Today on the KAOS Report I’ll be talking with Eugene Jereki, director/producer of the new documentary “Why We Fight.” from 5-6pm central, and after that, Shauna and I will discuss the news.

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It’s a heck of a note that Ashcroft was better on civil liberties than the top leaders of the administration, including the now-Attorney General Alberto Thumscrew Gonzales.

By William Norman Grigg

“Under the influence of disgraced super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay became an apologist for slave labor camps — on American soil. Deep in a humid tropical island jungle, in poorly ventilated buildings ringed with barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards, impoverished Asian women — most of them Chinese — toil for 80 hours a week making brand-name apparel for export to the United States.

The female garment workers were lured to the labor camps, which are run by members of the Chinese Communist Party, with promises of wages extravagant by their standards, up to 60 percent of what their counterparts in the U.S. earn. But before they were hired, the women had to sign “shadow contracts” that effectively made them slaves to the company. Their activities are strictly regimented, and since they depend on the company store for most of their necessities, what they earn is recycled back into company hands. Furthermore, most of the workers had to borrow huge sums of money, at extortionate rates of interest, to pay, up front, the human traffickers responsible for transporting them to the island.

As is the case wherever the Chinese Communist Party claims jurisdiction, the female garment workers are subject to the regime’s repulsive one-child policy. They are forbidden to marry or have boyfriends. Those who become pregnant are forced to have their children aborted.

Despite being produced from Chinese fabric by Chinese laborers who labor under Chinese law, the designer clothing that emerges from those island factories is labeled “Made in the USA.” This is actually a case of truth in labeling, since these Chinese labor camps were established on Saipan, a territorial possession of the United States. Thanks to the efforts of super-lobbyist and confessed felon Jack Abramoff, this squalid arrangement has enjoyed political protection from, and been effusively praised by, many “conservative” Republican politicians, including disgraced former House GOP leader Tom DeLay.”

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By the way, I’m a big Grigg fan. Check out my interview of him from March 5, 2005.

Rick Kick at the Memory Hole reminds us, it’s no accident.

My interview of John Taylor Gatto from September 6th, 2003.

Transcript.

(or) Why I Hate 57% of Americans

According to numerous reports and audits released by entities such as Inspector General Offices of agencies that deal with national security and various presidential commissions, today, more than four years after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, almost all our national security related agencies are in disarray, riddled with incompetence, corruption, and in some cases criminal activities. While most of the real problems facing our national security today stem from gross mismanagement, inefficiency, incompetence and a lack of sensible policies and vigorous oversight, the Bush Administration insists upon blaming these deficiencies on a regrettable and dangerous lack of power in the executive branch. But the kind of power the Administration pursues is the kind of power that would vault the presidency to monarchical status and nullify the Bill of Rights.

• According to the DOJ-IG Report on the FBI’s Foreign Language Program that was released in October 2004, “more than 89,000 hours of audio and 30,000 hours of audio in other Counterterrorism languages have not been reviewed. Additionally, over 370,000 hours of audio in languages associated with counterintelligence activities have not been reviewed.”
• According to a report by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding WMD (Robb-Silberman Report), released in March 2005, in just the past 20 years the CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, NRO, and the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy have all been penetrated by espionage. Secrets stolen include nuclear weapons data, U.S. cryptographic codes and procedures, identification of U.S. intelligence sources and methods (human and technical), and war plans. Indeed, it would be difficult to exaggerate the damage that foreign intelligence penetrations have caused.
• According to the final report by the 9/11 Discourse Project released in December 2005, the commissioners gave the federal government mediocre and failing grades for its response to its 41 recommendations, and characterized some failures as “shocking.” The commission cited huge remaining loopholes in aviation security, a politicized system of doling out billions of homeland security dollars, and a failure to give firefighters and other responders the radio spectrum they need to communicate during crises.
• According to an audit released by the Department of Homeland Security in December 2005, nearly three years after it was formed, the immense DHS remains hampered by severe management and financial problems; problems that contributed to the flawed response to Hurricane Katrina.
• In December 2005, a group of House Democrats issued a report alleging that the Department of Homeland Security had failed to follow through on 33 promised improvements to border security, infrastructure protection and other physical security projects.
• According to an AP news article released on January 18, 2006, by Ted Bridis, the FBI missed neon-bright signs of espionage in the case of Bureau Intelligence Analyst Leandro Aragoncillo. He was arrested a few months ago. Despite several IG reports, congressional inquiries, and media reports on several other recent cases of alleged espionage activities, the bureau’s inability to secure even its own offices continues today. Here is an agency that is in charge of defending our national security and protecting our safety, but it has yet to prove it is capable of securing itself.

What do the various reports mentioned above have in common? These reports & audits, whether conducted by the Inspector General offices of our federal agencies, congress, or the presidential commissions, indicate that the weak state of our nation’s security today is a result of inefficient, incompetent and mismanaged government. How can any of the failures established by these reports be attributed to the lack of power to engage in massive communications intercepts of Americans? Based on these reports, how can one go about fixing our nation’s security problems by unlawfully gathering millions of discrete pieces of information from the citizens of our country, inundating our intelligence agencies with huge amounts of raw intelligence, and causing an insurmountable backlog?

The NSA has overwhelmed the FBI with raw intelligence gathered at the price of our liberty, privacy, and due process. Information culled from electronic eavesdropping and intercepted Internet traffic by the NSA resulting from Bush’s illegal authorization of domestic surveillance turned into a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips each month. A New York Times story says that FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The Times also reported that almost all of the tips led to dead ends, and one former FBI official said: “We’d chase a number, find it’s a schoolteacher with no indication they’ve ever been involved in international terrorism — case closed.” He added: “After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration.”

Mr. President, please stop. You are damaging our national security and simultaneously destroying what makes us American in mind and soul; our Bill of Rights. Remember what you told us just a few days after 9/11: “The terrorists hate our way of life, and they want to take it away from us.’” Mr. President, they haven’t, you beat them to that result. Do you really want to fix our security problems? Do you really want to address and fix our vulnerabilities? Then here is a start for you; implement a three-phrase program, and we can guarantee that you’ll make our “national security” problems disappear: Government Accountability, Government Oversight, and Government Integrity.

Well, Bush denounced Hamas’s electoral win earlier, asked Abbas to stay in office anyway and demanded the winners be disarmed, and now I’m watching Netanyahu on MSNBC blaming Sharon for leaving Gaza and “emboldening” Hamas.

Why their election did not immediately turn Hamas into wonderful angels was not explained.

Boy, can you imagine what would happen if there were democratic elections in all our imperial satellite states in the Middle East? I don’t think they’d be our puppets anymore. Maybe then we could try having a limited constitutional republic.

Gore Vidal on the “boy emperor” and the fall of the empire.