Mom Arrested for Washing Kid's Mouth With Soap

This will become increasingly prevalent as time passes, because the State wants you to know your children do not belong to you; they belong to them. Any excuse they can use to crack you over the head with, like this non-abusive, traditional remedy for children with filthy mouths, they'll use. Don't let your child fall and bruise his or her leg. That's child abuse. Don't let them scrape their knee. Child abuse. Don't yell at them. Don't lock them in their room. Don't send them to bed without dinner. Big Brother is watching, and Big Brother wants your children. If you haven't figured this out yet, CPS is nothing more than a child kidnapping ring.

NBC News -



A Palm Bay woman and her boyfriend were arrested Monday for child abuse after the couple went old school to punish their 8-year-old daughter for swearing.

They washed her mouth out with soap.

We don't know about you, but we would petition President Obama and Congress to make it mandatory for every parent to carry a bar of Irish Spring in their back pockets with all the profanity kids use today.

Police claim Adriyanna Herdener and Wilfredo Rivera went too far by placing a bar of soap in the girl's mouth and letting it stay for 10 minutes. Herdener did not intervene in the discipline.

The girl eventually vomited and Rivera took her to the local hospital, where hospital staff called police.

No one wants a child to be hurt or inhumanely punished, but parents' discipline choices in this country have come down to calling Dr. Phil or hiding the joysticks to the Wii.

Next time your kid has a potty mouth, just give them some gum.

The government's private army

Jack D Douglas
LewRockwell.com

Chuck Baldwin's excellent essay below gives some more details on recent moves by the Obama forces to seize direct control over U.S. police, quasi-private military forces, and to create new forces under control of the Party.

Bill Marina and I paid a great deal of detailed attention to Bush's explosive use of the Blackwater, etc., private armies in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. There are now a few good books on them. In general, these mercenaries – highly paid, mostly former Special Forces from the U.S., Israel, South Africa, etc. – outnumber the regular military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan and beyond. The statement that the U.S. forces in Afghanistan are 65,000 is a preposterous Big Lie to hide the reality and the vast costs. These forces are the ones that use hollow point sniper bullets for long-range murders of civilians, etc. They probably use other war crimes materials like white phosphorus against personnel, depleted uranium shells in Iraq, etc.

There is a long history of their use by the U.S. – going back certainly to the Privateers; but those operated under prize-taking rules that were international and provided incentives to minimize death and destruction, not maximize them. The U.S. Navy started a few decades ago using private, contracted ships working with the Navy ships to carry fuel, food, etc., to keep the official number of ships down, so the public would not know how huge the Navy really was when the contract ships were counted. [I started seeing gray painted ships in the San Diego harbor with colored stripes along their sides and found out from Navy men they were the contract ships. They looked like regular Navy ships except for the colored stripe, which was small and could only be seen up close.]

Bush started using secret Special Ops masquerading as employees of Big Corps., notably Halliburton's KBR, very early in Afghanistan, as we learned from a very close professional friend and co-worker of a very old friend of mine. He was a great sniper who was called up overnight and sent off to shoot peasants in Afghanistan suspected of being Taliban, etc. [The U.S. mercenaries guard Karzai in depth and are everywhere in Afghanistan and I expect are now used in Pakistan.]

Blackwater tried a few years ago to build a huge international training camp for their mercenaries in San Diego County. That led to a huge outcry and struggle. As far as I know, it remains on ice. The details of that are in The San Diego Union-Tribune archives.

I believe the crucial, secret part of McChrystal's New Plan is to vastly increase the use of drone Hellfires, Special Ops air strikes, and secret sniper murders in Afghanistan and Pakistan against suspected al-Queda and Taliban forces and sympathizers. McChrystal was the head of U.S. Special Ops "black ops" [murder squads of snipers, etc.] when Obama appointed him to be the head of all U.S. forces in Afpak. I believe Obama appointed him for the purpose of increasing the Murder Squad programs and this has led to an explosion of Afpak support for the guerillas and rage against Karzai and the U.S. Pakistan is fiercely resisting this, but that just means the U.S. has to vastly increase the bribes.

I just got an e-mail in response to one of my Afpak essays Lew Rockwell posted in which the writer says he is SF [Special Forces] and has worked in eleven countries propping up dictators for the U.S. [He objects to my calling these "black ops programs" of the Special Ops "Death Squads" – which has never been any official term used by anyone but is the unofficial term used since Vietnam, the CIA's vast Phoenix Program, John Kerry's "fast boats" running agents up the Mekong, etc.] I think most of these former SF mercenaries are totally cynical like mercenaries throughout history. They know it's all Big Lies and BS, but they get paid vast sums to sign up, reenlist, annual salaries, bonuses, expenses....

They are like the Condotierri in the Italian City States, totally mercenary and very dangerous.

The SF guy who wrote me was morally outraged that I oppose the SF executions by snipers. He insists that this is better than bombing the whole house or village but will not consider the possibility it might be best to work morally and legally to root out murderers on all sides. I told him about the U.S. military commander in San Francisco in 1906 who moved his 1,700 troops into the streets after the earthquake to maintain law and order, pushing aside the police trained to do these things. Some of his men wound up executing supposed looters and then doing the looting themselves.

I certainly think Obama's Civilian Defense Force is intended to be an auxiliary Party force, very similar to the Sturmabteilung [the infamous SA] of the Nazi's that grew out of the Freikorps and became the Party's private army, as Trotsky's Red Army was the private army of the Bolsheviki, not of the state. Hitler was himself eventually threatened by the SA and killed off the leaders and folded the troops into the new SS, which became the private army of Hitler, swearing allegiance to him personally in the Nuremberg Sportsplatz ceremonies, rather than being subject to the orders of the German General Staff, the Wehrmacht. The Soviet Party always maintained heavily armed special forces around Moscow responsible to the Party. They also had their own more loyal Spetznetz forces, very much like the US Special Forces, and the Party-controlled Cheka-NKVD-KGB, GRU, and MVD. Putin came from the KGB but controlled all of them in the new regime. [He still does informally.] The US Imperial President controls the 19 [plus secret-secret units] secret police from the FBI and CIA to DEA and BATF, but they do not have heavy weapons. They have more direct control of some of the Special Forces for that but I do not know the details of such secret matters.

The U.S. Constitution provides for the state-controlled reserves, national guards for emergencies, etc. The federal government is moving to take control of the state military forces upon command of the President.

Obama's military and secret police forces are moving very fast and across the entire spectrum of forces to get direct control of all major forces in the U.S. and around the world and to create new ones under direct control from the beginning of the Party. Hitler had to move slowly over several years because the General Staff hated him. The Obama police and military czars are moving extremely fast and across the whole spectrum of forces. They are running great risks of a catastrophic showdown with Iran and Pakistan and other nations to build their military image as Winners. Iran alone can shut down the Persian Gulf oil and cripple the U.S. economy already in Depression II. They have also seized control of all of the top of the vast U.S. financial system, plan to impose the Fed as a totalitarian czar over finance permanently, have seized the biggest insurer – AIG, the biggest manufacturer – GM, and are planning to seize the vast power industry, health care, education, the internet ["in times of emergency declared by Obama"], and no doubt any other great concentrations of power. All U.S. concentrations of power will be under the direct control of Obama through the Party political commissars, popularly known as "Czars" because they have under the Emperor totalitarian powers. Ravenwood may be fictional. These are brutal facts.

