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Category: Espionage/"Intelligence"

  • Trump’s Spy on Your Neighbors Initiatives Creating Climate of Fear

    Neighbors fingering neighbors and workers spying on workers is as American as bacon and eggs and toddlers shooting themselves with guns left around the house by their parents. In the early 2000s, the Bush Administration called it Operation TIPS, a spy-on-your-neighbors scheme aimed at reporting “suspicious” behavior. Now, the Trump administration is encouraging people to report on suspected undocumented immigrants in their neighborhoods. And, workers at various government agencies are being urged to report any activities that they might consider “anti-Christian.”

    What could possibly go wrong with Ameri-snitchers running around their communities?

    Don’t like your neighbor’s dog running through your yard? Call ICE. Don’t want to pay for work an immigrant just performed for you? Call ICE. Co-worker not religious or patriotic enough? Call the government’s anti-Christian bias hotline!

    Calling ICE on Your Neighbors

    In January, Tom Homan, appointed by Trump to oversee deportation efforts, announced plans for a government hotline where individuals can report undocumented immigrants in their communities. Homan stated, “I’m hoping people start calling ICE and reporting because we have millions of people in this country that can be force multipliers for us if they just call us with information.”

    “Experts warn government-inspired informing can devolve into corrupt acts and score-settling,” Forbes’ Stuart Anderson reported. “Businesses are likely to become targets during the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Given the nature of bureaucracies, officials will assign a top priority to generating large numbers of arrests without concern for collateral impacts.”

    Trump’s Anti-Christian Grievance Hotline

    For decades, prominent Religious Right leaders have complained about anti-Christian bias. In early February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.

    Politico’s Robbie Gramer and Nahal Toosi recently reported that “The [State Department] … will work with an administration-wide task force to collect information ‘involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration’ and will collect examples of anti-Christian bias through anonymous employee report forms. … Some State Department officials reacted to the cable with shock and alarm, saying that even if well-intentioned, it is based on the flawed premise that the department harbors anti-Christian bias to begin with, and warning it could create a culture of fear.”

    “The instructions are clear,” Daily Kos’ Alex Samuels recently pointed out. “Give names, dates, and locations of the alleged bias, with a task force set to meet on April 22 to review the ‘evidence.’ The goal? To collect examples of religious discrimination under the Biden administration, because nothing says “freedom of religion” quite like your coworkers quietly documenting your every move for a federal task force.”

    According to the Guardian:

    One example of the ‘bias’ the department wants reported includes ‘mistreatment for opposing displays of flags, banners or other paraphernalia’ – a thinly veiled reference to Pride flags displayed at US embassies under the previous administration. The cable also specifically points to ‘policies related to preferred personal pronouns’ as potentially discriminatory against religious employees.

    George W. Bush’s Operation TIPS

    In early March  2002, professional sidekick Ed McMahon (look up Johnny Carson) introduced Attorney General John Ashcroft to an enthusiastic audience of representatives from more than 300 Neighborhood Watch groups meeting in Washington, D.C. Ashcroft unveiled an expanded mission for the Neighborhood Watch Program, announcing a grant of $1.9 million in federal funds to help the National Sheriffs’ Association double the number of participant groups to 15,000 nationwide.

    According to the government’s web page at citizencorps.gov/watch.html, “Community residents will be provided with information which will enable them to recognize signs of potential terrorist activity, and to know how to report that activity, making these residents a critical element in the detection, prevention, and disruption of terrorism.” Under the supervision of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), “Terrorism prevention” was intended to become the “routine mission” of the Neighborhood Watch Program, the web site pointed out.

    The new thrust of Neighborhood Watch is just part of the Bush Administration’s plan to set up a whole network of citizen snitches. In August, for instance, it will unveil a new Justice Department initiative called Operation TIPS, which stands for Terrorist Information and Prevention System.

    Operation TIPS “will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity,” says the citizencorps.gov web site. Involving one million workers in ten cities during the pilot stage, Operation TIPS will be “a national reporting system…. Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free number is readily available.”

    Encouraging people to skulk around their neighborhoods in search of immigrants, and at government workplaces hunting anti-Christian bias is a totally anti-American undertaking. Trump’s policies could easily lead to abuse and misuse, including racial profiling, false reports and personal vendettas. It could also foster fear and mistrust within communities.

    The post Trump’s Spy on Your Neighbors Initiatives Creating Climate of Fear first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Will Trump Keep His Promise to End the War in Ukraine?

    Ironically, it was the US under President Trump which has broken with the US national security establishment’s bi-partisan strategy of incremental encirclement and escalation against Russia. That break offered Europe the opportunity to escape the trap created by its past lack of policy vision. Instead, Europe has proved plus royaliste que le roi (more royal than the King) and has remained loyal to the US national security Deep State.

    — Thomas Palley

    In her recent “Threat Assessment” testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reasonably described Russia as a “formidable competitor.”  However, in keeping with Trump’s desire for improved diplomatic and economic relations with Moscow, she avoided the word “adversary.” And, in a thinly disguised reference to Biden’s “Ukraine Project,” Gabbard said that Russia has gained significant information about US intelligence and weapons from the Ukraine war. As for Biden’s plan to weaken or overthrow Putin, Gabbard concluded that the Russian leader “is presently less likely to be replaced than at any point in his quarter-century rule.” Gabbard’s assessment was considerably at odds with those under Biden, which referred to Russia’s “malign influence” and a threat to the United States and its allies. Most important is the conclusion that “This grinding war of attrition will lead to a steady erosion of Kyiv’s position on the battlefield, regardless of any U.S. or allied attempt to impose new and greater costs on Moscow.”  This is not an equivocal statement, and Trump surely knows it’s true.

    One encouraging consequence of the report is that it leaves Democrats and liberals in the awkward position of supporting not just a lost cause but one that’s increasingly becoming known as a war provoked by the United States. Those who’ve long asserted that Ukraine was used as a proxy have been provided further vindication — as if any was needed — by the “expose” in the New York Times, titled “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine.” The roughly 13,000-word piece is “secret” only if one relies on the Times as their only source of information. In any event, the article details how American military and intelligence officers shaped Ukraine’s strategy.  Planning began with the US and Ukraine at a clandestine meeting in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 2022, a gathering known “only to a small circle of American and allied officials.” As the war progressed, “One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback by how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in the Ukraine operation. They are part of the kill chain now.”

    One surely unintended takeaway for the reader from the Times’ investigation is US hubris. According to the authors, the Biden administration provided everything to Ukraine but boots on the ground, and the effort was succeeding until the Spring of 2023. At that point, Ukrainian generals went rogue, became disobedient, and denied their US overlords a devastating victory over Russian forces. The latter are barely stick figures waiting to be chopped down by Ukrainian forces, who the omniscient American advisors have been giving every advantage.  Zelensky also receives his share of the blame because he was too obsessed with good PR to be an effective wartime leader.

    Notably, none of the 300 (mostly anonymous) interviewees were Russian, so that perspective is absent. Not surprisingly, there’s neither a scintilla of remorse nor even a tacit admission of the price Ukrainians paid for allowing their country to be used by the United States in this manner.  Finally, one is forced to wonder whether this duplicitous account of the war will be the “blame game” narrative for the Democrats when the war is lost.

    Checkmate in Ukraine isn’t imminent, but nothing can be done to prevent the loss of this US-initiated war.  Putin has a strong hand to play, and all indications point toward the conclusion that the longer the fighting continues, the more territory will fall to Russian advances. Whether Trump will be able to end the war remains an open question. We know that Starmer, Macron, Mertz (once he assumes the German chancellorship), and Zelensky all seek to sabotage peace. And in Kyiv, the Azov Battalion has morphed into the Third Army Brigade, and its leader is Andriy Biletsky, today’s Stephan Bandera. He and his Hitler-worshipping Nazi followers oppose any negotiations with Russia and will continue some rearguard action until they are finally vanquished.

    Trump also faces strong opposition from neoliberal warhawks like Waltz and Rubio. I sense that if Trump wants an actual peace settlement—and I believe he does—he must instruct more capable and trustworthy negotiators that Moscow sees Ukraine as an existential threat and its demands are non-negotiable. Russia is clearly winning and continues to absorb more territory. Finally, I wouldn’t bet against Trump going back on his promise and walking away from the Ukraine Project, leaving the remaining parties to resolve matters.

    Because the billionaire sector of the US ruling class behind Trump has a different world order in mind, the present iteration of European oligarchs find themselves up that proverbial creek without paddles. Trump isn’t even bothering to say, “Thank you for your service in fighting Russia” because he knows these vassals enthusiastically cooperated with a doom-to-fail war that killed well over a million soldiers. In a final desperate attempt to save themselves, Europe’s soon-to-be politically extinct vassals want Trump to give them a “security guarantee” before inserting their own “peacekeepers” into Ukraine. That will never happen

    Some critics have employed words like delusional, crazy, and stupid to describe European leaders. However, it’s more accurate to say that these heads of state are so heavily invested in the fable, the fiction of the “Russian threat,” for over seventy years in order to maintain their junior accomplice role with Washington.  Thomas Palley argues they have become a “US foreign policy satrap, a condition which still endures.” These leaders are certainly not “stupid,” and they know that if the truth about the “Ukraine project” gains traction — and Trump seeks closer relations with Russia — suspicions will rise within the European public that Russophobia was manufactured and remains a hoax.

    Finally, as I have argued in the past, what makes Ukraine so difficult to grasp is the edifice of lies, the false narrative about the “Russian threat” that is so pervasive in the popular mindset and used to disguise the actual motives behind US imperialism. Political scientist Michael Parenti once characterized this as “suppression by omission,” in this case, the entire context of the war in Ukraine.  We must use every means to bring those omissions to light.

    The post Will Trump Keep His Promise to End the War in Ukraine? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Secrecy and Virtue Signalling: Another View of Signalgate

    There has been a fascinating, near unanimous condemnation among the cognoscenti about the seemingly careless addition of Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic to the chat chain of Signal by US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Condemnation of the error spans the spectrum from clownish to dangerous. There has been virtually nothing on the importance of such leaks of national security information and the importance they serve in informing the public about what those in power are really up to.

    Rather than appreciate the fact that there was a journalist there to receive information on military operations that might raise a host of concerns (legitimate targeting and the laws of war come to mind), there was a chill of terror coursing through the commentariat and Congress that military secrets and strategy had been compromised. Goldberg himself initially disbelieved it. “I didn’t think it could be real.” He also professed that some messages would not be made public given the risks they posed, conceding that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s communications to the group “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

    This seemingly principled stance ignores the bread-and-butter importance of investigative reporting and activist publishing, which so often relies on classified material received via accident or design. Normally, the one receiving the message is condemned. In this case, Golberg objected to being the recipient, claiming moral high ground in reporting the security lapse. Certain messages of the “Houthi PC small group channel” were only published by The Atlantic to throw cold water on stubborn claims by the White House that classified details had not been shared.

    The supposed diligence on Goldberg’s part to fuss about the cavalier attitude to national security shown by the Trump administration reveals the feeble compromise the Fourth Estate has reached with the national security state. Could it be that WikiLeaks was, like the ghost of Banquo, at this Signal’s feast? Last year’s conviction of the organisation’s founding publisher, Julian Assange, on one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC), might have exerted some force over Goldberg’s considerations. Having been added to the communication chain in error, the defence material could well have imperilled him, with First Amendment considerations on that subject untested.

    As for what the messages revealed, along with the importance of their disclosure, things become clear. Waltz reveals that the killing of a Houthi official necessitated the destruction of a civilian building. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.” Vance replies: “Excellent.”

    As Turse reminds us in The Intercept, this conforms to the practices all too frequently used when bombing the Houthis in Yemen. The United States offered extensive support to the Saudi-led bombing campaign against the Shia group, one that precipitated one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises. That particular aerial campaign rarely heeded specific targeting, laying waste to vital infrastructure and health facilities. Anthropologist Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, also noted in remarks to The Intercept that fifty-three people have perished in the latest US airstrikes, among them five children. “These are just the latest deaths in a long track record of US killing in Yemen, and the research shows that US airstrikes in many countries have a history of killing and traumatizing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc on people’s lives and livelihoods.”

    The appearance of Hillary Clinton in the debate on Signalgate confirmed the importance of such leaks, and why they are treated with pathological loathing. “We’re all shocked – shocked!” she screeched in The New York Times. “What’s worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.” As a person with a hatred of open publishing outlets such as WikiLeaks (her own careless side to security was exposed by the organisation’s publication of emails sent from a private server while she was Secretary of State), the mania is almost understandable.

    Other countries, notably members of the Five Eyes alliance system, are also voicing concern that their valuable secrets are at risk if shared with the Trump administration. Again, the focus there is less on the accountability of officials than the cast iron virtues of secrecy. “When mistakes happen, and sensitive intelligence leaks, lessons must be learned to prevent that from recurring,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stated gravely in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “It’s a serious, serious issue, and all lessons must be taken.”

    Former chief of Canada’s intelligence agency, Richard Fadden, was even more explicit: “Canada needs to think about what this means in practical terms: is the United States prepared to protect our secrets, as we are bound to protect theirs?”

    Signalgate jolted the national security state. Rather than being treated as a valuable revelation about the latest US bombing strategy in Yemen, the obsession has been on keeping a lid on such matters. For the sake of accountability and the public interest, let us hope that the lid on this administration’s activities remains insecure.

    The post Secrecy and Virtue Signalling: Another View of Signalgate first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Gloominess and Magical Thinking

    Never allow intelligence chiefs to speak publicly. Their prerogative lies in lying, their reassurance, cool deception. While the attractions of transparency are powerful, the result of a garrulous spook is always going to be unreliable.

    In Australia, a comically looking individual by the name of Mike Burgess terrorises and terrifies the local populace as head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the domestic spy agency. It will surprise no one familiar with this approach that it resembles several that have come before. Keep them frightened, soften them for the next encroaching round, and await ever larger budgets for the already fattened calf known as the national security state.

    In his 2025 threat assessment, the chief tries to be bracingly calm and reassuring, even as he delivers the frightening blows. “Fortunately, I was born with the glass-half-full gene.” He tells us the agency is “always looking ahead”, which is encouraging. Prior to making that point, he says that he had “focused on past and present threats.” With pointless contradiction assured, the theme is set for clotting clichés, grammatical torments and trying formulations. “This year’s Assessment is future focused. And I think it’s fair to say it’s the most significant, serious and sober address so far.”

