The famous “Eye of God” on the pyramid top within a triangle, still stands. Below the triangle is a Roman fasces bearing upon a thin tying band of red, white, and blue the words “Union and Constitution”.
The keepers of the 225-year-old Great Seal of the United States recently told Rocky Mountain News readers what were myths and what were truths about the seal, such as “the seal using several Freemasonry symbols was a myth.”
Well, Colorado has its own Great Seal which dates back to 1876, when we became a state, and an almost identical prior seal dated in 1861 when Colorado officially became a separate territory.
And Colorado’s Great Seal has a real mystery. At the bottom of the territorial seal, there are no stars around the date 1861 and no mention of any stars in the statute passed Nov. 6, 1861 describing the territorial seal in the very first territorial legislative session.
In our state constitution adopted in 1876 by the voters, the legislature was told the territorial seal continued to be the seal until the legislature acted to create a Great Seal. That happened March 15, 1877 and the description of the Great Seal really didn’t change much from the territorial seal.
There was “1876” where “1861” once appeared. The Latin phrase “Sigillum Territorii Coloradenesis” (meaning “seal of the territory of Colorado”) was changed to the English words “State of Colorado”.
The territorial and state motto remained the same “Nil Sine Numine” meaning either “Nothing Without Providence” or “Nothing Without Deity”. The famous “Eye of God” on the pyramid top within a triangle, still stands.
Below the triangle is a Roman fasces bearing upon a thin tying band of red, white, and blue the words “Union and Constitution”. The Roman fasces during the Roman Empire consisted of a bundle of wooden rods with an axe head hanging down from the bottom of the bundle. Ours more resembles a spear entering on the left of the bundle of rods and an axe head coming out on the right.
Below the fasces is a Heraldic shield that is as up-to-date as if it had been created in 2008 instead of 1861. At the top of the shield are three snow-capped mountains, even higher than clouds. It is an excellent reminder to tourists of why they visit Colorado.
Below the clouds, separated by a thin yellow line, are a pickaxe and sledgehammer of a miner. They lie partly on golden ground and partly on brown soil.
Mining gold, silver, and coal offered the potential to make the territory and young state rich - - just as mining oil, gas, and oil shale, if equitably taxed, could greatly benefit Colorado’s state budget.
Today, at the bottom are six gold stars, three on each side of the gold letters “1876″. But our state statute doesn’t mention the six stars.
A research analyst at the State Historical Society found for me a Denver Post article written in 1958 describing a group of young students being shown a copy of the seal at the state museum and asking what the six stars stood for.
No one knew what the stars stood for, or where the stars came from, even after that newspaper did weeks of research. And the stars are still there in 2008, but never ever described in the state statute which lays out the Great Seal.
Well, the Denver Post failed. Perhaps the Rocky Mountain News can solve the mystery.
Frà Matthew Festing, 58, an Englishman, becomes the 79th Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta.
Until his final breath, Matthew Festing will carry the title “His Most Eminent Highness”.
Leading Knights said the order is often depicted as secret society of the wealthy elite.
By John Thavis
ROME (CNS) — In a secret and swift election, the Knights of Malta elected an Englishman as their 79th grand master.
Matthew Festing, who had been the Knights’ grand prior of England, was chosen March 11 to replace Andrew W.N. Bertie, who died in February.
Festing, 59, will head the world’s oldest chivalric order, founded in the 11th century. He is only the second Englishman to hold the post of grand master; Bertie was the first.
Known officially as the Sovereign Military Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, the organization was established to care for pilgrims during the Crusades. It lives on today as a lay Catholic religious order and a worldwide humanitarian network.
The order is also a sovereign state, holding observer status at the United Nations and maintaining diplomatic relations with 100 countries.
Festing, an expert in art and history, joined the Knights in 1977 and in 1991 became a “professed” knight, taking religious vows. He is a descendent of Blessed Adrian Fortescue, a Knight of Malta who was martyred in the 16th century.
As head of the English priory, Festing organized humanitarian assistance missions to Lebanon and Kosovo and led a delegation on the order’s annual pilgrimage with the sick to Lourdes.
