LulzSec announced Thursday evening the publication at Pirate Bay of a trove of leaked material from Arizona law enforcement agencies. Arizona’s Department of Public Safety confirmed shortly thereafter that it was hacked.

In the press release included with the dump, a LulzSec affiliate outlines a more activist agenda than is usually associated with the group:

We are releasing hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement. We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona.

The documents classified as “law enforcement sensitive”, “not for public distribution”, and “for official use only” are primarily related to border patrol and counter-terrorism operations and describe the use of informants to infiltrate various gangs, cartels, motorcycle clubs, Nazi groups, and protest movements.

Read more at BoingBoing.

Top three facts to know about private prisons (via immigrantsforsale.org):

1. The victims: Private prisons don’t care about who they lock up. At a rate of $200 per immigrant a night at their prisons, this is a money making scheme that destroys families and lives.
2. The players: CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), The Geo Group and Management and Training corporations—combined these private prisons currently profit more than $5 billion a year.
3. The money: These private prisons have spent over $20 million lobbying state legislators to make sure they get state anti-immigrant laws approved and ensure access to more immigrant inmates.

140 US Sailors & Marines from 45 different countries take the Oath of Citizenship aboard a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

Legal immigrants to the US have been allowed to gain citizenship after joining the military. By allowing citizenship to be approved while in boot camp, there’s less bureaucratic paperwork during deployment and a ‘well-deserved break’ before being shipped to war. From AP via The Bellingham Herald:

Military service has long been one route to U.S. citizenship. Now the Army and Navy, in need of specialists and language skills in wartime, are speeding things up by allowing recruits to wrap up the process while they’re still in basic training.

It means a change in a no-visitors policy during boot camp, to allow federal immigration officers access to the recruits. But military officials say it’s a well-deserved break for volunteers who otherwise would have to slog through the bureaucratic ordeal during deployments around the world, often far from U.S. embassies.

The military route is not a short-cut for foreigners abroad to get into the U.S. Only legal immigrants can apply, officials stress, and they must complete five years of honorable service or chance having their citizenship revoked.

[Continues at The Bellingham Herald]

CNN reports:

The number of radical right groups in America — including hate groups, “Patriot” groups and nativist groups — increased in 2010 for the second year in a row, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The organization’s quarterly publication, Intelligence Report, said the growth was “driven by resentment over the changing racial demographics of the country, frustration over the government’s handling of the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at various minorities.”

The SPLC documented 1,002 hate groups operating in the United States in 2010, a 7.5% increase from the year before. It was the first time that more than 1,000 hate groups were recorded since the organization started tracking them in the 1980s.

But the biggest growth was in so-called “Patriot” groups, which the organization described as conspiracy-minded groups that see the federal government as their primary enemy. There were 300 new groups like this, an increase of more than 60% from the year before, the report said. A lot of the growth in the Patriot groups came from an increase in the number of militias recorded.

Article continues at CNN.com

An immigration officer tried to rid himself of his wife by adding her name to a list of terrorist suspects.

He used his access to security databases to include his wife on a watch list of people banned from boarding flights into Britain because their presence in the country is ‘not conducive to the public good’. As a result the woman was unable for three years to return from Pakistan after traveling to the county to visit family.

The tampering went undetected until the immigration officer was selected for promotion and his wife name was found on the suspects’ list during a vetting inquiry. The Home Office confirmed today that the officer has been sacked for gross misconduct.

The incident is likely to raise new questions over levels of efficiency in the UK Border Agency, the organization formed nearly three years ago by then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to take over all immigration controls.

(For the disinfo regular, I’d recommend the watching the movie The Constant Gardener and the documentary Darwin’s Nightmare, but perhaps you already have…)

Who would suspect an elderly white man? Nobody. At least, that’s what the young man from Hong Kong thought. While the facial disguise was quite impressive, he forgot to make his hands appear aged as well, which was what raised suspicion as he boarded the plane. CNN reports:

Canadian authorities are investigating an “unbelievable” incident in which a passenger boarded an Air Canada flight disguised as an elderly man, according to a confidential alert obtained by CNN.