    Those wishing to waste their unrecoverable time listening to the address then realise that the agency has become a victim of public relations capture and trend shopping. Sections have been created that would make your run of the mill moronic university manager sigh. There is, for instance, a “Futures Team” (think “Future Fellows” or “Deans of the Future” – their reality is never the now but always deferred) that supposedly “pours over classified intelligence, reviews open source information, consults experts and uses structured analytical techniques to develop in-depth assessments about future trajectories and vulnerabilities.”

    The only thing missing from this froth is the use of artificial intelligence (appropriate for ASIO), which is bound to do the job as competently as any in the “Futures Team”. For all we know, this is already being done, the machine component triumphant, the human minds lazily tempted.

    The predictable banalities follow in the Burgess show. “Australia has entered a period of strategic surprise and security fragility.” If so, Australia has been entering for a very lengthy period, given the number of addresses Burgess has given. Like an academic who rises to the top on the strength of one idea and one paper eternally rewritten, the director can be relied upon to bore with ideas that have come before, ribboned and stringed for effect. “Over the next five years, a complex, challenging and changing security environment will become more dynamic, more diverse and more degraded.”

    The Australian public, it would seem, is not playing along with the authorities. How dare they question and debate the norms they have been told are so sacred to servile stability? “Social cohesion” – a vacuous term – is apparently eroding. Institutions are no longer trusted, while intolerance grows. Truth is being assailed (Burgess is a true comic as spy chief), “undermined by conspiracy, mis- and disinformation.” For an entity that specialises in all three, this is fabulously funny.

    The terrifying world, it would seem, is replete with “multifaceted, merging, intersecting, concurrent and cascading threats.” He is concerned “about young Australians being caught up in webs of hate, both religiously and ideologically motivated”. There is a sense that individuals are seeking “hybrid beliefs”, cherry-picked from a garden of tempting varieties. Environmentalists of the left commune with Hitler in their beliefs. Islamic State propaganda converses with neo-Nazi dogma. Students of history will hardly find these couplings odd, but looking ahead will do that to you.

    In terms of concrete threats, one is singled out as numinous. One can only cringe at the identification of what Burgess calls “the A-team”. This mysterious “Australia team” is supposedly dedicated to combing “professional networking sites for Australians with access to privileged information, and then use false, anglicised personas to approach their targets.” Their targets are offered “consulting opportunities” and generous sums for reporting on Australian trade, politics, economics, foreign policy, defence and security. This does really sound like money poorly spent by the “A-team”, but who are we to judge? Some people are evidently living it up.

    Magical thinking also figures in domestic spy land. We find that questioning the imbecilic foreign policy decision by Australian governments to purchase and construct fantasy nuclear-propelled submarines as servitors of the US empire is bound to be the product of “foreign interference”. The agency “has identified foreign services seeking to target AUKUS to position themselves to collect the capabilities, how Australia intends to use them, and to undermine the confidence of our allies.”

    In his 2024 address, Burgess quotes the words of Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley to the Australian Parliament after establishing ASIO: “It is not usual to discuss the detailed activities of a security service. Much of the value of such a service lies in the fact that it works quietly. Members of the organisation should not be unduly prominent at cocktail parties, but should devote themselves to the tasks allotted to them.”

    Burgess, ever the funny man, then takes a stab at humour, claiming to be more permissive than the former Australian PM: “given the work my people do, I would never begrudge them the odd cocktail party now and then”. If only his agents, and Burgess, spent more time at such events and less time babbling on the stage, we would all be better off.

    The post Gloominess and Magical Thinking first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • How the U.S./UK Empire Works — as in the Middle East

    It’s shown with remarkable clarity, in the first 14 minutes of this video from Vanessa Beeley, on February 6. It is titled “Trump in Gaza, Jolani self-proclaimed president, south Lebanon and Russia to pay reparations, not Israel: My reports for UK Column yesterday”.

    Whereas all of its first 14 minutes — the entirety of Beeley’s report — is extremely insightful into what’s now happening in the Middle East (especially Israel, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. regime that has been running the show there ever since at least the 1970s), the following from me expands upon what I consider to be the most stunning portion of it:

    Richard Dearlove, head of Britain’s MI6 in 1999, said in 2014, at the empire’s Royal United Services Institute, this (see him saying it at 10:55 to 11:30 in the video), “The second Saudi incident predates 9/11 and comes from a conversation with Prince Bandar [(bin Sultan al-Saud), who then had been Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the U.S. and working with his buddy Georga W. Bush to set up 9/11, and having the active participation of FBI Directors Robert W. Mueller, James Comey, and Louis Freeh for that operation] I believe at the moment the head of GID [General Directorate of Investigation] in Saudi Arabia, and that was, ‘The time is not far off, Richard, in the Middle East, when it will be literally GOD HELP THE SHIA [the Iran-led Muslim sect] — more than a billion Sunnis [the Saud-led Muslim sect] have simply had enough of them.’” Basically, whereas Sunni Islam accepts hereditary monarchies (such as the ones in Arabia), Shia Islam doesn’t — and thus is viewed by Islamic monarchs (including the Arab ones) as being a mortal threat to their continued rule. The U.S. and Israeli regimes therefore work with Arab monarchies against Shiism — and ESPECIALLY against Iran, and has been very actively doing so ever since the U.S. regime (which had won control over Iran in a 1953 U.S. CIA coup — go to page 116 there to see a description of it) lost Iran in 1979 (when the U.S.-imposed tyrant became overthrown in an authentic revolution). And this is the reason why the U.S. regime constantly touts the blatant lie that “Iran is the chief state-sponsor of terrorism [jihadism],” despite the demonstrable fact that virtually 100% of jihadist attacks are perpetrated by SUNNI fundamentalists, NOT by Shia.

    The Palestinians are overwhelmingly Sunnis, but they are anti-imperialists because they have experienced the worst of imperialism themselves; and, so, the only predominantly Muslim Governments that have been supporting them against Israel — which is America’s biggest colony in the Middle East — have been Shia-led countries, especially Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. And this is why, whereas Israel has been contributing the troops to ethnically cleanse or else exterminate the Gazans, the United States has been donating the weapons and the bombs to do that.

    On January 31, Craig Murray headlined a video “Israel Slaughters and Destroys in Southern Lebanon,” showing him traveling around the ruins from the Israel-U.S. bombings of that area; and at 3:00 he enters what had been the beautiful home of Dr. Julia Ali, including her destroyed concert piano; then, at 4:00 he plays a clip of her performing on it at home. Here is an instagram I found of her at home playing the piano and then Israeli troops occupying her house and destroying her piano. This is another instagram, in which she comments upon the beautiful world that now was gone from her. And here she is shown working at the hospital before the bombings. At 11:50 in Murray’s video, he shows land that Israel has taken, and points out that “they’ve taken more land during the cease-fire than they ever took during the fighting.”

    As regards the question of whether or not what Israel and the U.S. are doing to the Gazans constitutes “ethnic cleansing” or even “genocide,” the best logical analysis that I have encountered on this question was youtubed on 4 January 2024, titled “Is Gaza REALLY Gone? Norman Finkelstein Answers.” I seriously doubt that anyone who claims it’s NOT this will attempt a counter-argument to it.

    The reason why the obvious attempt by Jews and Christians (such as Trump’s new U.N. Ambassador) in the American empire to exterminate all Palestinians is NOT condemned inside the American empire as being what it so obviously is, is the same as the reason why the hidden attempt by Christians in the German empire to exterminate all Jews was NOT condemned inside the German empire.

    Merely for a country to CLAIM to be a “democracy” doesn’t mean that it IS any sort of democracy at all.

    The social ‘sciences’ in such dictatorships hide — not expose — such realities there. And this is why the ‘news’-media there can get away with LIKEWISE hiding it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not so. It instead exemplifies that it IS so.

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  • Mike Lynch, Probability and the Cyber Industrial Complex

    It began as a devastating, confined storm off the coast of Sicily, striking the luxury yacht Bayesian in the form of a devastating water column resembling a tornado.  Probability was inherent in the name (Thomas Bayes, mathematician and nonconformist theologian of the 18th century, had been the first to use probability inductively) and improbability the nature of the accident.

    It also led to rich speculation about the fate of those on the doomed vessel.  While most on the sunk yacht were saved (the eventual number totalled fifteen), a number of prominent figures initially went missing before being found.  They included British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter, along with Morgan Stanley International Bank chairman, Jonathan Bloomer, and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo.

    Lynch, co-founder of the British data analytics firm Autonomy and co-founder and investor in the cybersecurity firm Darktrace, had been recently acquitted by a US federal jury of fifteen counts of fraud and conspiracy, along with his co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain, regarding Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of Autonomy in 2011.  While the firm’s acquisition had cost a mighty US$11 billion, HP wrote off a stunning US$8.8 billion within 12 months, demanding an investigation into what it regarded as “serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy.”  Clifford Chance was instructed by Lynch to act for him following the write down of Autonomy’s value in November 2012, hence Morvillo’s presence.

    Lynch had his fair share of unwanted excitement.  The US Department of Justice successfully secured his extradition, though failed to get a conviction.  The investor proved less fortunate in a 2022 civil suit in the UK, one he lost.

    For all his legal travails, Lynch stayed busy. He founded Invoke Capital, which became the largest investor in the cybersecurity firm Darktrace.  Other companies featured in terms of funding targets for the company, among them Sophia Genetics, Featurespace and Luminance.

    Darktrace, founded in 2013, has thrived in the thick soup of security establishment interests.  British prime ministers have fallen within its orbit of influence, so much so that David Cameron accompanied its CEO Nicole Egan on an official visit to Washington DC in January 2015 ahead of the opening of the company’s US headquarters.

    Members of the UK signals intelligence agency GCHQ are said to have approached Lynch, who proceeded to broker a meeting that proved most profitable in packing Darktrace with former members of the UK and, eventually, US intelligence community.  The company boasts a veritable closet of former operatives on the books: MI5, MI6, CIA, the NSA, and FBI.  Co-founder Stephen Huxter, a notable official in MI5’s cyber defence team, became Darktrace’s managing director.

    Other connections are also of interest in sketching the extensive reach of the cyber industrial complex.  This need not lend itself to a conspiratorial reading of power so much as the influence companies such as Darktrace wield in the field.  Take Alexander Arbuthnot, yet another cut and dried establishment figure whose private equity firm Vitruvian Partners found Darktrace worthy of receiving a multi-million-pound investment as part of a push into cybersecurity.

    Fascinating as this is, such matters gather steam and huff on looking at Arbuthnot’s family ties.  Take Arbuthnot’s mother and Westminster chief magistrate, one Lady Emma Arbuthnot.  The magistrate presided over part of the lengthily cruel and prolonged extradition proceedings of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and hounded for alleged breaches of the US Espionage Act.  (Assange recently pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917.)  Any conflict of interest, actual or perceived, including her husband’s own links to the UK military community as former UK defence minister, were not declared during the legal circus.  Establishment members tend to regard themselves as above reproach.

    With such a tight tangle of links, it took another coincidence to send the amateur sleuths on a feverish digital trawl for sauce and conspiracy.  On August 17, a few days prior to Lynch’s drowning, his co-defendant was struck while running in Cambridgeshire.  Chamberlain died in hospital from his injuries, with the driver, a 49-year-old woman from Haddenham, assisting at the scene with inquiries.

    Reddit and the platform X duly caught fire with theories on the alleged role of hidden corporate actors, disgruntled US justice officials robbed of their quarry, and links to the intelligence community.  Chay Bowes, a blustery Irish businessman with an addiction to internet soapbox pontification, found himself obsessed with probabilities, wondering, “How could two of the statistically most charmed men alive meet tragic ends within two days of each other in the most improbable ways?”

    A better line of reflection is considering the influence and power such corporations exercise in the cyber military-industrial complex.  In the realm of cyber policy, the line between public sector notions of security and defence, and the entrepreneurial pursuit of profit, have ceased to be meaningful.  In a fundamental sense, Lynch was vital to that blurring, the innovator as semi-divine.

    Darktrace became an apotheosis of that phenomenon, retaining influence in the market despite a scandal spotted record.  It has, for instance, survived claims and investigations of sexual harassment.  (One of those accused at the company was the most appropriately named Randy Cheek, a sales chief based in the San Francisco office.)

    In 2023, its chief executive Poppy Gustafsson fended off a stinging report by the US-hedge fund Quintessential Capital Management (QCM) alleging questionable sales and accounting practices intended to drive up the value of the company before it was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2021.  This sounded rather typical and seemed eerily reminiscent of the Autonomy affair.  “After a careful analysis,” QCM reported, “we are deeply sceptical about the validity of Darktrace’s financial statements and fear that sales, margins and growth rates may be overstated and close to sharp correction.”

    QCM’s efforts did no lasting damage.  In April this year, it was revealed that Darktrace would be purchased by US private equity firm Thoma Bravo for the punchy sum of US$5.32 billion.  The Darktrace board was bullish about the deal, telling investors that its “operating and financial achievements have not been reflected commensurately in its valuation, with shares trading at a significant discount to its global peer group”.  If things sour on this one, Thoma Bravo will only have itself to blame, given the collapse of takeover talks it had with the company in 2022.  Irrespective of any anticipated sketchiness, Lynch’s troubled legacy regarding data-driven technology and its relation to the state will remain.

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    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Project Total Control: Everything Is a Weapon When Totalitarianism Is Normalized

    The U.S. government is working to re-shape the country in the image of a totalitarian state.

    This has remained true over the past 50-plus years no matter which political party held office.

    This will remain true no matter who wins the 2024 presidential election.

    In the midst of the partisan furor over Project 2025, a 920-page roadmap for how to re-fashion the government to favor so-called conservative causes, both the Right and the Left have proven themselves woefully naive about the dangers posed by the power-hungry Deep State.

    Yet we must never lose sight of the fact that both the Right and the Left and their various operatives are extensions of the Deep State, which continues to wage psychological warfare on the American people.

    For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the government’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

    For example, in 2022, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

    “Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” the psyops video posits. “Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”

    This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

    Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

    Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

    Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry in order to acclimate us to the Deep State’s totalitarian agenda.

    Weaponizing violence in order to institute martial law. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

    Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

    Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Digital currencies, combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism, will create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society.

    Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

    Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.

    Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

    Weaponizing politics. Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset.

    Weaponizing the dystopian future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have-nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

    The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in undermining our freedoms.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the facts speak for themselves.

    Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

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  • Julian Assange Is Released from Prison: What Does it Mean?

    Lifesize bronze sculpture featuring (L-R) former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former US soldier Chelsea Manning convicted of violations of the Espionage Act, on May 1, 2015 at Alexanderplatz square in Berlin. (AFP Photo / Tobias Schwarz) © AFP

    The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, will at long last taste freedom again. He should never have been imprisoned. Nevertheless, the release is conditional on his accepting to plead guilty to espionage in the United States — in the far-flung US territory of Saipan. There he is to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served. However, it is much longer that 62 months. Since Sweden ordered an arrest of Assange over rape allegations in 2010, Assange has found himself under some form of incarceration until his current release.