In a statement issued after his election, the new grand master said he wanted to continue the work of his predecessor, who was credited with expanding the order’s humanitarian services and its diplomatic connections.
Pope Benedict XVI was informed of Festing’s election before it was announced to the world.
The election of a grand master is a major event in Rome. Fifty electors, representing the 12,500 male and female members of the order, filed into the Knights’ villa on Rome’s Aventine Hill, wearing their distinctive red robes decorated with the Maltese cross.
The election, which began with a Mass, had similarities to a papal conclave. The grand master had to be chosen from among the order’s approximately 50 professed Knights.
The voting was done by a secret ballot, after nonvoters were asked to leave. No politicking was allowed, and the new grand master had to receive a “majority plus one” of the total votes — at least 27 out of 50.
At a press conference a few days before the election, leading Knights said the order is often wrongly depicted as an elite, wealthy secret society.
“In many ways, we are misunderstood,” said Winfried Henckel von Donnersmark, a member of the order’s sovereign council. In part, that’s because of the unusual nature of the organization, he said.
The Knights are a religious order, yet the vast majority of members are lay, he pointed out. It is a Catholic organization, but its humanitarian operations are open to people of all faiths. And while it does have some property and patrimony, it has to continually raise funds to support its annual $1 billion in charity works around the world, he said.
Membership in the order is by invitation. Knights and Dames are practicing Catholics and devote part of their time to doing works of mercy.
The professed members are all male, but women form an increasingly important part of the order, officials said.
According to Albrecht von Boeselager, one of the order’s chief officials, the Knights have about 80,000 local volunteers working in 120 countries throughout the world. The organization is welcomed by so many governments — even by the military regime in Myanmar, for example — because it adheres to strict neutrality on political issues, he said.
“We don’t consider ourselves a human rights organization. If making accusations on human rights issues would prevent us from assisting the needy, we would prefer to be silent,” von Boeselager said.
In the Middle East and Asia, however, the Knights’ neutrality has recently been called into question by extremist propaganda, he said.
“We have been accused of being part of a ‘new crusade,’ and even of having mercenaries fighting in Iraq. That is totally untrue, and it endangers our personnel in Muslim countries,” he said.
Noreen Falcone, president of the Knights’ U.S. federal association, said the order’s organizational structure gives it the ability to move quickly into disaster areas. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, for example, the order went to work immediately.
“We’re still there, building homes and helping to give people back their self-respect,” she said.
. . .
Related
British art historian elected grand master of Knights of Malta
ROME (AP) - The Knights of Malta said Tuesday they have elected a British art historian as the new grand master of the lay Roman Catholic order.
Fra Matthew Festing replaces the late Fra Andrew Bertie as head of the 900-year-old charitable order.
The Knights of Malta chose the 59-year-old Festing as their 79th grand master during
a meeting Tuesday in Rome. Festing was sworn in shortly after the election, the order said.
Festing joined the Order of Malta in 1977. He has led humanitarian missions in Lebanon and Kosovo as the Grand Prior of England, a senior position he held for the past 15 years, the statement said.
Officially known as the Sovereign Military Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, the order was founded with a pilgrims’ hospice in 11th century Jerusalem and has the status of an independent state.
The order has 12,500 members and operates in 120 countries, providing medical and social services, particularly in war zones and impoverished areas. It maintains diplomatic relations with 100 nations.
. . .
Frà Matthew Festing Elected Grand Master
Frà Matthew Festing, 58, an Englishman, becomes the 79th Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, elected this morning by the Council Complete of State (the Order’s electoral body). In accepting the role, the new Grand Master swore his Oath before the Cardinal Patronus of the Order, Cardinal Pio Laghi, and the electoral body. He succeeds Frà Andrew Bertie, 78th Grand Master (1988-2008), who died on 7 February.
The new Grand Master affirms his resolve to continue the great work carried out by his predecessor. Frà Matthew comes with a wide range of experience in Order affairs. He has been the Grand Prior of England since the Priory’s re-establishment in 1993, restored after an abeyance of 450 years. In this capacity, he has led missions of humanitarian aid to Kosovo, Serbia and Croatia after the recent disturbances in those countries, and with a large delegation from Britain he attends the Order’s annual pilgrimage to Lourdes with handicapped pilgrims.