The incident occurred on October 29 on Air Canada flight AC018 to Vancouver originating in Hong Kong. An intelligence alert from the Canada Border Services Agency describes the incident as an “unbelievable case of concealment.”

“Information was received from Air Canada Corporate Security regarding a possible imposter on a flight originating from Hong Kong,” the alert says. “The passenger in question was observed at the beginning of the flight to be an elderly Caucasian male who appeared to have young looking hands. During the flight the subject attended the washroom and emerged an Asian looking male that appeared to be in his early 20s.”

After landing in Canada, Border Services Officers (BSOs) escorted the man off the plane where he “proceeded to make a claim for refugee protection,” the alert says.

Continues at CNN …

Arizona state Sen. Russell Pierce. Photo: Phoenician Patriot (CC)

Maybe this is what Tea Baggers mean by “leaner, more efficient government”?  Privatising the process altogether? Alex Pareene at Salon explores Arizona’s sell out of its citizens to the highest corporate bidder:

When it comes to creating demand for a previously unnecessary service and making a profit by any means necessary, you can’t beat the private sector. So no one should be surprised that the private prison industry is in part responsible for the Arizona immigration law that requires state law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law (read: lock up anyone suspected of being Hispanic until and unless they can prove their citizenship). NPR investigated the prison industry’s role in drafting and passing SB 1070. It’s pretty depressing.

Corporations and interest groups like R.J. Reynolds, ExxonMobil, the NRA, and the Corrections Corporation of America host a regular conference for state legislators in DC. At last December’s conference, the Corrections Corporation of America and Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce drafted the bill that eventually became the Arizona law.

MORE . . .

More than a century after she crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico into the US, Eulalia Garcia has become an American citizen at the age of 101.

“I feel really good about what I have accomplished – at my age and with my health,” she said.

Ms Garcia, who entered the US on 12 October 1909, became a citizen on the 101st anniversary of her arrival.

She said the first thing she wanted to do as an American was vote in the mid-term elections on 2 November.

“Sure, I do – for the best [candidate],” Ms Garcia said.

The naturalisation ceremony took place on Tuesday in a federal courthouse in Brownsville in the US state of Texas, where Ms Garcia has lived almost all her life.

Continues at BBC News …

Since he left CNN last November, after Latino groups mounted a protest campaign against his inflammatory rhetoric, Dobbs has continued to advocate an enforcement-first approach to immigration, emphasizing, as he did in a March 2010 interview on Univision, that “the illegal employer is the central issue in this entire mess!”

His scheduled October 9 address at the Virginia Tea Party Convention will mark his second major Tea Party address of the year, reviving questions about whether the former CNN host is gearing up for an electoral campaign. He recently told Fox’s Sean Hannity that he has not ruled out a possible Senate or even presidential run in 2012.

But with his relentless diatribes against “illegals” and their employers, Dobbs is casting stones from a house—make that an estate—of glass. Based on a yearlong investigation, including interviews with five immigrants who worked without papers on his properties, The Nation and the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute have found that Dobbs has relied for years on undocumented labor for the upkeep of his multimillion-dollar estates and the horses he keeps for his 22-year-old daughter, Hillary, a champion show jumper.

Dobbs lives in a sprawling white mansion on his 300-acre estate in Sussex, New Jersey, where he and his family run a horse farm. In 2005 he acquired another house—a spacious multimillion-dollar winter holiday home in Eagle Isle, the most exclusive enclave of the Ibis Golf and Country Club, a gated community in West Palm Beach, Florida. It offers his daughter a place to stay during her competitions at the Wellington Winter Equestrian Festival, one of the most important events in the horse show world.

Dobbs’s daughter keeps five European Warmbloods, a breed that often fetches close to $1 million apiece. In the official results of her competitions, her horses’ owner is always listed as The Dobbs Group—a corporate entity for which few details are available on the public record. However, incorporation documents and other state records reveal it to be a New Jersey company of which Lou Dobbs is president. This same company also owns the copyright on Dobbs’s books.

