Bill Drafted In Secret Would Block Release Of Some Newtown Massacre Records
Looks like some secretive bill being drafted to prevent the People from finding out the truth about what happened in Newtown. I think by now, that most of the nation can agree that we were not told the truth.
Recapping some of my articles following the alleged lone-wolf shooting at Sandy Hook…
A Bushwhacked Sheriff in Newtown
Who’s on First? The Bait and Switch at Sandy Hook
Enjoy 
Authored in 2008 by Richard Serino, then-Director of Boston's Emergency Medical Services, Marathons - A Tale of Two Cities and the Running of a Planned Mass Casualty Event (PDF) provides a detailed and fully operationalized plan for carrying out a mass casualty drill uncannily similar to what transpired at the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013.
(Intellihub) - VIRGINIA — This adds a whole new tear to domestic surveillance as most airspace is free range to the men behind the curtain. Now advanced drones are roaming the land, air and water.
For the first time in aviation history a military drone aircraft was launched at sea off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS George W. Bush.
“SALTY-DOG502″ is what the drone has been labeled by the military as this will likely signify a new form of foreign and domestic surveillance over waters.
According to reports, the drone was able to, successfully negotiate, passes above and around the ship, while Naval Officers stood by proud not realizing that this would be the death of the constitution in America and the start of a Fascist dictatorship.
In fact, Wired.com did an article in which the details read, “But the X-47B, a Northrop Grumman creation, is a step ahead of other drones in another way. Almost all drones of its size — with a 62-foot wingspan, it’s bigger than a Predator and about on the scale of a manned F/A-18 Super Hornet — are flown by human beings. Those human beings might be thousands of miles away from the drone, in a cramped and freezing-cold Ground Control Station, but they have instruments that give them physical, real-time control of how the drone flies and what it sees — a very remote cockpit. The X-47B is different: its flight plan is pre-programmed, a matter of an algorithm, and the drone executes it autonomously, relying on GPS. The human back on board the ship only overrides it if something goes wrong.
“The Navy’s model is different from the Air Force’s,” said Rear Adm. Ted Branch, the commander of Naval Air Forces Atlantic. “We don’t have someone actively flying this machine with a stick and a throttle. We fly it with a mouse and a keyboard.” In military nomenclature, the Air Force has dronepilots; the Navy has drone operators.
Today’s launch has been planned for months and anticipated for years. Earlier this month, at the Navy’s aviation test hub in Maryland, known as Pax River, the X-47B touched down and caught the arresting wire on a mock carrier deck. Catching the wire, or the “Trap,” is as difficult as it is necessary to keep a plane from careening off the carrier and into the water. While it was a positive sign that the Navy’s new robot demonstrator could do it, the X-47B’s successful Trap catch was still on dry land.”
http://intellihub.com/2013/05/14/navy-x47-b-drone-to-patrol-seas/
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Pentagon Unilaterally Grants Itself Authority Over ‘Civil Disturbances’
(Long Island Press) -
The manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects offered the nation a window into the stunning military-style capabilities of our local law enforcement agencies. For the past 30 years, police departments throughout the United States have benefitted from the government’s largesse in the form of military weaponry and training, incentives offered in the ongoing “War on Drugs.” For the average citizen watching events such as the intense pursuit of the Tsarnaev brothers on television, it would be difficult to discern between fully outfitted police SWAT teams and the military.
The lines blurred even further Monday as a new dynamic was introduced to the militarization of domestic law enforcement. By making a few subtle changes to a regulation in the U.S. Code titled“Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies” the military has quietly granted itself the ability to police the streets without obtaining prior local or state consent, upending a precedent that has been in place for more than two centuries.
The most objectionable aspect of the regulatory change is the inclusion of vague language that permits military intervention in the event of “civil disturbances.” According to the rule:
Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances.
Bruce Afran, a civil liberties attorney and constitutional law professor at Rutgers University, calls the rule, “a wanton power grab by the military,” and says, “It’s quite shocking actually because it violates the long-standing presumption that the military is under civilian control.”
