Who’s A Low Level Terrorist? Are You?
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Emily SpenceSmirking ChimpJune 26, 2009
Despite that DoD officials removed the offensive section from their educational resources at the urging of ACLU members, the DoD stance is still troubling since a longstanding practice to designate peaceful, law abiding activists as dangerous and treasonable still exists in many government departments and agencies. Indeed the participants of the first antiwar protest against the Vietnam incursion, put together in the mid-1960’s by peaceable Quakers and FOR members after having discussed Gandhi’s Salt March as a model for a nonviolent demonstration, faced government operatives filming them face by face from rooftops as they moved en masse down Broadway to the UN Plaza. (My mother, a pacifist married to a World War II Conscientious Objector, and I, a child at the time of the march, both were in attendance. When the film crew focused on us, she stood tall, faced the agents with their telephoto lens, glared in disdainful defiance and, simultaneously, throw the corner of her coat over my face. Afterwards, she muttered, “How dare they try to intimidate us!”)
This sort of happening in mind, the treatment of Nobel Peace Award winner Aung San Sui Kyi in Myanmar is not necessarily all that different than the response that she’d receive in the USA and, while it’s commendable that American spokespersons publicly object to her most recent arrest, they, certainly, might seem to be a bunch of hypocrites. This is due to the fact that a number of Nobel Peace Award recipients, such as American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), have had difficulties of their own on American soil.
For example, “AFSC’s work, always open and resolutely nonviolent, has been under government surveillance for decades. The Service Committee secured nearly 1,700 pages of files from the FBI under a Freedom of Information request in 1976. These files show that the FBI kept files on AFSC that dated back to 1921. Ten other federal agencies kept files on AFSC, including the CIA, Air Force, Navy, Internal Revenue Service, Secret Service, and the State Department. The CIA has intercepted overseas mail and cables in the 1950s, and some AFSC offices (and even its staff’s homes) have been infiltrated and burglarized in the late 1960s into the 1970s.” [2]
In relation, AFSC associate general secretary for justice and human rights, Joyce Miller, asked, “How can we speak of spreading democracy in Iraq while dismantling it here at home?” She further remarked, “Political dissent is fundamental to a free and democratic society. It should not be equated with crime.”
Add to the AFSC problems, those pertaining to Nobel Peace Award recipient Nelson Mandela, who only a year ago had the designation “terrorist” removed from his name, under protest by the State Department, so that he no longer suffered travel restrictions from the US government. Yet his travel curtailment was not nearly as awful as was Ramzy Baroud’s blockage. He, the editor of Palestine Chronicle, had his US passport seized by a consular officer at an overseas American Embassy [3]. Similarly, Senator Edward Kennedy was, also, flagged by the U.S. no-fly list.
Then again, Ted Kennedy received much less harassment than did Nobel Peace Award winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire after her flight from Guatemala had been directed to Ireland through Houston:
“She was probably tired and ready to get back to Belfast, where her attempts to bring about an end to The Troubles in 1976 made her at 32 the youngest Nobel Peace Prize-winner ever. Since then, she’s been given the Pacem in Terris Award by Pope John Paul II, and the United Nations selected her (along with the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Jordan’s Queen Noor and a dozen or so other fellow Nobel Laureates) as an honorary board member of the International Coalition for the Decade.
“Unfortunately for Maguire, her flight back home to Northern Ireland was routed through Houston, where none of that meant diddly. Federal Customs officials were far less interested in any of that than they were in a box on the back of the transit form she filled out on her flight.
“‘They questioned me about my nonviolent protests in USA against the Afghanistan invasion and Iraqi war,’ Maguire said later in a statement. ‘They insisted I must tick the box in the Immigration form admitting to criminal activities.’
“Maguire was detained for two hours — grilled once, fingerprinted, photographed, and grilled again. She missed her flight home. She was only released after an organization she helped found — the Nobel Women’s Initiative — started kicking up a fuss.” [4]
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
On can add to her troubles countless other ones wherein human rights and environmental supporters have been repeatedly hassled for no other reason than that they’re holding views that don’t jive with positions at any number of U.S. government institutions. One needn’t return in time to the McCarthy Era to find many individuals who have been investigated and persecuted for holding vilified opinions. For example, Stephen Lendman, a peace advocate and writer in his seventies with a permanent knee injury that delimits travel, has been repeatedly investigated by the FBI.
At the same time, he is joined by myriad others such as assorted activists in Maryland whose names were put on federal terrorist lists by state police who infiltrated their groups. [5] As such, their perfectly legal activities, freedom of speech and right to unhindered assembly have been criminalized.
