Freedomshift

What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse . Since then, we have been terrorized, traumatized, and acclimated to life in the American Surveillance State. The bogeyman’s names and faces change over time, but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has transitioned us to life in a society where government agents routinely practice violence on the citizens while, in conjunction with the Corporate State, spying on the most intimate details of our personal lives. Ironically, the 14 th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks occurs just days before the 228 th anniversary of the ratification of our Constitution . Yet while there is much to mourn about the loss of our freedoms in the years since 9/11, there is virtually nothing to cele...

On Saturday we introduced readers to the “ Ferguson Effect ”. The idea is that the recent spate of prosecutions and instances of social unrest that followed a series of events involving perceived police misconduct directed at African Americans have made police officers gun shy — literally. Here’s what Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “Are Cops Racist?” Heather Mac Donald wrote in a WSJ piece: Here

Bloggers, conspiracy theorists and people who challenge establishment narratives on the Internet were all likened to ISIS terrorists during a chilling Congressional hearing which took place yesterday.

'Realistic Military Training' exercise expands to as many as ten states The US military has quietly added more states to its eight-week Jade Helm joint training drill, originally designated to take place in seven southwestern states. Speaking of the exercise at the Brazos County Commissioners Court in Texas last month, Jade Helm Operations Planner and retired Green Beret Thomas Mead told an audience that the drill, which will run from July 15 to September 15, will now include the states Mississippi and Florida. “The exercise is actually an eight-week exercise taking place across seven states,” Mead explains . “As you can see right there, it spans the whole southwest of the United States. We’ve also added Mississippi and we have a group also working out of Florida .” Read more: here

From 2012: A right-wing militia inspired by the Tea Party movement has taken over the city of Darlington, South Carolina, arrested the local government, and declared that the federal government should be overthrown. As the militia establishes checkpoints across I-95, other extremist groups across the nation rush to declare their support. South Carolina’s governor – a Tea Party supporter – declines to send in law enforcement to quash the militia, but quietly asks for federal intervention. The President invokes the Insurrection Act to authorize the use of federal troops, as the Pentagon prepares for war at home…. Read more: here

Spiegel reports this week that drug dealers and low-level Taliban members were targeted for death by drone: NATO didn’t just target the Taliban leadership, but also eliminated mid- and lower-level members of the group on a large scale. Some Afghans were only on the list because, as drug dealers, they were allegedly supporting the insurgents. The operations were based on the lists maintained by the CIA and NATO — Obama’s lists. The White House dubbed the strategy “escalate and exit.” McChrystal’s successor, General David Petraeus, documented the strategy in “Field Manual 3-24″ on fighting insurgencies, which remains a standard work today. Petraeus outlined three stages in fighting guerilla organizations like the Taliban. The first was a cleansing phase …. Behind closed doors, Petraeus and his staff explained exactly what was meant by “cleansing.” German politicians recall something that Michael T. Flynn, the head of ISAF intelligence in Afghanistan, once said during a ...

On October 22 four former Blackwater military contractors were found guilty in the deaths of fourteen Iraqi citizens. The ruling is related to a 2007 incident where Blackwater contractors fired automatic weapons, sniper rifles, and grenade launchers at a public square. In addition to the fourteen deaths, seventeen other individuals were injured. Read more: here

by Justin Raimondo , September 26, 2014 Print This | Share This Did Senator John McCain, a leading advocate of arming Syria’s Islamist revolutionaries, meet with members or allies of the Islamic State in al-Sham [the Levant] (ISIS) during his trip to Syria on May 27 of last year? Read more: here

“We Are No Longer a Nation Ruled By Laws” Pulitzer prize winning reporter Chris Hedges – along with journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, activist Tangerine Bolen and others – sued the government to join the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans. The trial judge in the case asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys. The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge. The trial judge ruled that the indefinite detention bill was unconstitutional, holding: Read more: here

Fifteen people who had been heading to a wedding in Yemen have been killed in an air strike. Local media reported that a drone attack had been responsible, and the party-goers had been hit instead of an Al-Qaeda convoy. “An air strike missed its target and hit a wedding car convoy, ten people were killed immediately and another five who were injured died after being admitted to the hospital,” a Yemeni security official told Reuters. Five more people were injured in the attack which took place in Radda, central al-Bayda province on Thursday, the source added. The group had been en route to the the village of Qaifa, the site of the wedding, when it was hit. The assault left charred bodies strewn in the road and vehicles on fire, officials told AP. While officials would not identify the source of the air strike, local and tribal media sources attributed the deaths to a drone attack. Read more: here

The government shutdown isn’t slowing down the warmongers.  For example: The CIA is ramping up covert training program for Syrian rebels President Obama has waived a ban on aiding regimes that use child soldiers The Department of Defense awarded 94 new contracts  worth a combined total of more than $5 billion dollars the day right before the government shutdown DoD will continue to award contracts during the shutdown … but will stop publicly announcing them The giant $2 billion dollar NSA spying center in Utah is still opening (the NSA is part of the Department of Defense , which carries out assassination and cyber-warfare campaigns, as well as destroying the privacy of American citizens) As Ron Paul notes , military spending will increase 18% even after the sequestration “cuts”: Read more: here

Last week, Justin Amash, the two-term libertarian Republican congressman from Michigan, joined with John Conyers, the 25-term liberal Democratic congressman from the same state, to offer an amendment to legislation funding the National Security Agency (NSA). If enacted, the Amash-Conyers amendment would have forced the government’s domestic spies when seeking search warrants to capture Americans’ phone calls, texts and emails first to identify their targets and produce evidence of their terror-related activities before a judge may issue a warrant. The support they garnered had a surprising result that stunned the Washington establishment. It almost passed. Read more: here

Three days ago we pointed out that while the story surrounding the alleged Boston Bombers had many gaping holes in it while it was being made up in process, following the filing of the official sworn FBI affidavit making things up out of thin air would become far more complicated. Sure enough, one specific section in the 11 page sworn testimony caught our attention: the one discussing the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev following the boat "shootout". Read more: here

This is what America looks like under martial law: Read more: here

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." - Rahm Emanuel, former White House Chief Of Staff to Barack Obama While many people might immediately dismiss the concept, any student of true and unadulterated history has to eventually admit this fact: Governments exploit crisis. Sometimes, they merely take advantage of the ensuing chaos and aftermath of a disaster they had nothing to do with directly. Other times, they create those disasters themselves in order to engineer social and political opportunity. Read more: Here