I assume Obama and The Party have only the "best of intentions." They apparently want to save us from all the agonies of real freedom and leave us only with the mundane choices among tooth paste brands manufactured by Big Corps. working under the direct Consumer Protection Czar in the White House.

Being an unregenerate, old-fashioned American I fear that all of their best intentions will not save us in the short run from the agonies of Imperial and bureaucratic tyranny and that in the long run they will discover as the Soviets did that central-planning does not work. Their goal, like that of Lenin, is Utopia Today, but I fear they will produce very soon the awful reality of Systemic Implosion and an American Armageddon. The Soviets had the U.S. and the Europeans to hold them up while they divested themselves of the most awful concentrations of central planning power, but the U.S. is too big to be held up. We will implode.

October 10, 2009

Who Will Protect Our Children from the Police?

Will Grigg -

The Dolton, Illinois police officer caught on camera assaulting a helpless, mentally handicapped 16-year-old student has been identified as 38-year-old Christopher Lloyd.

Unlike the veteran character actor who shares that name (best known for playing eccentric characters such as “Reverend” Jim Ignatowski on the TV series “Taxi,” Klingon commander Kruge in Star Trek III, and Doc Brown in the Back to the Future series), Officer Lloyd is a violent criminal who should never have been given access to school-age youngsters.

This morning’s Chicago Tribune reports that Lloyd was arrested last month on charges of raping a woman in Indiana. Court documents allege that Lloyd, who had previously threatened the woman with a knife, held a pillow over her face while sexually assaulting her.

In spite of being accused of assault rape, Lloyd was permitted to roam the halls of a school in the Chicago suburb while armed and clothed in both a state-issued costume and the supposed authority to inflict violence on those who didn’t render immediate and unconditional obedience to him.

In February of last year, Lloyd gunned down a man named Cornel McKinney, at the time his ex-wife’s new husband. Lloyd shot McKinney twenty-four times, but wasn’t prosecuted because the Chicago Police Department, for which he worked at the time, accepted his claim that the shooting was an act of self-defense.

Even though no criminal charges were filed against him, Lloyd was dismissed from the force, but shortly thereafter found another job as a policeman in Dolton.

The Dolton police force terminated Lloyd’s employment last Wednesday, and the ex-officer is now in jail in Lake County, Indiana awaiting trial on the rape charge.

While it’s true that, even today, there are many honorable and decent men working as police officers, we must understand that the uniform is a bit like Forrest Gump’s proverbial box of chocolates: You never know what you’ll find inside. In this case, however, the hidden surprise may be a pretty unpleasant one.

A Nation of Snoops

Counterpunch -

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops are calling for a new system of “citizen watch” programs, allegedly to help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that city.

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton.

Back in the late 1970s, together with a band of other doughty journalists, including Tommy Thompson, Ron Ridenour, Ben Pleasants, I co-founded and ran a spunky little news weekly called the LA Vanguard. In the course of just one year, we broke stories about secret “security offices” run by local phone companies (Pacific Telephone and GTE) which provided unlisted numbers and credit information to police and other government agencies without requiring a warrant, about the killing of unarmed citizens by police, about the LAPD’s “shoot to kill” gun use policy, about judges in landlord-tenant cases who were slumlords themselves, and many other stories that were being ignored by the LA Times and the rest of the local establishment media.

For our efforts, we found out years later, we were targeted by the LAPD’s “red squad,” known at the time as the Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID), for an intensive program of spying that including planting a young cop, Connie Milazzo, as a member of our editorial collective. We only learned of Milazzo’s real identity years later when she admitted disclosed it herself to a judge in a public hearing (she wanted to avoid being sent to the county lockup along with a group of activists she had “joined” undercover who had all been arrested during a protest and who were refusing to provide their identities to the court).

A subsequent lawsuit filed with the help of the ACLU of Southern California, eventually settled for a payment of $1.8 million by the City of Los Angeles, disclosed that the PDID had for years been using as many as 20 undercover cops to infiltrate and spy on over 200 legal political and activist organizations in the Los Angeles area, gathering rooms full of files on everyone from members of the National Organization for Women to the staffs of certain members of the city council. We also learned that the LAPD was providing those files to a shadowy private outfit in San Francisco called Western Goals, which had links to the ultra-right John Birch Society. Western Goals was apparently seeking to serve as a private repository of dossiers on leftists and political activists collected by local police all around the country in a kind of end run around the restrictions on domestic spying by the FBI that had been imposed after the post-Watergate revelations about the abuses of the COINTELPRO era.

This is why Bratton’s idea stinks. Local police, because they are local, are even more prone to rogue activities that will never be exposed or monitored than are federal police.

As accommodating of police-state tactics as Congress has been, especially since 9-11, at least some members of that body have raised concerns and demanded investigations of some of those abuses by organizations like the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. But city councils have been notoriously uninterested in monitoring the unconstitutional activities of their local police around the country, who have extremely powerful political connections and the support of local media establishments.

Any attempt to organize a citizen’s watch program to look for suspicious activity is bound to devolve into a police program of spying on those who are outside of the “norm”: minorities, leftists, activists, loners, people with alternative life-styles, artists, etc.

Let’s be honest. America faces no existential threat from terrorism. It does face such threats from rampaging climate change, political corruption, corporate power, economic collapse, and many other things, but it is hardly threatened by terrorism, which has killed far fewer people even in 2001 than have auto defects, contaminated food, and insurance company denials of care.

Back in 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration stoked an irrational fear of terrorism in order to win passage of the Patriot Act and acceptance of other actions, such as creation of a program by the National Security Agency to use supercomputers to monitor millions of Americans’ electronic communications. Many of those threats to freedom remain in place today. Now Chief Bratton and his compatriots in police departments around the country are trying to stoke that same irrational fear of terrorism to move the country even further towards a police-state mentality.

The last thing we need in this era of corporate-media-induced conformity and citizen passivity is a bunch of self-appointed citizen snoops calling in to the cops with reports on every neighbor who looks or acts a little bit different.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com

Police stop more than 1 million people on street

This is all about teaching you to be subservient. Slaves. They tell you they're just trying to crack down on crime, but the line between innocent until proven and guilty until proven innocent is blurred, so that your mere presence outside of your home - and likely someday soon in your home - makes you a suspect. A suspect of what? They won't know, until after you're searched.

Associated Press -

NEW YORK – A teenager trying to get into his apartment after school is confronted by police. A man leaving his workplace chooses a different route back home to avoid officers who roam a particular street.

These and hundreds of thousands of other Americans in big cities have been stopped on the street by police using a law-enforcement practice called stop-and-frisk that alarms civil libertarians but is credited by authorities with helping reduce crime.