Simultaneously, there’s a certain inescapable irony and disingenuous quality presented by the Western government heads who are harshly critical of the Iran crackdown on dissenting citizens while they, themselves, condone similar ironfisted policies in their own lands. Their two-faced position is barely hidden beneath the surface of their mock concern for the well-being of Iranian protesters as they urge their own and allied troops into battle, show little (if any) sincere remorse over the slaughter of masses of civilians that happen in the process and make sure that demonstrators at home are disregarded, denigrated or preemptively rounded up as happened at the 2008 Republican National Convention.
Then again, one might find himself in pretty good company if he were singled out as unpatriotic and treacherous for holding viewpoints or undertaking actions that go contrary to the perspectives that a certain hawkish and totalitarian segment of society holds. All the same, every method conceivable might be used to hunt down the offenders and, when taken to the extreme, render their seemingly provocative positions ineffectual by any means possible, including imprisonment and murder.
Anyone who doubts this to be the case needs only to remember about what happened to people like Howard Fast; the slain Freedom Riders Andy Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner; the thirteen shot students at Kent State University at which Ohio National Guardsman fired sixty-seven rounds over a thirteen second period, and scores of others who have stood against mainstream policies.
Meanwhile, stigmatizing dissidents is a fairly common practice. As such, “There are 1.1 million people on the [U.S.] Terrorist Watch List and there is a 35 per cent error rate, minimum, for that list,” according to ACLU’s Michael German. [6] Furthermore, the overzealous and aggressive surveillance tactics used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to check the public’s e-mails, telephone calls and other communications are the same ones as were in use during George W. Bush’s administration. Likewise, the amount of spying on personal exchanges is as high as it ever was.
In relation to recent claims by Justice Department and national security officials that the overcollection was unintentional, House representative, Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey and Chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, commented “Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental.” Additionally, the act of tracking e-mailed transmissions and other interactions has seemed in violation of federal law according to lawyers at the Justice Department. Regardless, the practice continues.
At the same time, the decision to designate social activists as troublemakers, while singling them out for intimidation, threats and investigations, carries serious legal and political implications in democratic societies.The further measure of subjecting them to the sorts of difficulties that Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Ramzy Baroud, AFSC members and innumerable others have endured is clearly based in xenophobic, paranoid and despotic thinking. It embodies the kind of authoritarian mentality and oppressive activities that one finds in the worst types of tyrannical regimes.
As Harry S. Truman suggested, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” Due to this fear, are we, then, to all conform with lock-step in perverse obedience to the State’s dictates, outlooks and agendas in an increasingly Orwellian milieu? If not, then we must constantly remind ourselves and each other of US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s vision: “Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”
References
[1] Pentagon Rebrands Protest as “Low-Level Terrorism” (http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/pentagon-rebrands-protest-as-low-level-terrorism/).
[2] American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) (http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/0201-03.htm).
[3] “Punishing activists or pursuing terrorists?” by Maggie Mitchell Salem in Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy. (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GL10Aa01.html).
[4] Nobel Prize Winner Gets Hassled At Bush Intercontinental … (http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/05/29-8).
[5] Police Spied on Activists In Md. - washingtonpost.com (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/17/AR2008071701287.html) and Md. Police Put Activists’ Names On Terror Lists - … (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/10/07/AR2008100703245.html).
[6] One third of FBI Terror Watch List are innocent people Top … (http://www.russiatoday.ru/Top_News/2009-06-17/One_third_of_FBI_Terror_Watch_List_are_innocent_people.html).
Showing posts with label BS politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BS politics. Show all posts
Sunday, June 28, 2009
US is a terror training mecca
JUST IN CASE YOU ARE TOO LAZY TO FOLLOW THE ^%&&*%$ LINKS HERE IS BUT ONE ONLY ONE MORE EXAMPLE
FOR MORE PICK UP A BOOK!!!!!!
Will the "School of the Assassins" be closed?
