannot see that if there is one thing that should be understood after the shooting is that the government cannot protect them, and that their protection is their responsibility.

Not only have many congressmen shown opposition to firearm ownership, but a large number of them have been quietly working on legislation to limit them, some of the most loyal supporters of the National Rifle Association (NRA), such as Sen. Joe Machin, a member of the powerful lobby for years, yesterday joined the supporters of imposing tighter controls. “It is time to move beyond the rhetoric, we need to sit down and do something,” he said.

Indeed, it is a new time. The country lives under a shock like never before. Millions of parents that Monday morning left their children at school have yet to experience the dreadful outcome of the crime perpetrated at the Sandy Hook school last Friday. The shooting did not make them understand that it is their responsibility to protect their own children. Children, teachers and families are always talking about it, how something so horrible could happen, what needs to be done so that does not happen again, but they seem unable to rationalize and come up with the right answer.

Obama picked up the popular sentiment in a speech on Sunday night in Newtown, which promised to use “all power” in his hands to carry out significant change. It is very likely that this is the great cause of his second term and certainly an ambitious one, since at least 80 million people in the United States are gun owners. We can expect two outcomes, if the Obama White House really attempts to enact a massive gun ban: The first would result in the mass enslavement of the population, should the majority of those 80 million decide to hand in their weapons. This is all the government wants. The second, if those 80 million stand their ground and refuse to hand the firearms, but the government imposes some kind of gun confiscation policy the country may be on the way to experience another civil war.

A civil war would not be new. In fact, a minority of Americans fought a war against British imperialism to keep their right to own firearms, after the English crown called for the citizens to hand in their guns. The outcome was the defeat of the British and the Americans kept their right to keep and bear arms. If the U.S. government decides to impose a ban on the possession of firearms and law enforcement decides to comply with such task, we are in the works for one of the bloodiest battles in the history of the United States.

The Media and the Propaganda

“We can not accept events like this as routine. Are we willing to accept that we are powerless over a slaughter of this nature? What policy does not allow us to act? Are we willing to say that violence attacking our children year after year is just the price we pay for our freedom,” asked Barack Obama. “No law can eliminate evil from the world, or prevent acts of senseless violence in our society. But that can not be an excuse for doing nothing. ”

“We have to change,” Obama said. The problem for Obama is that for him to weaken or completely eliminate the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms, he will have to fight with half of the country and more precisely with a growing minority that understands now more than ever that owning guns has nothing to do with hunting and everything to do with protecting themselves from mentally ill people. Many pro second amendment people are asking what would have happened if the principal of the Sandy Hook school had been a gun owner, or if the teachers had been trained to use guns and had one of their own. Other states and cities around the United States have asked that same question and have voted to give teachers the legal right to own firearms.

Besides the need to defend themselves, pro second amendment Americans will offer firm opposition to Obama, Congress and the main stream corporate media by supporting the concept of freedom as inalienable patrimony of the individual in the U.S., which is  subjected to the constant threat of collectivist state authority. This collectivism is reflected in Obama’s last speech when he called for all Americans to support his gun ban project. “If we want to educate and protect our children, we are going to have to do together,” said the president.

Those words are a challenge to the idea that a child’s safety is the responsibility of the family and not the government. Millions of Americans share the principle that the protection of a child is the sole and exclusive obligation of the parents or close relatives. In that same idea of ​​individual responsibility, which has many positive applications, children are educated and raised to become the best in their communities. Children who are homeschooled, and who are taught real family and social values are more successful as members of a community.

Challenging the constitutional right to keep and bear arms, as suggested by Obama will obviously hit a very sensitive fiber; one of the most sensitive at the core of American existence. This country was founded on individual freedom, and this explains why the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms. Those who seek to challenge the second amendment say that limits must be imposed for the safety of the collective, clearly missing the core principles upon which their country was founded. Most of these people are domesticated Americans who actually believe that the government knows better how to protect them, even though the federal government has failed time after time, after time. Fear has taken its toll.

Translating political rhetoric into concrete action will not be easy. Any legislative process to impose greater controls on firearm ownership will be costly all around. The forces opposed to the regulation of weapons — the citizenry — will not go away overnight. Even after controlled opposition such as the National Rifle Association and the Republican Party failed to come out in defense of the second amendment, other organization like Gun Owners of America and the average folk himself will not let the latest tragedy run away with his right to hold on to their guns to protect himself and his family.

