Home Secretary Resignation Shakes Brit Government

Telegraph
June 2, 2009

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The Home Secretary is resigning, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is expected to be replaced and allegations of impropriety hang over several other Cabinet members. There has rarely been a more turbulent time at the apex of government, probably not since 1962, when Harold Macmillan sacked seven ministers in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives. That was done in an ultimately fruitless attempt to save his political skin, and it inspired a famous put-down by Jeremy Thorpe: “Greater love hath no man than this; that he lay down his friends for his life.” Mr Brown’s friends are a dwindling band.

Jacqui Smith was one of his closest political allies, and her tenure in office, and the manner of her departure, symbolise everything that is wrong with the current administration, now almost two years old. She was simply not up to the job, yet she was appointed to one of the great offices of state – not because she had earned her spurs in a succession of successful ministerial posts, but because she was part of the Brown tribe, one of a number of acolytes promoted way beyond their merits to the detriment of good governance.

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URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/home-secretary-resignation-shakes-brit-government/

It’s increasingly evident that Obama should resign

Ted Rall
The State Journal Register
June 2, 2009

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.

Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous.

From health care to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When a president doesn’t have the nerve to annoy the Turks, why does he bother to show up for work in the morning?

Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now — before he drags us further into the abyss.

I refer here to Obama’s plan for “preventive detentions.” If a cop or other government official thinks you might want to commit a crime someday, you could be held in “prolonged detention.” Reports in U.S. state-controlled media imply that Obama’s shocking new policy would only apply to Islamic terrorists (or, in this case, wannabe Islamic terrorists, and also kinda-sorta-maybe-thinking-about-terrorism dudes). As if that made it OK.

In practice, Obama wants to let government goons snatch you, me and anyone else they deem annoying off the street.

Preventive detention is the classic defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Because dictatorial regimes rely on fear rather than consensus, their priority is self-preservation rather than improving their people’s lives. They worry obsessively over the one thing they can’t control, what George Orwell called “thoughtcrime” — contempt for rulers that might someday translate to direct action.

Locking up people who haven’t done anything wrong is worse than un-American and a violent attack on the most basic principles of Western jurisprudence. It is contrary to the most essential notion of human decency. That anyone has ever been subjected to “preventive detention” is an outrage. That the president of the United States, a man who won an election because he promised to elevate our moral and political discourse, would even entertain such a revolting idea offends the idea of civilization itself.

Obama is cute. He is charming. But there is something rotten inside him. Unlike the Republicans who backed George W. Bush, I won’t follow a terrible leader just because I voted for him. Obama has revealed himself. He is a monster, and he should remove himself from power.

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“Prolonged detention,” reported The New York Times, would be inflicted upon “terrorism suspects who cannot be tried.”

“Cannot be tried.” Interesting choice of words.

Any “terrorism suspect” (can you be a suspect if you haven’t been charged with a crime?) can be tried. Anyone can be tried for anything. At this writing, a Somali child is sitting in a prison in New York, charged with piracy in the Indian Ocean, where the U.S. has no jurisdiction. Anyone can be tried.

What they mean, of course, is that the hundreds of men and boys languishing at Guantánamo and the thousands of “detainees” the Obama administration anticipates kidnapping in the future cannot be convicted. As in the old Soviet Union, putting enemies of the state on trial isn’t enough. The game has to be fixed. Conviction has to be a foregone conclusion.

Why is it, exactly, that some prisoners “cannot be tried”?

The Old Grey Lady explains why Obama wants this “entirely new chapter in American law” in a boring little sentence buried a couple of paragraphs past the jump and a couple of hundred words down page A16: “Yet another question is what to do with the most problematic group of Guantánamo detainees: those who pose a national security threat but cannot be prosecuted, either for lack of evidence or because evidence is tainted.”

In democracies with functioning legal systems, it is assumed that people against whom there is a “lack of evidence” are innocent. They walk free. In countries where the rule of law prevails, in places blessedly free of fearful leaders whose only concern is staying in power, “tainted evidence” is no evidence at all. If you can’t prove that a defendant committed a crime — an actual crime, not a thoughtcrime — in a fair trial, you release him and apologize to the judge and jury for wasting their time.