This weekend, thousands of priests, nuns, and other activists will descend on Fort Benning, Georgia, to demonstrate against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC).The annual demonstrations against the U.S. training center have become one of the largest expressions of anti-war sentiment in the country, but will it succeed in changing U.S. policy?The institute, formerly known as the School of the Americas, was launched in Panama in 1946 as a base to train military officers in Latin America. It was kicked out of Panama in the mid-1980s and moved to Fort Benning, where it has since been targeted by hundreds of faith and human rights groups for its unsavory role in supporting dictators and death squads.As the activist group SOA Watch, sponsor of the annual protests, states:
Over its 59 years, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. These graduates have consistently used their skills to wage a war against their own people. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, and forced into refugee by those trained at the School of Assassins.Many of the atrocities linked to SOA/WHISC graduates occurred in the bloody 1980s, but some incidents are more recent. For example:
On February 21-22, 2005, eight members of the San José de Apartadó Peace Community in Urabá, Colombia were brutally massacred. Witnesses identified the killers as members of the Colombian military's 17th Brigade, commanded by an SOA graduate.This year, SOA Watch anticipates "over 20,000" people will descend on Columbus, Georgia for"teach-ins, workshops, rallies and marches," including over 1,000 grandmothers -- a special mobilization this year.Will it have any impact? Activists came surprisingly close to closing SOA in the late 1990s, as bad publicity about the actions of SOA's alumni spread. A Congressional House vote on closing SOA narrowly missed, and -- in a sign that the Pentagon was concerned about the negative press -- the center's name was changed to WHISC in 2001, although there was little evidence of a change in policy. The protests didn't let up after 9/11, although the new political climate took closing WHISC off the Congressional agenda.With many Latin American countries shifting to the left -- the latest being Nicaragua -- debates about the U.S. role in the region will likely only intensify. The thousands coming to Fort Benning this weekend wonder: Will a new Congress, bolstered by a public frustrated with the direction of U.S. foreign policy, return scrutiny to WHISC/SOA and the U.S. role in human rights violations abroad?
FOR MORE PICK UP A BOOK!!!!!!
Will the "School of the Assassins" be closed?
This weekend, thousands of priests, nuns, and other activists will descend on Fort Benning, Georgia, to demonstrate against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC).The annual demonstrations against the U.S. training center have become one of the largest expressions of anti-war sentiment in the country, but will it succeed in changing U.S. policy?The institute, formerly known as the School of the Americas, was launched in Panama in 1946 as a base to train military officers in Latin America. It was kicked out of Panama in the mid-1980s and moved to Fort Benning, where it has since been targeted by hundreds of faith and human rights groups for its unsavory role in supporting dictators and death squads.As the activist group SOA Watch, sponsor of the annual protests, states:
Over its 59 years, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. These graduates have consistently used their skills to wage a war against their own people. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, and forced into refugee by those trained at the School of Assassins.Many of the atrocities linked to SOA/WHISC graduates occurred in the bloody 1980s, but some incidents are more recent. For example:
On February 21-22, 2005, eight members of the San José de Apartadó Peace Community in Urabá, Colombia were brutally massacred. Witnesses identified the killers as members of the Colombian military's 17th Brigade, commanded by an SOA graduate.This year, SOA Watch anticipates "over 20,000" people will descend on Columbus, Georgia for"teach-ins, workshops, rallies and marches," including over 1,000 grandmothers -- a special mobilization this year.Will it have any impact? Activists came surprisingly close to closing SOA in the late 1990s, as bad publicity about the actions of SOA's alumni spread. A Congressional House vote on closing SOA narrowly missed, and -- in a sign that the Pentagon was concerned about the negative press -- the center's name was changed to WHISC in 2001, although there was little evidence of a change in policy. The protests didn't let up after 9/11, although the new political climate took closing WHISC off the Congressional agenda.With many Latin American countries shifting to the left -- the latest being Nicaragua -- debates about the U.S. role in the region will likely only intensify. The thousands coming to Fort Benning this weekend wonder: Will a new Congress, bolstered by a public frustrated with the direction of U.S. foreign policy, return scrutiny to WHISC/SOA and the U.S. role in human rights violations abroad?
More BS from the US
Key leaders of Honduras military coup trained in U.S.
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Chris KrommFacing SouthJune 28, 2009
At least two leaders of the coup launched in Honduras today were apparently trained at a controversial Department of Defense school based at Fort Benning, Georgia infamous for producing graduates linked to torture, death squads and other human rights abuses.
Leftist President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and transported to Costa Rica this morning after a growing controversy over a vote concerning term limits. Over the last week, Zelaya clashed with and eventually dismissed General Romeo Vasquez — who is now reportedly in charge of the armed forces that abducted the Honduran president.
According to the watchdog group School of Americas Watch, Gen. Vasquez trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at least twice — in 1976 and 1984 — when it was still called School of Americas.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
The Georgia-based U.S. military school is infamous for training over 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including infamous dictators, “death squad” leaders and others charged with torture and other human rights abuses. SOA Watch’s annual protest to shut down the Fort Benning training site draws thousands.