In the U.S. Congress, it is expected that most Republican congressmen will bend over and allow the fake liberal, progressive movement, to which the U.S. president belong, to impose some kind of limitation to the second amendment. Plans have already been drawn by people like Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein to attack the second amendment.

New gun laws will not fix anything. The problem in the United States is not one of a ‘gun culture’ but one of a mentally ill population, that is drugged up to their eyeballs while suffering the worst crisis of identity in the history of the country. The fake multiculturalism, the racial division, the lack of accountability of both government and corporate American and the hatred campaigns secretly being supported by government grants or tax-exempted NGO’s have devastated the core of the of the greatest nations in history.

Prohibiting or greatly limiting gun ownership will not only not solve the problem of violence in the American society. In fact, it will make it worse. If today gun-free zones such as schools, churches, malls and sporting events are sweet targets mentally ill people to pull out a gun and kill anyone they want, imagine what will happen in the United States if the country as a whole becomes a gun-free zone.

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Obama implies Second Amendment is for Hunting

Obama spoke publicly of his intention to curb the possession of firearms and implied dissenters are potential mentally ill people.

By PAUL J. WATSON | INFOWARS.com | JULY 26, 2012

President Barack Obama has caved to pressure from his supporters and finally exploited last week’s Aurora massacre to begin the push for gun control, erroneously claiming during a speech last night that the second amendment is about hunting and target practice.

“We recognise the traditions of gun ownership that passed on from generation to generation, that hunting and shooting are part of a cherished national heritage,” said Obama during remarks made at a National Urban League Conference in New Orleans.

In reality, the founders put the second amendment in the bill of rights not to ensure Americans could enjoy hunting or target practice, but as a protection against government tyranny.

As Howard University School of Law’s Thomas M. Moncure, Jr. explains, the right to bear arms was derived from English common law and was clearly focused around having an armed citizen militia to protect against abuses by the state.

As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, the right to bear arms was seen as a means of protecting liberties against government intrusion. Madison noted that in “several kingdoms of Europe … governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

Patrick Henry also made it clear that firearms were for self-defense and not duck hunting when he stated, “Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense?”

“Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people’s liberty teeth and keystone under independence,” said George Washington, adding that “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference.”

Congressman Ron Paul has also outlined how the assault rifle ban is merely an end run around the second amendment.

“The second amendment is not about hunting deer or keeping a pistol in your nightstand. It is not about protecting oneself against common criminals. It is about preventing tyranny. The Founders knew that unarmed citizens would never be able to overthrow a tyrannical government as they did. They envisioned government as a servant, not a master, of the American people. The muskets they used against the British Army were the assault rifles of the time,” said Paul.

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U.S. Regards its citizens as Terrorists

Government uses scare tactics to play people against each other and teach them how to tattle tale.

by Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
July 21, 2011

The artificial imminence of a terrorist attack against the United States continues to be the tool of choice for the U.S. government to provoke fear among its citizens. After the false-flag attacks of September 11, the government blamed Arabs and Muslims indiscriminately and told people to watch out and report any suspicious activity. The definition of suspicious or ‘out of the ordinary’ activity, however, was not specified. Neither was specified the reach of any potential attack, nor any credible information of an attempt to cause harm to the nation.

A decade later, the United States government has proven conspiracy theories correct. The whole security apparatus created before and after 9/11 was meant to be used on citizens, not elusive boogie men hiding in a cave or under a bed somewhere. The failure to carry out their policies of societal control through the menace of terrorism, obligated the government to change plans and, earlier rather than later, turn the homeland security machinery against the citizenry. Now, the threat of an attack perpetrated by a brown-skinned man somewhere in the 50 states has been downplayed to re-focus the attention towards the common middle-class, hard-working citizen.

Even though terrorists exist, the real measurable threat of an attack by Muslim or Arab terrorists is so miniscule that security experts such as Wayne Madsen, historians such as Webster Tarpley and former intelligence operatives such as Bob Chapman and Ray McGovern usually compare the likelihood of an attack with getting hit by lightning or dying during a bee attack. As it has been widely proven, the government not only cannot provide any hard evidence on an imminent attack on U.S. soil, but also has admitted to creating false threats to support the implementation of policies that violate well established constitutional rights such as privacy, the right to own and bear arms, assembly, protest in public places, and so on, using as an excuse the false premise that any ‘out of the ordinary’ citizen activity implies the potential threat of a terrorist attack.