Educated at Ampleforth and St. John’s College Cambridge, where he read history, Frà Matthew, an art expert, has for most of his professional life worked at an international art auction house. As a child he lived in Egypt and Singapore, where his father, Field Marshal Sir Francis Festing, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had earlier postings. His mother was a member of the recusant Riddells of Swinburne Castle who suffered for their faith in penal times. He is also descended from Sir Adrian Fortescue, a knight of Malta, who was martyred in 1539.
Frà Matthew served in the Grenadier Guards and holds the rank of colonel in the Territorial Army. He was appointed OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) by the Queen and has served as her Deputy Lieutenant in the county of Northumberland for a number of years.
In 1977 Frà Matthew became a member of the Order of Malta, taking solemn religious vows in 1991.
ROME—Sotheby’s auctioneer Matthew Festing has been elected as the 79th Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, a Roman Catholic chivalric order established in the 11th century during the Crusades, the Times (London) reports. The secret-ballot election took place March 11 at a papal-style conclave in the order’s headquarters on the Aventine Hill in Rome.
The Knights, who are also known as the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, carry out charitable and medical operations in 120 countries. The organization has recently been attempting to dispel rumors that it is rich and secretive (see the Da Vinci Code), and the election of Festing, who is seen as a reformer, is a sign that they plan to be more open and to better publicize their charitable acts.
Festing, a descendant of Sir Adrian Fortescue, a Knight of Malta martyred in 1539, was admitted to the order in 1977. In 1988 he became a Knight of Justice, in 1991 he took perpetual vows, and he has recently served as Grand Prior of the British Association, Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of Malta (BASMOM). Festing’s father was also a member of the order, and his brother Andrew Festing is president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and a favorite of the British royal family.
Grand Masters, like Popes, are elected for life. Until his final breath, Matthew Festing will carry the title “His Most Eminent Highness.”
The mother of an 11-year-old boy abducted by SWAT team members and taken to a hospital after he was bruised while horsing around is warning members of her community of the “Nazi” tactics she endured, including a statement from the officers that her “rights” were “only in the movies.”
The case involves Jon Shiflett, who injured himself while trying to grab the handle of a door on a car his sister was driving. He slipped and fell to the pavement, hitting his head. His parents treated him for the injury and rejected paramedics’ demands that they be allowed to take him to a hospital.
Nearly 36 hours later, SWAT team members broke into the family home in western Colorado near New Castle and took Jon to a hospital, where a doctor said the family should keep ice on his bruise, exactly the treatment the family already had been providing.
Tina Shiflett, Jon’s mother, has written a letter to the editor to a local newspaper, the Post Independent, “to awaken, alert and appall any who read it and hear the bells ringing.”
“A fully armed SWAT team broke into our home, slammed my children to the floor face down with their hands behind their backs and shoved a gun in my daughter’s face and handcuffed her…” her letter said.
In a separate letter to WND, she elaborated a little more fully.
During the attack, she wrote, “One (officer) grabbed my daughter Beth (18 years), who also had a gun to her face, slammed her down and kneed her in the back and held her in that position… My sons Adam (14) and Noah (only 7) lay down willingly, yet they were still forced to put their hands behind their backs and were yelled at to keep their heads down.
“My daughter Jeanette was coming out from the back bedroom when she was grabbed, drug down the hallway, across a couch and slammed to the ground,” she said. “The officers then began throwing scissors and screwdrivers across the room (out of our reach, I suppose) and going through our cupboards.
“I asked if I could make a phone call and was told, ‘no.’ My daughter asked if that wasn’t one of our rights. The reply was made, ‘That’s only in the movies,’” she told WND.
It was some unidentified person, possibly a paramedic who had been refused permission to take Jon Shiflett to the hospital as she wanted, who provided information last week that convinced a magistrate to issue a court order that Jon be taken into state custody and examined by a doctor.