According to SOA Watch, the U.S. Army school has a particularly checkered record in Honduras, with over 50 graduates who have been intimately involved in human rights abuses. In 1975, SOA Graduate General Juan Melgar Castro became the military dictator of Honduras. From 1980-1982 the dictatorial Honduran regime was headed by yet another SOA graduate, Policarpo Paz Garcia, who intensified repression and murder by Battalion 3-16, one of the most feared death squads in all of Latin America (founded by Honduran SOA graduates with the help of Argentine SOA graduates).
General Vasquez isn’t the only leader in the Honduras coup linked to the U.S. training facility. As Kristin Bricker points out:
The head of the Air Force, Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, studied in the School of the Americas in 1996. The Air Force has been a central protagonist in the Honduran crisis. When the military refused to distribute the ballot boxes for the opinion poll, the ballot boxes were stored on an Air Force base until citizens accompanied by Zelaya rescued them. Zelaya reports that after soldiers kidnapped him, they took him to an Air Force base, where he was put on a plane and sent to Costa Rica.
For previous Facing South coverage of controversy surrounding the School of Americas/Western Hemisphere Center, see here.
THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME ASK ARGENTINIANS HOW THEY FEEL OR JUST ABOUT EVERY COUNTRY IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE
Text size
Chris KrommFacing SouthJune 28, 2009
At least two leaders of the coup launched in Honduras today were apparently trained at a controversial Department of Defense school based at Fort Benning, Georgia infamous for producing graduates linked to torture, death squads and other human rights abuses.
Leftist President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and transported to Costa Rica this morning after a growing controversy over a vote concerning term limits. Over the last week, Zelaya clashed with and eventually dismissed General Romeo Vasquez — who is now reportedly in charge of the armed forces that abducted the Honduran president.
According to the watchdog group School of Americas Watch, Gen. Vasquez trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at least twice — in 1976 and 1984 — when it was still called School of Americas.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
The Georgia-based U.S. military school is infamous for training over 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including infamous dictators, “death squad” leaders and others charged with torture and other human rights abuses. SOA Watch’s annual protest to shut down the Fort Benning training site draws thousands.
According to SOA Watch, the U.S. Army school has a particularly checkered record in Honduras, with over 50 graduates who have been intimately involved in human rights abuses. In 1975, SOA Graduate General Juan Melgar Castro became the military dictator of Honduras. From 1980-1982 the dictatorial Honduran regime was headed by yet another SOA graduate, Policarpo Paz Garcia, who intensified repression and murder by Battalion 3-16, one of the most feared death squads in all of Latin America (founded by Honduran SOA graduates with the help of Argentine SOA graduates).
General Vasquez isn’t the only leader in the Honduras coup linked to the U.S. training facility. As Kristin Bricker points out:
The head of the Air Force, Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, studied in the School of the Americas in 1996. The Air Force has been a central protagonist in the Honduran crisis. When the military refused to distribute the ballot boxes for the opinion poll, the ballot boxes were stored on an Air Force base until citizens accompanied by Zelaya rescued them. Zelaya reports that after soldiers kidnapped him, they took him to an Air Force base, where he was put on a plane and sent to Costa Rica.
For previous Facing South coverage of controversy surrounding the School of Americas/Western Hemisphere Center, see here.
THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME ASK ARGENTINIANS HOW THEY FEEL OR JUST ABOUT EVERY COUNTRY IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE
gimme a break
Climate Cops To Fine “Wasteful” Homeowners & Businesses
Energy police to carry out home inspections under invasive and tyrannical new measures
Paul Joseph WatsonPrison Planet.comThursday, June 25, 2009
Climate cops in Scotland have been handed new powers to fine “wasteful” homeowners and businesses who use too much energy or too many plastic bags under new legislation that represents the first wave of invasive tyranny under the pretext of fighting the manufactured threat of global warming.
Energy police will have free reign to impose penalties on householders and companies who do not comply with “energy efficiency” demands following home inspections. This is the template for similar measures set to be imposed in the U.S. should Democrats manage to force through their own climate legislation this week.
“Measures voted through by Parliament included the power to fine householders and companies if they do not take action to improve the energy efficiency of their houses and buildings,” reports the Scotsman. “Charges could be brought in for plastic bags, and businesses may be forced to reduce packaging under the powers granted to ministers in the Climate Change Bill.”
We have been warning for years that the real agenda behind the climate change con has nothing to do with saving the environment and everything to do with the government controlling and regulating every aspect of our private lives.
How long before you get a knock on your door from the “green brigades” demanding that you comply with the latest government energy regulations?