Police in major U.S. cities stop and question more than a million people each year — a sharply higher number than just a few years ago. Most are black and Hispanic men. Many are frisked, and nearly all are innocent of any crime, according to figures gathered by The Associated Press.

And the numbers are rising at the same time crime rates are dropping.

Ronnie Carr's experience was typical: He was fumbling with his apartment door after school in Brooklyn when plainclothes officers flashed their badges.

"What are you doing here?" one asked, as they rifled through his backpack and then his pockets. The black teenager stood there, quiet and nervous, and waited.

Carr said the officers told him they stopped him because he looked suspicious peeking in the windows. He explained that he had lost his keys. Twenty minutes later, the officers left. Carr was not arrested or cited with any offense.

"I felt bad, like I did something wrong," he said.

Civil liberties groups say the practice is racist and fails to deter crime. Police departments maintain it is a necessary tool that turns up illegal weapons and drugs and prevents more serious crime.

Police records indicate that officers are drawn to suspicious behavior: furtive movements, actions that indicate someone may be serving as a lookout, anything that suggests a drug deal, or a person carrying burglary tools such as a slim jim or pry bar.

The New York Police Department is among the most vocal defenders of the practice. Commissioner Raymond Kelly said recently that officers may stop as many as 600,000 people this year. About 10 percent are arrested.

"This is a proven law enforcement tactic to fight and deter crime, one that is authorized by criminal procedure law," he said.

The practice is perfectly legal. A 1968 Supreme Court decision established the benchmark of "reasonable suspicion" — a standard that is lower than the "probable cause" needed to justify an arrest.

But in the mid-1990s, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner William Bratton made stop-and-frisk an integral part of the city's law enforcement, relying on the "broken windows" theory that targeting low-level offenses helps prevent bigger ones.

Street stops started to go up, and overall crime dropped dramatically in a once-dangerous city.

Last year, New York police stopped 531,159 people, more than five times the number in 2002. Fifty-one percent of those stopped were black, 32 percent Hispanic and 11 percent white.

Not all stops are the same. Some people are just stopped and questioned. Others have their bag or backpack searched. And sometimes police conduct a full pat-down.

David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on street stops, said few searches yield weapons or drugs. And the more people are searched, the more innocent people are hassled.

"The hit rate goes down because you're being less selective about how you're doing this. That has a cost. It's not free," Harris said.

When officers make a stop, they are required to fill out a form, including the time and location of the stop and why police were suspicious. Age, race and whether the person was frisked are also recorded.

In Philadelphia, stops nearly doubled to more than 200,000 from 2007 to 2008. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter deployed an "aggressive" stop-and-frisk policy in the year since his election in November 2007 and overall crime has dropped.

In Los Angeles, where Bratton recently stepped down as police commissioner, pedestrian stops have doubled in the past six years to 244,038 in 2008. The number of people stopped in cars is higher.

About 15 percent of the stops resulted in arrests in 2002, compared with about 30 percent in 2008, according to an analysis of the data by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

Several other major police departments do not keep street-stop statistics or do not release them. Chicago police refused to release numbers to the AP. Boston police say they do not keep the records. The New Orleans department is not required to keep statistics on race and pedestrian stops.

RAND, an independent research agency hired by the New York Police Department to analyze street-stop data in 2007 after public outcry, found little racial profiling. It said the raw statistics "distorted the magnitude and, at times, the existence of racially biased policing."

The NYPD continues to monitor the issue, but after the RAND analysis, officials agreed that large-scale restructuring was unnecessary.

Kelly has warned against more simplistic data reviews.

"There are 8.4 million people in New York City. That number swells to more than 10 million every work day. Police are responsible for more than 800,000 summonses and arrests annually based on the higher standard of probable cause," Kelly said.

"Under the circumstances, it's not surprising that we make 500,000 or even 600,000 stops based on the less stringent standard of reasonable suspicion."

Continue reading...

The government has declared war...on you

It is in vain, sir, to extentuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace--but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! - Patrick Henry

It is not yet time for armed revolution. But we can expect Boston Massacre-type events to continue as the people begin to wake up and the government continues to crack down.

Mike Ferner
LewRockwell.com

No longer the stuff of disturbing futuristic fantasies, an arsenal of “crowd control munitions,” including one that reportedly made its debut in the U.S., was deployed with a massive, overpowering police presence in Pittsburgh during last week’s G-20 protests.

Nearly 200 arrests were made and civil liberties groups charged the many thousands of police (most transported on Port Authority buses displaying “PITTSBURGH WELCOMES THE WORLD”), from as far away as Arizona and Florida with overreacting…and they had plenty of weaponry with which to do it.

Bean bags fired from shotguns, CS (tear) gas, OC (Oleoresin Capsicum) spray, flash-bang grenades, batons and, according to local news reports, for the first time on the streets of America, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD).

Mounted in the turret of an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC), I saw the LRAD in action twice in the area of 25th, Penn and Liberty Streets of Lawrenceville, an old Pittsburgh neighborhood. Blasting a shrill, piercing noise like a high-pitched police siren on steroids, it quickly swept streets and sidewalks of pedestrians, merchants and journalists and drove residents into their homes, but in neither case were any demonstrators present. The APC, oversized and sinister for a city street, together with lines of police in full riot gear looking like darkly threatening Michelin Men, made for a scene out of a movie you didn’t want to be in.

As intimidating as this massive show of armed force and technology was, the good burghers of Pittsburgh and their fellow citizens in the Land of the Brave and Home of the Free ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Tear gas and pepper spray are nothing to sniff at and, indeed, have proven fatal a surprising number of times, but they have now become the old standbys compared to the list below that’s already at or coming soon to a police station or National Guard headquarters near you. Proving that “what goes around, comes around,” some of the new Property Protection Devices were developed by a network of federally-funded, university-based research institutes like one in Pittsburgh itself, Penn State’s Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies.

• Raytheon Corp.'s Active Denial System, designed for crowd control in combat zones, uses an energy beam to induce an intolerable heating sensation, like a hot iron placed on the skin. It is effective beyond the range of small arms, in excess of 400 meters. Company officials have been advised they could expand the market by selling a smaller, tripod-mounted version for police forces.

• M5 Modular Crowd Control Munition, with a range of 30 meters "is similar in operation to a claymore mine, but it delivers...a strong, nonpenetrating blow to the body with multiple sub-munitions (600 rubber balls)."

• Long Range Acoustic Device or "The Scream," is a powerful megaphone the size of a satellite dish that can emit sound "50 times greater than the human threshold for pain" at close range, causing permanent hearing damage. The L.A. Times wrote U.S. Marines in Iraq used it in 2004. It can deliver recorded warnings in Arabic and, on command, emit a piercing tone..."[For] most people, even if they plug their ears, [the device] will produce the equivalent of an instant migraine," says Woody Norris, chairman of American Technology Corp., the San Diego firm that produces the weapon. "It will knock [some people] on their knees." CBS News reported in 2005 that the Israeli Army first used the device in the field to break up a protest against Israel's separation wall. "Protesters covered their ears and grabbed their heads, overcome by dizziness and nausea, after the vehicle-mounted device began sending out bursts of audible, but not loud, sound at intervals of about 10 seconds...A military official said the device emits a special frequency that targets the inner ear."

