Avdeon has a great summary of the FISA debacle. She includes this bit of information which never seems to make it into any corporate media account of the gutting of the Fourth Amendment:
They reported that the government invited them to help them spy on Americans in the early months of 2001, well before the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center - at a time when the Bush administration was showing a remarkable lack of interest in terrorism.
In case you haven't read Shock Doctrine or read it a while ago and have forgotten how completely it explains the world, you can read about how the US withheld water from dying Haitians in order to get politicals goals met. Glossy but still damning NYT story here. Complete story available in this very long report from the RFK Memorial, one of the human rights groups that broke the story. (pdf) From the organization's press release on the topic:
Using documents obtained by the RFK Center through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department, the report exposes the U.S. government’s role in blocking the disbursal of millions of dollars in loans that would have had life-saving consequences for the Haitian people. The loans, which the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) approved in 1998 for urgently needed water and sanitation projects in Haiti, were derailed in 2001 by politically-motivated, behind-the-scenes interventions on behalf of the United States and other members of the international community.
Obama embraces ethanol and lets its corporate defenders whisper in his ear. McCain doesn't until he does. It's complicated!
And just because I'm still feeling pissy over the FISA capitulation:
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