link/Permanent US Iraqi Presence

As predicted by many years ago, the US is now signalling an intent to stay more-or-less permanently in Iraq.

In Washington and among American military officers in Iraq, the idea of establishing permanent US bases there is under discussion - with one official citing as an example the decades-long presence of US troops in Korea.

[..]

"The analogy doesn't make sense," says Mr. O'Hanlon. "South Korea was threatened by an external enemy. Iraq is threatened by internal chaos."

link/"Vast expansion" of DNA collection

If you want another reason not to go to the crazy fascist USA, here's a good one:

The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering that will include hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, by far the largest group affected.

The new forensic DNA sampling was authorized by Congress in a little-noticed amendment to a January 2006 renewal of the Violence Against Women Act,[..]

The goal, justice officials said, is to make the practice of DNA sampling as routine as fingerprinting for anyone detained by federal agents, including illegal immigrants. Until now, federal authorities have taken DNA samples only from convicted felons.

link/Pentagon wants to beta-test non-lethal weapons on Americans

A. Non-lethal weapons are still being reviewed by the medical group. It's a kind of an interesting thing about non-lethal weapons. I will tell you that having seen the high-powered microwave that is a crowd disperser, the ADS system, used in a system and actually being invited to put your finger in the hole and by golly you'll see that your resistance is somewhat weakened when the beam hits you. Basically my point to them was (that) we need to start using that here in the United States on Americans.

link/Film Refinery: Homeland Security charge

Independant journalist Greg Palast has been charged with unauthorized filming of "Critical Infrastructure" (an Exxon refinery which may be viewed here).

On August 22nd, for LinkTV and DemocracyNow! we videotaped the thousands of Katrina evacuees still held behind barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans. Its been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POWs (Prisoners of W) are still in this aluminum ghetto in the middle of nowhere. One resident Pamela Lewis said, It is a prison set-up except there are no home furloughs for these inmates because they no longer have homes. To give a sense of the full flavor and smell of the place, we wanted to show that this human parking lot, with kids and elderly, is nearly adjacent to the Exxon Oil refinery, the nations second largest, a chemical-belching behemoth.

So we filmed it. Without Big Brothers authorization. Uh, oh. Apparently, the broadcast of these stinking smokestacks tipped off Osama that, if his assassins pose as poor Black folk, they can get a cramped Airstream right next to a critical infrastructure asset.

link/ICBM strikes against alleged terrorists

Holy juses fucking christ.

The Pentagon is considering replacing the nuclear warheads on some ballistic missiles with conventional munitions so that they can be used for "pre-emptive" strikes against alleged terrorists, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters after a meeting with Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov.

But they're just cute little conventional warheads (which now have more explosive power than Hiroshima). Nothing could possibly go wrong. Not even what those info-terrorists at WikiNews wildly speculate:

[..] it would be impossible for another nation to tell whether a Trident II or Minuteman III launch was conventional or nuclear-armed until it had actually detonated.

I'm not telling where heavily my heavily supplied cabin-in-the woods is located.