John Harris: History From A Different Perspective

Military to Pledge Oath to Obama, Not Constitution

Michele Chang – Jumping in Pools January 28, 2009

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is extremely frustrated with orders that the White House is contemplating. According to sources at the Pentagon, including all branches of the armed forces, the Obama Administration may break with a centuries-old tradition.

A spokesman for General James Cartwright, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, states that the Obama Administration wants to have soldiers and officers pledge a loyalty oath directly to the office of the President, and no longer to the Constitution.

"The oath to the Constitution is as old as the document itself." the spokesman said, "At no time in American history, not even in the Civil War, did the oath change or the subject of the oath differ. It has always been to the Constitution."

The back-and-forth between the White House and the Defense Department was expected as President George W. Bush left office. President Obama has already signed orders to close Guantanamo and to pull combat troops from Iraq. But, this, say many at the Defense Department, goes too far.

"Technically, we can't talk about it before it becomes official policy." the spokesman continued. "However, the Defense Department, including the Secretary, will not take this laying down. Expect a fight from the bureaucracy and the brass."

Sources at the White House had a different point of view. In a circular distributed by White


House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, the rationale for the change was made more clear.

"The President feels that the military has been too indoctrinated by the old harbingers of hate: nationalism, racism, and classism. By removing an oath to the American society, the soldiers are less likely to commit atrocities like those at Abu Ghraib."

"We expect a lot of flak over this," the classified memo continues. "But those that would be most against it are those looking either for attention or control."

The time frame for the changes are unknown. However, it is more likely that the changes will be made around the July 4th holiday, in order to dampen any potential backlash. The difference in the oath will actually only be slight. The main differences will be the new phrasing. It is expected that the oath to the Constitution will be entirely phased out within two years.

Recession is the birth pangs of a New Global Order, says Brown

New World Order man. Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown gives a speech in front of a painting of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I at 10 Downing Street in London, Monday, Jan. 26, 2009. AP Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth

Daily Mail | Jan 27, 2009

By Kirsty Walker

Gordon Brown has insisted that the recession was just the ‘difficult birth pangs of a new global order’.

As a poll showed more voters are turning against him, the Prime Minister warned that countries must see the financial crisis as the chance to forge a new financial system.

Setting the scene for April’s G20 talks in London, Mr Brown said: ‘If what happens to a bank in one country can within minutes have devastating effects for banks on a different continent, then only a truly international response of policy and governance can be effective.’

He said current ‘threats and challenges’ to the world economy should be seen as ‘the difficult birth pangs of a new global order’.

‘Our task now is nothing less than making the transition to a new internationalism with the benefits of an expanding global economy, not muddling through as pessimists, but making the necessary adjustment to a better future and setting new rules for this new global order’, he said.

Mr Brown and Chancellor Alistair Darling are aware the G20 summit of developing countries and business leaders on April 4, could decide further stimulus measures that could alter the of this year’s Budget. The Prime Ministeris pinning his hopes on other countries, in particular the U.S., following Britain’s lead by pumping cash into their economies.

The Treasury rejected suggestions that Mr Darling is already working on a third economic rescue. Ministers want to give the Government time to see if its £410billion rescue plan has had any impact on the economy. But a poll last night found most voters believe Labour’s attempts to kick-start the economy are doomed to failure.

The Guardian/ICM poll found that two-thirds of voters believe that the banking bailout packages will achieve nothing or make things worse.

It also shows more signs that David Cameron has seen off the ‘Brown bounce’. The Conservatives have opened up a 12-point margin on 44 per cent, up six on last month, while Labour is on 32 and the Liberal Democrats are on 16.

The poll, carried out after last week’s bank bailouts and sharp falls in share values, found that public confidence in Labour’s economic team has plunged by 11 per cent since November, with the Conservatives seen as more trusted on the economy by a margin of two points.

There is support for the VAT cut (63 per cent) and a programme of public works (85 per cent). But only 43 per cent support the decision to buy large stakes in some banks and only 40 per cent back outright nationalisation. Voters are slightly more enthusiastic about Labour attempts to underwrite bank lending, backed by 52 per cent.

If the poll were replicated at a General Election, the Tories would win 360 seats - a majority of 70. The LibDems will be disturbed by their fall to the lowest level in any ICM poll since August.