A defense official who declined to be named takes a different view of the rule, claiming, “The authorization has been around over 100 years; it’s not a new authority. It’s been there but it hasn’t been exercised. This is a carryover of domestic policy.” Moreover, he insists the Pentagon doesn’t “want to get involved in civilian law enforcement. It’s one of those red lines that the military hasn’t signed up for.” Nevertheless, he says, “every person in the military swears an oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the United States to defend that Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.”
One of the more disturbing aspects of the new procedures that govern military command on the ground in the event of a civil disturbance relates to authority. Not only does it fail to define what circumstances would be so severe that the president’s authorization is “impossible,” it grants full presidential authority to “Federal military commanders.” According to the defense official, a commander is defined as follows: “Somebody who’s in the position of command, has the title commander. And most of the time they are centrally selected by a board, they’ve gone through additional schooling to exercise command authority.”
As it is written, this “commander” has the same power to authorize military force as the president in the event the president is somehow unable to access a telephone. (The rule doesn’t address the statutory chain of authority that already exists in the event a sitting president is unavailable.) In doing so, this commander must exercise judgment in determining what constitutes, “wanton destruction of property,” “adequate protection for Federal property,” “domestic violence,” or “conspiracy that hinders the execution of State or Federal law,” as these are the circumstances that might be considered an “emergency.”
“These phrases don’t have any legal meaning,” says Afran. “It’s no different than the emergency powers clause in the Weimar constitution [of the German Reich]. It’s a grant of emergency power to the military to rule over parts of the country at their own discretion.”
Afran also expresses apprehension over the government’s authority “to engage temporarily in activities necessary to quell large-scale disturbances.”
“Governments never like to give up power when they get it,” says Afran. “They still think after twelve years they can get intelligence out of people in Guantanamo. Temporary is in the eye of the beholder. That’s why in statutes we have definitions. All of these statutes have one thing in common and that is that they have no definitions. How long is temporary? There’s none here. The definitions are absurdly broad.”
The U.S. military is prohibited from intervening in domestic affairs except where provided under Article IV of the Constitution in cases of domestic violence that threaten the government of a state or the application of federal law. This provision was further clarified both by the Insurrection Act of 1807 and a post-Reconstruction law known as the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (PCA). The Insurrection Act specifies the circumstances under which the president may convene the armed forces to suppress an insurrection against any state or the federal government. Furthermore, where an individual state is concerned, consent of the governor must be obtained prior to the deployment of troops. The PCA—passed in response to federal troops that enforced local laws and oversaw elections during Reconstruction—made unauthorized employment of federal troops a punishable offense, thereby giving teeth to the Insurrection Act.
Together, these laws limit executive authority over domestic military action. Yet Monday’s official regulatory changes issued unilaterally by the Department of Defense is a game-changer.
The stated purpose of the updated rule is “support in Accordance With the Posse Comitatus Act,” but in reality it undermines the Insurrection Act and PCA in significant and alarming ways. The most substantial change is the notion of “civil disturbance” as one of the few “domestic emergencies” that would allow for the deployment of military assets on American soil.
To wit, the relatively few instances that federal troops have been deployed for domestic support have produced a wide range of results. Situations have included responding to natural disasters and protecting demonstrators during the Civil Rights era to, disastrously, the Kent State student massacre and the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee.
Michael German, senior policy counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), noted in a 2009 Daily Kos article that, “there is no doubt that the military is very good at many things. But recent history shows that restraint in their new-found domestic role is not one of them.”
At the time German was referring to the military’s expanded surveillance techniques and hostile interventions related to border control and the War on Drugs. And in fact, many have argued that these actions have already upended the PCA in a significant way. Even before this most recent rule change, the ACLU was vocal in its opposition to the Department of Defense (DoD) request to expand domestic military authority “in the event of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high yield explosive (CBRNE) incidents.” The ACLU’s position is that civilian agencies are more than equipped to handle such emergencies since 9/11. (ACLU spokespersons in Washington D.C. declined, however, to be interviewed for this story.)