It is amazing and incredible, after eight years of Bush’s lawless behavior, to have to still have to explain these things. For that reason alone, Obama should resign.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/its-increasingly-evident-that-obama-should-resign/

Sacrifices are needed to save GM, Obama tells Americans

Andrew Clark
The Guardian
June 2, 2009

America’s biggest carmaker, General Motors, yesterday declared itself bankrupt with debts of $172bn (£105bn) in a move paving the way for the Obama administration to take control of a 101-year-old stalwart of the US manufacturing industry.

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GM filed for chapter 11 protection from its creditors at a federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan at 8am local time, kicking off the largest industrial insolvency in US history.

The owner of brands such as Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and Vauxhall will continue manufacturing and selling cars, while a New York bankruptcy judge, Robert Gerber, scrutinises its future.

Under a rescue plan put forward by the White House, the US and Canadian ­governments will pump $30bn of tax­payers’ money into GM in return for a 70% equity stake – a move Republicans angrily criticised as a political power grab of a vast industrial company.

In a televised address, Barack Obama warned there will need to be deep sacrifices to keep GM afloat. As he spoke, GM, which employs 235,000 people globally, announced 14 of its 47 car factories in the US will shut by the end of 2011.

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URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/sacrifices-are-needed-to-save-gm-obama-tells-americans/

Federal highway fund will run out by August

Jim Myers
Tulsa World
June 2, 2009

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe said Tuesday the federal fund that pays for highways will run out of money by August, forcing Oklahoma to deprogram up to $80 million in projects.

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“This will be done by canceling new projects and existing contracts that have already been signed,” the Oklahoma Republican said in a written statement.

Inhofe said projects that have already broken ground also will be delayed.

“Clearly this would have a detrimental effect on the economy and will negate the gains made by the stimulus,” he said.

Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said he based his comments on information the Obama administration shared recently with Democrats on the panel.

He said figures on the Oklahoma impact came from the state.

Inhofe submitted his statement at the Senate committee’s confirmation hearing for Victor Mendez to be the head of the Federal Highway Administration.

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URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/federal-highway-fund-will-run-out-by-august/

Obama Breaking Vows on Secrecy

William Fisher
Oh Bummer
June 2, 2009

Despite President Barack Obama’s formation of a new task force to review government secrecy, and an ongoing investigation into use of the so-called state-secrets doctrine, lawyers for the new administration refused last week to disclose information on the government’s use of warrantless wiretaps and backed legislation to block the release of photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last week, Obama announced the formation of a task force to review government classification policies, proposing the creation of a National Declassification Center to facilitate public disclosure of once-secret information.

The president reaffirmed his commitment “to operating with an unprecedented level of openness.”

But the next day, Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers filed notice of the government’s intention to challenge in the Supreme Court a New York federal appeals court ruling ordering the administration to make public the photographs allegedly depicting the abuse of terrorism suspects in U.S. custody.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit to force their disclosure. A federal court judge agreed and ordered the government to release the photos.

President Obama initially indicated he would comply with the court’s order but later changed his mind, saying that release of the photos might risk the lives of U.S. armed forces personnel.

At the same time, the DOJ told the court that a formal appeal by a June 9 deadline could be unnecessary if Congress quickly passes the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009.

That measure is supported by the White House and was passed by the Senate on May 2. It would forbid disclosure of photographs taken between Sept. 11, 2001, and Jan. 22, 2009, “relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001,” by U.S. Armed Forces in operations outside the U.S. if “the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have determined would endanger military personnel if released.”

Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder rescinded Bush-era FOIA guidelines and replaced them with new rules to preserve FOIA’s purpose of making public important information about the workings of the government.

In the wiretapping case, lawyers for a now-defunct Saudi charity claim they were victims of electronic spying by the government. A federal judge ordered the Obama administration to disclose documents relating to that charge.

The wiretapping allegedly took place as part of the so-called terrorist surveillance program that was initiated by then-president George W. Bush following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The DOJ, responding to a federal judge’s inquiry into whether the administration should be sanctioned for “failing to obey the court’s orders,” refused to turn over the documents and asked the court for permission to appeal its decision.

It urged the court to permit appellate review over the fundamental and significant separation of powers questions presented before any disclosure or risk of disclosure in further proceedings,” Anthony Coppolino, the DOJ’s special litigation counsel, wrote to Federal Circuit Court Judge Vaughn Walker.

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A DOJ spokesman said sanctions were unwarranted because only the government can decide whether to disclose documents it believes are state secrets.

The lawsuit was brought in San Francisco by two U.S. lawyers who claim their telephone calls were illegally intercepted by the National Security Agency (NSA) under the Bush administration. The lawyers represent the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a charity that the Treasury Department claims was linked to terrorism.