• In "Non-lethal Technologies: An Overview," Lewer and Davison describe a lengthy catalog of new weaponry including the "Directed Stick Radiator," a hand-held system based on the same technology as The Scream. "It fires high intensity ‘sonic bullets' or pulses of sound between 125-150db for a second or two. Such a weapon could, when fully developed, have the capacity to knock people off their feet."

• The Penn State facility is testing a "Distributed Sound and Light Array Debilitator" a.k.a. the "puke ray." The colors and rhythm of light are absorbed by the retina and disorient the brain, blinding the victim for several seconds. In conjunction with disturbing sounds it can make the person stumble or feel nauseated. Foreign Policy in Focus reports that the Department of Homeland Security, with $1 million invested for testing the device, hopes to see it "in the hands of thousands of policemen, border agents and National Guardsmen" by 2010.

• Spider silk is cited in the University of Bradford’s Non-Lethal Weapons Research Project, Report #4 (pg. 20) as an up-and-comer. “A research collaboration between the University of New Hampshire and the U.S. Army Natick Research, Development and Engineering Center is looking into the use of spider silk as a non-lethal ‘entanglement’ material for disabling people. They have developed a method for producing recombinant spider silk protein using E. coli and are trying to develop methods to produce large quantities of these fibres.”

• New Scientist reports that the (I'm not making this up) Inertial Capacitive Incapacitator (ICI), developed by the Physical Optics Corporation of Torrance, California, uses a thin-film storage device charged during manufacture that only discharges when it strikes the target. It can be incorporated into a ring-shaped aerofoil and fired from a standard grenade launcher at low velocity, while still maintaining a flat trajectory for maximum accuracy.

• Aiming beyond Tasers, the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, (FY 2009 budget: $1B) the domestic equivalent of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), plans to develop wireless weapons effective over greater distances, such as in an auditorium or sports stadium, or on a city street. One such device, the Piezer, uses piezoelectric crystals that produce voltage when they are compressed. A 12-gauge shotgun fires the crystals, stunning the target with an electric shock on impact. Lynntech of College Station, Texas, is developing a projectile Taser that can be fired from a shotgun or 40-mm grenade launcher to increase greatly the weapon's current range of seven meters.

• "Off the Rocker and On the Floor: Continued Development of Biochemical Incapacitating Weapons," a report by the Bradford Disarmament Research Centre revealed that in 1992, the National Institute of Justice contracted with Lawrence Livermore National Lab to review clinical anesthetics for use by special ops military forces and police. LLNL concluded the best option was an opioid, like fentanyl, effective at very low doses compared to morphine. Combined with a patch soaked in DMSO (dimethylsufoxide, a solvent) and fired from an air rifle, fentanyl could be delivered to the skin even through light clothing. Another recommended application for the drug was mixed with fine powder and dispersed as smoke.

• After upgrades, the infamous "Puff the Magic Dragon" gunship from the Vietnam War is now the AC-130. "Non-Lethal Weaponry: Applications to AC-130 Gunships," observes that "With the increasing involvement of US military in operations other than war..." the AC-130 "would provide commanders a full range of non-lethal weaponry from an airborne platform which was not previously available to them." The paper concludes in part that "As the use of non-lethal weapons increases and it becomes valid and acceptable, more options will become available."

• Prozac and Zoloft are two of over 100 pharmaceuticals identified by the Penn State College of Medicine and the university's Applied Research Lab for further study as "non-lethal calmatives." These Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), noted the Penn State study, "...are found to be highly effective for numerous behavioral disturbances encountered in situations where a deployment of a non-lethal technique must be considered. This class of pharmaceutical agents also continues to be under intense development by the pharmaceutical industry...New compounds under development (WO 09500194) are being designed with a faster onset of action. Drug development is continuing at a rapid rate in this area due to the large market for the treatment of depression (15 million individuals in North America)...It is likely that an SSRI agent can be identified in the near future that will feature a rapid rate of onset."

In Pittsburgh last week, an enormously expensive show of police and weaponry, intended for “security” of the G20 delegates, simultaneously shut workers out of downtown jobs for two days, forced gasping students and residents back into their dormitories and homes, and turned journalists’ press passes into quaint, obsolete reminders of a bygone time.

Most significant of all, however, was what Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania ACLU, told the Associated Press: “It's not just intimidation, it's disruption and in some cases outright prevention of peaceful protesters being able to get their message out.”

This article originally appeared on GlobalResearch.ca.

Airports To Screen Passengers For H1N1 Symptoms

The slaves love it. "I'm all for it!" Just like they love stripping down for TSA goons, letting the perverts grope their wives and daughters, and walking through scanners that lets them see them naked. They love it, and they thank them for it. Never mind that even the media is now forced to report that there is no second resurgence of the swine flu, because it's a weak virus. Relinquish your rights anyway. Get the vaccine, and let them take your temperature before you get on the plane. It's all FYOG.

CBS News -

With the holiday season just a few weeks away, health officials fear the swine flu will pick up right along with air travel.

New government guidelines are on their way, designed to help keep passengers healthy.

This flu season, airport staff across the nation won't just be screening for security threats. They'll also be looking out for health threats – people who look like they may have the H1N1 virus.

The government says that people traveling internationally may be screened for the H1N1 virus as they leave or enter the U.S.

"It feels a little bit overboard," Stanford, Conn. resident Derek Ferguson said.

The government warns that some passengers may be asked to pass through a screening device, have their temperatures taken, answer questions about their health, and even be quarantined if someone on the flight shows symptoms of H1N1.

"I'm all for it, I really am," Mount Vernon resident Rosa Raspaldo said. "Because – guaranteed – if people are coughing on the plane, all of those germs will be spread around."

But the H1N1 virus isn't just a danger in the skies. Buses and trains can also be a breeding ground for germs. Millions of riders climb aboard every day, and that has many taking precautions.

"I keep antiseptic in my purse and I use it all the time," said New York City resident Rose Donato.

Donato is a daily commuter, and says she isn't relying on others to take responsibility for her health.

"We're in Grand Central – I'm sure there are people that are sick and are walking around, and are spraying their germs all over the place," Donato said.

New York, along with other transportation agencies around the country, is posting signs reminding customers to keep their sneezes and coughs to themselves. It's common sense advice that doctors echo.

"Get vaccinated, wash your hands frequently, and you've really done the most that almost anybody can do to protect against influenza," Dr. Michael Phillips, of New York University's Langone Medical Center, said.

The first doses of swine flu vaccine arrived earlier this week, but new polls show that many people don't plan to get it. Flu shot or not, experts say that healthy habits will help make sure that, when you travel, germs don't take the trip with you.

If you have questions about the swine flu, check out our online resource guide here, including what you need for a swine flu survival kit. You can also check out information on screenings for travelers here.

MSNBC Eugenicist: Health workers must get flu shot or quit

Resistance is futile. Quit your bitching, do as the media and the government tell you, or toss your livelihood in the trash. This is America, where you are free ... to do as we tell you to do.