But while outcomes of military interventions have varied, the protocol by which the president works cooperatively with state governments has remained the same. The president is only allowed to deploy troops to a state upon request of its governor. Even then, the military—specifically the National Guard—is there to provide support for local law enforcement and is prohibited from engaging in any activities that are outside of this scope, such as the power to arrest.
Eric Freedman, a constitutional law professor from Hofstra University, also calls the ruling “an unauthorized power grab.” According to Freedman, “The Department of Defense does not have the authority to grant itself by regulation any more authority than Congress has granted it by statute.” Yet that’s precisely what it did. This wasn’t, however, the Pentagon’s first attempt to expand its authority domestically in the last decade.
http://www.longislandpress.com/2013/05/14/u-s-military-power-grab-goes-into-effect/
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07May2013: DHS On The Hunt For Millions Of Rounds Of Frangible Ammunition
(TheDailySheeple) – Via FreedomOutPost – As I pointed out to you before, the Department of Homeland Security had nearly 264 million rounds of ammunition in their inventory at the beginning of Fiscal Year 2013. DHS also had roughly $37 million of taxpayer money to spend on ammunition as well. Though they have claimed that the Sequester has cut into their budget so much that they were releasing felons into the population, they continue their search for millions of rounds of ammunition, but this ammunition is specifically designed for the range.
Following the solicitations of over 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition last year, “Big Sis” has put out a new request for ammunition. This time they are looking for frangible ammunition. This type of ammunition is designed to “disintegrate into tiny particles upon impact to minimize their penetration for reasons of range safety, to limit environmental impact, or to limit the danger behind the intended target.”
According to Global Security, “Frangible ammunition represents the first viable revolutionary change to firearms science in the past 100 years. Frangible ammunition is a relatively recent development in bullets, presenting a departure from the standard projectiles in use for both range shooting and personal protection. With the advent of modern hostage rescue tactics in the 1970s and 1980s, the military and police agencies began to look for ways to minimize over penetration risks. One widely-accepted solution was the frangible round, also known as the AET (Advanced Energy Transfer) round.”
DHS’ solicitation refers to the frangible ammo as “reduced hazard training ammunition.” According to solicitation number HSFLGL-RFI-00056, DHS is requesting the following:
CALIBER TYPE; Acceptable Bullet Weight Range
DHS also wants to know just how fast these manufacturers can turn out this ammunition. For instance, they as the following questions:
You can read about the differences of terminal ballistics between frangible rounds and others here. Most people commenting on the frangible rounds say they would not use them, though there are exceptions of those that would use them in a home defense setting.
The problem is that with budget tightening, is the purchase of frangible ammunition frugal? The answer is both yes and no. It is more expensive than full metal jacket ammo, but usually less expensive than defense ammunition (hollow points). They are also considered to be safer, as they are designed to be “lead free,” and additionally, as the video below indicates, the user can recycle the copper and recoup some of the money spent on the ammunition.
Could these be used away from the range? Of course, but experts say they are used for scenarios where you don’t want over penetration.
This switch to frangible ammunition is interesting in light of the fact that the Government Accountability Office is “just getting underway” with an investigation on DHS ammo purchases. USNews reports:
The congressional investigative agency is jumping into the fray just as legislation was introduced in both the Senate and the House to restrict the purchase of ammo by some government agencies (except the Department of Defense). The AMMO Act, introduced Friday, would prevent agencies from buying more ammunition if “stockpiles” are greater than what they were in previous administrations.
Donelle Harder, a spokeswoman for Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., who introduced the legislation in the Senate, tells Whispers the bill would also require GAO to share the findings of its report on DHS purchases with Congress.
Officials at DHS have denied to both Whispers and lawmakers that it is stockpiling ammunition. The Associated Press reported in February that DHS wanted to buy more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition, but DHS officials testified last week it was only planning to buy up to 750 million.
Read More & Watch Video: http://www.thedailysheeple.com/dhs-on-the-hunt-for-millions-of-rounds-of-frangible-ammunition_052013
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