Jon Eisenberg, the attorney for the two lawyers, told Judge Walker at the time that the purpose of the lawsuit was to “obtain an adjudication of the legality of President George W. Bush’s warrantless electronic surveillance program and, more broadly, the Bush administration’s expansive theories of presidential power.”

Bush claimed that his war powers gave him the authority to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens’ electronic communications without warrants.

Eisenberg told IPS, “The DOJ attorneys repeat all the same arguments that Judge Walker has already rejected. They’re treating Judge Walker as if he were irrelevant.”

The San Francisco lawsuit began when the government accidentally sent the plaintiffs documents that showed their overseas communications with al-Haramain officials were intercepted without warrants. The pair sued, but was forced to return the documents because they were marked “top secret.”

In the al-Haramain case, the Bush administration’s Treasury Department found that the group was funneling money to terrorists in Chechnya and shut it down. But the government inadvertently released a classified document to the group’s lawyers. The lawyers contend that this document revealed that the government had been wiretapping both the organization and its lawyers without a warrant.

The organization sued the Bush administration. But when the case came to court in 2006, the government invoked the so-called state-secrets privilege, claiming that the case could not go forward because it would reveal information that would compromise national security.

But Judge Walker rejected the government’s claims. He ruled that the president could not invoke the state secrets privilege to conceal the evidence and dismiss the case.

Al-Haramain’s lawyers said they needed the classified documents to represent their clients. They said they were surprised to see the Obama administration arguing so vigorously for the same expansive Bush-era view of executive power.

Al-Haramain lawyer Eisenberg told IPS, “I anticipated that the Obama Department of Justice would take a more reasonable approach to moving forward with litigating this case in a manner that doesn’t jeopardize national security, which I think can be easily done.”

“They’re taking as hard a line as the Bush administration did on state secrets,” he said. “If anything, they’re being more aggressive about it.”

“In three years of litigating this case,” Eisenberg added, “I’d come to expect this sort of thing from the Bush Department of Justice, but I’m astounded to see the new Obama DOJ continuing down the same path. So far, at least, we’re not seeing any ‘change we can believe in’ regarding presidential abuse of the state-secrets privilege.”

Obama has ordered a DOJ task force to study the government’s use of the state-secrets privilege. The Bush administration invoked the privilege more than any other government in U.S. history.

In 2005, Bush admitted authorizing electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens without first obtaining warrants from the FISA court.

President Bush said that he secretly ordered the NSA to eavesdrop on citizens with suspected ties to terrorists because it was “critical to saving American lives” and “consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution.”

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/obama-breaking-vows-on-secrecy/

US to sell ‘bunker buster’ bombs to South Korea

Malcolm Moore
Telegraph
June 2, 2009

America has agreed to sell “bunker-buster” bombs to South Korea capable of destroying underground facilities in North Korea.

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The laser-guided GBU-28 bombs were first used in 1990 during the Gulf War to destroy underground command centres in Iraq.

The 19-ft-long, 5,000lb bombs can penetrate over 20ft of concrete and 100ft of earth and could be used to target North Korea’s intricate system of military bunkers and a series of munitions tunnels along the border.

General Walter Sharp, the top United States commander in the South, said in April that the North may have around 13,000 artillery pieces deployed along the border.

An unnamed South Korean military official told the Yonhap news agency that the bombs would be delivered between 2010 and 2014.

Meanwhile, South Korea has sent a high-speed gun boat equipped with stealth technology to the border with North Korea in the Yellow Sea. The deployment of the 440-ton Yun Yeong Ha came after North Korea scrapped an armistice agreement dating from the Korean War and threatened the safety of South Korean islands. The ship is equipped with guided missiles, a 76mm gun and a 40mm gun.

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URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/us-to-sell-bunker-buster-bombs-to-south-korea/

The Big Collapse Could Be Very Near

Robert Wenzel
Global Research
June 2, 2009

The Federal Reserve appears to be increasingly nervous about the long term bond market. This is serious. How panicked are they? After leaking a story on Friday, they are back at it on Sunday.

	The Fed can of course print money to buy up every Treasury bond in existence, but the inflationary ramifications would be Zimbabwe like, and crush the dollar on international currency markets.