MSNBC -

Arthur Caplan, Ph.D. • E-mail

Enough already with the whining, moaning, demonstrating and protesting by health care workers. Doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, nurses’ aides, and anyone else who has regular contact with patients ought to be required to get a flu shot or find another line of work.

The California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee have issued statements that individuals should be able to refuse the vaccine. The New York State Public Employees Federation said that “vaccination for influenza is not as effective in the control of disease as vaccination for diseases such as polio, measles and mumps.” Other health groups wanted to know why those who preferred to shun the shot could not simply wear masks.

Last week hundreds of people showed up in Albany, N.Y., at a rally to protest New York State’s plan to require all state workers to get both an annual flu shot and a swine flu vaccine. Most at the rally said their rights were being infringed.

Excuse me? What rights might those be?

Apparently the doctor has never read the Constitution of the United States, or the Nuremberg Code.

The right to infect your patient and kill them? The right to create havoc in the health care workforce if swine flu hits hard? The right to ignore all the evidence of safety and efficacy of vaccines thus continuing to promulgate an irrational fear on the part of the public of the best protection babies, pregnant women, the elderly and the frail have against the flu? Those rights?

Many hospitals in Illinois, Washington, Missouri, Georgia and Maryland are putting in place flu shot mandates. My own institution, the University of Pennsylvania Health System and its affiliated, top-ranked Children’s Hospital are leading the way in getting mandates moving. Why? The answer is simple: The vaccine will save lives.

Only half get vaccine

The annual rate of health care workers getting flu shots has been hovering around 50 percent at most institutions for years. The evidence for the toll this low vaccination rate takes on patients and staff has been mounting year after year.

If you can get close to 100 percent vaccination rates you can cut patient death rates from flu by 40 percent. Sick days among doctors and nurses drop by about the same amount. Eleven babies died of swine flu during the last week of September alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With a potentially potent form of swine flu on the horizon, those kind of grim statistics have made hospital infection disease experts sound the alarm to implement mandates to boost vaccination rates.

Nothing works as well as vaccines to prevent getting the flu and transmitting it others.

Here's where you have to stop, because as soon as a doctor tells you there's nothing better you can do to stay healthy than get jabbed with their Nazi - I mean FDA - approved drugs, you know he's got an ulterior motive. Is it because he's a eugenicist, like his colleague John Holdren, Obama's science czar? Or is it because he's a state-sponsored narcotics dealer? Nothing works better, doctor? Not vitamin C or vitamin D? Oh, you can't prescribe those (not yet anyway). I apologize. Here we see what the good doctor thinks of actually taking care of your body to ward off illnesses:

There is no evidence that vitamins, special diets, fresh air or any other alternative ideas does anything to make flu viruses less nasty.

He's lying.

And all we really have to fight swine flu are ventilators, some drugs that may or may not work and the new vaccine.

The medical establishment has been recommending that kids get flu shots forever. The state of New Jersey just put into practice a law requiring flu shots for young schoolchildren in day care and preschool. The U.S. Armed Forces has no time for anyone who will not get a flu shot. If you want to legally immigrate to this country you have to roll up your sleeve. Why should health care workers be treated any differently?

That's an outstanding argument, "Doctor": everyone else has their rights violated, what makes healthcare workers think they're so special? Read more if you like...I'm gonna be - pardon the pun - sick.

NYPD tracking cell phone owners, but foes aren't sure practice is legal

This is how they get away with this. Instead of stating the obvious - that this is a blatant 4th amendment violation - they say, "Well, we're not really sure if it's illegal, but it's alarming." And then instead of curbing the government's power, they rip each others' eyes out over the legality, and the establishment just laughs at them as the program advances under their noses.

NY Daily News -



The NYPD is amassing a database of cell phone users, instructing cops to log serial numbers from suspects' phones in hopes of connecting them to past or future crimes.

In the era of disposable, anonymous cell phones, the file could be a treasure-trove for detectives investigating drug rings and other criminal enterprises, police sources say.

"It's used to help build cases," one source said of the new initiative.

"It doesn't replace the human element, like debriefing prisoners, but it's another tool to use that we didn't have in the past."

A recent internal memo says that when cops make an arrest, they should remove the suspect's cell phone battery to avoid leakage - then jot down the International Mobile Equipment Identity number.

The IMEI number is registered with the service provider whenever a call is made.

And that data could allow a detective to match, for example, a cell phone used by one suspect to a phone used by another.

There are limits to the data's usefulness - all Chinese-made cells sold in India have the same number and some overseas cells are embedded with fake numbers.

Still, civil libertarians are alarmed by the new policy since normally a warrant is needed to obtain information such as calls made or numbers in an address book.

New York Civil Liberties Union associate legal director Christopher Dunn said it appears the NYPD is "taking phones apart to get information" without warrants.

"It's hard to believe they feel there's a real need to take out the battery to prevent leakage," he said. "Instead, it looks like they're doing this to circumvent the warrant process."

The cell phone information joins another database of more than 20 million 911 callers that the NYPD has been building. It has paid off.

In one case involving a 911 call, detectives solved a burglary pattern after the suspect left a slip of paper with his cell number on it at a crime scene, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said.

The phone was disposable so no owner information was available, but police were able to track it to the suspect because he had used it to make a 911 call after he was assaulted.

The NYPD started collecting 911 data for incidents involving a police response in 2003. Four years ago, it began putting the information into its new computer nerve center, the Real Time Crime Center.

Report: Pentagon’s burn weapon could end up in police hands

Raw Story
Thursday, Oct 1st, 2009

A powerful hand-held weapon being developed by the Pentagon could end up in police hands, says a report in a UK science journal.

The Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate has been developing the Thermal Laser System since 2005, with the purpose of developing a weapon that could disperse crowds or incapacitate individuals by causing them to experience burning sensations in their skin.

According to NewScientist magazine, the weapon has evolved into a rifle-mounted instrument, and there are plans for a hand-held model that could be used by police forces.

News of the possibility that police departments could obtain the burn weapon will likely concern civil-liberties advocates, who have been watching with alarm as the Taser conducted-energy weapon has gone into regular use in police forces across the United States.

As NewScientist notes, the weapon is still in the testing phase and kinks have yet to be worked out.

The Gizmag blog reported last week that “the infrared [rays] of the Thermal Laser System can be blocked by clothing – fine if you’re trying to subdue a group of nudists, but problematic otherwise.”

NewScientist reports:

[T]ests at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s human effectiveness lab have established that the skin heating effect causes no permanent damage – suggesting it may have “military utility”. The tests also highlighted areas in need of improvement before troops can use it, says lab manager Semih Kumru – though what those features are has not been revealed.

The proposed system is rifle mounted, with a sight above it and a visible low-power laser beam that the soldier uses to aim the invisible infrared laser. The solid-state laser system is battery-powered, and could become hand-held “in the near future”…

“I’d like to know why they want another advanced pain compliance weapon like this,” says Steve Wright, non-lethal weapons analyst at Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. “Persuading by pain rather than brain – through conversation – has led to push-button torture in the past. If it leaves no mark on the skin how will anyone prove it’s been abused?”