The upkeep of Dobbs’s multiple properties creates no small demand for labor in two sectors where undocumented immigrants are known to be particularly prevalent. Jay Hickey, president of the American Horse Council, the horse industry’s main lobby group, suggested in 2009 that more than half of the workers in his industry are likely undocumented. Likewise, studies have found that undocumented workers make up an estimated 28 percent of workers in landscaping. In both of these sectors, the use of contractors is commonplace, so it is not surprising that Dobbs has relied on third parties to supply the labor he needs. Vicky Moon, author of A Sunday Horse: Inside the Grand Prix Show-Jumping Circuit, explained that contracting out the care of one’s horses “alleviates the time involved in coordinating the horses’ care, transport, and management but it also removes the responsibility of hiring competent grooms, providing housing and meals, possibly paying Social Security taxes, health insurance and, most important, making extra sure they are legal.”

Read more here.

Isn’t it interesting though that they didn’t think it was such a waste of time when, a few years earlier, Chris Farley made an appearance there?

(Chris Farley rules.)

The tightness of their schedule and the importance of the upcoming debates are actually mentioned during the video, and yet the entire room rises for a standing ovation as soon as Chris Farley enters the rooms (which is, of course, the only reaction possible when he walked into a room).

Stephen Colbert’s presence was declared a “waste of time” because he was speaking up for the rights of immigrants, something very few politicians have been willing to do.

Click here for coverage of Stephen Colbert’s testimony before congress at The Huffington Post.

It’s no joke — Stephen Colbert will testify before Congress.

The Comedy Central host will head to Capitol Hill and appear before a House Judiciary subcommittee for a hearing on immigration called “Protecting America’s Harvest.”

Colbert will speak alongside United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez.

The comedian spent a day working at a farm in New York last month after Rodriguez came on the show to discuss UFW’s “Take Our Jobs” campaign, which challenges the view that illegal immigrants are stealing jobs from Americans.

Continues at New York Daily News …

Climbing temperatures are expected to raise sea levels and increase droughts, floods, heat waves and wildfires.

Now, scientists are predicting another consequence of climate change: mass migration to the United States.

Between 1.4 million and 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate to the U.S. by 2080 as climate change reduces crop yields and agricultural production in Mexico, according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The number could amount to 10% of the current population of Mexicans ages 15 to 65.

“Assuming that the climate projections are correct, gradually over the next several decades heading toward the end of the century, it becomes one of the more important factors in driving Mexicans across the border, all other things being equal,” said study author Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University…

[continues in the Los Angeles Times]

Arizona has argued, and fine-tuned the law, to emphasize the fact that officers will not perform random spot checks, but will enforce the law once someone has brought attention to themselves because of another law-breaking action. This  questions if “reasonable doubt” could easily be jaywalking, broken tail light, etc. Although this law has been widely contested throughout the country, according to Los Angeles Times, Arizona has already received $120,000 in private donations throughout the nation,to defend the law.  In President Obama’s speech on comprehensive immigration reform, on July 1, he addressed the concern over Arizona:

“States like Arizona have decided to take matters into their own hands. Given the levels of frustration across the country, this is understandable. But it is also ill conceived. And it’s not just that the law Arizona passed is divisive – although it has fanned the flames of an already contentious debate. Laws like Arizona’s put huge pressures on local law enforcement to enforce rules that ultimately are unenforceable. It puts pressure on already hard-strapped state and local budgets. It makes it difficult for people here illegally to report crimes – driving a wedge between communities and law enforcement, making our streets more dangerous and the jobs of our police officers more difficult.

These laws also have the potential of violating the rights of innocent American citizens and legal residents, making them subject to possible stops or questioning because of what they look like or how they sound. And as other states and localities go their own ways, we face the prospect that different rules for immigration will apply in different parts of the country – a patchwork of local immigration rules where we all know one clear national standard is needed.”

With the passing of Arizona’s immigration law, not only the question of whether or not this creates an acceptance of racial profiling, but opens the door for many other concerns.  Is the enforcement allowing the misconception that only Latinos make up the population of illegal workers? Does it deter illegal immigrants from calling in a crime in fear that they may be questioned as well?  Is this law subconsciously exist in other states?

Photo: Ross D. Franklin

Joan Lowy writes on the AP via Yahoo News:

Unmanned aircraft have proved their usefulness and reliability in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the pressure’s on to allow them in the skies over the United States.

