Major political reporters have been actively ignoring the issue of
global warming when interviewing presidential candidates.
They have only mentioned the words GLOBAL WARMING in 3 questions ALL YEAR!
For the rest of the story www.whataretheywait
From 2003 to 2007, an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's "Threat and Local Observation Notice" system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Department of Defense itself. Last year, via Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU uncovered at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the U.S. -- some listed as "credible threats" --- from student groups at the University of California-Santa Cruz, State University of New York, Georgia State University, and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.
At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now double as full-time FBI agents and, according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student activists' doors from North Carolina State to the University of Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Massachusetts-
FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don't have to do all the work themselves. Administrators often do it for them, setting up "free speech zones," which actually constrain speech, and punishing those who step outside them. Last year, protests were typically forced into "free assembly areas" at the University of Central Florida and Clemson University; while students at Hampton and Pace Universities faced expulsion for handing out antiwar flyers, aka "unauthorized materials."
Mine student records: Student records have, in recent years, been opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment, or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named "Project Strike Back," the Department of Education teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The objective? "To identify potential people of interest," explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to "potential terrorist activity."
Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006, days after students at Northwestern University blew its cover. But just one month later, the Education Department's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report, recommended the creation of a federal "unit record" database that would track the activities and studies of college students nationwide. The Department's Institute of Education Sciences has developed a prototype for such a national database.
It's not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part, hopes to turn campuses into recruitment centers for its overstretched, overstressed forces. In fact, the Department of Defense (DoD) has built its own database for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies, this program now tracks 30 million young people, ages 16 to 25. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the DoD has partnered with private marketing and data mining firms, which, in turn, sell the government reams of information on students and other potential recruits.
. Privatize, privatize, privatize: Of course, homeland security is not just a department, nor is it simply a new network of surveillance and data mining -- it's big business. (According to USA Today , global homeland-security-
Not surprisingly, then, universities have, in recent years, established unprecedented private-sector partnerships with the corporations that have the most to gain from their research.
http://www.tomdispa
Letter to the Editor: Nation needs ACLU more than ever
There goes (name censored) again (in a Skagit County newspaper) - libeling the
American Civil Liberties Union in his Christmas
Day "Prickly City" cartoon. Shame! You imply
that the ACLU is hostile to religion and opposed
to people saying "Merry Christmas."
You're either ignorant or you know the truth
but choose to pander to popular misconceptions
and misrepresentations spread by the ACLU's
enemies. As America's foremost champion of
our Bill of Rights, the ACLU defends freedom of
expression, including your right to publish cartoons
that mislead and defame.
Though the ACLU defends personal expressions
of faith, it opposes the entanglement of
government and religion, which history has
shown to be detrimental to both. Some choose
to disregard those lessons of history and try
to enlist the coercive power of government to
"Christianize" America. As anti-abortion zealot
Randall Terry of Operation Rescue declared:
"Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical
duty; we are called by God to conquer this
country."
Even as American soldiers fight to establish
secular governments in Iraq and Afghanistan,
which will protect the rights of those of differing
religions, back home, some groups are
trying to undermine the wall of separation
between church and state so they can impose
their "biblical" morality and divine mandates
on us.
They slander those who resist them and
spread lies on the Internet. One example was
their assertion that the ACLU opposed the
crosses in Arlington National Cemetery. In fact,
the ACLU was supporting veterans who wanted
grave markers that reflected their personal religious
beliefs.
With civil liberties and constitutional checks
and balances under attack from outside and
inside our government, we need the American
Civil Liberties Union more than ever.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
Larry Edwards
Burlington, WA
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