Saturday, February 09, 2008

When, not if, martial law is declared

Digby of Hullabaloo quotes Matthew Rothschild of the Alternet:
One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation -- and what their role might be. He showed me his InfraGard card, with his name and e-mail address on the front, along with the InfraGard logo and its slogan, "Partnership for Protection." On the back of the card were the emergency numbers that Schneck mentioned.

This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.

"The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage," he says. "From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we'd be given specific benefits." These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out. But that's not all.

"Then they said when -- not if -- martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn't be prosecuted," he says.
Deadly force to contain American citizens. Hmmm. And what if they use deadly force back?

Doesn't it sound like Bush and his cohorts know of some impending and ever so convenient terrorist attack? I suggest we watch for where Georgie and Dick go from now on to January 20, 2009. Just to observe if they take oddly timed vacations or start having trucks drive up to their secret undisclosed locations with lots and lots of canned food....

3 comments:

Steve Bates said...

Ooooh... s#1t! This looks as bad as anything I've seen today. Who was it said "Stasi"? Sounds like it to me.

ellroon said...

Digby:
Far be it for me to draw parallels between our developing police state and earlier authoritarian regimes, but there is some fairly recent evidence of where this sort of thing leads:

The Stasi infiltrated almost every aspect of GDR life. In the mid-1980s, a network of civilian informants, Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs, Unofficial Collaborators), began growing in both German states; by the time East Germany collapsed in 1989, the Stasi employed an estimated 91,000 employees and 300,000 informants. About one of every 50 East Germans collaborated with the Stasi — one of the most extensive police infiltrations of a society in history. In 2007 an article in BBC stated that "Some calculations have concluded that in East Germany there was one informer to every seven citizens." Additionally, Stasi agents infiltrated and undermined West Germany's government and spy agencies.

I'm so proud to be an American....

ellroon said...

(First link of my post, scroll down.)