The Federal Aviation Administration has been asked to issue flying rights for a range of pilotless planes to carry out civilian and law-enforcement functions but has been hesitant to act.

Officials are worried that they might plow into airliners, cargo planes and corporate jets that zoom around at high altitudes, or helicopters and hot air balloons that fly as low as a few hundred feet off the ground.

On top of that, these pilotless aircraft come in a variety of sizes. Some are as big as a small airliner, others the size of a backpack. The tiniest are small enough to fly through a house window.

The obvious risks have not deterred the civilian demand for pilotless planes. Tornado researchers want to send them into storms to gather data. Energy companies want to use them to monitor pipelines. State police hope to send them up to capture images of speeding cars’ license plates. Local police envision using them to track fleeing suspects.

Read More: AP via Yahoo News

A U.S. Border Patrol agent fatally shot a 15-year-old Mexican boy after a group trying to illegally enter Texas threw rocks at officers near downtown El Paso, U.S. authorities said Tuesday.

The shooting, which happened Monday evening beneath a railroad bridge linking the two nations, drew sharp criticism from Mexico, where the government said Tuesday that “the use of firearms to repel attacks with stones represents disproportionate use of force, particularly coming from authorities who have received specialized training.”

It was the second death of a Mexican at the hands of Border Patrol officers in less than two weeks, and the case threatened to swell into a full-blown international incident when U.S. and Mexican officials traded suggestions of misconduct.

Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the Chihuahua Attorney General’s office, said a spent 40-mm shell was found near the body – raising the question of whether the fatal shot was fired inside Mexico, although he did not explicitly make that suggestion. That would violate the rules for Border Patrol agents, who are supposed to stay on the U.S. side of the border…

[continues at CBS World News]

Who knew that Kermit the Frog was this into politics. The campaign of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) has put out a video that features a frog puppet — that looks much like the famous Sesame Street character — to help sell the state’s controversial immigration law.

The frog encourages opponents to read the immigration law before criticizing it.

Some may scoff, but the law has boosted Brewer in the polls over her Democratic opponent, Terry Goddard.

Watch it here:

Seven in 10 U.S. adults support arresting people who can’t prove they’re in the United States legally, a poll about Arizona’s new immigration law indicated.

The Angus Reid Public Opinion poll of 1,002 American adults asked respondents if they’d want four guidelines in Arizona’s immigration law enacted in their own state.

Feel free to add the entire state of Arizona to this map. Source: ACLU

The law, the nation’s toughest, seeks to identify, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants and gives police broad powers to stop people on suspicion of being in the United States illegally.

Seventy-one percent of poll respondents said they’d support requiring their own police to determine people’s U.S. status if there was “reasonable suspicion” the people were illegal immigrants, the poll found.

Read More: UPI

Photo: Nevit Dilmen (CC)

Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:

For a country that prides itself on its freedoms, we’ve systematically begun to dismantle them in favor of a perceived sense of safety. We have the largest, most powerful military in the world. Our surveillance systems and police technologies are state of the art. We have more law enforcement agencies than acronyms available.

Yet, for all the measures in place to make us feel safe, we live our lives in fear of the next thwarted terrorist attack. To live and believe that we are the most powerful country in the world and simultaneously feel so vulnerable is a mental gymnastics performance that would make Orwell blush.

With all of the shouting in the public square about the constitution and the paranoia some Americans fear over “big government,” how can our elected leaders even begin to fathom, let alone propose and support such draconian and downright dictatorial powers? Yet, millions of Americans justified the PATRIOT ACT when legislators jumped at the chance to sign the bill without reading it.

Even though there is hopeful popular and political resistance to Arizona’s immigration bill, millions of Americans support that as well. Now in the face of this “vulnerable world,” we’re supposed to quietly and lovingly accept big brother’s biometric seal of approval and God given right to take it away in secret, without presenting a burden of proof.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

1. On your campaign page, you hold up Cesar Chavez as an example of non-violence. In light of recent events in Arizona and the passage of controversial immigration legislation, how does Mr. Chavez’s opposition to illegal immigration function alongside your personal views of border control? (This is what I’m talking about.)

Is attempting to apply restrictions on human movements through the enforcement of borders ever inherently racist?