    There are some important takeaways from this gross dereliction of justice.

    One: The rape allegations, that continue to appear in lazy media, were false, and this was attested to by the two women in the case. The allegations were a political construction between Sweden acting on behalf of the US. The United Kingdom abetted the US’s scheming against Assange. No western nations stepped forward to criticize the treatment. Graciously, president  Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador offered asylum for Assange in Mexico.

    Why was Assange being targetted? Because WikiLeaks has released scads of classified US military documents on the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,  diplomatic cables, and the devastating video Collateral Murder. When US citizen Daniel Ellsberg released the “Pentagon Papers” for publication, he was charged with theft on top of espionage, but government chicanery caused it to end up in a mistrial. Whereas president Richard Nixon failed miserably against Ellsberg, Donald Trump and Joe Biden persevered and kept Assange under some form of lock-and-key.

    Two: Assange is not guilty. He is guilty of journalism, which is not a crime. He did not commit treason against the US. He is an Australian citizen and not a US citizen. He did not commit espionage. Assange is not a spy and neither was he a thief. He is a publisher, and when WikiLeaks published the leaks, Assange was doing what the New York Times did when they published the “Pentagon Papers.”

    Nonetheless, Assange is human. He has parents, a wife, and kids. Assange realizes that he was up against the state machinery of the US, UK, Sweden, and the collusion of Ecuador under president Lenin Moreno. Crucial was the unwillingness of pre-Albanese Australian administrations to fight for one of its citizens.

    If the Deep State in the US can have its own president assassinated without consequences, then it can easily have a single person put in some form of incarceration for as long as it intends.

    After years and years of incarceration — especially in the notorious Belmarsh prison, his health diminishing, missing his family — that Assange would have accepted the release terms of a rogue empire is completely understandable.

    Three: Justice is all too often not just. Justice delayed is justice denied goes the legal maxim. Unfortunately, Assange is not an isolated example. Edward Snowden cannot return stateside. Seeing what has happened to Assange reinforces that the US government will mete out injustice to him.

    Four: Monopoly media continues to evince that it is an organ of government and corporations. Why so? First, because they are instruments of power. Second, they found themselves all too often scooped by WikiLeaks on major stories.

    Five: The bad: this is a blow to freedom of speech and the right of the public to know what their government is doing.

    Six: More bad: it is too easy to demonize a hero, to torture a hero, and to do this even though there is a significant (although arguably not numerous enough) global movement in support of a hero.

    Seven: Even more bad: people must keep in mind the other heroes out there who brought corruption, war crimes, crimes against peace and humanity to the public consciousness and as a consequence face persecution, imprisonment, assassination, and whatever sordid punishments the machinery of rogue states can cook up. People like Daniel Ellsberg, William Binney, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, George Galloway, conscientious objectors, truth tellers, resistance fighters, among others.

    Eight: Assange is a hero. Heroes tend to be too loosely defined. Scoring a boatload of goals does not one a hero make, neither does crooning a hit song make one a hero, nor does attaining ultra wealth. Heroes are embued with a highly developed sense of morality and transcend themselves by working for the greater good of humanity and the world.

    Nine: It is a Pyrrhic victory for Empire. Yes, Assange was brought to the point of having to confess guilt, but who knows what Assange and WikiLeaks will do for exposing crimes of state from here on.

    Ten: Whatever Assange decides to do in the future, his decision is earned. He has already done so much for the people who want transparency and who want their governments held to account.

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  • Acting As If It Weren’t Really So

    Laughing on the bus/Playing Games with the faces/She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy/I said, Be careful his bowtie is really a camera.
    — America by Paul Simon, recorded by Simon and Garfunkel in their Bookends album, 1968

    Only people who listen to the chorus of reliable alternative media voices warning of the quickly growing threat of nuclear war have any sense of the nightmare that is approaching.  Even for them, however, and surely for most others, unreality reigns.  Reality has a tough time countering illusions.  For we are cataleptically slow-walking to WW III.  If it is very hard or impossible to imagine our own deaths, how much harder is it to imagine the deaths of hundreds of millions of others or more.

    In 1915, amid the insane slaughter of tens of millions during WW I that was a shocking embarrassment to the meliorist fantasy of the long-standing public consciousness, Freud wrote:

    It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are, in fact, still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that, at bottom, no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing another way, that, in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.

    The growing lunacy of the Biden administration’s provocations against Russia via Ukraine seem lost on so many.  The long-running and deep-seated demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin by U.S. propagandists has sunk so deep into the Western mind that facts can’t descend that deep to counteract it. It is one of the greatest triumphs of U.S. government propaganda.

    A friend, a retired history professor at an elite university, recently told me that he can’t think of such matters as the growing threat of nuclear war if he wants to sleep at night, but anyway, he’s more concerned with the consequences of global warming.  Readers at publications where my numerous articles about the nuclear war risk have appeared – the worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 – have made many comments such as “nuclear weapons don’t exist,” that it’s all a hoax, that Putin is in cahoots with Biden in a game of fear mongering to promote a secret agenda, etc.  How can one respond to such denials of reality?

    The other day I met another friend who likes to talk about politics.  He is an intelligent and a caring man.  He was sporting a tee-shirt with a quote from George Washington and quickly started talking about his obsessive fear of Donald Trump and the possibility that he could be elected again.  I told him that I despised Trump but that Biden was a far greater threat right now.  He spoke highly of Biden, and when I responded that Biden has been a warmonger throughout his political career and, of course, in Ukraine, was instigating the use of nuclear weapons, and was in full support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, he looked at me as if I were saying something he had never heard before.  When I spoke of the 2014 U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine, he, a man in his sixties at least, said he was unaware of it, but in any case Biden supported our military as he did and that was good.  When I said Biden is mentally out of it and physically tottering, he emphatically denied it; said Biden was very sharp and fully engaged.  He said Trump was fat and a great danger and George Washington would agree.  I was at a loss for words.  The conversation ended.

    A third friend, just back from living overseas for a year, flew back east from California to visit old friends and relatives.  He told me this sad tale:

    There were experiences that troubled me very deeply during my visit that had nothing to do with all the death and final goodbyes I was immersed in.  My family I would say is pretty typical working class Democrat.  Liberal/progressive in social outlook.  Most are devout Catholics.  All are kind, generous very loving people.  What was troubling was that it was pretty much impossible to carry on a rational reasonably sane political conversation with all but a couple of them, as the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” symptoms were absolutely off the charts.  It was quite stunning actually.  It is almost as if Dementia-Joe isn’t even in office as they had no interest in discussing his many failings, because their entire focus was the orange haired clown.  If I had ten bucks for every time someone told me any one of the following NPR/PBS talking points I’d buy a nice meal for myself – (Trump will be a dictator if elected – Trump will prosecute his enemies if elected – Trump will destroy our democracy if he gets in – etc.)  Any and all attempts to question these narratives and talking points by bringing the behavior of the current administration into the conversation were met with befuddlement – as if people couldn’t believe that “I” wasn’t as terrified as they were by the “Trump-Monster” lurking in the shadows.

    So I guess I’m sharing these thoughts with you, Ed, because it feels like I’m dealing with several different kinds of loss right now.  The more obvious “loss” associated with the physical death of loved ones – but I’m also mourning the intellectual and psychological death of living loved ones who have somehow become completely untethered from the “material realities” I observe on planet earth.  They can repeat “talking points” but can’t explain the evidence or reason that needs to be attached to those talking points for them to be anything but propaganda. Physical death is a natural thing – something we will all face – but this intellectual and spiritual death I am witness to is perhaps even more painful and disconcerting for me.  How do we find our way forward when reason, rational debate, evidence, and real-world events are replaced with fear – and rather irrational fears at that?

    This intellectual and spiritual death that he describes is a widespread phenomenon.  It is not new, but COVID 19 with its lockdowns, lies, and dangerous “vaccines” dramatically intensified it.  It created vast gaps in interpersonal communication that were earlier exploited in the lead-up to the 2016 election and Trump’s surprising victory.  Families and friends stopped talking to each other.  The longstanding official propaganda apparatus went into overdrive.  Then in 2020 the normal human fear of death and chaos was fully digitized during the lockdowns.  Putin, Trump, the Chinese, sexual predators, viruses, space aliens, your next door neighbor, etc. – you name it – were all tossed into the mix that created fear and panic to replace the growing realization that the war on terror initiated by George W. Bush in 2001 was losing its power.  New terrors were created, censorship was reinforced, and here we are in 2024 in a country supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza and with a population blind to the growing threat of WW III and the use of nuclear weapons.

    The communication gap – what my friend aptly describes as “this intellectual and spiritual death” – is two-sided.  On one hand there is simple ignorance of what is really going on in the world, greatly aided by vast government/media propaganda. On the other, there is chosen ignorance or the wish to be deceived to maintain illusions.

    We are thinking reeds as Pascal called us, vulnerable feeling creatures afraid of death; we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by supporting wars that make so much blood that is inside other people get to the outside for the earth to drink since it is not our blood and we survive.

    I could, of course, quote liberally from truth tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless.  Why bother?  At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true.  I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.

    For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins. Grasping the theatrical nature of social life, the need to pretend, to act, to feel oneself part of a “meaningful” play explains a lot.  To stand outside consensus reality, outside the stage door, so to speak, is not very popular.   Despite the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media, people want to believe them to feel they belong.

    Yet D. H. Lawrence’s point a century ago still applies: “The essential America soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.  It has never yet melted.”

    But this killer soul must be hidden behind a wall of deceptions as the U.S. warfare state ceaselessly wages wars all around the world.  It must be hidden behind feel good news stories about how Americans really care about others, but only others that they are officially allowed to care about.  Not Syrians, Yemenis, Russian speakers of the Donbass, Palestinians, et al.  The terrorist nature of decades upon decades of U.S. savagery and the indifference of so many Americans go hand-in-hand but escape notice in the corporate media that are propagandists. The major theme of these media is that the United States government is the great defender of freedom, peace, and democracy.  Every once in a while, a scapegoat, one rotten apple in the barrel, is offered up to show that all is not perfect in paradise.  Here or there a decent article appears to reinforce the illusion that the corporate media tell the truth.  But essentially it is one massive deception that is leading many people to accept a slow walk toward WW III.

    There’s a make-believe quality to this vast spectacle of violent power and false innocence that baffles the mind.  To see and hear the corporate masked media magicians’ daily reports is to enter a world of pure illusion that deserves only sardonic laughter but sadly captivates so many adult children desperate to believe.

    Here’s an anecdote about a very strange encounter, one I couldn’t make up.  A communication of some sort that also has a make-believe quality to it.  I’m not sure what the message is.

    I was recently meeting with a writer and researcher who has interviewed scores of people about the famous 1960s assassinations and other sensitive matters.  I only knew this person through internet communication, but he was passing my way and suggested that we meet, which we did at a local out-of-the-way cafe.  We were the only customers and we took our drinks out the back to a small table and chairs under a tree in the café’s large garden that bordered open land down to a river.  About 10 yards away a woman sat at a table, writing in a notebook that I took to be journaling of some sort.  The researcher and I talked very openly for more than two hours about our mutual work and what he had learned from many of his interviewees about the assassinations.  Neither of us paid any attention to the woman at the table – naively? – and our conversation naturally revolved around the parts played by intelligence agencies, the CIA, etc. in the assassinations of the Kennedys and MLK, Jr.  The woman sat and wrote.  Near the end of our two plus hours, my friend went inside the café, which had closed to new customers, to use the men’s room.  The woman called to me and said I hope you don’t mind but I overheard some of your conversation and my father worked for U.S. intelligence.  She then told us much more about him, where he went to college, etc. or at least what she said she knew because when growing up he didn’t tell her mother, her, or siblings any details about his decades of spying.  But when she attended his memorial service in Washington D.C., the place was filled with intelligence  operatives and she learned more about her father’s secretive life.  Then, out of the blue, it burst out of her how he was obsessed with the high school he attended, one she assured us we probably never heard of (we were in Massachusetts) – Regis High School, a Jesuit scholarship prep school for boys in NYC.  To say I was startled is an understatement, since I went to Regis myself, and the anomalous “coincidence” of this encounter in the back garden of an empty café spooked my friend as well.  The woman told us more about her father until we had to leave.

    I wondered if he wore a bowtie and if what just happened weren’t really so.

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  • Nesting in Australia: Indian Spy Rings Take Root

    In his 2021 annual threat assessment, the director-general of ASIO, the Australian domestic intelligence service, pointed to an active spy ring operating in the country, or what he chose to call a “nest of spies”.  The obvious conclusion drawn by information-starved pundits was that the nest was filled with the eggs and fledglings of Chinese intelligence or Russian troublemakers.  How awkward then, for the revelations to be focused on another country, one Australia is ingratiatingly disposed to in its efforts to keep China in its place.

    At the start of this month, a number of anonymous security sources revealed to various outlets, including The Washington Post, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, that the spies in question came from the Indian foreign intelligence agency, known rather benignly, even bookishly, as the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

    The range of their interests were expansive: gathering information on defence projects of a sensitive nature, the state of Australia’s airport security, and classified information covering Australia’s trade relationships.  The more sinister aspect of the RAW’s remit, and once it has extended to other countries, was monitoring members of the Indian diaspora, a habit it has fallen into over the years.  According to Burgess, “The spies developed targeted relationships with current and former politicians, a foreign embassy and a state police service.”  The particular “nest” of agents in question had also cultivated and recruited, with some success, an Australian government security clearance holder with access to “sensitive details of defence technology”.

    In details supplied by Burgess, the agents in question, including “a number” of Indian officials, were subsequently removed by the Morrison government of the day.  The Washington Post also revealed that two members of the RAW were expelled from Australia in 2020 following a counter-intelligence operation by ASIO.

    Given the recent exchanges between the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, all efforts to pursue the sacred cows of prosperity and security, this was something of an embarrassment.  But the embarrassment is more profound to Canberra, which continues to prove itself amateurish when it comes to understanding the thuggish inclinations of great powers.  Beijing and Moscow are condemned as authoritarian forces in the dark tussle between evil and good, while Washington and New Delhi are democratic, friendlier propositions on the right side of history.  Yet all have powerful interests, and Australia, being at best a lowly middle-power annexed to the US imperium, will always be vulnerable to the walkover by friends and adversaries alike.

    Grant Wyeth writes with cold clarity on the matter in The Diplomat.  “With countries like Australia seeking to court India due to the wealth of opportunities it provides, New Delhi knows that actions like these won’t come with any significant consequences.”