Recently, townships in Phoenix and Arkansas have banned citizen gatherings without a municipal permit and tried to harass the mayor and other citizens who were in the process of revealing the out of control federal power grab occurring all over the country. Bureaucrats in those states and all over the nation have the backing of local police chiefs who either let the feds take over their towns in exchange for a larger federal budget for their police force, or side with the violators as a consequence of their ignorance.

While in previous opportunities the Department of Homeland Security has flashed its military-like capabilities to detain and apprehend citizens deemed as suspects -without any kind of legal basis- now, the government is trying to ‘alert’ the population about the threat that members of the middle-class, war veterans and minority citizens present to society. In a recent video issued by the U.S. government, the so-called ‘authorities’ profile every single type of person, but emphasize that the threat may come from white middle-class Americans. The first actor in the video psy-op sponsored by FEMA and Homeland Security, portrays a supposed caucasian terrorist who sprays can paint on a security camera to hide the arrival of a van carrying who knows what. In the sequence, an African-American man calls police to denounce what he calls ‘suspicious activity’. The video follows with pictures from previous terrorist attacks which ironically were carried out by the very same government such as the Oklahoma City bombing. This version of the facts often labeled as a conspiracy theory is supported by people like Major Edward A. Dames, an Army veteran of the United States. Dames said that there is a power group which intends to run another terrorist attack in Oklahoma City, similar to the attack of the 90’s. The Major has identified the location of the possible attack as 210 Park Avenue, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Read the testimony of ex-military here.

In other sections of the video, people can see a caucasian man dropping a backpack with what appears to be an explosive device, while another man observes through an office window. For anyone who is not familiar with psychological operations, this is the way terrorist tell you what their next move will be. In other words, it is very likely the next terrorist attack on United States soil will be a truck bomb inside a federal building, an explosive device on some city corner or any of the other forms shown in the video. The exposure of the public to these kind of scenarios guarantees that the masses will believe the government when it comes out to say that the latest terrorist attack was carried out by white man who left car bombs or explosive devices somewhere to kill police, federal workers or their neighbors who lived or worked around the corner.

The most recent video created by Homeland Security is part of a campaign labeled as “See something, say something”, which has a budget of at least $10 million. Although the denouncement of possible terror attacks is painted as ‘patriotic’ and government officials often wrap themselves with the flag, history shows that urgent calls from governments to pass legislation to spy on its citizens or for citizens to spy on themselves result in the installation of what many call a Police State. History points us to specific examples. Requests to abolish civil and constitutional rights were followed by dictatorial regimes in communist Russia, Nazi Germany, communist China, Chile in the 70’s and 80’s, Brazil, Cuba up until today, and so on.

What is more alarming on this day and age is not that governments such as the American attempt to portray and blame its own citizens as terrorists; this is a historical fact. The novelty on calls from governments to ‘help avoid imminent attack’ is that in their propaganda, government officials label almost any form or dissent or traditions as Terrorism. That is why people who speak about the Constitution or constitutional rights are now suspects of terrorism. People who support non-establishment political candidates are identified as potential terrorists. People who display stickers or banners calling for the reduction in the size of government are stopped, searched and sometimes issued tickets for expressing their political or even religious beliefs.The list also includes Ron Paul supporters, gun owners, gold bullion enthusiasts, and anyone and everyone who opposes government policies.

Read the details of this policy in the Report entitled: MIAC Report: The Modern Militia Movement. Additionally, the government has hired pastors and priests to teach his followers to submit to government guidelines. This plan was implemented with Executive Order 13397: The Churches as Government Agencies.

The Corporate Internet Based Reconnaissance Operations

United States government contractors partner to spy on everything to “keep us safe”.  Internet Based Reconnaissance Operations (Echelon)

Tom Burghardt
Global Research
July 6, 2011

Last week, the White House released its National Strategy for Counterterrorism, a macabre document that places a premium on “public safety” over civil liberties and constitutional rights.

Indeed, “hope and change” huckster Barack Obama had the temerity to assert that the President “bears no greater responsibility than ensuring the safety and security of the American people.”

Pity that others, including CIA “black site” prisoners tortured to death to “keep us safe” (some 100 at last count) aren’t extended the same courtesy as The Washington Post reported last week.

As Secrecy News editor Steven Aftergood correctly points out, the claim that the President “has no greater responsibility than ‘protecting the American people’ is a paternalistic invention that is historically unfounded and potentially damaging to the political heritage of the nation.”