Hardin, Montana, tip of the iceberg?

There seems to be plenty of conflicting reports as to the significance of this story, but you can be sure, APF/Blackwater-type mercenary firms are absolutely part of the police state control grid they are building for you. Yes, for you, because you're "maybe a potential terrorist".

Newark Examiner -

Desperate times call for desperate measures. This is most likely the culprit in the situation now unfolding in Hardin, Montana. All across America, small towns are struggling to survive. Many rural areas have discovered the correctional industry as an easy fix for hard economic times. However, a look behind the scenes reveals that this small country town may have got more than it bargained for.

Private security firms like Wackenhut have been around for years and although they may have raised an eyebrow, no one thought too much of a private company overseeing the containment of prison inmates. After all, it provided jobs and nobody seems to be getting hurt.


(AP photo)

Suspicion was aroused in Hardin when a number of Mercedes were spotted with an unfamiliar decal and the words "Hardin Police" prominently displayed. This along with the fact that the new correctional facility was abuzz with fresh activity prompted some questions. Problems began to arise when questions were asked and answers were not provided.

The facility had been under controversy since it had been built as a detention facility but did not meet the requirements for a correctional facility. Once the building was completed, Hardin officials were unable to secure a contract for the facility. Enter APF. Details remain sketchy about "American Police Force"; however, in an article in the Helenair newspaper, a source from APF revealed that his boss was retired U.S. Army colonel Richard Culver. Thanks to some investigative snooping by Ron Paul supporters from the DailyPaul.com, particularly "Liberty_Belle", on the connection between the American Police Force and Richard Culver, he is an executive with the security firm International SOS out of Trevose, PA. Culver is profiled in Portfolio.com's "Job of the Week" spotlight which states that in this particular job one could expect to earn between $100,000 to $350,000 annually. Not only does ISOS provide security services it touts itself as the world's largest "medical and security assistance company". In fact, it is keeping tabs on the swine flu pandemic and has its own "pandemic preparedness" page. Two items of note on this page under the topic "International SOS Capability" are "Medical Evacuation" and "RMR Capability".

Whether or not APF's duties were to extend beyond the detention facility is unclear. It is also unclear as to the relationship between APF and International SOS, other than sharing a security director. However, one disturbing fact regarding International SOS is that it is listed as a member of the International Peace Operations Association, which at one time provided an umbrella for Blackwater, and currently resides over Dyncorp as well as numerous other security and medical agencies. The IPOA's Wikipedia page defines the group as "created to support the burgeoning private military industry." For one, I am uncomfortable with the "burgeoning" of this particular industry, but maybe I have watched too many superhero movies lately.

What is disturbing in all of this is the growing trend which the government displays in "outsourcing" the fundamental responsibilities it has under the Constitution; namely, "to promote the general welfare, and to provide for the common defense". In a recent report, Moshe Schwartz, Specialist in Defense Acquisition, reported that the U.S. Department of Defense had 200,000 contractors and 194,000 military troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He further states that,

DOD officials have stated that the military’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with Congressional attention and legislation, has focused DOD’s attention on the importance of contractors to operational success.

In other words, Congress is well aware that contractors now outnumber U.S. militiary forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The use of civilian personnel during war raises numerous concerns. Not only the obvious concerns regarding logistics, discipline, safety and protocol, but concerns regarding the reporting of

casualties and overall progress of the campaign. The reported torture of Iraqi prisoners, for example, takes on a completely different focus with the introduction of mercenary groups.

Overseas activities are not the only areas of concern regarding these para-military organizations. During Katrina, Blackwater troops were used extensively and were placed in positions of having to disarm American citizens. What are the ramifications of a private, civilian army violating the first and second amendment rights of American citizens for the purpose of financial gain? Numerous officers during the recent protests at the G 20 summit in Pittsburgh were unable to be identified by insignia. Undoubtedly, they were contracted by a private agency such as International SOS.

Ron Paul has stated that government does provide a function which is defined by the Constitution. It is for this purpose that we collectively authorize the government. We do not give authorization with the understanding that these essential functions will be "outsourced", whether by a Democrat or Republican administration.

Update: Justin Elliott of TPMMuckraker reports that APF contracted the facility for purposes of training for law enforcement sniper operations and DNA testing.
Update II: AP reporter Matthew Brown reports APF "Captain" has checkered past, contract elaborate scam.

You Commit Three Felonies a Day

This is of course the point of creating a police state control grid: make it impossible for you to go about your day without breaking the law. You criminal! Don't pass go, don't collect $200...GO TO JAIL.

Wall Street Journal -

When we think about the pace of change in technology, it's usually to marvel at how computing power has become cheaper and faster or how many new digital ways we have to communicate. Unfortunately, this pace of change is increasingly clashing with some of the slower-moving parts of our culture.

Technology moves so quickly we can barely keep up, and our legal system moves so slowly it can't keep up with itself. By design, the law is built up over time by court decisions, statutes and regulations. Sometimes even criminal laws are left vague, to be defined case by case. Technology exacerbates the problem of laws so open and vague that they are hard to abide by, to the point that we have all become potential criminals.

Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate calls his new book "Three Felonies a Day," referring to the number of crimes he estimates the average American now unwittingly commits because of vague laws. New technology adds its own complexity, making innocent activity potentially criminal.

Mr. Silverglate describes several cases in which prosecutors didn't understand or didn't want to understand technology. This problem is compounded by a trend that has accelerated since the 1980s for prosecutors to abandon the principle that there can't be a crime without criminal intent.

In 2001, a man named Bradford Councilman was charged in Massachusetts with violating the wiretap laws. He worked at a company that offered an online book-listing service and also acted as an Internet service provider to book dealers. As an ISP, the company routinely intercepted and copied emails as part of the process of shuttling them through the Web to recipients.

The federal wiretap laws, Mr. Silverglate writes, were "written before the dawn of the Internet, often amended, not always clear, and frequently lagging behind the whipcrack speed of technological change." Prosecutors chose to interpret the ISP role of momentarily copying messages as they made their way through the system as akin to impermissibly listening in on communications. The case went through several rounds of litigation, with no judge making the obvious point that this is how ISPs operate. After six years, a jury found Mr. Councilman not guilty.

Other misunderstandings of the Web criminalize the exercise of First Amendment rights. A Saudi student in Idaho was charged in 2003 with offering "material support" to terrorists. He had operated Web sites for a Muslim charity that focused on normal religious training, but was prosecuted on the theory that if a user followed enough links off his site, he would find violent, anti-American comments on other sites. The Internet is a series of links, so if there's liability for anything in an online chain, it would be hard to avoid prosecution.

Mr. Silverglate, a liberal who wrote a previous book taking the conservative position against political correctness on campuses, is a persistent, principled critic of overbroad statutes. This is a common problem in securities laws, which Congress leaves intentionally vague, encouraging regulators and prosecutors to try people even when the law is unclear. He reminds us of the long prosecution of Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone, which after five years resulted in a reversal of his criminal conviction on vague charges of obstruction of justice.