He was taken by SWAT team members dispatched by the sheriff to the family’s home at 11 p.m. at night, and they punched a hole in the front door and held guns on other children in the family in order to take Jon.
“The armed men in black masks took my terrified son against his wishes to Grand River Hospital, where he was examined by a doctor and interrogated by Social Services. No evidence was found that he had not been properly taken care of. Upon his return, we were told to keep ice on his head,” Tina Shiflett’s letter to the editor said.
“To the SWAT Team members … how far will you go in ‘just doing your job?’ If you feel no guilt busting into an innocent family’s home, traumatizing young children and stomping the security found therein, will you follow more horrific orders?” she wrote.
“May I remind you that in Nazi Germany, outrageous, monstrous crimes were committed by soldiers ‘just doing their job?’ What will be next? Where will this stop?” she wrote.
“Fathers, mothers, families and countrymen, I challenge you to consider our story and ask yourself the question, ‘If this were my family, what would I do?’ For it very well could be you … next!”
Garfield County Sheriff Lou Vallario told WND he simply ordered his officers to do exactly what the magistrate demanded.
“I was given a court order by the magistrate to seize the child, and arrange for medical evaluation, and that’s what we did,” he said.
The situation developed at the Apple Tree Mobile Home Park near New Castle last week when Jon Shiflett was horsing around and fell. Tom Shiflett carried his son home and put an ice pack on his head, while examining him to see whether his mental faculties were there. The boy correctly recited Bible verses and spelled words, the parents told WND.
But paramedics were called by a neighbor, and when they arrived, Tom Shiflett let them see his son, but refused their demands that he be taken to a hospital. The paramedics then apparently lobbied the city police, the sheriff’s office, social workers and eventually the magistrate in order to get their way in having Jon taken to a hospital.
Jim Bradford, a court clerk in Garfield County, said it was a juvenile matter and he could not comment on any aspect of the case, and he declined to allow WND to leave a message for Garfield County Magistrate Lain Leoniak, who signed the order.
But participants in a forum at the Rocky Mountain News, which carried reports subsequent to the WND report, seemed to agree with Tina Shiflett.
Wrote ItsJustMe, “Welcome to the coming socialist police state.”
Said “mrNiceGuy,” “Police man shoots man in heart at a distant range, is not charged. Police cover up the events that proceed (sic) the death of someone in their custody, no one is charged. Police enter wrong apartment and shoot an unarmed man thinking a can is a weapon, no charges filed. But a kid bumps his head and his parents deem him to be ok – knock the door in and start cuffing people.”
“I cannot describe the feeling of having your child abducted, taken from your care, not knowing what will happen to him, and if he will ever be returned back into your arms again,” Tina Shiflett wrote in the separate letter to WND. “I record this by my own hand in hopes of awakening anyone who would read it to the injustice of our police depart (sic), social services and court system. But above all to glorify my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, whose reign is supreme over all this earth…”
The letter clarifies that the family did, indeed, cooperate with officers who arrived about 11 p.m. on that night.
“Between 10 and 11 … a sheriff came to the door. My husband met him at the window and he began to question my husband. My husband spoke with him and answered all his questions. The sheriff then said if Tom would just let him speak with Jonathan (our 11 yr. old son) this whole matter (story following) would be closed,” she documented.
“Tom said, ‘You are saying, ‘If I let you speak to Jonathan this whole matter will be closed.?’ Then Tom called for Jonathan to come to the window,” she said.
“As soon as Jonathan was visible to the sheriff, a SWAT team appeared shining lights on Jon’s face and others were bashing at the door with a ramming device. My daughter resisted and pushed against the door to stop them as she didn’t know who they were. I told her to back up and not try to fight them. They then entered our home, held a gun to my daughter’s face and others of them, five or more, rushed into the living room and physically forced my other children to the ground.”
“We were told Jonathan would be taken to a hospital near us for evaluation, and then questioned by the human resources. At this point Jonathan was scared, crying and shaking. We asked if we could accompany him, or follow them to the hospital. We were warned not to try to follow him or come to the hospital or criminal charges would be pressed against us.