Any good labor leader will want to protect against strike-breakers. This is what Chavez was dealing with — illegals were being hired to cross picket lines and scab on the union.

The ideal immigration policy would make it easier to become a citizen. We need to create more jobs in this country so that we’re not at each others’ throats competing for a such a small number of jobs.

You asked about racism. I think that that’s certainly in play here in today’s politics. What’s going on in Arizona does have an ugly racial tone to it. Let’s remember to try to empathize with what everyone is going through. This whole Tea Party movement is about not getting enough information, not enough “transparency” from Obama. Left and Right, people are feeling like the Government is out of control, out of touch. The response from the liberal magazines has been to attack the Tea Party. I say instead, let’s build a mass movement for peace, for America, for free speech and free flow of information, for truth.

2. You mentioned “Anthrax” as needing investigation on your website. Do you feel that Bruce Ivins is responsible for his own death? Do you believe, if responsible at all, he is the sole party culpable for the attacks on congressional offices? If he wasn’t, why would investigators be so eager to find a fall guy?

Bruce Ivins could not have done it. All the experts on this point out that the antrax was super-fine, it was “weaponized”. Ivins simply did not have the tech at hand to make anthrax this fine.

Whether Ivins killed himself or not is not as relevant as the clear pressure that was on him. He had the FBI telling him he was going down for this huge crime. FBI even pressured Ivins son to take “one million dollars and the sportscar of your choice” to betray his father, and claim that he was guilty. The son wouldn’t do it, bless him. But what does that show you? Brutal fabrication of evidence, trying to coerce witnesses who did not witness any guilt.

Look at the timing of the Ivins scape-goating. It was a rush job, just as the Bush/Cheney administration was falling apart, on the verge of impeachment, on the verge of dissolution, lowest polls ever, their sorry term about to end. Ivins was the perfect fall guy, especially because he was dead when accused in public.

What really blows me away is that I’m not alone with this stuff. Even the Wall Street Journal backs me up! This piece by Edward Jay Epstein came out earlier this year. But the FBI changed their story once again, shortly after this came out, and despite Epstein’s claims, the FBI re-affirmed that Ivins was their culprit. But this can not be true. For an even more comprehensive refutation of the FBI’s pathetically weak story, see attorney Barry Kissin’s masterful compendium of media articles, with commentary, that shows that the “weaponization” of the anthrax indicates that it came from high up in the world of the US military. But someone in the media/military/intelligence undertook a campaign to delete, and make us forget that the words “weaponized” were ever used with this anthrax.

3. So I saw the film “Able Danger,” as filmed by Paul Krik in your coffee shop “Vox Pop.” Although that film was a dramatization of real events, do you think it’s too charitable to presume that the members of operation “Able Danger” were doing anything less than “letting 9/11 happen on purpose?”

Well, hold on, the guys in the “Able Danger” operation were the good guys. They were Army intelligence reservists working in early 2000 on their task: to find and document Al Qaeda operatives inside the USA. They did so, and that’s when things got hairy with their higher-ups. People like Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer testified to Congress, and Rep. Curt Weldon, in 2005 that a very strange series of blocks arose against Able Danger sharing their info with FBI or other people at Pentagon. I don’t think Able Danger had the power to “let 9/11 happen” but I do believe we need a new investigation, to find out who really did do 9/11. Clearly someone higher up allowed it to happen, or made it happen. The terrorists that Able Danger found, Nawaf Al-Hazmi, Khalid Al-Mihdhar, and Mohammed Atta, all have these strange connections to CIA, FBI and the Saudi Royals close to Bush. Weird, huh?

I just ran into [Washington Editor for Harper's Magazine] Ken Silverstein at Left Forum this year. My jaw hit the floor. He actually said that he “enjoyed . . . destroying the life” of Congressman Curt Weldon, the guy who had the guts to convene the Able Danger Congressional hearings in 2005. Remember this? The FBI raided the guy’s daughter’s house right before his re-election, and his easy victory turned into a sound defeat. Even Mueller thought that this was a politically biased raid, and a lot of the experts have been implying that this was payback from CIA.

I blogged about my confrontation with Silverstein. The guy is dangerous. He stopped answering my questions after one dismissive, cynical email.

