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It is in the U.S. borderlands that, as anthropologist Josiah Heyman once wrote, the U.S. government’s modern expertise in creating and tracking "a marked population” was first developed and practiced. It involved, he wrote prophetically, “the birth and development of a... means of domination, born of the mating between moral panics about foreigners and drugs, and a well-funded and expert bureaucracy.” You may not be able to watch them at the Border Security Expo, but in those borderlands -- make no bones about it -- the Department of Homeland Security, with its tripartite missions of drug interdiction, immigration enforcement, and the war on terror, is watching you, whoever you are. And make no bones about this either: our borders are widening and the zones in which the watchers are increasingly free to do whatever they want are growing.

In March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) awarded a $145 million contract to that Israeli company through its U.S. division. Elbit Systems prides itself on having spent “10+ years securing the world’s most challenging borders,” above all deploying similar “border protection systems” to the separation wall between Israel and Palestine. It is now poised to enter U.S. indigenous lands.

Now, thanks to the Elbit Systems contract, a new kind of border will continue to be added to this layering.  Imagine part of the futuristic Phoenix exhibition hall leaving Border Expo with the goal of incorporating itself into the lands of a people who were living here before there was a “New World,” no less a United States or a Border Patrol. Though this is increasingly the reality from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego, California, on Tohono O’odham land a post-9/11 war posture shades uncomfortably into the leftovers from a nineteenth century Indian war.  Think of it as the place where the homeland security state meets its older compatriot, Manifest Destiny.

The president also equated the foundation of Israel with the civil rights movement in the U.S. [T]o me, being pro-Israel and pro-Jewish is part and parcel with the values that I’ve been fighting for since I was politically conscious and started getting involved in politics. There’s a direct line between supporting the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland and to feel safe and free of discrimination and persecution, and the right of African Americans to vote and have equal protection under the law. These things are indivisible in my mind. But what is also true, by extension, is that I have to show that same kind of regard to other peoples. And I think it is true to Israel’s traditions and its values—its founding principles—that it has to care about those Palestinian kids. Says Donald Johnson, who tipped me to this: “I  understand the long history of antisemitism as an argument for having a Jewish state, but why can’t people be honest about the price paid by the Palestinians? I know the answer.”

Which gets us to Rep. Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan receives much praise, but I don't think his role in the current moment has been fully recognized. He is doing something unique in national politics. He thinks. He studies. He reads. Then he comes forward to speak, calmly and at some length, about what he believes to be true. He defines a problem and offers solutions, often providing the intellectual and philosophical rationale behind them.

"Why have we extended an endless supply of taxpayer credit to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, instead of demanding that their government guarantee be wound down and their taxpayer subsidies ended?" Why are tax dollars being wasted on bankrupt, politically connected solar energy firms like Solyndra? "Why is Washington wasting your money on entrenched agribusiness?"

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will be taking another look at the AUMF this week. The hearing's title, “Authorization For Use Of Military Force After Iraq And Afghanistan,” hints at a preordained conclusion: that an updated authorization is needed. Ranking Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee wants to be sure the executive branch has “all the tools and capabilities” it needs to address “threats that did not exist in 2001.” Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., the sole member of Congress to vote “no” on the original AUMF, has a better idea: end it, don't mend it. Joined by libertarian-leaning, antiwar Republicans like Reps. Justin Amash and Walter Jones, she's introduced legislation to repeal the AUMF. Two imperial presidents in a row have treated that authorization like a permanent delegation of congressional war power to the president. Their successors would no doubt do the same with any new “tools and capabilities” they’re given.

Without the AUMF, presidents still retain the constitutional power to “repel sudden attacks,” as James Madison put it. And if they think groups like al-Shabaab or Boko Haram demand a more sustained military response, they'll be free to make that case to Congress. But delegating new authorities in advance might permanently change our constitutional default setting from peace to war. Madison also said that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” We're now into our second decade running that experiment; how much longer do we want to risk proving him right?

After the vote, Mark Jaycox, a legislative analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: “The bill is littered with loopholes. The problem right now, especially after multiple revisions, is that it doesn't effectively end mass surveillance.”In a statement, Zeke Johnson, the director of Amnesty International USA's security and human rights program, said the House had “failed to deliver serious surveillance reform”.

The size of the rebellion and the seniority of the rebels may support efforts to tighten language in the legislation as it makes its way to the Senate.Senator Patrick Leahy, the chair of the Senate judiciary committee and the lead Democratic author of the Freedom Act, said that the actions of the house in passing it was an “important step towards reforming our nation's surveillance authorities”which “few could have predicted less than a year ago.”However, in a statement issued on Thursday, Leahy expressed disappointment that the bill, which he had introduced jointly with Sensenbrenner in October, had been diluted.

Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who has waged an often lonely campaign against NSA surveillance, said he opposed the House bill in the form that passed on Thursday. "I am gravely concerned that the changes that have been made to the House version of this bill have watered it down so far that it fails to protect Americans from suspicionless mass surveillance," he said.He said the Senate version of the bill remained strong, and that he hoped that its provisions could be preserved.

The bill was the first vote on a NSA related matter in either the House or Senate since last July, when Republican congressman Justin Amash failed by 205-217 votes to pass an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have stripped funding for bulk surveillance.The revised USA Freedom Act was supported by the White House. Obama had urged for a solution to ending bulk collection of telephone metadata in ways that would not unduly constrain the NSA.

And according to Sanger’s murky sources, the recognition that things were hopeless came at the latest by June 2011. But it wasn’t for three more long years —  until this May — that Obama finally announced U.S. troops would be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2016. Which brings us to the question I raised at the top. George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq sent vastly more people to their deaths than anything Obama did – nearly 5,000 U.S. servicemembers, plus over 100,000 Iraqi civilians – and left as many as half a million U.S. servicemembers wounded or otherwise permanently damaged

(Obama’s latest doomed-to-fail show of force explicitly keeps U.S. servicemembers out of harm’s way. ) But Bush at least thought the war in Iraq would do some good. He was incredibly wrong, mind you. He was both delusional — and actively manipulated by neocons like Dick Cheney (who believe the application of American power is always and inherently a good thing). He intentionally misled the public about his real reasons for going to war (the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were an excuse, not a reason; there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction). His eventual goal was both unachievable (a sudden flowering of pro-Western democracy in the Middle East) and perverse (American control of Iraqi oil fields). His methods (firing all the Baathists; trying to install a corrupt puppet) were spectacularly misguided. Much of the rest of his presidency was consumed with sectarian warfare in Iraq and new lies to  cover up the old ones at home. And the end result was a massive human rights catastrophe, including torture of U.S. detainees, a refugee crisis, mass casualties, social disorder and – finally – the Islamic State.

Bush also certainly saw – and exploited — the political upside of being a war president. But he didn’t let loose the dogs of war simply because his political operatives told him it would poll well.

Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said some states and judges are pushing back against stingrays. "In Tacoma, judges now require police (to) specifically note they plan to use an IMSI catcher and promise not to store data collected from people who are not investigation targets," he said. "The Florida and Massachusetts state supreme courts ruled warrants were necessary for real-time cell phone tracking. Nine states—Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin—passed laws specifically requiring police to use a warrant to track a cell phone in real time."

The Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who also attended the London demonstration, was criticised by Lord West for blocking the “snooper’s charter” in his capacity as deputy Prime Minister. “I think we need to make sure that we don't lose powers,” Lord West said. “The Communications Data Bill was there to ensure we kept capabilities we had which are beginning to disappear. I think that needs to go through.

“I'll be meeting with security and intelligence chiefs on Monday morning to once again go through all of those questions and to make sure we do everything we can to in order to ensure we're as well prepared as we can be to deal with this threat. “It's a threat that has been with us for many years and I believe will be with us for many years to come.” Speaking to Sky News from a demonstration in support of Paris at Trafalgar Square, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson said: “I’m not interested in this civil liberties stuff. If they’re a threat, I want their emails and calls listened to.”

“I was very irked that it was removed by the deputy prime minister when it had all been agreed across all parties. That needs to be pushed through.”

UPDATE: The ACLU of Massachusetts’s Kade Crockford notes this extraordinarily revealing quote from former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes, as he defends one of the worst FBI terror “sting” operations of all (the Cromitie prosecution we describe at length here): If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that “We won the war on terror and everything’s great,” cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive. That is the FBI’s terrorism strategy — keep fear alive — and it drives everything they do.

Then several years later the US encouraged South Korean incursions into Communist North Korea in order to manipulate North Korea into responding in kind. Guaranteeing South Korea full UN support, when the baited North Koreans retaliated by moving two miles inside the South Korean border, that June 1950 “transgression” immediately became the false pretense used to initiate the Korean War.

in August 1964 President Johnson lied to the American people with the bogus claim that a US Navy ship was attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin to launch America’s longest running war in history (that is until this century’s everlasting war of terror). That false flag cost near 60,000 American lives and over 3 million dead Southeast Asians, in addition to being the first US humiliating war defeat in its history, marking the first of many consecutive losses.