“Our son was returned to us at 2:30 a.m. Saturday morning. In all this was not one shred of evidence found that we had done anything wrong or that Jon had not been properly cared for at home,” she said.
“what the?” was KarlSpackler’s comment on a forum at the Denver Post.
And “mamm354″ added, “Whoever it was that gave the order to do this should be thrown in jail. Illegal assaults on our privacy is why we need the second ammendment. I don’t see the police being this agressive against illegal aliens but they approach their work with this level of zest against citizens!?!?! Heads should roll for this.”
Lynn Rennick, the social services director in Garfield County, has said her office is required to intervene when it receives a report about “possible mistreatment” of children, but she didn’t comment on any such report in this case, who may have filed it, or what it might have said.
A spokeswoman for WestCare Ambulance, which reportedly responded to the call, also refused to answer any questions about the case, saying all issues were considered patient confidentiality issues.
Ross Talbott, the owner of the Apple Tree Mobile Home Park who rents to the Shifletts, called the SWAT team actions “gross irresponsibility and stupidity.”
“Is this Russia? I don’t know what we’re coming to when they think your kid needs medical help and they send a SWAT team,” he said.
The Recording Industry Association of America has said that an Arizona resident whose computer contains almost 2,000 songs ripped from CDs he bought legally is in violation of copyright law for creating the collection.
Jeffery Howell is accused of sharing the songs, but industry officials said he should not have made the copies from his CD collection onto his computer. The RIAA recently won a $220,000 judgment from a woman who downloaded 24 songs.
Lawyer Ray Beckerman said, “Recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation.” Beckerman, who has experience in such cases, has attacked the RIAA’s position.
Since this movie The Wave was based on a real experiment at a high school in 1967, you can just ignore those who glibly claim that “it can’t happen here”. Unfortunately, it can happen here and it IS happening here. The proof is in the fact that I can’t even talk like this in public without the people around me getting very disturbed and hostile. And if I were to walk up to a group of shoppers at the mall suggesting that we live in a fascist dictatorship, that our rights are being stripped, that private property is under threat, that 9/11 was an inside job, that the war is a total fraud, that global warming is a hoax designed to “unite the world” and that our leaders on both sides are murdering terrorist gangsters who have defrauded Americans of trillions and are pushing us by stealth into a North-American Union and on to global government, someone is bound to come try to shut me up while others will be afraid to say anything lest they be attacked themselves.
Therefore, we live in a Stasi-like self-policing climate of fear and paranoia where anyone who dares to criticize the government is seen as a dangerous “conspiracy theorist” or even as a terrorist to be reported to the fascist authorities at Homeland Security. And those who question climate change are labeled as “global warming deniers”, dangerous people who believe that the sun is warming the solar system. We are the ones who will refuse to get sterilized or maintain one-child families. We are the ones who will refuse to take the chip implant and the neurotoxic injections. We are the sane ones, the ones with any sense left in our heads, yet are believed to be crazy fanatics who are a threat to world order. That is how brainwashed and warped people have become.
So group-think has taken hold in America. We are no longer a land of individualists. We have been transformed into a bunch of robotic goons ready to do whatever the government tells us “for our safety”. And this is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany, and in fact it is happening all over the world, by design. And the liberals, socialists and “progressives” out there who know Bush and the neocons are bad, think themselves to be the very antithesis of fascism, yet they are just as vulnerable to it as anyone else. The Right is controlled through the War on Terror paradigm, but the Left is controlled through the Global Warming paradigm, two false paradigms with the same ulterior motive, to use chaos and fear to unite the world under a global fascist dictatorship.
So as you watch this movie, keep in mind that anyone, of any political persuasion, can be whipped up into a fascist mindset, even though he sees it as something wonderful and fantastic. Hitler put it best:
“Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.”
PW
. . .
The Wave - 46 min
1981 - Based on the real experience of a high school class in Palo Alto, CA in April 1967, whose teacher wanted to explain the rise of the Nazi party to his students.
“There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater. … Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later….”
These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German).