    The lamentably defanged responses from Australian government ministers are solid proof of that proposition.  “I don’t want to get into these kinds of operational issues in any way,” explained Australia’s Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, to the ABC.  “We’ve got a good relationship with India and with other countries in the region, it’s an important economic relationship, it’s become closer in recent years as a consequence of efforts on both sides, and that’s a good thing.”

    Operational issues are exactly the sort of thing that should interest Chalmers and other government members.  In targeting dissidents and activists, Modi’s BJP government has taken to venturing afar, from proximate Pakistan to a more distant United States, particularly Sikh activists who are accused of demanding, and agitating, for a separate homeland known as Khalistan.  The methods used there have not just involved plodding research and cool analysis but outright murder.  The Indian PM, far from being a cuddly, statesmanlike sort, is a figure of ethnoreligious fanaticism keen on turning India into an exclusively Hindu state.

    In September last year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke of “credible allegations” that Indian agents had murdered Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Khalistan advocate designated in 2020 by New Delhi to be a terrorist.  He had been slain in his truck on June 18, 2023 outside the Surrey temple, Guru Nanak Gurdwara.  “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil,” reasoned Trudeau, “is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty.  It is contrary to the fundamental rules by which free, open and democratic societies conduct themselves.”

    This month, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced that three Indian citizens resident in Edmonton had been arrested in connection with the killing.  “There are separate and distinct investigations,” stated the RCMP assistant commissioner, David Teboul.  “These efforts include investigating connections to the government of India.”

    Given that Australia has a Sikh population of around 200,000 or so, this should be a point of nail-biting concern.  Instead, Canberra’s tepid response is all too familiar, tolerant of violations of a sovereignty it keeps alienating it to the highest bidders.  Tellingly, Albanese went so far as to assure Modi during his May visit last year that “strict action” would be taken against Sikh separatist groups in Australia, whatever that entailed.  Modi had taken a particular interest in reports of vandalism against Hindu temples in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney featuring pro-Khalistan slogans.

    Be it Washington’s seduction with its promise of nuclear-powered submarines and a security guarantee against manufactured and exaggerated threats, or India’s sweet undertakings for greater economic and military cooperation, Australia’s political and security cadres have been found wanting.  There has even been an open admission by Burgess – expressly made in his 2022 Annual Threat Assessment address – that “espionage is conducted by countries we consider friends – friends with sharp elbows and voracious intelligence requirements.”  The ABC similarly reports, citing unnamed government sources, “that friendly nations believed to be particularly active in espionage operations in Australia include Singapore, South Korea, Israel and India.”  Something to be proud of.

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  • Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution

    Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference … The Thought Police would get him just the same … the arrests invariably happened at night … In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

    — George Orwell, 1984

    The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder.

    The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

    What’s playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized by Congress doesn’t just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.

    Read the fine print: it’s a doozy.

    Just as the USA Patriot was perverted from its stated intent to fight terrorism abroad and was instead used to covertly crack down on the American people (allowing government agencies to secretly track Americans’ financial activities, monitor their communications, and carry out wide-ranging surveillance on them), Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats, emails and other electronic communication) without a warrant.

    Now intelligence officials are pushing to dramatically expand the government’s spying powers, effectively giving the government unbridled authority to force millions of Americans to spy on its behalf.

    Basically, the Deep State wants to turn the American people into extensions of Big Brother.

    As Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) explains:

    “If you have access to any communications, the government can force you to help it spy. That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a Wi-Fi router, a phone, or a computer. So think for a moment about the millions of Americans who work in buildings and offices in which communications are stored or pass through.

    After all, every office building in America has data cables running through it. The people are not just the engineers who install, maintain, and repair our communications infrastructure; there are countless others who could be forced to help the government spy, including those who clean offices and guard buildings. If this provision is enacted, the government can deputize any of these people against their will, and force them in effect to become what amounts to an agent for Big Brother—for example, by forcing an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night.

    This could all happen without any oversight whatsoever: The FISA Court won’t know about it, Congress won’t know about it. Americans who are handed these directives will be forbidden from talking about it. Unless they can afford high-priced lawyers with security clearances who know their way around the FISA Court, they will have no recourse at all.”

    This is how an effort to reform Section 702 has quickly steamrollered into an expansion of the government’s surveillance powers.

    We should have seen this coming.

    After all, the Police State doesn’t relinquish power easily, the Surveillance State doesn’t look favorably on anything that might weaken its control, and Big Brother doesn’t like to be restricted.

    What most Americans don’t get is that even without Section 702 in play, the government will still target the populace for warrantless, suspicionless mass surveillance, because that’s how the police state maintains its stranglehold on power.

    These maneuvers are just the tip of the iceberg.

    For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government.

    This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military.

    It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful.

    It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

    The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins. They have become one and the same entity.

    The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.

    On any given day, the average American is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

    Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

    Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

    Privacy, as we have known it, is dead.

    Whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking you. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine. These corporate trackers monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere and share the data with the government.

    Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to collect data and spy on the American people. Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power.

    These government snoops are constantly combing through and harvesting vast quantities of our communications, then storing it in massive databases for years. Once this information—collected illegally and without any probable cause—is ingested into NSA servers, other government agencies can often search through the databases to make criminal cases against Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism or anything national security-related.

    Empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.

    Talk about a system rife for abuse.

    Now, the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they’re only looking to get the “bad” guys who are overseas.

    Don’t believe it.

    The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

    Indeed, the government has become the biggest lawbreaker of all.

    It’s telling that even after it was revealed that the FBI, one of the most power-hungry and corrupt agencies within the police state’s vast complex of power-hungry and corrupt agencies, misused a massive government surveillance database more than 300,000 times in order to target American citizens, we’re still debating whether they should be allowed to continue to sidestep the Fourth Amendment.

    This is how the government operates, after all: our objections are routinely overruled and our rights trampled underfoot.

    It works the same every time.

    First, the government seeks out extraordinary powers acquired in the wake of some national crisis—in this case, warrantless surveillance powers intended to help the government spy on foreign targets suspected of engaging in terrorism—and then they use those powers against the American people.

    According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI repeatedly misused Section 702 in order to spy on the communications of two vastly disparate groups of Americans: those involved in the George Floyd protests and those who may have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol.

    This abuse of its so-called national security powers is par for the course for the government.

    According to the Brennan Center for Justice, intelligence agencies conduct roughly 200,000 of these warrantless “backdoor” searches for Americans’ private communications each year.

    No one is spared.

    Many of the targets of these searches have done nothing wrong.

    Government agents have spied on the communications of protesters, members of Congress, crime victims, journalists, and political donors, among many others.

    The government has claimed that its spying on Americans is simply “incidental,” as though it were an accident, but it fully intends to collect this information.

    As journalist Jake Johnson warns, under an expanded Section 702, U.S. intelligence agencies “could, without a warrant, compel gyms, grocery stores, barber shops, and other businesses to hand over communications data.”

    According to the Wall Street Journal, “The Securities and Exchange Commission is deploying a massive government database—the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT—that monitors in real time the identity, transactions and investment portfolio of everyone who invests in the stock market.”

    Journalist Leo Hohmann reports that the government is also handing out $20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential “extremists.”

    Ask the government why it’s carrying out this far-reaching surveillance on American citizens, and you’ll get the same Orwellian answer the government has been trotting in response to every so-called crisis to justify its assaults on our civil liberties: to keep America safe.

    What this is really all about, however, is control.

    What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority.

    When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out dragnet searches of customer transactions—warrantlessly and without probable cause—for “extremism” indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we’re all in trouble.

    You don’t have to do anything illegal.

    For that matter, you don’t even have to challenge the government’s authority.

    Frankly, you don’t even have to care about politics or know anything about your rights.

    All you really need to do in order to be tagged as a suspicious character, flagged for surveillance, and eventually placed on a government watch list is live in the United States.

    As long as the government is allowed to weaponize its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, it’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it won’t be long before Big Brother’s Thought Police are locking us up to “protect us” from ourselves.

    At that point, we will disappear.

    The post Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • American Censorship is Bad for Peace

    I cannot sit back and allow the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

    — General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove

    Most people would agree that in any modern, wealthy, multicultural, free, non-colonized, democratic society, people have the right to know what is going on in their community. In fact, in order to fulfill their various responsibilities as citizens, consumers, workers, company presidents, government officials, family members, etc., they have to know what is going on. We want and need to know what our own government and foreign governments are doing; what products, services, and sociopolitical programs are available in our country; and what medical choices we have when we are sick or injured. There are exceptions, such as children and psychopaths, but in general, all people have the right to benefit from the knowledge in libraries, on the Internet, in museums, and in doctors’ offices. In U.S. cities, almost everyone has a right to a library card.

    During a “state of exception” or a state of emergency though, some convincingly argue that you do not have the right to certain dangerous information. The United States is officially not at war yet with Russia; we just supply their enemies with lots of expensive weapons. But if and when we are at war with Russia, do U.S. citizens have a right to hear Vladimir Putin speak? When we are under attack by a lethal virus, do we have the right to hear about all the various methods of protecting our health, even alternative, traditional, foreign, naturopathic, or unorthodox methods?

    Some would say “no.” Just as you must not be allowed to buy enriched uranium and download from the Internet blueprints for how to make a nuclear bomb, you do not have the right to protect your health from SARS-CoV-2 without using mRNA vaccines. And people who advocate for the Russians, who love Russia, work with Russian companies, promote positive images of Russia, and facilitate the spread of state-sponsored, pro-Russia propaganda must be silenced or banned. Like hate speech, there are certain statements that are just beyond the pale, that are too dangerous and must be suppressed. Some, such as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, argue that when teens are jumping out of windows, the government has a responsibility to step in and prevent people from reading posts encouraging them to engage in this dangerous behavior. With the Supreme Court case of Murthy v. Missouri, Americans are now forced to think about exactly how precious our First Amendment is, and when we prioritize free speech over health and safety.

    In the U.S. today, the government is censoring people and publications on both the Left and the Right, the typical library book-banning activities are up, and there is evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) systems are now doing some of the censorship work, strengthening the hand of the government vis-a-vis the people in ways generally only seen during great crises or wars. (This is documented in the downloadable report from the U.S. House of Representatives “The Weaponization of the National Science Foundation: How NSF Is Funding the Development of Automated Tools To Censor Online Speech”).

    Here we delve into two cases of the Government suppressing free speech, one on the “Left” of the political spectrum and one on the “Right.” On the Left we see the anti-racist and anti-imperialist, African-American activist Omali Yeshitela and two other socialists. On the Right we see people such as Jill Hines, co-director of conservative Health Freedom Louisiana, and Jim Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site that reportedly has published threats against election workers for false claims of election-rigging. Suppressed along with these two on the Right but actually going beyond political categories, we see Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologists that raised questions about government pandemic policies, and professor of psychiatry and human behavior Aaron Kheriaty, who was dismissed by the University of California, Irvine, for refusing an mRNA shot. And finally, we see the suppression of millions of people who do not identify with either the Left or the Right, some of whom are not conspiracy theorists, who have expressed dissatisfaction with the government’s public health measures that were taken in response to SARS-CoV-2.

    Silencing African-American Socialists

    In April of last year the “Uhuru 3,” Omali Yeshitela, an African-American man born in 1941; Penny Hess, a white woman over the age of 70, who is the chairperson of the African People’s Solidarity Committee; and Jesse Nevel, a young, white man who is the “National Chair of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, the mass organization of the African People’s Solidarity Committee,” were charged by a federal grand jury with acting as unregistered agents of the Russian government. The Biden administration apparently considers them major threats to U.S. national security.

    Yeshitela’s political roots go back to the Civil Rights Movement as a member of the legendary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1972, he and others felt the need to move beyond protests and to capture political power, so they formed the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP). This was and is an internationalist Black Power movement, or African internationalism, and has been developed over 50 years, fighting against colonialism, and this is not the first time that their free speech rights have been violated, he says.

    Yeshitela explains that he got in trouble with the law this time by touring the U.S. in 2016 to gain support for a movement charging the U.S. with genocide, and going to Russia to speak about self-determination with a Russian NGO, not for the government of the Russian Federation. According to Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors, for the sacrifices he made for white, capitalist Russia, he has received the whopping sum of $7,000. In a summary of the case in October, the Grayzone’s Anya Parampil warns that “lawyers for the Uhuru 3 maintain that the DOJ’s justification for prosecuting their clients sets the stage for the US government to legally harass and prosecute other Americans who criticize US domestic and foreign policy, particularly where designated enemies like Russia or China are concerned.”

    Award-winning peace advocate, spokesperson for the Black Alliance for Peace, and 2016 candidate for U.S. vice president on the Green Party ticket Ajamu Baraka has provided insightful analysis of this case. Early on in the “Russiagate” hype, he warned that those fearmongering about Russia would soon target anti-capitalist, Black liberation movements, just as they did at the end of the Second World War, when peace activists including W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and Paul Robeson (1898-1976) suffered government oppression. (Robeson also charged the U.S. government with genocide. He did so in 1951 for their failure to stop U.S. lynchings).

    Like Noam Chomsky, Baraka categorizes the U.S. as a lawless, “rogue state.” He warns that our “national security state” is engaging in systematic repression against anyone who opposes them, including “the Left” (from around 7:30 in the video). For example, people who protest “Cop City” are being labeled as “domestic terrorists.” What we are looking at is “McCarthyism 2.0,” he suggests. The Peninsula Peace and Justice Center is one of the few organizations standing up for the Uhuru movement’s right to free speech.

    As Chomsky once said, “Democratic societies can’t force people. Therefore, they have to control what they think.”

    Silencing Opponents of Government COVID-19 Policies

    Besides the violations of free speech that have resulted from Russophobia, Afro-phobia, and reparations-justice-phobia, we are now also facing such violations caused by SARS-CoV-2-phobia, the biosecurity panic, and the war on the virus. In the opinion of Benjamin Wallace-Wells writing for the New Yorker, “the most eyebrow-raising revelations in the Twitter Files, documented mostly by Matt Taibbi and Lee Fang, concern the extent to which the F.B.I. and the Pentagon were interested in controlling what was seen on the platform.” For instance, Lee Fang has written about a British company called “Logically.ai.” According to AP, they are “an established social enterprise bringing credibility and confidence to news and social discourse,” and they launched an app in the U.S. in 2020 that enables “users to receive personalized, verified and in-depth information on any storyline in order to restore digital trust.”

    Such words might make some people feel safe, but Lee Fang warns about the American censorship advocate Brian Murphy, who used to be an FBI agent leading the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, and is an executive of Logically.ai. Murphy has argued that the U.S. government must now rein in the social media companies, and we, U.S. citizens, must give up some of our freedoms that we “need and deserve” so that we can get our “security back.”