The smaller, less intensive military campaigns of Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua and El Salvador, the First Gulf War, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were all jingoistic saber rattling manipulations of imperialistic Empire overpowering far weaker opponents to take down former US allied dictators (or in the case of Saddam Hussein a preliminary step to the father-son neocon tag team), balkanizing a divide and conquer strategy for global hegemony and imperial war profiteering from the always lucrative drug trafficking trade.

Meanwhile, the only true winners of all wars is the oligarch owned and controlled central banking cabal and its Wall Street 500. Once American Empire wreaks military havoc to achieve another ravaged failed state, be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, a second invasion that becomes the permanent occupation arrives in the form of IMF and World Bank loans. When the war destroyed nation cannot pay the bankster cabal’s loan shark extortion, privatization through transnational corporations rapidly descends as economic hit men-vultures move in for the final kill. The game’s been rigged, set up so no one but the filthy, gluttonous, bloodthirsty, psychopathic vampires comprising the ruling elite can possibly win from all this rigged warring death and destruction.

The Zionist neocon creation with a little help from their Saudi-Israeli evil axis friends pulled off the coup of the century on 9/11, massacring 3,000 Americans as their sacrificial lambs, setting into motion the fabricated war on terror masking their actual war on Islam to ensure that a constant fresh supply of made-by-the-USA enemy materializes to justify permanent global violence. During the near ten years that Americans fought in Iraq near a half million Iraqis lost their life, mostly innocent civilians. That toll has only since risen with war still raging. The Islamic State jihadists that the US-Saudi-Israeli unholy alliance secretly created, trained, armed and has funded (just as it did al Qaeda for decades) invaded Iraq last June and is currently in control of more area in Iraq than the weak US puppet government in Baghdad with no end of sectarian violence in sight. Afghanistan looks no better with the puppet Kabul government holding less territory than the surging Taliban that has been waiting for the US military exodus by December 2014 leaving 10,800 US military advisors still remaining behind.

The proxy wars leaving Libya as a corrupt and lawlessly violent failed state and Syria a stalemated quagmire with Islamic State mercenaries our not-so-secret friendly boots on the ground still unable to topple and remove Assad from power. Meanwhile, near a quarter of a million people have died in the war in Syria and an astounding 6.5 million have been displaced in that colossal human tragedy supported and caused by the United States.

But like some madcap Dr. Seuss character, the Pentagon can’t seem to stop and so, the New York Times recently reported, it has now presented the White House with a plan for a new (or refurbished) “network” of bases in the most “volatile” regions of the planet. These shadowy “hubs” are meant mainly for America’s secret warriors -- “Special Operations troops and intelligence operatives who would conduct counterterrorism missions for the foreseeable future” against the Islamic State and its various franchisees.  This will undoubtedly be news for Times readers, but not for TomDispatch ones.  For several years, Nick Turse has been reporting at this site on the building, or building up of, both the “hubs” and “spokes” of this system in southern Europe and across Africa (as well as on the way the U.S. military's pivot to Africa has acted as a kind of blowback machine for terror outfits). Today, he’s at it again, revealing wars secretly being fought in our name from this country’s ever-changing, ever-evolving empire of bases.

The new license plate reader contract comes after years of internal lobbying by the agency. ICE first tested Vigilant’s system in 2012, gauging how effective it was at locating undocumented immigrants. Two years later, the agency issued an open solicitation for the technology, sparking an outcry from civil liberties group. Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson canceled the solicitation shortly afterward, citing privacy concerns, although two field offices subsequently formed rogue contracts with Vigilant in apparent violation of Johnson’s policy. In 2015, Homeland Security issued another call for bids, although an ICE representative said no contract resulted from that solicitation. As a result, this new contract is the first agency-wide contract ICE has completed with the company, a fact that is reflected in accompanying documents. On December 27th, 2017, Homeland Security issued an updated privacy assessment of license plate reader technology, a move it explained was necessary because “ICE has now entered into a contract with a vendor.” The new system places some limits on ICE surveillance, but not enough to quiet privacy concerns. Unlike many agencies, ICE won’t upload new data to Vigilant’s system but simply scan through the data that’s already there. In practical terms, that means driving past a Vigilant-linked camera might flag a car to ICE, but driving past an ICE camera won’t flag a car to everyone else using the system. License plates on the hot list will also expire after one year, and the system retains extensive audit logs to help supervisors trace back any abuse of the system. Still, the biggest concern for critics is the sheer scale of Vigilant’s network, assembled almost entirely outside of public accountability. “If ICE were to propose a system that would do what Vigilant does, there would be a huge privacy uproar and I don’t think Congress would approve it,” Stanley says. “But because it’s a private contract, they can sidestep that process.”