The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages—in English as “Defying Hitler.”
I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and e-mailed to ask me to “write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America. … This is almost unbelievable.”
More about Haffner below. Let’s set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how “odd” it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such “calm, superior indifference.”
Goebbels Would be Proud
It has been two years since top New York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.
The Times had learned of this well before the election in 2004 and acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information.
In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen’s book, “State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” revealing the warrantless eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer.
It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen’s book on the street, with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs’s trademark criterion: All The News That’s Fit To Print.
(The Times’ own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the newspaper’s explanation for the long delay in publishing this story “woefully inadequate.”)
When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times.
The truth would out; part of it, at least.
Glitches
There were some embarrassing glitches. For example, unfortunately for National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the White House neglected to tell him that the cat would soon be out of the bag.
So on Dec. 6, Alexander spoke from the old talking points in assuring visiting House intelligence committee member Rush Holt, D-New Jersey, that the NSA did not eavesdrop on Americans without a court order.
Still possessed of the quaint notion that generals and other senior officials are not supposed to lie to congressional oversight committees, Holt wrote a blistering letter to Gen. Alexander after the Times, on Dec. 16, front-paged a feature by Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.”
But House Intelligence Committee chair Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, apparently found Holt’s scruples benighted; Hoekstra did nothing to hold Alexander accountable for misleading Holt, his most experienced committee member, who had served as an intelligence analyst at the State Department.
What followed struck me as bizarre. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article, the president of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense.
Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Judiciary Committee.
Bush Takes Frontal Approach
Far from expressing regret, the president bragged about having authorized the surveillance “more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks,” and said he would continue to do so. The president also said:
“Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it.”
On Dec. 19, 2005, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-NSA Director Michael Hayden held a press conference to answer questions about the as yet unnamed surveillance program.
Gonzales was asked why the White House decided to flout FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing instead a “backdoor approach.” He answered:
“We have had discussions with Congress…as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible.”
Hmm. Impossible? It strains credulity that a program of the limited scope described would be unable to win ready approval from a Congress that had just passed the “Patriot Act” in record time.
James Risen has made the following quip about the prevailing mood: “In October 2001, you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America.”
It was not difficult to infer that the surveillance program must have been of such scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it didn’t have a prayer for passage.
It turns out we didn’t know the half of it.
What To Call These Activities
“Illegal Surveillance Program” didn’t seem quite right for White House purposes, and the PR machine was unusually slow off the blocks.
It took six weeks to settle on “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” with FOX News leading the way followed by the president himself. This labeling would dovetail nicely with the president’s rhetoric on Dec. 17:
“In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. … The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September 11 helped address that problem…” [Emphasis added]
And Gen. Michael Hayden, who headed NSA from 1999 to 2005, was of course on the same page, dissembling as convincingly as the president. At his May 2006 confirmation hearings to become CIA director, he told of his soul-searching when, as director of NSA, he was asked to eavesdrop on Americans without a court warrant.
“I had to make this personal decision in early October 2001,” said Hayden. “It was a personal decision. … I could not not do this.”
Like so much else, it was all because of 9/11. But we now know…
It Started Seven Months Before 9/11.
How many times have you heard it? The mantra “after 9/11 everything changed” has given absolution to all manner of sin.
We are understandably reluctant to believe the worst of our leaders, and this tends to make us negligent. After all, we learned from former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that drastic changes were made in U.S. foreign policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue and toward Iraq at the first National Security Council meeting on Jan. 30, 2001.
Should we not have anticipated far-reaching changes at home as well?
Reporting by the Rocky Mountain News and court documents and testimony on a case involving Qwest strongly suggest that in February 2001 Hayden saluted smartly when the Bush administration instructed NSA to suborn AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest to spy illegally on you, me, and other Americans.
Bear in mind that this would have had nothing to do with terrorism, which did not really appear on the new administration’s radar screen until a week before 9/11, despite the pleading of Clinton aides that the issue deserved extremely high priority.
So this until-recently-unknown pre-9/11 facet of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was not related to Osama bin Laden or to whomever he and his associates might be speaking. It had to do with us.