Aftergood avers, “the presidential oath of office that is prescribed by the U.S. Constitution (Art. II, sect. 1) makes it clear that the President’s supreme responsibility is to ‘…preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ There is no mention of public safety. It is the constitutional order that the President is sworn to protect, even if doing so entails risks to the safety and security of the American people.”

But as our former republic slips ever-closer towards corporate dictatorship, Obama’s mendacious twaddle about “protecting the American people,” serves only to obscure, and reinforce, the inescapable fact that it’s a rigged game.

Rest assured, “what happens in Vegas,” Baghdad, Kabul or Manama–from driftnet spying to political-inspired witchhunts toillegal detention–won’t, and hasn’t, “stayed in Vegas.”

Cyber Here, Cyber There, Cyber-Surveillance Everywhere

Last month, researcher Barrett Brown and the OpMetalGear network lifted the lid on a new U.S. Government-sponsored cyber-surveillance project, Romas/COIN, now Odyssey, a multiyear, multimillion dollar enterprise currently run by defense and security giant Northrop Grumman.

With some $10.8 billion in revenue largely derived from contracts with the Defense Department, Northrop Grumman was No. 2 on the Washington Technology 2011 Top 100 List of Prime Federal Contractors.

“For at least two years,” Brown writes, “the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once.”

Information on this shadowy program was derived by scrutinizing hundreds of the more than 70,000 HBGary emails leaked onto the web by the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous.

Brown uncovered evidence that the “top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr–the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients.”

Readers will recall that Barr claimed he could exploit social media to gather information about WikiLeaks supporters in a bid to destroy that organization. Earlier this year, Barr told the Financial Times he had used scraping techniques and had infiltrated WikiLeaks supporter Anonymous, in part by using IRC, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

According to emails subsequently released by Anonymous, it was revealed that the ultra rightist U.S. Chamber of Commerce had hired white shoe law firm Hunton & Williams, and that Hunton attorneys, upon recommendation of an unnamed U.S. Department of Justice official, solicited a set of private security contractors–HBGary, HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico Technologies (collectively known as Team Themis)–and stitched-up a sabotage campaign against WikiLeaks, journalists, labor unions, progressive political groups and Chamber critics.

Amongst the firms who sought to grab the Romas/COIN/Odyssey contract from Northrop when it came up for a “recompete” wasTASC, which describes itself as “a renowned provTASC, ider of advanced systems engineering, integration and decision-support services across the intelligence, defense, homeland security and federal markets.”

According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, TASC’s head of “Cybersecurity Initiatives,” Larry Strang, was formerly a Vice President with Northrop Grumman who led that firm’s Cybersecurity Group and served as Northrop’s NSA Account Manager. Prior to that, Strang, a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel, was Vice President for Operations at the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

Brown relates that emails between TASC executives Al Pisani, John Lovegrow and former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr, provided details that they “were in talks with each other as well as Mantech executive Bob Frisbie on a ‘recompete’ pursuant to ‘counter intelligence’ operations that were already being conducted on behalf of the federal government by another firm, SAIC, with which they hoped to compete for contracts.”

In fact, HBGary Federal and TASC may have been cats-paws for defense giant ManTech International in the race to secure U.S. Government cyber-surveillance contracts. Clocking in at No. 22on Washington Technology’s “2011 Top 100 list,” ManTech earned some $1.46 billion in 2010, largely derived from work in “systems engineering and integration, technology and software development, enterprise security architecture, intelligence operations support, critical infrastructure protection and computer forensics.” The firm’s major customers include the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s geek squad that is busily working to develop software for their Cyber Insider Threat (CINDER) program.

Both HBGary Federal and parent company HBGary, a California-based security firm run by the husband-wife team, Greg Hoglund and Penny Leavy, had been key players for the design of malware, undetectable rootkits and other “full directory exfiltration tools over TCP/IP” for the Defense Department according to documents released by the secret-shredding web site Public Intelligence.

Additional published documents revealed that they and had done so in close collaboration with General Dynamics (Project Cand Task Z), which had requested “multiple protocols to be scoped as viable options … for VoIP (Skype) protocol, BitTorrent protocol, video over HTTP (port 80), and HTTPS (port 443)” for unnamed secret state agencies.