4. Today, Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey said that there is a cap of $75 billion on what the law holds BP legally liable for in regards to the Gulf spill. Is this cap acceptable? What, if anything, can be done to hold the company accountable for this without causing the company to pass on the added cost to consumers?

It’s not just Sen. Bob Menendez. The laws on the books protect any oil company from legal liabilities over $75 million.

But wait, the damage should really cost them $10 BILLION. The Guardian reports that the financial analysts at Barclay’s say that BP could be hit with about 100,000 claims of $100,000 each. What does that total? $10 billion.

OK, so let’s do some quick math. People are suffering. BP should compensate them. The damages equal X amount.

BUT, this oil-addicted society, where the law is written by big money, you have laws like this $75 million cap. It was put there after the Exxon Valdez, actually, another huge tragedy that Exxon took way too long to clean up.

This law says that BP doesn’t have to pay that X amount to compensate the suffering. No, not even half. They only have to pay 1/133rd of that. They only have to pay 0.75% of that. Wild, huh?

I mean, I don’t even really have to answer this, anyone can see that this is a damn lousy deal for anyone living or owning land or otherwise damaged by this sloppy oil company. I wonder if laws like this have an effect on the liklihood of future accidents. Hey, if you’re BP or Exxon, why would you spend too much money on safety? That’s not smart business! Instead, just pay your lobbyists to pass laws like this $75 million cap on liabilities.

One more point before I go:

Look at BP’s Operating Profits. $33,392,000,000 last year. $33 billion.

Am I alone in thinking that the first $10 billion of the 2010 profits should go to pay damages? I’m sure a lot of people will agree with me on this. Except that the law is not on our side. This has to change. We need to get money out of politics. No more regulatory legislation written by oil lobbyists.

5. Respond point-by-point to this video sponsored largely by the Koch family through the Institute for Energy Research.

Bleh. This is silly. Of course wind turbines are made with traditional steel and transported with fossil fuels. How else could they be made? They can’t will themselves into existence. The point is that once they are made, then they begin to replace the need for fossil fuels.

6. Do you now suspect there were explosives in World Trade Center 7? How about towers one and two? How certain are you of this suspicion?

What I’m certain of is that we need a real investigation. We have never had a fair and impartial inquiry. Even the 9/11 Commission leaders admit that now. Then there’s that international panel of scientists who last summer (09) published a peer-reviewed paper. They found nano-thermite, a military grade explosive, in four out of four dust samples tested at the site. Those guys are pretty certain that two planes didn’t bring down three towers. My friends in Architechts and Engineers for 9/11 Truth agree— they tell me that no fire of any kind ever brought down a steel-framed building. Pretty weird, don’t you think? No matter what you believe, this issue is not going to go away. The only therapy for the country’s nagging doubts is a real investigation.

7. Senator Kit Bond has frequently gone on television to defend consideration of a military tribunal for 9/11 suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, citing leaked documents from the civilian trial of a suspect in the first World Trade Center bombing that, he asserted, aided Osama bin Laden’s evading authorities. In light of this, do you support a domestic trial and/or a civilian trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? If so, why?

Well, you are assuming a lot here, first of all that KSM is guilty, or indictable at all. Or that Osama bin Laden was guilty, or that he “evaded” authorities. I’m not sure any of that is true. We never proved that Bin Laden had anything to do with the attacks, although we promised the world proof. Colin Powell promised “a white paper” on this that never came. Tony Blair did as well. Today, the FBI does not list Bin Laden on the 10 Most Wanted list for 9/11, they say they don’t have enough proof. I told this to ABC’s Nightline when I was on, and the guy just looked at me like I was nuts. “We’ll look into it.” Chris Bury promised, but he didn’t mention it on air.

I’m not sure I have ever seen strong evidence that KSM was guilty. Plus, this guy has been tortured for years, so he may not be fit to be tried. In the context of the nano-thermite those scientists found in the dust, or the 1000 Architects and Engineers who submitted a petition to Congress, I think really we have a lot bigger issues to pursue in this country, around 9/11 Justice, before we try and fry a couple of Islamists.