    “Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.” The company Logically is doing work outsourced to them by the British government. The government agency responsible, called the “Counter Disinformation Unit” or “CDU,” were targeting a “former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies,” Fang explains. Apparently, not only groups that opposed lockdowns but also groups that promote peace are being surveilled and flagged as dangerous, by a foreign company based in a foreign country.

    Not long ago, few would have guessed that Stanford University would be against free speech, but now it appears that some segment of the university is actively participating in censorship, as a kind of government proxy. Professor Jay Bhattacharya at the Stanford School of Medicine, who is an expert on health policy at Stanford University, and who holds an M.D. as well as a Ph.D. in Economics, has summarized the free speech case Murthy v. Missouri that is currently before the Supreme Court. He points out that Stanford University, his own employer, has a program called the “Stanford Internet Observatory” (SIO) (10:00 to 12:00 in the video) who describe themselves as a “cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies, with a focus on social media.” The program was founded in 2019.

    In an appellate court struggle, his own university weighed in against him, and they claimed that the Stanford Internet Observatory is not a government cut-out, is just doing research, and is not meant to violate the 1st Amendment. He describes that as “disingenuous.” Stanford has a rule that they require researchers to adhere to, like universities around the world, that human subjects of a research project must not be harmed by the research. Yet this Internet Observatory is basically making a list, effectively a blacklist, of organizations or people to suppress. That would constitute an ethics violation, since the subjects of the research are U.S. citizens, and their rights under the 1st Amendment have been violated. Either this is not research, or it is unethical research, Bhattacharya argues.

    In his expert opinion, the U.S. government is “the number one source of misinformation during the Pandemic.” His “short list” of their misinformation includes the following:

    1. The government overestimated the lethality of COVID-19.
    2. The risk to children was minimal, but the government talked as if everyone was equally at risk.
    3. The government suppressed the “idea of immunity after COVID recovery,” and made people wait for the vaccine.
    4. Evidence that masking was ineffective was available during the early stages of the pandemic. There was no consensus among scientists that masks worked, but the government recommended masks anyway.
    5. The government promoted the illusion that there was a consensus about lockdowns and censored the Great Barrington Declaration.
    6. The government censored people who provided evidence that the vaccines were not safe and effective, even after evidence emerged that there was a risk of myocarditis.

    (12:00-17:00 in video)

    In May of last year, the “New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group, filed a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s ongoing efforts to work in concert with social media companies and the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project to monitor and censor online support groups catering to those injured by Covid vaccines.”

    The Stanford Internet Observatory is a proud member of the “Election Integrity Partnership” (EIP) along with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”), Graphika, and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. The Atlantic Council are notorious militarists.

    In his Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi calls the Stanford Internet Observatory the “ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations.” The DFRLab is partially funded by the Global Engagement Center (GEC). And they, the GEC, are part of the State Department. Taibbi views the GEC as part of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex,” along with organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the DFRLab itself, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD). In other words, it appears that many of the same organizations that have engaged in fear mongering over Russia or promoting militarism have also engaged in censoring Americans.

    Conclusion

    The U.S. has become a nation-state that is obsessed with national security. Ajamu Baraka sums up our situation best:

    It’s us today but it’s you tomorrow, if you persist in any kind of oppositional politics, because the ruling element in the U.S. is serious. They are serious about attempting to maintain their hegemony, and their global hegemony. And the notion, of some of the values of the liberal framework, liberal philosophy, liberalism—they have completely abandoned that. They have jettisoned that. And basically they are engaged in lawlessness. The U.S. is now a rogue state. What we have domestically in the U.S. is systematic repression from a national security state that seems to be completely unbound by any kind of standards beyond its own. (From 6:50 to 7:40 in video).

    Then Baraka raises a very important question, i.e., “Where is the opposition?” Our national security state is currently run by “liberals,” people who are supposed to care about freedom of speech and freedom in general, like their liberal predecessors who espoused the idea that freedom was an essential condition for happiness. (Never for people of African or Native American descent or for women, but they did espouse it for wealthy white men). Instead of protecting our rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” they are giving us “death, shackles, and misery.” Now the question is, “What are we going to do about it?”

    We need free speech if we are to build peace. Today they are coming for militant revolutionaries who reject white supremacy, for the narrow-minded Right, and for the medical scientists who recommend a different approach from the government’s approach to SARS-CoV-2. Without a thriving movement against the current censorship, the U.S. government, along with the companies that help the government censor people, could easily pull the rug out from under our feet, even as we diligently work for peace and human rights. Do not be surprised if tomorrow the FBI, or the “Blob,” (i.e., the foreign policy establishment including the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA), or any of the many companies that work for them in this constantly expanding biodefense industry come after you next.

    The post American Censorship is Bad for Peace first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Russiagate Hoax illustrates the Power the National Security Police State

    The US rulers and their national security state foisted two major campaigns of lies on us to win our support for their planned wars. The first that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. This bogus story was rejected by the progressive and anti-war movements. The second that Trump colluded with Putin to steal the 2016 election; this, progressives fell for. It remains a shocking example of manipulation of supposedly well-educated progressive people – many of whom do not hesitate to ridicule MAGA people for their bigotry and ignorance.

    Russiagate, packaged as a tale of Putin and Trump collusion, was a plot against the government elected by the people. Russiagate, first leaked to the media in mid-2016 by CIA Director Brennan, sought to sabotage a presidential campaign and then delegitimize the Trump presidency. It was an essential tool for legitimizing the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, costing hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.

    Yet, no evidence was ever presented that Trump colluded with Putin. No evidence was presented that the Russians hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) computers. No evidence was presented that any votes in 2016 were switched.

    Origin of anti-Russian campaign and the Russiagate Story

    In 2014 Washington instigated an anti-Russian coup in Ukraine. Then when Russia aided Syria in the US-provoked “civil war,” Russia bashing intensified. As General Wesley Clark revealed, the US had targeted Syria for overthrow at least since 2001 and was in a favorable position to accomplish this goal until Moscow began significant military aid to Damascus in 2015.

    CIA’s Brennan aimed to manipulate the public to prepare for a showdown with Russia. Mike Whitney wrote, “After Putin blocked Brennan’s operations in both Ukraine and Syria, Brennan had every reason to retaliate and to use the tools at his disposal to demonize Putin and try to isolate Russia.” Meanwhile, Trump was gaining ground in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries when he called for US troops to get out Syria and the Middle East and said the “deep state” lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Whitney adds, “It provided him [Brennan] the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, to deliver a withering blow to Putin and Trump at the very same time.”

    In Whose Bright Idea Was RussiaGate, Paul Craig Roberts elaborated:

    Russiagate was created by CIA director John Brennan. The CIA started what is called Russiagate in order to prevent Trump from being able to normalize relations with Russia. The CIA and the military/security complex need an enemy in order to justify their huge budgets and unaccountable power. Russia has been assigned that role. The Democrats joined in as a way of attacking Trump. They hoped to have him tarnished as cooperating with Russia to steal the presidential election from Hillary and to have him impeached.

    Russian expert Stephen Cohen concurred, reporting that Brennan was collecting material for the collusion story in late 2015 or early 2016 and instigated the FBI investigation into the Trump-Putin hoax. “Brennan played a central role in promoting the Russiagate narrative thereafter.” Cohen, in “Russiagate’s ‘Core Narrative’ Has Always Lacked Actual Evidence,” said the story was based on two documents: an “Intelligence Community Assessment” and the Steele dossier, compiled by a retired UK intelligence officer. The core narrative of both claimed Putin intervened in the 2016 presidential campaign to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy to help Trump. Journalist Aaron Mate further detailed CIA Director Brennan’s role as “a prime mover of Russiagate.”

    Steele Dossier

    “The Dossier” asserted Trump colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton, claiming that Russia hacked the DNC computer servers. Mike Whitney and others point out the Steele Dossier was paid for by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. While the Dossier is now discredited, the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s connections to Russia was launched based on “information” gathered from this paid-for report. Steele “was a former M16 agent who was paid $160,000 for composing the dubious set of reports that make up the dossier. We don’t even know if Steele’s alleged contacts or intermediaries in Russia actually exist or not.”

    The “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA)

    CIA boss Brennan, along with the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Clapper, finally released the ICA report in January 2017, which concluded that Putin “ordered” a campaign aimed at influencing the election. The Assessment claimed:

    “Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order… We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency…We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump…Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards…. We have high confidence in these judgments.”

    The Assessment contained no evidence of Russia’s role but asserted Russia’s actions included hacking into the email accounts of the DNC along with intermediaries such as WikiLeaks to release the hacked information.

    Stephen Cohen adds, “Clapper subsequently admitted he had personally selected for the ICA analysts from the three agencies, but we still do not know who. No doubt these were analysts who would conform to the ‘core narrative’ of Kremlin-Trump collusion…. the ICA provided almost no facts for its ‘assessment.’”

    National Security State Directors Perpetuate their Trump-Putin collusion hoax

    CIA’s Brennan deceived Congress and the public by claiming sufficient evidence existed to investigate Trump’s campaign. The BBC 2017 article Ex-CIA chief Brennan says Trump-Russia inquiry ‘well-founded’ stated Brennan “told the House Intelligence Committee he was aware of intelligence showing contact between Russian officials and ‘US persons involved in the Trump campaign’.” Brennan said the Russians ‘brazenly interfered’ in the 2016 US elections and were ‘very aggressive.’”

    21st Century Wire reported that Clapper, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), had “leaked information on the ‘Trump dossier’ to CNN’s Jake Tapper, lied about it to Congress, and then was hired by CNN just a few months later.” Clapper later asserted that Putin “knows how to handle an asset and that’s what he’s doing with the President”.

    The third national security state boss, FBI Director Comey, proclaimed in Congressional hearings that Putin:

    hated Secretary Clinton so much that the flip side of that coin was that he had a clear preference for the person running against the person he hated so much. They engaged in a multifaceted campaign to undermine our democracy. They were unusually loud in their intervention. It’s almost as if they didn’t care that we knew, that they wanted us to see what they were doing. Their number one mission is to undermine the credibility of our entire democracy enterprise of this nation. They’ll be back. They’ll be back, in 2020. They may be back in 2018.

    Mike Whitney remarked, “So among his other talents, Comey also knows how to read minds. He knows that Putin hates Hillary and favors Trump. He knows the Russians ‘engaged in a multifaceted campaign to undermine our democracy’, even though he hasn’t produced a lick of proof to verify his claims.”

    Whitney adds later, “The FBI made a “concerted effort to conceal information from the court” in order to get a warrant to spy on a member of a rival political campaign. The FBI failed to mention that the dossier was paid for by the Hillary campaign and the DNC.”

    The fourth national police state boss, NSA Director Michael Rogers, when asked on November 15, 2016, about the WikiLeaks release of DNC emails during the 2016 presidential campaign, declared, “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state [Russia] to attempt to achieve a specific effect.” He added, “This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance.”

    Thus, the Trump-Putin collusion and Russia hacking story was propagated by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and DNI, the backbone of the national security police state.

    The story that Russia “hacked” DNC-Hillary Clinton computers

    Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity pointed out that the “NSA is able to identify both the sender and recipient when hacking is involved…The bottom line is that the NSA would know where and how any “hacked” emails from the DNC, HRClinton or any other servers were routed through the network.” Given that this hacking was allegedly by a foreign power, which the US considered an enemy, it would make sense to conclude the NSA knew Russia did not do it, but stayed mum.

    Instead of asking the NSA or FBI, the DNC hired CrowdStrike to investigate the “hacking” of their computers, despite the claimed significant US national security threat that a foreign power hacked presidential campaign computers to alter the election. CrowdStrike became the only actual source for “information” on the Russian hacking of DNC computers and Russia’s providing the scoop to WikiLeaks. FBI Director Comey never insisted on access to the DNC computers, nor was the FBI given an unredacted report. The only evidence of a hack comes from this company paid by the DNC.

    CrowdStrike’s chief technical officer was Dmitri Alperovich, a senior fellow with the Saudi and Rockefeller Foundation funded think tank, the neocon Atlantic Council. It has several former CIA directors on its board and considered to be NATO’s “think tank.”

    Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, knew from the head of CrowdStrike, Shawn Henry in December 5, 2017, that CrowdStrike had no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked by Russia or anyone else. However, Schiff kept this from the public until May 7, 2020, two and a half years later.

    National  Police State Directors admit they made up the Trump-Putin collusion Story

    After the 2016 election, the DNI, CIA, NSA, and FBI bosses admitted they made up the collusion story and that the Intelligence Community Assessment they released to the public contained no evidence. CIA boss Brennan when asked on May 23, 2017 in a Congressional hearing into Russian collusion declared, “I don’t do evidence…I don’t know whether such collusion existed.”

    Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted to the House Intelligence Committee on July 17, 2017, “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.” Clapper also owned up, in July 5, 2017 testimony that “17 intelligence agencies” had confirmed Russian interference in the 2016 election has been false all along.

    For his part, FBI Director Comey, in Congressional testimony on March 20, 2017, “stated there is no evidence to support collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia.” In a June 8, 2017 hearing, when asked “Are you confident that no votes cast in the 2016 presidential election were altered?” Comey answered, “I’m confident.”

    Brennan, Clapper, and Comey, the three chief national security state bosses behind the Russiagate story admitted they made it up, that no evidence substantiates their hoax on the public.

    Too many progressives swallow the CIA invented Trump-Putin collusion story

    Thus, we have the heads of the national security state police agencies concocting a story to sway a US presidential election and incite anger at Russia. Progressives recognize the NSA, CIA and FBI as enemies of human rights and liberties. Most progressives also view Trump as fascist or “neo-fascist.” But here we have the curiosity of the national police state agencies interfering in a US election to stop a “fascist” from being elected. Progressives might reflect on why they have ended up opposing the same candidate the national security state opposes, how they put themselves in the position of voting for the candidates (Hillary and Biden) that the national security state preferred.

    We now have evidence to know the US national security state systematically interfered in a presidential election. They made up a story and convinced most of the US public of it. They even surveilled and wire-tapped members of the presidential campaign they opposed. This testifies to the colossal reach of the national security state over us, their ability to make us believe a falsehood is reality. And get away with it unpunished. It attests to their power over US society that no dared indict them for trying to fix our elections.

    That the national police agencies undertook this vast operation against the Republican Party, considered the more reactionary enforcer of the status quo of the two corporate parties, warns us what they have in store when an actual popular revolt against their status quo arises.