The Federal Reserve leaked to CNBC’s Steve Liesman on Friday that they weren’t targeting long rates. Why such a leak? Probably because the Fed did not want to appear impotent in controlling the long rate. So they put out the word through Liesman that they weren’t targetting the long rate. Can you imagine what would happen to the markets if it sensed long rates were beyond the control of the Fed?

The Fed can of course print money to buy up every Treasury bond in existence, but the inflationary ramifications would be Zimbabwe like, and crush the dollar on international currency markets. Are we near the phase where all hell breaks loose? I have never even answered, maybe, to this question before. It’s always been, “no.” Now it’s maybe.

What really has me spooked is another article out this afternoon (on a Sunday) that Drudge has even picked up. It’s a Reuters story by Alister Bull. The headline: Federal Reserve puzzled by yield curve steepening.

Translation, the Fed doesn’t know what is going on, but they are really scared.

Here’s more from Bull:

The Federal Reserve is studying significant moves in the U.S. government bond market last week that could have big implications for the central bank’s strategy to combat the country’s recession.

But the Fed is not really sure what is driving the sharp rise in long-dated bond yields, and especially a widening gap between short and long term yields.

Do rising U.S. Treasury yields and a steepening yield curve suggest an economic recovery is more certain, meaning less need for safe haven government bonds and a healthy demand for credit? If so, there might be less need for the Fed to expand the money supply by buying more U.S. Treasuries.

Or does the steepening yield curve mean investors are worried about the deterioration in the U.S. fiscal outlook, or the potential for a collapse in the U.S. dollar as the Fed floods the world with newly minted currency as part of its quantitative easing program. This might be an argument to augment to step up asset purchases.

Another possibility is that China, the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury debt, has decided to refocus its portfolio by leaning more heavily on shorter-term maturities…

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An obvious culprit for the move in bond yields is the country’s record fiscal deficit, which will generate a massive amount of new government issuance.

The U.S. Treasury must sell a record net $2 trillion in new debt in 2009 to fund a $1.8 trillion projected fiscal deficit, resulting from falling tax revenues, an economic stimulus package and sundry bank bailouts.

It’s the Chinese, and any other Treasury bond buyer who follows the markets, that have pulled away, to varying degrees from buying Treasury long securities. No one wants to be the last one holding bonds, where the new debt about to be issued is in the trillions.

Bull continues with the part of the message the Fed really wanted to get out: With officials still grappling to divine the factors steepening the yield curve, a speedy decision on whether to ramp up the Treasury debt purchase program or the related plan to snap up mortgage-related debt seems unlikely.

“I’m in wait-and-see mode,” said one Fed official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We laid out the asset purchase plan and we’re following it. That is going to have some affect on various interest rates, but together with a hundred other things. So I don’t think we should be chasing a long-term interest rate,” the official said. It’s the same message as Friday. The Fed does not want to spook the world into thinking that it can’t push long term rates down, so it says it is not trying. But if rates continue to climb, a panic out of Treasury securities is a very likely scenario. And Bernanke has only one play to force long rates back down, buy every long bond in sight, which of course is highly inflationary and puts upward pressure on rates. How’s that for a dilemma?

The end of the current financial system, as we know it, may be iminent. If you would have asked me even two weeks ago if collapse was imminent, I would have said it was highly unlikely, now I am saying it is possible. Bernanke may be able to patch things up short-term, if he is lucky, but long term the U.S. financial structure is in serious trouble. There is just too much Treasury debt that needs to be raised. An international panic out of Treasury securities, even a slow controlled panic, means the Fed will be the major buyer. This will ultimately mean record inflation.

And keep this in mind, we have never seen a collapse of a currency like the dollar. Even the hyperinflation during Germany’s Wiemar Period can not serve as an example. Since the dollar is the reserve currency of most of the world, a panic out of the dollar means more dollars will return to the U.S. shores than any country has ever experienced.

Other countries have had collapsed currencies, but never in the history of world of finance has so much currency been held outside a country of issue that could come flying back, almost on a moments notice. If the panic out of the dollar starts, even if Bernanke stops printing money (unlikely), all the dollars flying back into the U.S. could cause a huge price inflation all on its own.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/the-big-collapse-could-be-very-near/

Dollar Declines as Nations Mull Reserve Currency Alternative

Oliver Biggadike and Chris Fournier
Bloomberg
June 2, 2009

The dollar weakened beyond $1.43 against the euro for the first time in 2009 on bets record U.S. borrowing will undermine the greenback, prompting nations to consider alternatives to the world’s main reserve currency.