Apparently not too long if Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has his way. Schwarzenegger took the unusual step of praising the legislation passed in Scotland and said that “other nations to step up to the plate” with similar measures.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
Obama’s pledge to “create millions of new green jobs,” in other words millions more government enforcers harassing and fining citizens, is part of the government’s effort to push through a sprawling climate change bill this week which ultimately aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions by a whopping 70-80%.
As we previously highlighted, if such a program was to be fully implemented, the consequences for the American economy would be devastating, creating a new great depression and sinking Americans’ standard of living to near third world status.
As University of Oxford Professor Dr James Buckee states, banning the internal combustion engine, and coal-fired power stations of an entire country, be it Scotland or the U.S., would not even get close to obtaining an 80% reduction.
“More energy has been expended on finding ways to infringe on human activity than has gone into understanding the science,” said Buckee.
Such a massive program of carbon emission elimination can only be achieved through an army of “green brigades” bossing, enforcing and regulating the personal behavior of over 300 million Americans.
This is all about the creation of a leviathan system of suffocating bureaucracy, staffed and enforced by a gargantuan ‘green stasi’ army of regulators and petty officials charged with sucking the population dry of any money that hasn’t already been taxed or fined out of them by sticking their noses into our everyday activities.
The good news is that recent polls show that less and less people are buying into global warming hype as the apocalyptic predictions of hysterical alarmists fail to materialize in the real world.
Schwarzenegger’s desire to see similar legislation passed in the U.S. is being opposed by state representatives in places such as Arizona.
“Arizona is now close to becoming the first state to outlaw climate change legislation,” reports the Daily Tech. “The state Senate voted Monday, 19-10 to approve a bill banning the Department of Environmental Quality from enacting or enforcing measures with language pertaining to climate change. The bill is now awaiting House approval.”
Energy police to carry out home inspections under invasive and tyrannical new measures
Paul Joseph WatsonPrison Planet.comThursday, June 25, 2009
Climate cops in Scotland have been handed new powers to fine “wasteful” homeowners and businesses who use too much energy or too many plastic bags under new legislation that represents the first wave of invasive tyranny under the pretext of fighting the manufactured threat of global warming.
Energy police will have free reign to impose penalties on householders and companies who do not comply with “energy efficiency” demands following home inspections. This is the template for similar measures set to be imposed in the U.S. should Democrats manage to force through their own climate legislation this week.
“Measures voted through by Parliament included the power to fine householders and companies if they do not take action to improve the energy efficiency of their houses and buildings,” reports the Scotsman. “Charges could be brought in for plastic bags, and businesses may be forced to reduce packaging under the powers granted to ministers in the Climate Change Bill.”
We have been warning for years that the real agenda behind the climate change con has nothing to do with saving the environment and everything to do with the government controlling and regulating every aspect of our private lives.
How long before you get a knock on your door from the “green brigades” demanding that you comply with the latest government energy regulations?
Apparently not too long if Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has his way. Schwarzenegger took the unusual step of praising the legislation passed in Scotland and said that “other nations to step up to the plate” with similar measures.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
Obama’s pledge to “create millions of new green jobs,” in other words millions more government enforcers harassing and fining citizens, is part of the government’s effort to push through a sprawling climate change bill this week which ultimately aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions by a whopping 70-80%.
As we previously highlighted, if such a program was to be fully implemented, the consequences for the American economy would be devastating, creating a new great depression and sinking Americans’ standard of living to near third world status.
As University of Oxford Professor Dr James Buckee states, banning the internal combustion engine, and coal-fired power stations of an entire country, be it Scotland or the U.S., would not even get close to obtaining an 80% reduction.
“More energy has been expended on finding ways to infringe on human activity than has gone into understanding the science,” said Buckee.
Such a massive program of carbon emission elimination can only be achieved through an army of “green brigades” bossing, enforcing and regulating the personal behavior of over 300 million Americans.
This is all about the creation of a leviathan system of suffocating bureaucracy, staffed and enforced by a gargantuan ‘green stasi’ army of regulators and petty officials charged with sucking the population dry of any money that hasn’t already been taxed or fined out of them by sticking their noses into our everyday activities.
The good news is that recent polls show that less and less people are buying into global warming hype as the apocalyptic predictions of hysterical alarmists fail to materialize in the real world.
Schwarzenegger’s desire to see similar legislation passed in the U.S. is being opposed by state representatives in places such as Arizona.
“Arizona is now close to becoming the first state to outlaw climate change legislation,” reports the Daily Tech. “The state Senate voted Monday, 19-10 to approve a bill banning the Department of Environmental Quality from enacting or enforcing measures with language pertaining to climate change. The bill is now awaiting House approval.”
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