    Considerable information has existed for some years that the Russiagate hoax was no more true than Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, which few progressives swallowed. The opposite case here. Progressives drank the anti-Trump “Kool-Aid.” A 2018 Gallup poll showed that 90% of Democratic voters bought the Russia interference story compared to 67% of Republican voters. On whether Russia changed the election outcome, 78% of Democratic voters agreed. without evidence ever presented. Ironically, these voters include those who proclaim, “follow the science” and consider the MAGA crowd as uneducated and prejudiced.

    Many progressives had just supported Bernie in 2015-16 only to see Hillary Clinton’s dirty tricks snatch the Democratic nomination from him. Yet they welcomed this Clinton/DNC/national security state propagated hoax – the very people they just repudiated; a testimony of how the ruling class can manage consent.

    The police state agencies whipped up such a Russiagate hysteria that if you questioned it in a public forum, you were sure to be attacked as being a Putin stooge, disloyal, a MAGA bigot.

    This Putin-Trump collusion hoax and consequent hysteria laid the foundation for the later propaganda campaign to provoke the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. And we see in the 2018 poll that Democratic voters were more welcoming of aggressive action. Likewise, a poll revealed ten months into the Ukraine war that, “33% of Republicans agreed with that prolonged support, compared to 61% of Democrats and 46% of independents.” Remarkedly, Democratic voters have become more war-friendly.

    In addition, Russiagate gave impetus to the campaign of smearing independent, anti-war media as agents of Russian disinformation. Even articles in progressive media such as Counterpunch propagated this nonsense, labeling those who did not support the US attempts to overthrow the Syrian government or defend the Ukrainian coup regime as “Assadists” and “Putinists.” This shows the continuing threat to the anti-war movement, given that US national security police state disinformation operations still hold considerable sway, permitting them to repress and marginalize voices for peace more easily.

    The post The Russiagate Hoax illustrates the Power the National Security Police State first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Tragic Death of a Traitor

    Alexei Navalny under arrest

    Alexei Navalny, a Russian political opposition figure whose popularity in the West far exceeded his support in Russia, died while incarcerated in a Russian prison. He was serving a combined 30-and-a-half-year sentence for fraud and political extremism, charges that Navalny and his supporters claim were little more than trumped up accusations designed to silence a man who had emerged in recent years as the most vocal Russian critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    According to a statement released by the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, “On February 16, 2024, in penal colony number 3, convict Alexei Navalny felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness. The medical staff of the institution arrived immediately, and an ambulance team was called. All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, which did not yield positive results. Doctors of the ambulance stated the death of the convict. The causes of death are being established.”

    Alexei Navalny was 47 at the time of his death. He left behind his wife, Yulia, and two children.

    Navalny was serving out his sentence at the IK-3 prison colony in Kharp, a settlement in the Yamal-Nenets autonomous district some 2,000 kilometers northeast of Moscow, one of the most remote prisons in Russia with a reputation for austerity and—according to inmates who had served time there—brutality.


    Scott Ritter will discuss this article on Ep. 136 of Ask the Inspector.

    Navalny’s death has been widely condemned in the West, with President Joe Biden weighing in with a lengthy statement issued from the White House’s Roosevelt Room. Navalny, Biden said, “bravely stood up to the corruption, the violence and…all the bad things that the Putin government was doing. In response, Putin had him poisoned. He had him arrested. He had him prosecuted for fabricated crimes. He sentenced him to prison. He was held in isolation. Even all that didn’t stop him from calling out Putin’s lies.”

    Biden noted that “Even in prison he [Navalny] was a powerful voice for the truth, which is kind of amazing when you think about it. And he could have lived safely in exile after the assassination attempt on him in 2020, which nearly killed him, I might add. And — but he — he was traveling outside the country at the time. Instead, he returned to Russia. He returned to Russia knowing he’d likely be imprisoned or even killed if he continued his work, but he did it anyway because he believed so deeply in his country, in Russia.”

    Biden cast the blame for Navalny’s death squarely at the feet of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Make no mistake. Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death. Putin is responsible. What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality. No one should be fooled, not in Russia, not at home, not anywhere in the world.” Navalny, Biden said, “was so many things that Putin was not. He was brave. He was principled. He was dedicated to building a Russia where the rule of law existed and of where it applied to everybody. Navalny believed in that Russia, that Russia. He knew it was a cause worth fighting for, and obviously even dying for.”

    Yulia Navalny at the Munich Security Conference, February 16, 2024—the day her husband died.

    Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, addressed his death before the Munich Security Conference, with Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in attendance. “I want Putin and his entire surrounding…Putin’s friends, his government [to] know – that they will have to pay for what they’ve done with our country, with my family, and my husband. And that day will come very soon,” she declared, adding that “Vladimir Putin must be held accountable for all the horrors they are doing to my country, to our country – to Russia.”

    Similar outpourings of grief and support have emerged from the leaders and media of nations that have historically been aligned against Russia. Navalny, it seems, has been able to rally more support to his cause in death than he could while alive.

    Navalny has been elevated into near mythical status as the idealized symbol of “Russian democracy.”

    But the truth is far different.

    Alexei Navalny with his parents and younger brother, Oleg, in the mid-1980’s.

    Navalny was born on June 4, 1976. His father was a career Soviet Army officer. According to Navalny’s mother, her son was radicalized by listening to the conversations her husband had with other Soviet officers about the deteriorating conditions in the Soviet Union. Navalny earned a law degree from People’s Friendship University in Moscow in 1998, before earning his master’s in economics from State Finance Academy in 2001. While studying, Navalny became involved in politics, joining the liberal opposition association, Yabloko, in 1999.

    Yabloko (which means “apple” in Russian) began its life 1993 as a voting bloc in the Russian Duma that viewed itself as the political opposition to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. In 1995 Yabloko became an association of political parties which continued to oppose Yeltsin’s presidency—indeed, in May 1999 (the year Navalny joined) the Yabloko association voted in favor of the impeachment of Yeltsin (ironically, given its future political orientation, the bloc also voted, in August 1999, in favor of the selection of Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister.) Navalny went on to cut his political teeth as a local organizer at a time when life in Russia had hit nearly rock bottom—the decade of the 1990’s was marked by massive deterioration in Russian living conditions, and corruption marked nearly every aspect of Russian political, economic, and social existence. In December 2001, Yabloko applied for and was given permission to register as a political party.

    Navalny’s political maturation came at a time when Russian democratic institutions were almost exclusively organized and funded by western institutions. The US State Department, for example, conducted what it called the “democracy assistance program,” whose mission was “to capitalize on the historic opportunity to build democracy in place of a centralized Communist system” by creating and nurturing “the full range of democratic institutions, processes, and values” so that the “responsiveness and effectiveness of the Russian government” would be increased. The program provided financial and managerial support to “prodemocracy political activists and political parties, proreform trade unions, court systems, legal academies, officials throughout the government, and members of the media.” US-funded political party development programs in Russia were implemented through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) grants to the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI).

    In 2005, Navalny started working with another political activist, Maria Gaidar (the daughter of former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, and a member of the Union of Right Forces political party) to form a coalition known as the Democratic Alternative, or DA. In a statement made to US government officials in 2005, Maria Gaidar admitted that most of her funding came from the NED, although she did not publicize this fact out of fear of the political and legal consequences of being openly affiliated with the United States. Another recipient of NED funding was Gary Kasparov, the former chess champion-turned-political activist, who in 2005 formed the United Civil Front, an organization dedicated to dismantling the current electoral system in Russia so that new leadership could be elected to the Duma and presidency in the 2007-2008 election cycle.

    The 2007–2008 time frame was critical. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was appointed President by Boris Yeltsin on New Years Eve 1999, and elected President in March 2000, was coming to the end of his second term as President. The Russian Constitution only permitted two consecutive terms as President, so Putin was unable to run for reelection. However, Putin and his United Russia Party had come up with a solution—if the United Russia Party could hold on to its majority in the Russian Duma, then Putin would be appointed as Prime Minister. The current Prime Minister, Dmitri Medvedev, would then run for president.

    This scheme, however, opened the door in the minds of the Russian political opposition (and their western masters) for sweeping political change. If United Russia could be denied its Duma majority, then Putin would not be able to serve as Prime Minister. And a United Russia defeat in the Duma elections in December 2007 could pave the way for a similar defeat in the presidential election in March 2008. For Kasparov, Gaidar, Navalny, and other leaders of the opposition, this was an opportunity to bring an end to what they viewed as the autocratic rule of Vladimir Putin.

    Gary Kasparov and Alexei Navalny at the “Dissenter’s March” in March 2006.

    The promoters of “democratic reform” (i.e., regime change) in the State Department likewise believed this to be a unique opportunity for change. Already, US-funded “color revolutions” had swept aside autocratic governments in Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia. The hope was that a similar “revolution” could be organized in Russia. One of the key elements for making this happen was making sure that the opposition groups received the funding necessary to enable their training and organization. In addition to the NED and its two affiliates, the NDI and IRI, money was dispatched to various NGOs and Russian individuals covertly, using the CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

    The CIA was also involved in identifying, grooming, recruiting and managing Russian political dissidents who could help implement the American regime change strategy which targeted Putin and his United Russia Party for the 2007-2008 election cycle. One such dissident was a Russian journalist named Yevgenia Albats.

    Albats graduated from Moscow State University in 1980 with a degree in journalism. She was the recipient of an Alfred Friendly fellowship which saw her assigned to the Chicago Tribune as a visiting journalist in 1990. Albats spent 1993 at Harvard University after winning a prestigious Nieman Fellowship, where she spent two semesters “auditing classes with some of the university’s greatest thinkers, participating in Nieman events and collaborating with peers.”

    Yevgenia Albats, Moscow, 2006.

    The CIA’s Directorate of Operations, responsible for clandestine intelligence collection, operates what is known as the National Resources Division (NRD). The NRD is responsible for the CIA’s human intelligence collection activities inside the United States. The NRD has two major programs. The first involves the voluntary debriefing of US citizens—primarily businessmen—who travel to destinations of interest that the CIA might otherwise have difficulty gaining access to.

    The second involves the assessment and development of foreigners on US soil—students, visiting professors, businessmen, etc.—for possible recruitment by the CIA. NRD maintains relationships with major universities—such as Harvard—that host prestigious fellowships and conferences capable of attracting up and rising foreign talent. Albats had been placed on the CIA’s radar through her Alfred Friendly fellowship. While at Harvard there is little doubt that she was further groomed—perhaps without her being cognizant that it was happening.

    Albats was to return to Cambridge in 2000, where she studied for her PhD. One of her areas of specialty was what she called “grassroots organizations.” Albats spent the 2003-2004 academic year teaching at Yale University, where she became familiar with the Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program, a four-month, full-time residential program based out of Yale’s International Leadership Center and housed within the Jackson School of Global Affairs. The Program runs annually from mid-August to mid-December and brings together up and rising leaders from around the world—in short, the perfect targets for assessment and grooming by the NRD case officers.

    Her thesis advisor at Harvard was Timothy Colton, a professor of government and Russian studies. Colton specialized in the intricacies of Russian elections. The year Albats arrived at Harvard, Colton published a book, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia, and while Albats was preparing her thesis, Colton, together with Michael McFaul, a Stanford professor who had helped bring Boris Yeltsin to power in the 1990’s (and who would go on to serve as President Barack Obama’s principle Russian expert, first in the National Security Council, and later as the US Ambassador to Russia), collaborated on a second book, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000.

    Working with Colton, whose research had been heavily subsidized by the Department of State through the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, Albats focused on ways to exploit nationalism in Russia from an electoral perspective. She differentiated between what she termed imperial nationalism and ethnic nationalism, with imperial nationalism being the purview of the state and as such something to be opposed. Ethnic nationalism, on the other hand, wasn’t deemed by Albats to be dangerous, especially in a politically unstructured society such as Russia, where there was a natural tendency to unite on an ethnic basis.

    Albats returned to Russia in 2004, after successfully defending her PhD thesis in political science. One of the first things Albats did was to turn her Moscow apartment into a political science parlor where she gathered young activists together for the purpose of organizing them into politically viable entities capable of impacting the upcoming Russian elections in 2007-2008.

    One of these young activists she attracted was Alexei Navalny.

    The Albats-run political parlor sessions, which began in 2004, helped bring Navalny together with Maria Gaidar, and led to the creation of the Democratic Alternative organization, as well as Gary Kasparov (another member of the Albats parlor scene) and his United Civil Front movement. One of the goals of the parlor was to try and find a way to recreate in Russia the kind of youth movement that was created in 2004 in Ukraine that helped bring about the so-called Orange Revolution that prevented Viktor Yanukovich from becoming president. This movement, Pora, played an essential role in mobilizing opposition to Yanukovich. Albats and her team of aspiring political scientists conceived a Russian equivalent, which was called Oborona, or “defense.” The hope of Albats, Gaidar, Kasparov, and Navalny was that Oborona could serve as the impetus for the mobilization of the Russian youth to oust Vladimir Putin from power.

    As Albats worked to organize political dissent in Russia, the foundation of western support upon which Russian political opposition was built, namely the funding provided by non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) such as the NED, was exposed as being little more than a vehicle for the channeling of illicit foreign intelligence services. In the winter of 2005-2006, the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, broke up a sophisticated ring run out of the British Embassy involving a so-called “spy rock”—a sophisticated digital communications platform disguised as a rock—which enabled British spies to communicate with their Russian agents without ever having to meet with them.

    The Russian agent would pass near the rock and, using a hand-held communication device like a Blackberry, download an electronic message onto a server contained inside the rock. The British spies would then approach the rock and, using the same kind of device, upload the message to their own device. The scheme was discovered when a British spy, unable to retrieve the message, approached the rock and gave it a few kicks to see if the system would work. This attracted the attention of the FSB officers following him, which led to the rock being seized and evaluated. One Russian citizen, said to be employed by a sensitive military industrial facility, was arrested.

    The “Spy Rock” used by British intelligence officers to covertly communicate with Russian agents.

    But the most surprising aspect of the data retrieved from the “spy rock” was the fact that at least one of the British spies was using the device to transmit information about how various NGOs could access covert funds being provided by the British government. Persons from the NGOs in question, who had been issued similar devices to those used by their British masters, would download these instructions from the “rock.” Based upon the intelligence gathered from the captured server, the FSB was able to inform the Russian leadership about the specific NGOs involved in these illicit transactions. All in all, 12 Russian NGOs—including the Committee Against Torture, the Center for Development of Democracy, the Eurasia Foundation, and the Moscow Helsinki Group—were identified as receiving the illicit funds, which were administered as part of the British Foreign Office’s Global Opportunities Fund.