According to Brown, it appears that Romas/COIN/Odyssey was also big on social media surveillance, especially when it came to “Foreign Mobile” and “Foreign Web” monitoring. Indeed, documents published by Public Intelligence (scooped-up by the HBGary-Anonymous hack) was a ManTech International-HBGary collaboration describing plans for Internet Based Reconnaissance Operations. The October 2010 presentation described plans that would hand “customers,” presumably state intelligence agencies but also, as revealed by Anonymous, corporate security entities and public relations firms, the means to perform “native language searching” combined with “non-attributable architecture” and a “small footprint” that can be “as widely or narrowly focused as needed.”

ManTech and HBGary promised to provide customers the ability to “Locate/Profile Internet ‘Points of Interest'” on “individuals, companies, ISPs” and “organizations,” and would do so through “detailed network mapping” that will “identify registered networks and registered domains”; “Graphical network representation based on Active Hosts”; “Operating system and network application identification”; “Identification of possible perimeter defenses” through “Technology Research, Intelligence Gap Fill, Counterintelligence Research” and “Customer Public Image Assessment.”

The presentation described the social media monitoring process as one that would “employ highly skilled network professionals (read, ex-spooks and former military intelligence operatives) who will use “Non-attributable Internet access, custom developed toolsets and techniques, Native Language and in-country techniques” that “utilize foreign language search engines, mapping tools” and “iterative researching methodologies” for searching “Websites, picture sites, mapping sites/programs”; “Blogs and social networking sites”; “Forums and Bulletin Boards”; “Network Information: Whois, Trace Route, NetTroll, DNS”; “Archived and cached websites.”

Clients who bought into the ManTech-HBGary “product” were promised “Rapid Non-attributable Open Source Research Results”; “Sourced Research Findings”; “Triage level Analysis”; “Vulnerability Assessment” and “Graphical Network and Social Diagramming” via data mining and extensive link analysis.

Undoubtedly, readers recall this is precisely what the National Security Agency has been doing since the 1990s, if not earlier, through their electronic communications intercept program Echelon, a multibillion Pentagon project that conducted corporate espionage for American multinational firms as researcher Nicky Hager revealed in his 1997 piece for Covert Action Quarterly.

Other firms included in Lovegrove’s email to Barr indicate that the new Romas/COIN/Odyssey “team” was to have included: “TASC (PMO [Project Management Operations], creative services); HBGary (Strategy, planning, PMO); Akamai (infrastructure); Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning); Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics); Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services); Cipher (strategy, planning operations); PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic partners); Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development–long list of strategic partners); Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance–long list of strategic partners). We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app developers.”

Recall that AT&T is the NSA’s prime telecommunications partner in that agency’s illegal driftnet surveillance program and has been the recipient of “retroactive immunity” under the despicable FISA Amendments Act, a law supported by then-Senator Barack Obama. Also recall that the giant tech firm Apple was recently mired in scandal over reports that their mobile phone platform had, without their owners’ knowledge or consent, speared geolocational data from the iPhone and then stored this information in an Apple-controlled data base accessible to law enforcement through various “lawful interception” schemes.

“Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN,” Brown writes, “the firms that had been assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the program’s recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others that he’d spoken to the ‘CO [contracting officer] for COIN’.” The TASC executive told Barr that “the current procurement approach” was cancelled, citing “changed requirements.”

Apparently the Pentagon, or other unspecified secret state satrapy told the contestants that “an updated RFI [request for information]” will be issued soon. According to a later missive from Lovegrove to Barr, “COIN has been replaced by a procurement called Odyssey.” While it is still not entirely clear what Romas/COIN or the Odyssey program would do once deployed, Brown claims that “mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program.”

And given Barr’s monomaniacal obsession with social media surveillance (that worked out well with Anonymous!) the presence of Alterian and SocialEyez on the procurement team may indicate that the secret state is alarmed by the prospect that the “Arab Spring” just might slip from proverbial “safe hands” and threaten Gulf dictatorships and Saudi Arabia with the frightening specter of democratic transformation.

Although the email from TASC executive Chris Clair to John Lovegrow names “Alterion” as a company to contact because of their their “SM2 tool,” in all likelihood this is a typo given the fact that it is the UK-based firm “Alterian” that has developed said SM2 tool, described on their web site as a “business intelligence product that provides visibility into social media and lets you tap into a new kind of data resource; your customers’ direct thoughts and opinions.”