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The 16-nation euro gained for a fourth day versus the dollar as the Russian government said emerging-market leaders may discuss the idea of a supranational currency. The pound rose to the highest level since October and the Canadian dollar traded near an eight-month high on speculation signs of a recovery in U.S. housing will spur higher-yield demand.

“There’s been a lot of talk out of Russia about a new global currency, and that’s contributing toward this latest bout of dollar weakness,” said Henrik Gullberg, a currency strategist at Deutsche Bank AG in London. “These latest comments are just adding to the general dollar weakness we’ve seen recently.”

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URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/dollar-declines-as-nations-mull-reserve-currency-alternative/

Florida county mandates fingerprints to sell videogames

Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story
June 2, 2009

For many young Americans, reselling video games to pick up the newest, latest and greatest is simply the only choice to keep up with the fast-paced, high-dollar industry (which is about to kick off a massive annual trade show in Los Angeles as I write this).

GameStop, the largest games retailer on the planet, has made billions from the trade, building an empire off the business model that one Florida county appears to now view as a haven for criminals.

From the Broward-Palm Beach New Times:

I’m in line at Gamestop the other day, breaking down and finally buying the much-hated NCAA Football ‘09, when I hear the clerk ask the guy in front of me for his fingerprints. He’s returning a game, and the clerk breaks out some kind of form. He swipes his thumb across an ink pad stuck to the counter and then puts his mark in the appropriate box.

What the deuce? “The sheriff’s office has been making us do it,” the clerk told me. “People hate it.”

Reporter Eric Barton goes on to say:

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Broward County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Kayla Concepcion said the new requirement comes straight from the Florida Legislature, which enacted a law on October 1 of last year that treated video games like second-hand goods sold at pawn shops. Now any store buying used video games has to collect the thumb prints, along with a bunch of other personal info about the seller.

Now, I’ve got a little personal insight into this issue. As a teen and young adult, well before I found myself tasked with the journalisms, I was employed by Blockbuster, Movie Trading Company, Borders Books and Books-A-Million. Library science — or, at least inventory management and customer service — was my forte as a student. (We’ve all got to get by somehow.)

At Movie Trading Company, we had tons and tons of DVDs and VHS cassettes for sale, almost all of them brought in by customers looking for cash or store credit. After about six months, it became quite easy to spot the thieves among them.

I’m talking about people who’d walk in 10 minutes before closing with a stack of Simpsons box set DVDs, or five copies of that week’s big, new release. We had one regular customer, Eddy (a sex offender, I later found out), who offered a couple of us, myself included, methamphetamine in exchange for more cash back from his stolen DVDs. The man was obviously desperate. I’d even go so far as to guess that stealing DVDs was essentially his job.

It was policy that we accept what customers bring in unless the condition was beyond repair, so every time he’d show up with a backpack full of DVDs and games, we had to give him cash. But by the same measure, he had to submit some form of identification. We’d record it, pay out and go about our business.

One day a cop walked in with Eddy’s photo and asked if we’d see him and if we had records of what he had sold us. I told the officer yes, but the management stepped in after that and I never found out what happened … And I never saw Eddy again.

Case in point: That happened in Texas, where there is no requirement for fingerprints to sell used media like games or DVDs. Crimes were committed openly and law enforcement (apparently) worked. It wasn’t that difficult.

Surely Florida does not lack basic law enforcement capabilities. Why should such draconian measures be necessary just to trade in a video game?

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/florida-county-mandates-fingerprints-to-sell-videogames-2/

Today we’re all prisoners in the USA

Papers, Please!
June 2, 2009

As of today, June 1, 2009, even U.S. citizens are officially prisoners in the USA, or exiles barred from entering our own country without the government’s permission.

	Department of State’s U.S. Passport Card.

We are now forbidden by Federal regulations from leaving or entering the USA, anywhere, by any means — by air, by sea, or by land, to or from any other country or international waters or airspace — unless the government chooses to issue us a passport, passport card, or “enhanced” drivers license (any of which “travel documents” are now issued only with secretly and remotely-readable uniquely-numbered radio tracking beacons in the form of RFID transponder chips), or unless the Department of Homeland Security chooses to to exercise its standardless “discretion” to decide — in secret, with no way for us to know who is making the decision or on what basis — to issue a (one-time case-by-case) “waiver” of the new travel document requirements.

