http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/…

As Ted Galen Carpenter has noted, the War on Drugs is active in Afghanistan. Below is a photo from the DEA website of Special Agents burning a bunker of hashish in Afghanistan. Repeat: These guys are DEA agents, not U.S. soldiers.

Looks like they are putting their domestic training of busting down people’s doors to good use.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/…

Northcom has announced that two more U.S. military units will be assigned for domestic homeland security missions, bringing the total number of combat ready service members operating inside the U.S. to around 4,700, as fears grow about the increasing militarization of law enforcement.

The announcement follows the controversy surrounding a September 8 Army Times report (revised on September 30), which revealed that the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, fresh from combat duties in Iraq, would be operating inside America for tasks including “civil unrest and crowd control,” a detail that was later denied by Northcom despite the concession that forces would be armed with both non-lethal and lethal weapons as well as having access to tanks.

“In the next three years the military plans to activate and train an estimated 4,700 service members for specialized domestic operations, according to Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of U.S. Northern Command, which was created in 2002 for homeland defense missions,” reports the Colorado Independent.

“It’s to help us manage the consequences of a large-scale event,” said Renuart. “We have one [unit] now trained and equipped and assigned to the Northern Command. We’ll grow a second one this calendar year of 2009 and a third one in the calendar year 2010 so we can provide the nation three sets of capabilities that could respond to an event of the size of 9/11 or larger.”

But as Mike German, national security counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative office in Washington., D.C., points out, “This isn’t a military police brigade or a civil affairs brigade. This is actually a combat brigade being assigned a domestic mission.”

With these stories… combined with Biden and Powell saying shortly into the Obama presidency he will face a great test… well the conspiracy theorists sound less crazy. Lets hope they aren’t.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25605640/

Bowing to President Bush’s demands, the Senate approved and sent the White House a bill Wednesday to overhaul bitterly disputed rules on secret government eavesdropping and shield telecommunications companies from lawsuits complaining they helped the U.S. spy on Americans.

The relatively one-sided vote, 69-28, came only after a lengthy and heated debate that pitted privacy and civil liberties concerns against the desire to prevent terrorist attacks. It ended almost a year of wrangling over surveillance rules and the president’s warrantless wiretapping program that was initiated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The House passed the same bill last month, and Bush said he would sign it soon.

How completely not surprising that the Democrats would hand Bush and friends more dictatorial powers.

All the amendments were defeated. McCain didn’t bother to vote, Obama, Specter, Lieberman voted for it. Feingold, who had said “This president broke the law,” voted against it. As did Biden, Clinton, Schumer, Kerry and Dodd. Glad to see the NJ senators, Lautenberg and Menendez, voted Nay.

You can find the full list of how they all voted at GovTrack.us

They have legalized a major crime and transfered a huge amount of power, which they don’t have, to the executive branch. They don’t even fully know what they are giving immunities to. The information is highly classified. Just sad.