These miscarriages are avoidable. Under the English common law we inherited, a crime requires intent. This protection is disappearing in the U.S. As Mr. Silverglate writes, "Since the New Deal era, Congress has delegated to various administrative agencies the task of writing the regulations," even as "Congress has demonstrated a growing dysfunction in crafting legislation that can in fact be understood." Prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it. Expect more such prosecutions as Washington adds regulations.

Sometimes legislators know when they make false distinctions based on technology. An "anti-cyberbullying" proposal is making its way through Congress, prompted by the tragic case of a 13-year-old girl driven to suicide by the mother of a neighbor posing as a teenage boy and posting abusive messages on MySpace. The law would prohibit using the Internet to "coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person." Imagine a law that tried to apply this control of speech to letters, editorials or lobbying.

Mr. Silverglate, who will testify against the bill later this week, tells me he figures that "being emotionally distressed is just part of living in a free society." New technologies like the Web, he concludes, "scare legislators because they don't understand them and want to control them, even as they become a normal part of life."

In a complex world of new technologies, there is more need than ever for clear rules of the road. Americans should expect that a crime requires bad intent and also that Congress and prosecutors will try to create clarity, not uncertainty. Our legal system has a lot of catching up to do to work smoothly with the rest of our lives.

Infowars: American Police Force Is A Blackwater Front Group

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, October 1, 2009

UPDATE: The American Police Force website page which clearly states that they run the Blackwater-controlled U.S. Training Center is back online here.

American Police Force, the paramilitary unit patrolling a small town in Montana, has been exposed as being a front group for the disgraced private military contractor Blackwater, now called “Xe”.

The American Police Force website, on a page that has swiftly been deleted but remains cached here, states that APF runs the “U.S. Training Center,” which proves “a wide range of instruction and training for all types of law enforcement organizations, from basic firearms training to complex SWAT tactics,” according to the website.

The Blackwater website carries on its contact page the following address, underneath the logo for U.S. Training Center.

Xe Services, LLC

PO Box 1029

Moyock, NC 27958

Xe Services LLC is the new name of Blackwater USA. In addition, the U.S. Training Center contact page carries the exact same address.

PO Box 1029

Moyock, NC 27958

The U.S. Training Center is run by Blackwater. Indeed, The U.S. Training Center website, can be accessed via Blackwater’s forwarding URL at http://www.blackwaterusa.com/.

According to a February 2009 NY Times article, the U.S. Training Center is a Blackwater “subsidiary that conducts much of the company’s overseas operations and domestic training.” Blackwater changed the name of the facility from its old title, Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, earlier this this when they also changed their own name to “Xe”.

Since Blackwater runs the U.S. Training Center, and the American Police Force stated on its own website, before it was deleted this morning, that it also runs the U.S. Training Center, there is no other conclusion to draw but that APF and Blackwater are one and the same. Or in other words, APF is a front group for Blackwater.

CLICK FOR ENLARGEMENT: The American Police Force website, on a page that has now been deleted, states that the organization runs the U.S. Training Center.

CLICK FOR ENLARGEMENT: From Blackwater’s USA’s website with the U.S. Training Center logo at the top.

CLICK FOR ENLARGEMENT: From the U.S. Training Center website, the contact address is the same as on the Blckwater site becaue Blackwater owns the U.S. Training Center.

A domain registry check confirms that the U.S. Training Center website is registered to XE Services.

The fact that American Police Force attempted to hide the link by deleting the page on their website is further evidence that they are trying to conceal the fact that they are nothing more than a front group for Blackwater.

The U.S. Training Center is the training facility for Blackwater’s front group, American Police Force. This means that the new training facility that “American Police Force” are trying to build in Hardin is another Blackwater training facility.

This also means that Blackwater troops, under the guise of “American Police Force” have been patrolling Hardin, posing as law enforcement, and are also attempting to boss the $27 million dollar detention center recently built in the Montana town.

Many people have expressed suspicions that the convicted criminal running “American Police Force,” Michael Hilton, is not really the leader of the company and is merely a go between for his bosses. This is now confirmed by the revelation that APF is a front group for Blackwater.

APF’s reticence to divulge who their parent company was to reporters is also explained by the fact that they are a Blackwater front.

As the videos below discuss, Blackwater has been widely attacked for its involvement in atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. To have such individuals patrolling the streets of American towns posing as law enforcement and manning detention camps is a chilling precedent and all the more reason why American Police Force – or Blackwater as we should now call them – should be kicked out of Hardin immediately and face criminal charges for violating article 2 section 33 of the Montana Constitution.

The Takeover of Hardin: Tragedy, or Farce?

William Norman Grigg -

Courtesy of the AP by way of the “Piglipstick” blog we learn some important things about “Captain Michael Hilton,” who may be the “Professor Harold Hill” behind the peculiar events in Hardin, Montana:

[...] [W]hen Hilton came to town last week — wearing a military-style uniform and offering three Mercedes SUVs for use by local law enforcement — he was greeted with hugs by some grateful residents. The promise of more than 200 new jobs for a community struggling long before the recession hit had won them over.

But public documents and interviews with Hilton’s associates and legal adversaries offer a different picture, that of a convicted felon with a number of aliases, a string of legal judgments against him, two bankruptcies and a decades-long reputation for deals gone bad.

American Police Force is the company Hilton formed in March to take over the Hardin jail.

“Such schemes you cannot believe,” said Joseph Carella, an Orange County, Calif. doctor and co-defendant with Hilton in a real estate fraud case that resulted in a civil judgment against Hilton and several others.

“The guy’s brilliant. If he had been able to do honest work, he probably would have been a gazillionaire,” Carella said.

Court documents show Hilton has outstanding judgments against him in three civil cases totaling more than $1.1 million.

As for Hilton’s military expertise, including his claim to have advised forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, those interviewed knew of no such feats. Instead, Hilton was described alternately by those who know him as an arts dealer, cook, restaurant owner, land developer, loan broker and car salesman — always with a moneymaking scheme in the works.

Hilton did not return several calls seeking comment. American Police Force attorney Maziar Mafi referred questions to company spokeswoman Becky Shay.

When asked about court records detailing Hilton’s past, Shay replied, “The documents speak for themselves. If anyone has found public documents, the documents are what they are.”

Shay declined comment on Hilton’s military experience….

Hilton, 55, uses the title “captain” when introducing himself and on his business cards. But he acknowledged it was not a military rank.

He said he is naturalized U.S. citizen and native of Montenegro. Aliases for Hilton that appear in court documents include Miodrag Dokovich, Michael Hamilton, Hristian Djokich and Michael Djokovich.

One attorney who dealt with Hilton in a fraud lawsuit referred to him as a “chameleon” and he has a reputation for winning people over with his charm.

His criminal record goes back to at least 1988, when Hilton was arrested in Santa Ana, Calif. for writing bad checks.

Beginning in 1993, Hilton spent six years in prison in California on a dozen counts of grand theft and other charges including illegal diversion of construction funds.

