While You Sleep

You can stop worrying that the forces of autocracy in America are going to require all of us to carry national identification cards. That’s so old school.

[…]

”Next Generation Identification,” [a system being developed by the FBI] is intended to “fuse” our fingerprint data with our iris patterns, palm prints, earlobe shapes, facial contours and even the unique ways we walk and speak. This fused, digital image of our persons is to be shared with every police agency in the country... as well as agencies abroad.

[…]

If the very existence of this national ID system doesn’t make you worry about your privacy rights, you might want to know about a quiet little change that the FBI made in the management of such databases in 2004. Officials exempted police databases from a Privacy Act requirement that the personal data stored in them has to be accurate.

  Jim Hightower

That's pretty ambitious. I wonder how they propose to get everybody processed. There must be an old Soviet style thirty-year plan. Oh, wait. Do you suppose I'll soon have to submit to all those measurements if I want a driver's license?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Protect Your Freedom with a National ID Card

With states and citizens objecting, the Congress and the Bush Administration have moved ahead to require a national identification card — abandoning decades of opposition to such a system on civil liberties grounds. I testified against this proposal when it was first made in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. What is truly remarkable is that the REAL ID has become little more than an excuse to do something that the Bush Administration has been trying to do for years: create interlocking databases on citizens.

What is particularly galling is that the card has been watered down to reduce costs for the states. So that main selling point — a micro chip — has been removed. This is one of the reason that the card programs has been reduced in cost by roughly 75 percent from $14.6 billion to $3.9 billion. Now anyone born after 1964 (I missed the cut-off thankfully) will have to get a new REAL ID to get into federal buildings or to fly.

  Jonathan Turley

Because we know that terrorists cannot get us any other way than to have a valid ID - excuse me - REAL ID, they aren’t concerned with anything other than federal buildings or something that can only be penetrated by flying a plane into it, and they can’t forge IDs.

The real purpose of the card program was to get Congress to allow the Administration to allow the use of a massive data bank system checking and monitoring citizens. Private information on citizens will now be passed from agency to agency. The Administration has long sought what is called “total transparency.”

For everyone besides the Administration itself.

REAL ID.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

London Terror

EWR commented on my previous post about the terrorist attacks in London and my suggestion that it could have been an Operation Gladio-type event:

The G8 summit before this had shifted to an 'environmental' separation consisting of the G7 and the United States -- now I suspect it may be a solid G8 again.

Does this mean that Blair now will keep his troops in Iraq (they were planning a pullout towards the end of next year)?

Will this also mean that England's version of the Real ID act will have less resistance now?

I'm bringing it up here to respond and offer another assessment from an obscure source.

When I originally posted, I had wondered about the British intention to pull troops from Iraq as a possible reason for the timing of these bombings, but then I remembered that the intention included moving most of those troops to Afghanistan, and is only tentative, assuming the Iraqis are able to take over for themselves. With that caveat, I don't imagine the Brits will actually pull any troops.

The reduction in resistance in England to PATRIOT act type maneuvers remains to be seen. And it seems logical to suspect that the sagging support for Blair might be hoped to be reversed in the wake of these acts, as well.

At any rate, the question of who actually is behind these al-Qa'ida-claimed bombings appeared today in a VHeadline article by Andrew McKillip suggesting that the intended effect might be to get Buttie on board to take on the Saudis.

[T]here is plenty to ask about who was behind these multiform, varied, and well coordinated attacks in central London.

For the mass media and editorialists of the UK tabloid press there will only be one bottom line: Al Qaeda, and behind that Saudi Arabian Wahhabism, tolerated and also directly financed by the Saudi ruling family.

This in turn will serve to sharpen the already unfriendly relations between the Blair government of England and the Saudi rulers.

Unlike George W Bush, Blair never refers to the Saudi rulers as his friends, and the British press and media is almost uniformly hostile to Saudi Arabia, while claiming to be ‘studiously neutral.’

As a candidate for regime change, therefore, Saudi Arabia has top billing in UK right-wing political elites, whether New Labor or not. It is also widely supported by England’s opinion forming, editorial and media circles, more and more openly.

[...]

Neither Bush nor Blair have profited from the Iraq experiment: more attractive, and more realistic targets must be sought. Blair and Bush could come together, so naturally, on the last best choice of Saudi Arabia.

[...]

Ray-jeem changing Tay-Ran is not a slogan Blair whistles each day, for one reason because his European colleagues and rivals, such as the Schroeder-Chirac duo, would never come onboard in this venture, even less so than in the tomfool Iraq experiment. Another reason is that Iran is 3 times the size of Iraq or Saudi, quite well armed, is quite well organized, and has increasing amounts of nuclear materials, if not yet the bomb.

[...]

So Riyadh and Jeddah become the natural targets for bombing to a pulp from nearby Qatar and Iraq, with a few B2 flights across the Atlantic to thrill the techno-freaks. Above all, British, American and world public opinion has to be worked up, to a nice frenzy of blood lust, to support the venture.

Bush of course has first to be brought onboard, and what better way to start the process than a designer Al Qaeda attack in London the day the G-8 summit began?

Don't ask me.

All I know is the CIA essentially created al-Qa'ida, and Operation Gladio really exists. So does the Project for a New American Century and the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group.

You add 'em up.