If you’re in the USA without such documents — even if you were born here, or are a foreigner who entered the USA legally without such documents (a Canadian, for example, who entered the USA by land yesterday when no such documents were yet required), or your document(s) have expired or have been lost or stolen — you are forbidden to leave the country unless and until you procure such a document, or unless and until the DHS gives you an exit permit in the form of a discretionary one-time waiver to leave the country — but not necessarily to come home, unless they again exercise their discretion to “grant” you another waiver.

If you are a U.S. citizen abroad without such a document (for example, if you entered Canada legally without it yesterday by land, when it wasn’t required, or again if your document(s) are expired, lost, or stolen) you are forbidden to come home unless and until you can procure a new document acceptable to the DHS, or unless and until the DHS gives you permission to come home in the form of a discretionary one-time waiver.

The DHS admits, at the top of its GetYouHome.gov propapganda website, that it might take “several weeks” to obtain such a document if you don’t have one already or if it expires or is lost or stolen.  A temporary paper drivers license without a photo, or even a standard photo licnese or state ID, won’t suffice — only an extra-fee EDL with an RFID chip, which also takes several weeks to obtain in those few states that issue them at all.  Backlogs for even “rush” passport issuance can be even longer, as we pointed out in our comments to the DHS.  It doesn’t matter if your next-of-kin is dying in Canada or Mexico.  (Suppose a relative gets sick or injured, and needs you there to make medical decisons or escort them home, but you were’t going on the trip with them, and don’t have a passport.) You can’t go unless the U.S. government  approves your papers or approves a standardless discretionary “waiver” for you to leave the U.S. — which won’t guarantee that they’ll let you come back.

This is the final stage, effective June 1, 2009, of implementation of the so-called “Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative” (WHTI).

You don’t need us to tell you what’s wrong with this picture. But if you want it spelled out, you can read the comments here and here that we submitted to the DHS when they proposed the WHTI regulations imposing these ID and exit and entry permit requirments, first for airports and seaports and then for land border crossings.

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We shouldn’t have needed to point out to the DHS that the WHTI travel document requirements are in flagrant violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), one of the most important human rights treaties which the U.S. has signed and ratified. Article 12 of the ICCPR guarantees that, “Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own,” and “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.”

This article of the ICCPR has been interpreted by the U.N. Human Rights Committee (and by the U.S. when it has criticized other countries such as Cuba for their exit restrictions on their citizens) as making those rights near-absolute. The WHTI document rules are also in violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the NAFTA Implemdentation Act, by imposing a barrier to Canadians and Mexicans wishing to come to the U.S. to compete for business — the requirement for a passport or enhanced drivers license (EDL) — that doesn’t apply to U.S. citizens doing business within the U.S.

And that’s not to mention the incompatibility with the U.S. Constitution of these restrictions on travel, movement, and assembly.

DHS APIS regulations already require airlines to obtain individualized prior permission from the DHS before they allow anyone (even a U.S. citizen) to enter, leave or transit the U.S. by air, and the the Secure Flight scheme will require the same for domestic flights as soon as the travel industry can build the elaborate and expensive infrastructure needed for such a real-time travel surveillance and control program.  Meanwhile, the DHS is exapnding their assertion of similar and increasingly intrusive powers of search, seizure, interrogation, and above all surveillance (monitoring and logging) and control of travel and movement within the U.S. through warrantless, suspicionless checkpoints on roads that don’t cross any border and are up to 100 miles from coasts or borders, and at airports for passengers on domestic flights.

Previous court decisions upholding government discretion in whether or not to issue passoports has been premised on the assumption that passports were useful to facitlitate travel, but were not required for travel or for the exercise of any other rights. Those decisions will, obviously, need to be revisited in light of the fact that government-issued documents are now explicitly required as a condition of the exercise of those aspects of the right to travel — the right of anyone to leave the U.S., and the right of U.S. citizens to return to our own country — that are most explicitly guaranteed by international treaties to which the U.S. is a part, and which under the U.S. Constitution are “the supreme law of the land”. The DHS is cleverly saying that at first they will only issue warnings and waivers, in most cases, to U.S. citizens seeking to enter or leave the U.S. without the newly-required travel documents.  Presumably, they hope that the new ID and permission-based travel control regime will become a well-established fait accompli before anyone is able to bring a court challenge of a DHS decision to bar someone from leaving the U.S., or barring a U.S. citizen from entering the country.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/today-were-all-prisoners-in-the-usa/