This would be a highly-profitable partnership indeed for enterprising intelligence agencies and opaque corporate partners intent on monitoring political developments across the Middle East.

In fact, a 2010 press release, announced that Alterian had forged a partnership with the Dubai-based firm SocialEyez for “the world’s first social media monitoring service designed for the Arab market.”

We’re informed that SocialEyez, a division of Media Watch Middle East, described as “the leading media monitoring service in the Middle East,” offers services in “television, radio, social media, online news and internet monitoring across most sectors including commercial, government and PR.”

That Barr and his partners were interested in bringing these firms to the Romas/COIN table is not surprising considering that the Alterian/SocialEyez deal promises “to develop and launch an Arabic language interface for Alterian SM2 to make it the world’s first Arab language social media monitoring tool.” Inquiring minds can’t help but wonder which three-lettered American agencies alongside a stable of “corporate and government clients, including leading Blue Chips” might be interested in “maximising their social media monitoring investment”?

Pentagon “Manhunters” in the House

On an even more sinister note, the inclusion of Archimedes Global on the Romas/COIN team should set alarm bells ringing.

Archimedes is a small, privately-held niche security firm headquartered in Tampa, Florida where, surprise, surprise, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) has it’s main headquarters at the MacDill Air Force Base. On their web site, Archimedes describes itself as “a diversified technology company providing energy and information solutions to government and businesses worldwide.” The firm claims that it “delivers solutions” to its clients by “combining deep domain expertise, multi-disciplinary education and training, and technology-enabled innovations.”

While short on information regarding what it actually does, evidence suggests that the firm is chock-a-block with former spooks and Special Forces operators, skilled in the black arts of counterintelligence, various information operations, subversion and, let’s be frank, tasks euphemistically referred to in the grisly trade as “wet work.”

According to The Washington Post, the firm was established in 2005. However, although the Post claims in their “Top Secret America” series that the number of employees and revenue is “unknown,” Dana Priest and William M. Arkin note that Archimedes have five government clients and are have speared contracts relating to “Ground forces operations,” “Human intelligence,” Psychological operations,” and “Specialized military operations.”

Brown relates that Archimedes was slated to provide “Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning” for the proposed Romas/COIN/Odyssey project for an unknown U.S. Government entity.

Based on available evidence however, one can speculate that Archimedes may have been chosen as part of the HBGary Federal/TASC team precisely because of their previous work as private contractors in human intelligence (HUMINT), running spies and infiltrating assets into organizations of interest to the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) throughout the Middle East, Central- and South Asia.

In 2009, Antifascist Calling revealed that one of Archimedes Global’s senior directors, retired Air Force Lt. Colonel George A. Crawford, published a chilling monograph, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organizing for Irregular Warfare, for the highly-influential Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.

JSOU is the “educational component” of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). With a mission that touts its ability to “plan and synchronize operations” against America’s geopolitical adversaries and rivals, JSOU’s Strategic Studies Department “advances SOF strategic influence by its interaction in academic, interagency, and United States military communities.”

Accordingly, Archimedes “information and risk” brief claim they can solve “the most difficult communication and risk problems by seeing over the horizon with a blend of art and science.” And with focus areas that include “strategic communications, media analysis and support, crisis communications, and risk and vulnerability assessment and mitigation,” it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to infer that those well-schooled in the dark art of information operations (INFOOPS) would find a friendly home inside the Romas/COIN contract team.

With some 25-years experience “as a foreign area officer specializing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia,” including a stint “as acting Air and Defense Attaché to Kyrgyzstan,” Crawford brings an interesting skill-set to the table. Crawford writes:

Manhunting–the deliberate concentration of national power to find, influence, capture, or when necessary kill an individual to disrupt a human network–has emerged as a key component of operations to counter irregular warfare adversaries in lieu of traditional state-on-state conflict measures. It has arguably become a primary area of emphasis in countering terrorist and insurgent opponents. (George A. Crawford, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare, JSOU Report 09-7, The JSOU Press, Hurlburt Field, Florida, September 2009, p. 1)

Acknowledged manhunting masters in their own right, the Israeli settler-colonial security apparat have perfected the art of “targeted killing,” when they aren’t dropping banned munitions such as white phosphorus on unarmed, defenseless civilian populations or attacking civilian vessels on the high seas.