We know that the Democrats briefed on the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, (the one with the longest tenure on the House Intelligence Committee), Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, and former and current chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, D-Florida, and Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, respectively.
May one interpret their lack of public comment on the news that the snooping began well before 9/11 as a sign they were co-opted and then sworn to secrecy?
It is an important question. Were the appropriate leaders in Congress informed that within days of George W. Bush’s first inauguration the NSA electronic vacuum cleaner began to suck up information on you and me, despite the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment?
Are They All Complicit?
And are Democratic leaders about to cave in and grant retroactive immunity to those telecommunications corporations—AT&T and Verizon—which made millions by winking at the law and the Constitution?
(Qwest, to its credit, heeded the advice of its general counsel who said that what NSA wanted done was clearly illegal.)
What’s going on here? Have congressional leaders no sense for what is at stake?
Lately the adjective “spineless” has come into vogue in describing congressional Democrats—no offense to invertebrates.
Nazis and Their Enablers
You don’t have to be a Nazi. You can just be, well, a sheep.
In his journal, Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the “sheepish submissiveness” with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933.
Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances “saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened, and one’s desk might be broken into.”
But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here?
In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the “cowardly treachery” of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds:
“It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight.”
The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers—“for the most part decent, unimportant individuals.” In May, the party leaders sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.
The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month, and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that “legalized” Hitler’s dictatorship.
As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists: “Oh God,” writes Haffner, “what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward. … They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews. … They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested.”
In sum: “There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March 1933, millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders. … At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown. … The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.”
This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated.
Our Founding Fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison:
“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. … The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”
We cannot say we weren’t warned.
. . .
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The Wave - 46 min
1981 - Based on the real experience of a high school class in Palo Alto, CA in April 1967, whose teacher wanted to explain the rise of the Nazi party to his students.
This is an interesting bit of marketing strategy by Mountain Dew where they utilize the concept of a futuristic fascist police state to market their new drink under the moniker of “DewMocracy”.
Emmanuel of Savoy, center, son of Italy’s last king, his son Emanuele Filiberto, right, and his wife Marina Doria of Savoy, are pictured in Milan, Italy, on Feb. 9, 2002.
A demand by Italy’s former royal family for compensation from the Italian state for their 56 years of forced exile was met with deep scorn on Wednesday by anti-Fascist and Jewish groups.
“We are astonished by the absurdity of this demand,” said Massimo Rendina, head of Italy’s largest anti-fascist association ANPI.
“The royal family benefited financially from the Fascist regime. Remember the harm Victor Emmanuel III did by signing laws against civil liberties to fight opponents of the regime, causing them moral and financial harm,” Rendina said.
“There were also racial laws [against Jews]. Without the king’s signature, those laws could not have existed,” he said.
Vittorio Emmanuel III, the grandfather of the current head of the House of Savoy, co-signed laws that allowed nearly 8,000 Italian Jews to be deported by the occupying German forces starting in 1943.
Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy, 70, grandson of the last king of Italy from 1900 to 1946, and his son Emanuele Filiberto, 35, lodged the demand for 260 million euros (US$385 million) plus interest on Tuesday.
They are also seeking the return of assets that were confiscated by the Italian state after their forced exile in 1946.
The property the Savoys are seeking “wasn’t stolen, but seized under a law passed by the democratic Italian state,” Rendina said, while dismissing the demand as “indecent.”
Ricardo Pacifisti, spokesman of Rome’s Jewish community, was equally indignant.
“Decency would demand that the royal family remain silent as a sign of respect for all Italians, including Jews,” he said.
“If anyone has the right to damages plus interest, it’s the former subjects of the royal house, and among them the Jewish citizens whose lives were shattered by the king’s signature on the racial laws,” Pacifisti said, noting in particular that Jewish professors and students were forced to leave universities.
The Union of Jewish Communities in Italy, the main Jewish group in the country, called the demands offensive “to the historical memory of Italy” in a statement.