The big question for me around 9/11 is this: was it an act of treason. This is what the country needs to wake up and ask itself. Because treason is serious, the founding fathers held it up as the one crime that deserved its own definition, in the Constitution. You commit treason if you levy war, or cause or compel your country into war. 9/11 may well fit the bill for the most flagrant act of treason, ever in the history of the USA.

I mean, step back and look at US history: the Vietnam generation showed that the people have begun to reject wars of foreign intervention. For a good while there in the ’60s and ’70s with Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Gay Rights, and the anti-war movement, we were beginning to seriously find ways to resist the huge crime of war, the sick logic of the oil company laws. So, the right-wing had to come up with a new strategy, to trick the people into compliance. No wonder truthers get treated with so much vitriol. We truthers are pointing out that the whole of U.S. Foreign Policy is based on a big lie. But this big lie is so important to so much money and power, no one in the media or government can afford to stand up and say, yeah, the logic of the truth movement is superior to the shoddy sloppy logic of the 9/11 official story.

8. In the unlikely event that John McCain had beaten Barack Obama, do you think the United States would have as many military members deployed in Iraq?

There’s not much to like with McCain, but he is to the left of Obama on torture. A combat veteran, maybe he wouldn’t be so insouciant about asking for $33 billion more to amp up the Afghanistan occupation. But who knows. It’s almost like the GOP knew they couldn’t beat Obama, with the hated Bush/Cheney legacy looming over them, so they hit a sacrifice fly.

9. NATO has stopped burning poppy crops in Afghanistan. You have spoken very negatively of the financiers of narco-trafficking in writing you have done for AlterNet. Do you consider ceasing the burning of these crops a positive step?

Right. The logic goes, 90% of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan, and if we just burn their crops, that will lead to more support for the Taliban.

But listen, let’s talk hard truth. From the CIA and Casey and Reagan in the 80’s up to right now the USA has been at war in Afghanistan in one way or another for a good long time. We have tolerated and participated in the creation of a total narco-state. Heroin production went up by a factor of 33.

From 250 tons in 1979 to 8,200 tons in 2007. That means that we treat heroin trafficking as just a cost of doing business in Afghanistan.

That’s just life in PostModern America. But it’s not good enough for me.

Fight the pale-skin power. In response to Arizona’s new draconian SB 1070 immigration law, Zubi, an independent Hispanic advertising firm with offices in L.A., Dallas, Miami, and Detroit, has launched a microsite, Gringo Mask, to offer “support and dignity to the Hispanic community in the United States.”

Photo: PabloBM (CC)

In the wake of Arizona’s new racial-profiling reign-of-police-terror law, Senate Democrats countered by unveiling their own Orwellian immigration reform “solution”: biometric ID cards for all American workers. Yep, that’s going to go over really well. The Hill reports:

A plan by Senate Democratic leaders to reform the nation’s immigration laws ran into strong opposition from civil liberties defenders before lawmakers even unveiled it Thursday.

Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.

The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.

The American Civil Liberties Union, a civil liberties defender often aligned with the Democratic Party, wasted no time in blasting the plan.

“Creating a biometric national ID will not only be astronomically expensive, it will usher government into the very center of our lives. Every worker in America will need a government permission slip in order to work. And all of this will come with a new federal bureaucracy — one that combines the worst elements of the DMV and the TSA,” said Christopher Calabrese, ACLU legislative counsel.

Greg Palast in a guard tower looking out on Joe Arpaio's jail in Maricopa County, Arizona. Photo: Greg Palast/Truthout (CC)

BBC journalist Greg Palast has written a new article for TruthOut suggesting that perhaps the real reason for the insane-o “Papieren, bitte” (that’s “Papers, please” to you non-Nazis) law in Arizona is not actually about illegal immigration, so much as it is about voter suppression of LEGAL Hispanic residents.

If past trends in that state are any indicator, he may not be far off the mark. He writes:

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote — and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters … directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer’s command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you’re not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.

So I asked Brewer’s office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?

No, not one.

Which raises the question: were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?

The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters. “We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost 2 years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case.”

This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.

