From The Half-Red House

A MySpace friend  posted this video of Naomi Wolf talking about the themes in her book The End of America. In the book, she describes how anti-terrorist measures and rhetoric have been used to take away constitutionally-protected rights in the US, and how these developments eerily parallel those of the rise to power of Hitler and Mussolini. She concludes that Americans need to  take  direct action to let Congress  know in no uncertain terms that it needs to act, to hold impeachment hearings for Bush and Cheney and to dismantle the repressive “anti-terrorist” secret infrastructure. She says bullies are cowards and that they will “fold” if confronted by millions of determined citizens. She calls, among other things, for a general strike this fall,

Yesterday, I reeived the March issue of the Progressive magazine and read an article by Matt Rothschild about a quasi-governmental fraternal secret organization of corporate executives called InfraGuard that works with the FBI to  spy on citizens whose actions and thoughts are deemed suspicious. The organization is little-known; its members have certain speical privileges, and they may even have a license to break the law (may be even to kill) in exchange for their assistance to the FBI. I located the article on the web and was astounded to see that, even though was just published, it has attracted scores  of vitriolic comments, with ad-hominem attacks on Rothschild and various types of neocon claptrap. This looks like an orchestrated campaign by the InfraGuard folks themselves, and they obviously consider this a very dangerous article indeed.. People really need to know that this secretive organization, tens of thousands strong, exists, and the kind of threats it may pose to all of us. It will be very hard to dismantle this kind of organization once a new administration is in place; it may even, as the Israeli-US creation Hamas did in a different context, go on to become a powerful independent anti-democratic actor in its own right, a new Klan, perhaps.

It appears that several kinds of people power are urgently needed if the US is avoid becoming a police state.

Hearings on State Representative Betty Hall’s bill to have the state of New Hampshire call for impeachment of Cheney and Bush were held yesterday. A hundred people showd up to testify, most of them in favor. Watch Betty Hall explain her bill on Arnie Arnesen’s Political Chowder show at http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/5462
 and read Nancy Tobi’s opinion piece at OpEdNews.com, in which she says, “NH Rep Betty Hall has introduced a resolution for impeachment to the NH House. If the state legislature passes the resolution, by law the Congress must put it ON THE TABLE.“at: http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_nancy_to_080218_video_3a_nh_representa.htm
The committee must now decide whether to recommend that the bill pass; then it is sent to the floor of the House to be voted on.

A few days ago I mentioned the site known as wikileaks.org inb this blog. It has been shut down by a US judge at the request of a Cayman Island bank. Is freedom of thought on the internet dead? How can we protest this action?

This just in from my friend George Salzman (you can subscribe to his email newsletter An Anarchist Physicist’s Notes by emailing an-anarchist-physicists-notes-subscribe@lists.riseup.net), who got it from http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/2008/02/18/us-court-attacks-web-freedom-enjoins-wikileaksorg-out-of-existence/:

      Now censorship has extended to the United States of America, land of the First Amendment. As of Friday, February 15, those going to Wikileaks.org have gotten Server not found messages. Today I received a message explaining that a California court has granted an injunction written and requested by Cayman Island‘s Bank Julius Baer lawyers. It seems that the bank is trying to keep the public from accessing documents that may reveal shady dealings. Wikileaks was only given a couple of hours notice “by email” and was not even represented at the hearing where a U.S. judge took such a drastic step attempting to totally shut down an important information outlet. The result was this totally unprecedented attempt to totally wipe out the existence of Wikileaks:

      “Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.”

      There have, of course, been previous attempts by the U.S. Government and others to block publication of particular documents, most famously in 1971 when the Nixon administration attempted to stop publication by the New York Times of excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. But trying to close down an entire site in this way is truly unprecedented. Not even the Nixon administration, when they sought to block publication of the Pentagon Papers, considered closing down the New York Times in response.

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nbsp;    Dr. Soldz is identified on a page of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis website at http://www.bgsp.edu/statements/ps_ssoldz.html as follows: Ph.D., Cert. Psya., Director, Center for Research, Evaluation and Program Development; Full Professor, Instructor, BGSP. His website, separate from his blog, is at http://soldzresearch.com/stephensoldz .

New Hampshire State Representative Betty Hall of Brookline, who comes close to being Granny D’s contemporary and who is a thoughtful and determined woman, has brought a bill of impeachment against the President and Vice President to the New Hampshire House, and a hearing is being held on Tuesday, February 19 at Legislative Office Building rooms 305-307 starting at 1:00 p.m. She is inviting supporters both in-state and out-of-state to rally in front of the state house in Concord at noon that day and then attend the hearing. for detailed information, see http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/5430.

House rules permit a state to initiate impeachment proceedings inthe US house as an alternative method to action by a congressional representative. The primary issue is the federal encouragement of the use of proprietary voting software, which can be used to steal elections, but FISA violations, the suspension of habeas corpus, condoning of torture, use of depelted uranium weapons, and the lies used to start the war in Iraq and other high crimes and misdemeanors are also listed.

This tactic was attempted in Vermont last year without success (so far).

I am privileged to have been one of Betty Hall’s constituents in the past (redistricting put me in a different district several years ago), and we remain good friends. I urge anyone who is able to support her that day to please show up at Concord.

A friend just pointed out a website that hosts thousands of anonymous leaks from inside governments and institutions around the world. It’s called Wikileaks, and it’s located at http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks:About

I haven’t delved into this site much, but it seems to be a rich source of facts that our governemts and  corporations have wanted to keep out of the public domain. My friend’s inital question that led him to Wikileaks had to do with a document that purportedly authoirized sending US forces into Iraq in 1995. Looking at the Iraq page, I noticed the US Rules of Engagement for Iraq, which have been kept secret until leaked recently at this site. For anyone in the news or political research business, this is a goldmine, as it lets us all in on the way the Pentagon is thinking about the occupation of that country.