Pino Sgobio of the Italian Communist Party called the request “a joke,” adding that the royal family should reimburse Italy “for the moral and material damage inflicted on the Italian people.”
The government reacted swiftly to the demand, rejecting it on Tuesday and saying the Italian state owed nothing to the former royal family but was now thinking of suing them for their responsibility over the racial laws.
With their stiff-armed salutes, and cries of “Viva España!”, Spain’s fascists gathered this weekend to pay homage to General Franco outside the tomb of the late dictator for what may be the last time.
Well-to-do ladies came dressed in fur coats to keep out the bitter cold, young men and women wore the blue shirts of the Falangist party, while others were more recognisable as modern neo-nazis, with shaven heads and scarves wrapped tight around their faces.
But all were united by more than simple veneration of General Franco: they share an all-consuming hatred of the socialist government of José Luiz Rodríguez Zapatero, which last month passed a law that will ban political rallies outside the imposing mausoleum in which Franco is buried.
The controversial historical memory law was the brainchild of Zapatero, whose own grandfather was killed by Franco’s forces, and is an attempt to recognise the republican victims of the civil war and dictatorship. The law, which will come into force once it passes through the upper house, will see the remaining Francoist symbols removed from Spain’s public buildings and the depoliticisation of the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), Europe’s largest fascist religious monument.
Chants of “Reds no, Reds no!” and “Zapatero - you son of a bitch!” rang out across the valley as banners bearing the Cross of St James, known as Matamoros (Moorslayer), and pre-democratic Spanish flags were unfurled. But the largest cheers were reserved for Carmen Franco Polo, daughter of the late dictator, whose arrival and departure were greeted with sustained cries of “Franco! Franco! Franco!”.
The dictator’s supporters had come to the giant basilica, 30 miles north-east of Madrid, to attend mass on Saturday and to pay their respects to Franco and to the founder of the Falangist party, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, ahead of the anniversary of their deaths on tomorrow.
Although the Valle de los Caídos is officially designated as a monument to the 500,000 who are estimated to have died in the 1936-39 war, there are only two visible tombs - those of Franco and Primo de Rivera. Long a sacred place for Spain’s fascists, successive governments have tried to neutralise its significance, but the Zapatero administration is the first to directly challenge the right to use it to hold political rallies.
Many of those in attendance on Saturday seemed sanguine about the new law. Jorge Espinos, a 21-year-old economics student, does not believe the government has the will to defy the fascists. “We will come regardless … I am here because I am Spanish, and Catholic, to honour the memory of our Caudillo, the purest sword in Europe,” before proudly adding: “My grandfather killed 156 reds with his machine gun in Galicia in 1936, and then went off to eat seafood.”
Javier Astorga Vagara, a 38-year-old estate agent and Falangist, accepted that it might be the last time that they could gather to sing the fascist anthem Cara al Sol (Face to the sun) and chant their political slogans. “We won the civil war,” he says, “so they [the socialists] feel they have to win something, by removing our symbols”. But he says he does not mind and that there are more important battles to fight: most importantly the increasing numbers of immigrants in Spain.
This year’s anniversary comes at a particularly sensitive time, with tensions high following the stabbing to death last weekend of a 16-year-old anti-fascist activist by a neo-nazi in Madrid. Carlos Javier’s death sparked demonstrations in Madrid and Barcelona over the weekend, with riot police out in force to prevent disturbances between anti-fascist and extreme-right groups.
With elections set for next spring, many fear that the oft-repeated concept of the “two Spains”, divided between left and right, is being played out in the political sphere as well as in the streets. The conservative opposition People’s party fiercely opposed the historical memory law, accusing the government of unnecessarily raking up the past. “The only thing the law will create is problems and division. Why do we need to create problems … where there were none,” asked the party’s leader, Mariano Rajoy.
Standing in the winter sunshine outside Franco’s tomb, Ricardo - who has brought his wife and child from Madrid for what he describes as a “memorable day” - believes there are now two Spains: “But the other half, they’re not really Spanish. They want to separate from our country, and let immigrants in to run the place.”
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The fascist dictator Francisco Franco takes a walk with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in 1940