    In the aftermath of the “spy rock” scandal, the Russian government moved to create a new law on NGOs that imposed harsh conditions on the registration and operation of NGOs, effectively banning any NGO involved in politics from receiving foreign funding. While the NGOs impacted by this new law, which took effect in April 2006, denied any wrongdoing, they acknowledged that the impact of the law would be to stifle dissent before the 2007 Duma elections and the 2008 presidential race.

    Despite the crackdown on the British-affiliated NGOs, the Albats-run “political parlor” continued to aggressively try to coalesce a viable opposition effort in Russia. Egged on by Albats and her theories about the political potential of ethnic nationalism, in 2007 Navalny co-founded the democratic nationalist National Russian Liberation Movement, an umbrella organization which attracted far-right, ultranationalist movements. The ideology of these groups is perhaps best explained by Navalny’s efforts in coopting them to his cause. Navalny made two videos during this time as a means of introducing the new party to a larger Russian public. The first video had Navalny comparing Muslims in Russia to pests and ended with Navalny shooting a Muslim with a handgun, then declaring that pistols were to Muslims like flyswatters and slippers were to flies and cockroaches. The second video had Navalny comparing interethnic conflict to dental cavities, implying that the only solution was extraction.

    Alexei Navalny in a 2007 video where he likens Muslims to cockroaches who should be shot.

    Navalny was kicked out of Yabloko in the summer of 2007, his affiliation with far-right wing Russian nationalism a bridge too far for the neo-liberal political party. But before his falling out, Navalny was able to make an impression on his underwriters. In March 2007 Navalny participated in the so-called “Dissenter’s March,” walking side-by-side with one of the major organizers of the protest, Gary Kasparov.

    In the aftermath of the Russian crackdown on foreign funding for NGOs, Kasparov had turned to a network of Russian oligarchs operating out of London, where they colluded with the British Secret Intelligence Service to fund political opposition in Russia. The leader of this effort was the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who had founded a non-profit organization, the International Foundation for Civil Liberties, which served as a front to accomplish Berezovsky’s publicly stated mission of bringing down Putin “by force” or by bloodless revolution. Berezovsky was assisted in this venture by a number of Russian oligarchs, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon who was imprisoned on corruption charges in 2005, but whose foundation, Open Russia, continued to provide funding to Russian political opposition groups such as Kasparov’s United Civil Front; the Governor of Saint Petersburg at the time, Valentina Matviyenko, singled out Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky as the source of the money used to put on the “Dissenter’s March.”

    Gary Kasparov likewise noted that the bulk of the media support for the march was provided by Yevgenia Albats through her “Echo of Saint Petersburg” broadcasts.

    Albats’ influence on Navalny was discernable. Later, when explaining why he had embraced right-wing nationalism, Navalny’s response sounded like it could have been lifted from Albats’ Harvard doctoral thesis. “My idea is that you have to communicate with nationalists and educate them,” Navalny said. “Many Russian nationalists have no clear ideology. What they have is a sense of general injustice to which they respond with aggression against people with a different skin color or eyes of a different shape. I think it’s extremely important to explain to them that beating up migrants is not the solution to the problem of illegal immigration; the solution is a return to competitive elections that would allow us to get rid of the thieves and crooks who are getting rich off of illegal immigration.”

    Despite the direction provided by the State Department and CIA through proxies (witting or unwitting) such as Albats, and the covert funding provided via the British intelligence services, the goal of generating a Russian “Color Revolution” that could sweep Vladimir Putin and his United Russia Party from power failed. United Russia dominated the 2007 Duma elections, winning 65% of the vote and securing 315 of 450 seats; in March 2008, Dmitri Medvedev won the presidential race, securing 71.25% of the vote. Medvedev then followed up on his promise to appoint Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister.

    The 2007-2008 election cycle represented a devastating defeat for the political opponents of Vladimir Putin and their western supporters. For Navalny, however, it was liberating—he had grown weary of the constant infighting and jostling for power within the ranks of Russia’s political opposition. Instead, Navalny began to pour himself into his new passion—”shareholder activism.” In 2008, Navalny bought 300,000 rubles worth of stock in five Russian oil and gas companies with the goal of becoming an activist shareholder. He founded the Minority Shareholders Association, through which he used his status as a shareholder to push for transparency regarding the financial assets of these companies, as required by law.

    Navalny began attending shareholders meetings of some of the wealthiest companies, demanding answers to uncomfortable questions he was able to formulate by reviewing company paperwork legally available to shareholders. One of his first targets was SurgutNeftGas, or Surgut oil and gas company. Navalny had purchased $2,000 in stock and used his status as a minority shareholder to crash a meeting of shareholders in the Siberian city of Surgut. When the shareholders were asked if there were any questions, Navalny took the microphone and proceeded to ask the senior management of the company about the small size of their dividends and the opaque nature of the company’s ownership. His questions made the management uncomfortable and drew applause from many of the 300 shareholders in attendance.

    Navalny was riding on the coattails of the newly minted president, Dmitri Medvedev, and his stated goal of stamping out corruption. In addition to SurgutNeftGas, Navalny had placed his sights on such giants as Gazprom and Rosneft, and in doing so was peripherally attacking Medvedev, the former chairman of Gazprom, and Vladmir Putin, whose close associate, Igor Sechin, served as both chairman of Rosneft and deputy Prime Minister.

    Navalny wrote about his various campaigns online, through his LiveJournal blog. Hundreds of thousands of Russians followed his work, and the comments were mostly favorable (although several subscribers questioned Navalny’s motives, accusing him of running an extortion racket designed to make money, a charge Navalny dismissed without denying.)

    By tying his anti-corruption campaign in with the anti-corruption platform of Medvedev, Navalny not only shielded himself from direct retaliation, but was able to attract the attention—and support—of the Russian mainstream. Sergei Guriev, the Dean of Moscow’s New Economic School, and his deputy, Alexei Sitnikov, began supporting Navalny’s work.

    The main problem for Navalny, however, was income. He had yet to master the art of online fundraising, and he wasn’t yet established as one of the designated political opposition for whom western financing would be made available. In December 2008, an offer came in from Nikita Belykh, the Governor of Kirov, which, given his dire financial situation, he could not refuse.

    Nikita Belykh, a native of the Perm Region, had served in local government in multiple capacities, including Deputy Governor, up until May 2005, when he was elected as the leader of the Union of Right Forces, a leading opposition party, succeeding Boris Nemtsov, a noted critic of President Vladimir Putin. Belykh assumed the role of opposition leader, and in October 2005 helped form a coalition with the Yabloko Party, known as the Yabloko-United Democrats, to run in the Moscow City Duma elections, held on December 4, 2005. While the coalition won 11% of the vote and was able to be represented in the Moscow City Duma and became one of only three parties (along with United Russia and the Communist Party) to enter the new Moscow legislature, it was not to prove lasting; plans to merge with Yabloko were shelved in late 2006.

    The Union of Right Forces, like all opposition parties, was demoralized by the results of the 2007-2008 election cycle. Following the presidential election, in March 2008, the president-elect, Dmitri Medvedev, reached out to Belykh and offered him the post of Governor of the Kirov Region. Belykh, to the surprise of nearly everyone, accepted the job. His former political allies, like Maria Gaidar and Alexei Navalny, condemned Belykh for what they viewed as a betrayal—while they continued to struggle against the deeply entrenched pro-Putin apparatchiks who governed Russia, Belykh had jumped ship, and was now part of the establishment they so despised.

    Kirov Region Governor Nikita Belykh (right) meets with President Dmitri Medvedev, May 2009.

    Back in Moscow, Alexei Navalny and Maria Gaidar were trapped in a political post-apocalyptic nightmare. Money had dried up along with their political fortunes, and no one was in the mood for renewed political mischief. While Belykh had departed the Moscow political scene, he was still a friend. On November 18, 2008, Belykh reached out to Navalny to see if he was interested in serving as a volunteer consultant, advising the new governor on ways to enhance the transparency of the Kirov Region’s property management.

    Navalny accepted.

    (Maria Gaidar likewise followed Navalny to the Kirov Region, accepting an appointment in February 2009 as a deputy Governor.)

    The capital of the Kirov Region is the city of Kirov, located some 560 miles northeast of Moscow. While Kirov is known for its heavy industry, the Kirov region is also a leading producer of lumber. In 2007, the Kirov Region undertook a reorganization of the region’s timber industry, consolidating control over thirty-six timber mills under a single roof, a State unitary enterprise known as Kirovles. One of the problems confronting Kirovles was curtailing the practice of selling lumber for cash undertaken by many of the timber mills. The managers of the timber mills made a pretty profit, but this money was not registered as income for Kirovles, and as such the enterprise was operating at a deficit.

    One of Navalny’s first projects was to meet with the director of Kirovles. During this meeting, Navalny suggested that the best way to stop the unauthorized direct sale of timber by the managers of the timber mills would be for Kirovles to work with an intermediary timber trading company that would be responsible for finding clients for the timber produced by Kirovles. It just so happened that Navalny had coordinated with a friend, Petr Ofitserov, who had formed a timber trading company, the Vyatskaya Forest Company, or VLK, for this purpose. On April 15, 2009, Kirovles signed the first of several contracts for the purchase of timber from Kirovles by VLK worth, in their aggregate, around 330,000 Euros. VLK was then responsible for selling this timber to customers and would collect a commission of 7% for these sales.

    A KirovLes lumber outlet store.

    In July, Navalny undertook an audit of Kirovles. As a part of the audit, Belykh set up a working group for the purpose of restructuring Kirovles. Navalny was appointed the head of this working group. Based upon the findings of the audit, on August 17 the director of Kirovles was suspended from his position for mismanagement.

    On September 1, Kirovles terminated its contracts with VLK.

    Navalny finished his work in Kirov on September 11, 2009, and returned to Moscow.

    For the better part of the next year, Alexei Navalny focused on his work with the Minority Shareholders Association, which he publicly chronicled through his LiveJournal blog. Navalny was still a relatively unknown person in Russia, but his David versus Goliath approach toward uncovering corruption was starting to attract the attention of government officials and political junkies alike. Some people accused Navalny, through his shareholder activism, of simply running a giant grift, exposing corruption to extort payouts from the targeted entities. Others questioned how he was able to pay for all of his work, suggesting that he was being underwritten by entities who did not have the best interests of the Russian government in mind.

    Others worried about his security. Navalny spoke about this aspect of his life with a journalist in the winter of 2009, noting that his fears revolved around being arrested “or in the worst-case scenario with someone quietly having me killed.”

    Before he had left Kirov, Alexei Navalny met with Maria Gaidar to discuss his future. Gaidar had been a part of the political science parlor run by Yevgenia Albats, and shared the opinion expressed by Albats and Gary Kasparov that Navalny had potential as an activist but lacked the kind of political refinement needed to break out on the national stage. Gaidar was aware of the Yale World Fellows Program, and strongly encouraged Navalny to apply.

    Back in Moscow, Navalny took Gaidar’s suggestion to heart. Navalny consulted with Sergey Guriev, the Dean of the New Economic School, who agreed to nominate Navalny for the fellowship. Guriev wrote a recommendation, and turned to Yevgenia Albats and Gary Kasparov, who likewise agreed to write recommendations for Navalny. Albats turned to her Yale connections, and put Navalny in touch with Oleg Tsyvinsky, a Yale economics professor, who helped guide Navalny through the application process. Navalny was put in touch with Maxim Trudolyubov, an editor with the well-regarded Vedomosti business daily and an alumni of the Yale World Fellow Program, Class of 2009. Trudolyubov used his connections to have Vedomosti name Navalny its “Private Individual of the Year” for 2009, helping firm up his resumé.

    Sergei Guriev, the Dean of the New Economic School.

    The Yale World Fellows program requires that its applicants be “five and twenty-five years into their professional careers, with demonstrated and significant accomplishments at a regional, national, or international level.” Alexei Navalny’s “job description” at Yale was “Founder, Minority Shareholders Association,” a position he had held for less than a year at the time of his application. Navalny was also listed as being the “co-founder of the Democratic Alternative movement.” Left unsaid was that while he was, in fact, a co-founder of this movement in 2005, he did so in the capacity of a member of the Yabloko Party, which kicked Navalny out in 2007 because of his links to right-wing nationalists.

    The Yale World Fellows Program, Class of 2010. Navalny is standing, fourth from the right.

    On April 28, 2010, Alexei Navalny made the following announcement in his LiveJournal blog:

    “Girls and Boys, I was lucky enough to get into the Yale World fellows program at Yale University. It was not easy, the competition was something like 1000 people for 15 places. Therefore, I will spend the second half of 2010 in the city of New Haven, Connecticut.”

    Navalny laid out his expectations from this experience. “I want to seriously expand the tools of our work and learn/understand how to use all sorts of laws on foreign corruption, US/EU anti-money laundering legislation, exchange rules, etc. against Effective Managers [EM]. We must be able to destroy EM where they will not be protected by greedy swindlers from the General Prosecutors Office and Russian courts. Therefore,” Navalny concluded, “our activities will only expand…soon we will hit EM in all time zones and jurisdictions.”

    In early August, Navalny, his wife Yulia, and their two children left Moscow for New Haven. There, a new world order beckoned that would forever change, and eventually cost, Navalny’s life.

    The post The Tragic Death of a Traitor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hostage Nation

    In his Moscow interview, Tucker Carlson also asked the president of the Russian Federation to release a young American citizen convicted of espionage in Russia from imprisonment. Vladimir Putin replied that the man was arrested, tried and convicted by a Russian court of a crime under Russian law, espionage, by secretly receiving classified documents from someone in Russia.

    Carlson’s plea was based not on respect for Russian law — or understanding of the crime of espionage — but on a widely held prejudice in the West. Namely there is a presumption that Westerners, in particular Americans, if arrested in countries listed as enemies of the West or the US, are never incarcerated for their acts but taken as hostages. Thus Carlson’s appeal was phrased in terms of a plea for mercy to an outlaw. President Putin rejected that implication and explained both the specifics of the crime committed and the customary practice for reciprocal release of agents caught by opposing special (secret) services. While not ruling a release out, the Russian president made clear that this was not a case for executive clemency.

    Why, one might ask, did Carlson not grasp that fact? The obvious and superficial reason is that the request was gratuitous and theatrical. The “hostage release” mission is a typical form of quasi-diplomatic grandstanding. However there is a deeper level at which this segment can and ought to be understood. There is an ancient tradition — prior to 7 October — of states at war taking leaders of the opposing side as hostages to induce and guarantee negotiations to end hostilities or to enforce the conditions to which belligerents subsequently agreed. Medieval warfare is full of such incidents. Also other cultures have availed themselves of these in personam guarantees for treaties between warring parties. These guarantees have continued in the rituals of prisoner exchanges during truces.