Obama's Unconstitutional Agenda

Plan For A New World Order

Wake up Obama is NOT an American NWO deception

Escaping the System

Barack Obama To Increase Spying On YOU

Written by www.daily.pk

Saturday, 10 January 2009 11:59

Barack Obama will be in charge of the biggest domestic and international spying operation in history. Its prime engine is the National Security Agency (NSA)—located and guarded at Fort Meade, Maryland, about 10 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. A brief glimpse of its ever-expanding capacity was provided on October 26 by The Baltimore Sun's national security correspondent, David Wood: "The NSA's colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the 'Black Widow,' scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages." In July, George W. Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which gives the NSA even more power to look for patterns that suggest terrorism links in Americans' telephone and Internet communications. The ACLU immediately filed a lawsuit on free speech and privacy grounds. The new Bush law provides farcical judicial supervision over the NSA and other government trackers and databasers. Although Senator Barack Obama voted for this law, dig this from the ACLU: "The government is now permitted to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and e-mail addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it's conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing." This gives the word "dragnet" an especially chilling new meaning. The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer, director of its National Security Project, adds that the new statute, warming the cold hearts of the NSA, "implicates all kinds of communications that have nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activity of any kind." Why did Obama vote for this eye-that-never-blinks? He's a bright, informed guy, but he wasn't yet the President-Elect. The cool pragmatist wanted to indicate he wasn't radically unmindful of national security—and that his previous vow to filibuster such a bill may have been a lapse in judgment. It was. What particularly outraged civil libertarians across the political divide was that the FISA Amendments Act gave immunity to the telecommunications corporations—which, for seven years, have been a vital part of the Bush administration's secret wiretapping program—thereby dismissing the many court cases brought by citizens suing those companies for violating their individual constitutional liberties. This gives AT&T, Verizon, and the rest a hearty signal to go on pimping for the government. That's OK with the Obama administration? Please tell us, Mr. President. Some of us began to see how deeply and intricately the telecoms were involved in the NSA's spying when—as part of an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit—it was revealed by a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, that he had found a secret AT&T room in which the NSA was tapping into the telecom giant's fiber-optic cables. On National Public Radio on November 7, 2007, he disclosed: "It's not just AT&T's traffic going through these cables, because these cables connected AT&T's network with other networks like Sprint, Qwest the one firm that refused to play ball with the government, Global Crossing, UUNet, etc." What you should know is that these fruitful cables go through "a splitter" that, as Klein describes, "just copies the entire data without any selection going on. So it's a complete copy of the data stream." Under the new FISA Amendments Act, there are no limits on where this stream of data can be disseminated. As in the past, but now with "legal" protection under the 2008 statute, your suspicious "patterns" can go to the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA, and state and local police that are also involved in "fusion centers" with the FBI. Consider the enormous and bottomless databases that the government—and its NSA—can have a ball with. In James Bamford's The Shadow Factory (Doubleday)—a new book that leads you as far as anyone has gone into the bowels of the NSA—he notes: "For decades, AT&T and much of the rest of the telecommunications industry have had a very secret, very cozy relationship with the NSA." In AT&T's case, he points out, "its international voice service carried more than 18 billion minutes per year, reaching 240 countries, linking 400 carriers, and offering remote access via 19,500 points of presence in 149 countries around the globe." Voilá! Also, he notes: "Much of those communications passed through that secret AT&T room that Klein found on Folsom Street in downtown San Francisco." There's a lot more to come that we don't know about. Yet. In The Shadow Factory, James Bamford quotes Bush's Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell as saying that this wiretapping program was and is "only one program of many highly secret programs approved by Bush following the attacks on 9/11" (emphasis added). McConnell also said of the NSA's nonstop wiretapping: "This is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has officially been acknowledged." Come on, Mike. Bush acknowledged the NSA's flagrant contempt of the First and Fourth amendments only after The New York Times broke the story in December 2005. When the Times executive editor, Bill Keller, first decided to hold the explosive story for a year, General Michael Hayden—the former head of the NSA who is currently running the CIA—was relieved because he didn't want the news to get out that "most international communications pass through these telecommunications 'switching,' " Bamford reports. It would blow the cover off those corporate communicators. Now, AT&T, Verizon, et al., don't have to worry, thanks to the new law. There are increasing calls, inside and outside of Congress, for President Obama to urge investigations by an independently bipartisan commission—akin to the 9/11 Commission—to get deeply into the many American and international laws so regally broken by Bush and his strutting team. But there is so much still to find out about the NSA's "many highly secret programs" that a separate commission is sorely needed to probe exclusively into the past and ongoing actions of the Black Widow and other NSA lawless intrusions into our privacy and ideas. President Obama could atone for his vote that supported the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 by appointing such a bipartisan commission composed of technology experts who are also familiar with the Constitution. Bamford says that the insatiable NSA is "developing an artificial intelligence system designed to know what people are thinking." Here come the thought police!