[More at TruthOut]

In 2004 alone there were 3.7 million people under the age of 30 who registered as new Democrats, whereas only 1.2 million new voters registered as Republicans. This trend does not speak well of the GOP’s future, so it is reasonable to ask, what is the real motivator behind this new law? Why would a bunch of corporatists, who frankly PROFIT off of having what amounts to a cheap labor force at their disposal, care whether illegals walk our streets or not?

There clearly is racism at play here, but the only way political party hacks like the Governor of Arizona get behind anything, is if it keeps them in power. They don’t really CARE what the excuse is.

Palast has been keeping a good eye on this for some time, and he noted as far back as 2004 that there were weird going’s on with respect to not just brown people’s votes in Arizona, but with the red man’s as well in places like New Mexico.

You can read about that in his article at TomPaine.com:

“If the vote is stolen here, it will be stolen in Rio Arriba County,” a New Mexico politician told me. That’s a reasoned surmise: in 2000, one in 10 votes simply weren’t counted—chucked out, erased, discarded. In the voting biz, the technical term for these vanishing votes is “spoilage.” Citizens cast ballots, but the machines don’t notice. In one Rio Arriba precinct in the last go-’round, not one single vote was cast for president—or, at least, none showed up on the machines.

Not everyone’s vote spoils equally. Rio Arriba is 73 percent Hispanic. I asked nationally recognized vote statistician Dr. Philip Klinkner of Hamilton College to run a “regression” analysis of the Hispanic ballot spoilage in the Enchanted State. He calculated that a brown voter is 500 percent more likely to have their vote spoiled than a white voter. And It’s worse for Native Americans. Vote spoilage is epidemic near Indian reservations.

Indeed, it’s a bit of a long-term trend. Vote dilution/spoilage has been an ongoing struggle on the reservations. Back in the 1980’s Republican state lawmakers even attempted to create an all-Indian county through redistricting, a proposal one state senator called the “Arizona Apartheid Act.”

Back in 2004, Republicans put a referendum on the ballot called the “Protect Arizona Now” measure (Proposition 200), which would have done several things, including requiring proof of citizenship for anyone registering to vote – in other words, have police standing out in front of polling places intimidating brown-skinned Arizona citizens. Indeed the state was absolutely flooded with GOP-controlled astroturf organizations (like the Southwest Voter Registration Project, New American Freedom Summer, Truth in Action, and Moving America Forward) pushing such measures. Truth in Action even sent thugs in black t-shirts with “U.S. Constitutional Enforcement” written on the back and the image of a badge on the front to polling places to “monitor” things.

So to me at least, I think we need to ask broader questions about what is really behind this anti-illegal immigration law. Illegal immigration is a huge problem, no one’s denying that, but I think we would do well to think critically and ask ourselves just who is exploiting that fact, and for what reasons?

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.

The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

“It’s the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive. “If you say they can’t get a job when they come here, you’ll stop it.”

The biggest objections to the biometric cards may come from privacy advocates, who fear they would become de facto national ID cards that enable the government to track citizens…

They don’t claim to know who’s been naughty or nice, but some Houston charities are asking whether children are in the country legally before giving them toys.

In a year when more families than ever have asked for help, several programs providing Christmas gifts for needy children require at least one member of the household to be a U.S. citizen. Others ask for proof of income or rely on churches and schools to suggest recipients.

The Salvation Army and a charity affiliated with the Houston Fire Department are among those that consider immigration status, asking for birth certificates or Social Security cards for the children.

The point isn’t to punish the children but to ensure that their parents are either citizens, legal immigrants or working to become legal residents, said Lorugene Young, whose Outreach Program Inc. is one of three groups that distribute toys collected by firefighters.

“It’s not our desire to turn anyone down,” she said. “Those kids are not responsible if they are here illegally. It is the parents’ responsibility.”

The idea of a charity turning away children because of decisions made by their parents unsettled some immigration activists.

[Read more at The Houston Chronicle]

It sounds like a George Lopez joke: “Times are so bad that I saw an Anglo day laborer standing outside Home Depot the other day.”

Except it’s true…In the latest sign of the Las Vegas Valley’s economic free fall, U.S. citizens are starting to show up in the early mornings outside home improvement stores and plant nurseries across the Las Vegas Valley, jostling with illegal immigrants for a shot at a few hours of work.