The charges included stealing $20,000 in a real estate swindle in which Hilton convinced an associate to give him a deed on property in Long Beach, Calif., ostensibly as collateral on a loan. Hilton turned around and sold the property to another party but was caught when the buyer contacted the original owner.

> After his release, he got entangled in at least three civil lawsuits alleging fraud or misrepresentation. Those included luring investors to sink money into gold and silver collectible coins; posing as a fine arts dealer in Utah in order to convince a co uple to give him a $100,000 silver statue; and, in the case involving co-defendant Carella, seeking investors for an assisted living complex in Southern California that was never built.

Carella said he was duped into becoming a partner in the development project and that Hilton used Carella’s status as a physician to lure others into the scheme. He was described in court testimony as a “pawn” used by Hilton to lure investors.

Those involved with Hilton say he is an accomplished cook with a flair for the extravagant — wining and dining potential partners, showing up at the Utah couple’s house to negotiate for the silver statue in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

“This is the way we got taken,” said Carolyn Call of Provo, Utah, who said she gave Hilton her family’s silver statue to sell on the open market.

According to court documents, Hilton turned around and gave the statue to an attorney to pay for his services.

Two California attorneys said Wednesday that after learning of Hilton’s latest activities they planned to follow him to Montana to seek payment on the outstanding judgments against him.

“Once I know that there is an asset or some sort of funds to go after, we’ll go after it,” said Call’s attorney, Roger Naghash.

This doesn’t answer everything, but it does suggest that we can stand down from General Quarters — even though we should still keep our powder dry, as it were.

For what it’s worth, here’s a link to my radio program from Monday night in which I first discussed events in Hardin.

TSA to expand use of body scanners

People really think this is a good idea. Really. They think some TSA pervert, who is too inept to hold a real job, looking at the virtual naked body of their wives or daughters or girlfriends, or themselves, is a good thing. Because, you know, someone might sneak a boxcutter on board, or, true story, a fish hook, and use it to bring an entire nation to its knees. I know, I laugh too.

But we shouldn't, because this is serious. And they are going to keep pressing their boots on our necks, harder and harder, until we stand up and say 'enough!' How much humiliation are we going to cheerfully endure? Is it our patriotic duty to be degraded? To be treated with perpetual suspicion, a suspect every moment for the rest of our lives? Where is the line we're not willing to cross? Is it a cavity search?

USA Today -

WASHINGTON — The Transportation Security Administration plans to install 150 security machines at airport checkpoints that enable screeners to see under passengers' clothes.

The installation will vastly expand the use of the controversial body scanners, which can reveal hidden bombs and knives. But the devices have been labeled as intrusive by some lawmakers. The House of Representatives in June overwhelmingly passed a measure that would restrict their use by the TSA to passengers flagged by other types of screening, such as metal detectors. The measure is pending in the Senate.

TULSA: Passengers try out body scan

TSA spokeswoman Kristin Lee said the machines are "critical" to stopping terrorists with homemade bombs that may elude metal detectors. The agency hasn't decided which airports will get the machines, Lee said.

The $100,000 scanners shoot low-intensity X-rays that penetrate clothing, bounce off a person's skin and create images that show solid objects as dark areas. The TSA machines have privacy additions to create images that look like etchings. Screeners view them on a monitor in a locked room near a checkpoint and delete them immediately after viewing.

"Body imaging is a total invasion of privacy," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who proposed the restriction. "You don't need this kind of scrutiny."

Although the machines use X-rays, a 2003 report by the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements, which Congress created to develop radiation guidelines, said people can safely be scanned by the machines up to 2,500 times a year.

"Imaging technology is safe," Lee said.

The TSA used $25 million from the federal stimulus package to buy the scanners from California-based Rapiscan Systems. The agency is using an additional $22 million to buy 500 upgraded machines that scan bottles for liquid explosives.

The TSA has been testing scanners since early 2007, mostly on passengers who set off a metal-detector alarm and are taken aside for additional screening. The new scanners will be installed beginning early next year and will be used in place of metal detectors at checkpoints.

Passengers may choose to avoid the scanners and be screened by a metal detector, but those who do will be pulled aside for a pat-down, Lee said.

American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Christopher Calabrese said using the scanners in place of metal detectors "is unquestionably a step in the direction of having these machines be mandatory."

Private Paramilitary Security Force Takes Over a Montana Town

Yet another conspiracy theory that somehow turned out to be true, like the FEMA camps. And yet doublethink takes over, and stupid Americans everywhere tune it all out and go about their lives, pretending not to notice the police state control grid being developed for them. They tell themselves, our troops wouldn't fire on their own countrymen (yes, they would). And no, the government would never hire foreign mercenaries to police our cities so our troops don't have to worry about firing on their own countrymen. That's crazy. Not anymore. But pretend you don't see it. Pretend not to notice. These aren't the droids you were looking for.

William Norman Grigg -

Five years ago, the city government of Hardin, Montana decided to build a large jail — 144,000 square feet, 464 beds — in an attempt to capitalize on the detention boom. A development agency called the Two Rivers Authority (TRA) was created; it issued $27 million in bonds to pay for the project.

The jail was built. It remains empty. The bonds have gone into default.

Several months ago, the TRA negotiated a deal — the details of which remain secret — with a private security firm called American Police Force (APF), which was incorporated in Santa Ana, California last March.

The deal reportedly includes $2.6 million for APF to run the jail, plus $23 million to run a 30,000-square foot training facility for military and police personnel on property managed by the TRA.

In addition, APF promises to shower the city will all kinds of amenities — computers for the local schools, donations to the local food bank, tricked-out cars for the local police force…. Whoops, did I mention that last item out loud?

Hardin has no police force; it receives police coverage through the Big Horn County Sheriff’s Office. So it caused a stir last Thursday when APF officials arrived in Hardin in grand style — a convoy of black Mercedes SUVs bearing the logo of a non-existent “City of Hardin Police Force.”

The APF hired Becky Shay, a reporter from the Billings Gazette who had covered the story of the Hardin jail, as its new spokesperson (for the enviable salary of $60,000 a year). It also began negotiating an employment deal with mayoral candidate Kerri Smith. Her husband, Greg Smith, is the Executive Director of the TRA and the fellow responsible for working out the deal with APF. Greg Smith was immediately put on “administrative leave” and has effectively disappeared. (He didn’t answer messages I left at his business telephone number.)

Local residents are understandably curious about this mysterious private “security firm” that appears to be taking over their town.

There was initial speculation that American Police Force (the organization’s website conveniently went dark as this story broke) is a tentacle of the mercenary firm once known as Blackwater and now called Xe (pronounced “Zee”). A press spokesperson at Xe informed me that she had never heard of APF before news broke of recent developments in Hardin.

APF insists that it has plenty of money to make good on its promises, but pointedly refuses to say where it comes from. Its new press spokesman deflects such questions by saying that she’s confident that her paychecks will clear. Civic leaders either aren’t talking or don’t have anything useful to say.

There are some in Hardin who suspect that their town is essentially being taken over by a corporatist mercenary firm. As things stand, that suspicion is entirely justified.