Like their Israeli counterparts who come highly recommended as models of restraint, an American manhunting agency will employ similarly subtle, though no less lethal, tactics. Crawford informs us:

When compared with conventional force-on-force warfare, manhunting fundamentally alters the ratio between warfare’s respective firepower, maneuver, and psychological elements. Firepower becomes less significant in terms of mass, while the precision and discretion with which firepower is employed takes on tremendous significance, especially during influence operations. Why drop a bomb when effects operations or a knife might do? (Crawford, op. cit., p. 11, emphasis added)

Alongside actual shooters, “sensitive site exploitation (SSE) teams are critical operational components for Pentagon “manhunters.” We’re told that SSE teams will be assembled and able to respond on-call “in the event of a raid on a suspect site or to conduct independent ‘break-in and search’ operations without leaving evidence of their intrusion.” Such teams must possess “individual skills” such as “physical forensics, computer or electronic exploitation, document exploitation, investigative techniques, biometric collection, interrogation/debriefing and related skills.”

As if to drive home the point that the target of such sinister operations are the American people and world public opinion, Crawford, ever the consummate INFOOPS warrior, views “strategic information operations” as key to this murderous enterprise. Indeed, they “must be delicately woven into planned kinetic operations to increase the probability that a given operation or campaign will achieve its intended effect.”

Personnel skilled at conducting strategic information operations–to include psychological operations, public information, deception, media and computer network operations, and related activities–are important for victory. Despite robust DoD and Intelligence Community capabilities in this area, efforts to establish organizations that focus information operations have not been viewed as a positive development by the public or the media, who perceive government-sponsored information efforts with suspicion. Consequently, these efforts must take place away from public eyes. Strategic information operations may also require the establishment of regional or local offices to ensure dissemination of influence packages and assess their impact. Thus manhunting influence may call for parallel or independent structures at all levels…” (Crawford, op. cit., pp. 27-28, emphasis added)

While we do not as yet have a complete picture of the Romas/COIN/Odyssey project, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn.

“Altogether, then,” Brown writes, “a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms–capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence.”

Although Brown’s initial research concluded that Romas/COIN/Odyssey will operate “in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners,” with a firm like Archimedes on-board, once information has been assembled on individuals described in other contexts as “radicals” or “key extremists,” will they subsequently be made to “disappear” into the hands of “friendly” security services such as those of strategic U.S. partners Bahrain and Saudi Arabia?

We’re reminded that “Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means.”

Indeed, “none of the companies involved,” Brown writes, have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department’s decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct.”

Brown warns that “a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better ‘situational awareness’ on entire populations” while simultaneously manipulating “the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations.”

Beginning, it should be noted, right here at home…

CBS’ 60 Minutes Demonizes Constitutionalists

By Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
May 16, 2011

Anyone and everyone concerned with government handle of power and its limitless abuse of the Constitution and what it represents is now on the black lists of many law enforcement officials in the United States. Anyone who disagrees with government actions and voices such disagreement publicly, is considered dangerous and is the subject of police scrutiny.

CBS’s 60 Minutes is trying to play along with government corruption by labeling all people who are worried about government abuse as armed, dangerous, crazy and unconsciously prone to violence towards other people, especially law enforcement. People who talk about the right to free speech, the right to own and bear arms for self-defense, the right not to be taxed to death or abused by the fraudulent financial system will be kept on short leash by authorities as they may, says CBS,  “explode in anger” and simply kill anyone.

Law enforcement officials are now being “trained” to learn to spot and handle people who express respect for their constitutional rights. They want to paint everyone with the same brush, a brush that stamps them as “armed and dangerous”. The United States government has issued manuals and documents such as the MIAC Strategic Report to local law enforcement where it calls Libertarians and Constitutionalists “dangerous”, warning police to act cautiously when dealing with them.

Another goal of this kind of propaganda is to make it so that the rest of the public gets scared and promptly accepts the government issued message that it is necessary to tattle on family members, neighbors and friends who talk about the Constitution or constitutional rights. This group, includes Ron Paul supporters, people who want to end the current debt- based economic system or “end the feders”, those who preach freedom of assembly and the right to protest in public. Individuals who talk in public about government abuse of power will be named inciters of violence and will be rounded up if necessary.

This is happening while the U.S. government puts in place one of the largest police states in the history of humankind, with spying agencies listening to people on their cellphones, children being spied at home through their laptops, cameras on every corner, fliers molested at airports and the government’s military on the street, at airports and train stations to give a false sense of security.

Watch 60 Minute’s video for yourself.