    The late 20th century was accompanied by proliferation in the West of a new kind of hostage taking. Whereas the ancient mode usually involved the capture or surrender of belligerents (soldiers and officers) or high officials and dignitaries, modern Western warfare focussed on holding civilians, especially non-combatants, as hostage. This became a central tactic of counter-insurgency warfare. This was condemned in the treaties after World War 2 as a form of collective punishment and prohibited under the Geneva Conventions (or protocols to the Hague Convention on the Laws of Land Warfare).

    The practice of the French in Algeria was one of the most notorious post-war examples. Although almost universally condemned (at least beyond the West) it found its way into the annals of counter-insurgency doctrine through Roger Trinquier. His book Modern Warfare formed the core of CIA-US military strategy in Vietnam. The conduct of war Trinquier proposed based on his service in Indochina and Algeria was fundamentally opposed to the spirit of the Geneva Conventions. By arguing that there was no more distinction between combatants and civilians he provided the example and the theory upon which all modern wars are waged by the West. World War 2 was the first modern war in which non-combatant casualties and death exceeded those of the armed forces. That was the reason for the Geneva protocols. Triquier circumvented this essentially by claiming that the organized self-defense and armed struggle against colonial occupation was not protected by the laws of land warfare since they protected states and their regular armed forces, while colonies were not states and could therefore not field armies in terms of international law.

    While it is true that Trinquier insisted that treatment of civilians should distinguish between criminals to be tried and sentenced by the regular courts and “terrorists”, this distinction was no more than academic in the CI context. The CIA’s Phoenix Program extended to forcing the RVN legislature to criminalize political opinions and activities so that they could be punished as “civilian” crimes. As then CIA station chief William Colby explained, the Phoenix directorate in Saigon also insisted that political crimes be handled by the special branch of the national police so as to keep the military “clean” for regular warfare. However in Algeria, as in Vietnam, there was almost no contact between the regular forces of the two sides until the CI was virtually at an end. Moreover the personnel overlap between military and police in the colonies made the distinction more a question of clothes than substance.

    The use of hostages in counter-insurgency expanded throughout the era of wars against national independence movements regardless of the prohibitions under international law. There was also a major innovation in 1972.

    The conventional story is that a group of activists desiring to call attention to the ongoing occupation of Palestine by European settler-colonialists plotted to take the Olympic competition squad sent by the State of Israel to Munich hostage. Presumably this surprising move would compel the international community (as the US calls itself) to listen to the pleas of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, pleas for just treatment to resolve the conflict in compliance with international law.

    The immediate result was dramatic and has been repeatedly dramatized. A special paramilitary squad from the German national police, GSG 9, stormed the rooms where the hostages were held and killed everyone, hostages and alleged hostage-takers. After that international air travel to and from Palestine was subjected to security measures that would then be standardized for all air travel in 2001. The immediate result was not the opening of international venues to the Palestinian cause but the opposite. The PLO became a certified “terrorist organization” and its members were declared outlaws. One should recall here what the term “outlaw” actually means. The naive understanding is misleading. Since the days of the Medieval Inquisition there has been a clear legal distinction between criminal and outlaw. A criminal is someone accused and convicted of violating the law. Nonetheless he is also governed by the law and enjoys its protection. Only the authorities have the right to seize and punish a criminal. An outlaw however is deemed literally beyond the law, enjoying neither rights nor protection. Hence an act of violence, even killing, against an outlaw is no offense. Anyone is free to treat an outlaw as he likes. An outlaw has no claims whatsoever.

    One of the principles by which counter-insurgency is waged is by creating outlaws and removing them from the sight or oversight of the regular government and social infrastructure. This has also been done through what is now called “disappearing”. However hostage taking by the counter-insurgency agencies and their operatives has the perfidious effect of creating outlaws in the public perception by staging hostage incidents that appear to be perpetrated by the so-called “terrorists”. Thus the mythic propaganda of the deed is turned against those engaged in struggle — whether or not armed — to elicit the revulsion among the target population commensurate with this violation of the Geneva protocols.

    Leaving aside the plethora of staged hijackings in the 1970s, there are two high jacking-hostage incidents that bear consideration. Indeed they too relate to Palestine. The first is the Entebbe incident in which Israeli military force was applied to near universal acclaim to the recovery of a passenger liner taken there by “terrorists”.

    In June 1976, an Air France flight to Tel Aviv carrying some 248 passengers was diverted to Uganda’s capital. (Ironically Uganda had been one of Britain’s proposed sites for a future Zionist state.) Israel special forces attacked the airport and liberated the aircraft, killing some Ugandan soldiers and apparently violating Ugandan sovereignty to perform the raid. The ruler of Uganda, Idi Amin, apparently supported seizure of the airliner. In the course of the action practically all non-Israelis were released. The Israeli forces shot their way in and recovered all those passengers except for some collateral damage. Amin had been receiving and continued to receive exceptionally bad press. The review of his years in Uganda is only relevant to show that whatever domestic political struggles were underway in Britain’s former colony, Amin was one of several African leaders punished for supporting the citizens of Palestine in their armed struggle.

    The second incident involved a TWA flight from Athens to San Diego that was diverted to Beirut in June 1986. In the course of this action a US Navy diver was killed. While this death is treated as a civilian casualty, since it was not a military flight, the reported actions of a man trained in what is essentially a special forces MOS may have led to his death as combat-induced. Nonetheless the remarkable aspect of this hostage incident was not only the negotiated exchange of 19 hostages unharmed in return for fuel. Eventually all the hostages were released. In this case the Israeli government released prisoners it held while denying that the incident had forced them to do so.

    One of the hostages released was a Texas original, a businessman from that archconservative oil and ranching state. He was actually interviewed on network television just after he reached the tarmac. (The man disappeared from public view shortly thereafter.) He told assembled reporters that he was not only treated well but that they had made a case for their political objectives that he found very reasonable. He practically asked the governments concerned to listen and take his captors seriously. That was the last time he spoke in public- at least where cameras could record it.

    The case of TWA flight 847 ended with the released passengers being flown by USAF transporter to Frankfurt am Main, the center of US intelligence services in Germany, for “debriefing” before a quasi-heroic reception in the US. That Texas businessman who had spoken soberly to journalists asking why no one was listening to the people in Palestine, was declared to have incurred “Stockholm syndrome”.

    Stockholm syndrome is a pseudo-medical term invented in the early 1970s as a faux psychiatric disorder whereby captives allegedly become bonded with their captors and sympathetic to them. It has become a term of trade for discrediting anyone who by virtue of a politically motivated hostage-taking exhibits a sympathetic response to the political issue at hand, no matter how rational that sympathy may be articulated. To confuse matters the “syndrome” is sometimes compared with the established “attractions” in abusive relationships, e.g. wife-beating, child-beating, rape, etc. While there are plausible explanations for the persistence of abusive relationships the elements of time and social/ familial status are very different from those of temporary hostage situations.

    The purpose of Stockholm syndrome is to pathologize the responses of people caught in political conflict who begin to consider rationally or even humanely the terms of those conflicts in officially prohibited ways. The origin of the term “brainwashing” was similar. When US POWs were released after the Armistice in Korea, many were forced to retract statements made in captivity about war crimes they had been ordered to commit. To explain these retractions and conceal the threats made to extract them, the returning prisoners were alleged to have been victims of Korean brainwashing. This also served as convenient cover for what is now known as MKUltra, the CIA psychological warfare program which included the mass marketing of LSD.

    Throughout the so-called Cold War the Soviet Union was accused of conducting all the psychological and pharmament operations against its dissidents that the CIA was performing in the US, Canada and other countries under its control. The battlefield “mind” predates the Internet- in fact it has been the main battlespace since 1913.

    The history of modern hostage taking for political purposes could bear far more examination than this space permits. However to return to the Carlson-Putin interview and Carlson’s plea for a “hostage release” we should ask from what position Carlson’s request is actually addressed?

    That is most simply revealed in his opening questions.

    On February 22, 2022, you addressed your country in your nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States through NATO might initiate a quote, “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?

    Tucker Carlson, consciously or not, was speaking with the voice of the real “hostage-taker”. The US, in NATO extended, began to take the world hostage no later than August 1945. It held for a brief period the absolute atomic monopoly, until the Soviet Union followed by China acquired a deterrent. Then until 1990 the US claimed to be the hostage of a country half its population and subjected to more than twenty years of US-supported war mainly against its civilian population. In addition it held the world hostage while it carpet-bombed Korea and Vietnam (plus Laos and Cambodia), murdering over six million people from the air. At the same time it held as much of Africa, Latin America and the Pacific archipelagos hostage through military dictatorships, with or without civilian faces. Then through brain drain and strategic immigration policy it created an international hostage pool paying ransom in return for a chance to send money to impoverished families at home. Ultimately the psychological and economic warfare to which all inhabitants of the US are subjected is calculated to create a strong emotional bond with their captors, the real but unnamed hostage-takers who rule the Anglo-American Empire.

    Vladimir Putin responded to Tucker Carlson’s plea in the manner appropriate to a traditional statesman, schooled in statecraft from an age before the US was even conceived as a place, let alone as a nation. Also that point eluded the American journalist. President Putin’s repeated injunction that Tucker Carlson should ask the actors themselves (in the US) why they act as they do? was also a polite indication that for all his curiosity, sincerity and goodwill, Carlson was himself a captive, a hostage. He remains a captive of a hostage nation.

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  • The Global Deep State

    The madmen are in power.

    — Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

    The debate over U.S. foreign aid is a distraction.

    That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the federal budget, the United States still spends more on foreign aid than any other nation.

    The latest foreign aid spending bill includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

    Since World War II, the U.S. has given more foreign aid to Israel than any other country ($318 billion), with the bulk of those funds designated for Israel’s military efforts.

    Even so, more than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance.

    As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

    Whether or not that some of that foreign aid is used for legitimate purposes, the global welfare system itself is riddled with corruption and waste. As Adam Andrzejewski rightly asks, “Do taxpayers instinctively know that they are funding choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, aid for poultry farmers Tanzania, and sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia?”

    The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter.

    We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

    This financial tyranny persists whether it’s a Democrat or Republican at the helm.

    At a time when the government is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the national debt continues to grow, our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached.

    What is going on?

    The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has been overtaken by a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.

    This powerful international cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations—let’s call it the Global Deep State—is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

    Clearly, we have entered into a new world order: fascism on a global scale.

    It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

    Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and in recent years, the pharmaceutical-health sector.

    All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.

    Global Disease

    The COVID-19 pandemic propelled us into a whole new global frontier in which those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.

    Our ability to access, engage and move about in the world has now become dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against whatever the powers-that-be deem to be the latest Disease X versus those who have not.

    This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.

    “It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”

    Global Surveillance

     Spearheaded by the National Security Agency, which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.

    Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

    Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:

    “The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”

    Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).

    Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.

    Global War Profiteering

    War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.

    The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).

    Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

    The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.

    Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure,  spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.

    It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

    Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

    Global Policing

    Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.

    There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.

    For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Intercept sums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”

    This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.

    The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.

    Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

    Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

    This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

    Are you starting to get the picture now?

    The government and its global partners have struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.

    On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, our freedoms are being eroded while the Global Deep State becomes more entrenched.

    We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward slope now, and things are moving fast.

    Given the dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the Global Deep State. It’s too busy selling us to the highest bidder.

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  • Feathery Infiltrators: The Case of the Pigeon Spy

    Animals have, at times, been given the same dismissively nasty treatment humans love giving themselves.  Be it detention, torture, trial, and execution, the unwitting creatures can be found in the oddest situations, anthropomorphised with all the characteristics of will, thought and intention.  By way of ghastly example, the Norman city of Falaise hosted the execution of a pig in 1386 for having “indulged in the evil propensity of eating infants on the streets”, and sentenced to maiming in the heat and forelegs prior to hanging.

    A field where such a matter has, and continues to crop up, is espionage.  Espionage, that very human, unsavoury and often dangerous endeavour, has seen a number of animals enlisted in the cause.  Unasked and no doubt unbriefed, various species have been thrown into wars, conflicts and disagreements, all the cause of humankind, to provide advantage or gain for one party or another.

    We know of such programs as the Central Intelligence Agency’s “Project Acoustic Kitty”, which ran for five years in the 1960s and cost $20 million without much to show for it.  The feline android-hybrid, which possessed an antenna under its fur and mic in its ear, failed to perform.  Acoustic Kitty, on being driven to a designated park with the task of capturing the conversation of two men on a bench, proceeded to wander into the street, where it was promptly crushed by a taxi. “Our final examination of trained cats,” concludes a CIA memo on the subject, “convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.”

    Of all the animals featured in the intelligence inventory, one stands out.  The pigeon featured heavily in both World Wars, an inconspicuous, small creature ideal in performing various tasks.  Messages can be delivered surreptitiously in conditions of disrupted communications.  Pictures and images can be taken by cameras affixed to the bird, unbeknownst to human agents on the ground.  “Of the hundreds of thousands of carrier pigeons sent through enemy fire, 95% completed their missions,” the International Spy Museum informs us.  “Pigeons continued brave service worldwide through the 1950s, earning more medals of honor than any other animal.”

    Most recently, the pigeon as spy agent featured again.  Reports on the bird in question imputed a degree of sentience and awareness nothing less than human.  The humans in question, though, seemed positively cloddish.  It began in May, when the bird was captured near a port in Mumbai.  Its legs sported two rings, carrying a chip and supposedly cursive Chinese writing.  Must be a case of espionage, thought the local police.  A spell of detention followed, largely spent with the Bombay Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

    As things transpired, suspicions of espionage proved unfounded.  The three-month investigation found that the bird had escaped from Taiwan, where it had performed as an open-water racer.  The activist organisation PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) was outraged, as well it should have been.  “A pigeon who was detained in a veterinary hospital in India for eight months on suspicion of being used for spying is flying free once more, thanks to help from PETA India.”

    It would have been difficult keeping a straight face on hearing the following from PETA India’s Meet Ashar.  “PETA India handles 1,000 calls a week of animal emergencies, but this was our first case of a suspected spy who needed to be freed of wrongful imprisonment.”

    Despite this finding, a fellow of the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation, Sana Hashmi, thought a serious reflection was in order.  “This episode underscores India’s increased efforts to counter Chinese espionage attempts.  This suspicion extends to the point where even birds, reminiscent of past experiences with bird spies involving Pakistan, are perceived as potential tools of Chinese espionage.”

    The subcontinental obsession with pigeon espionage is an enduring one.  In October 2016, we find the Pakistani paper, The Frontier Star, reporting that three people were apprehended that month at Vikram chowk in Jammu city in Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir.  Why?  They were found carrying some 150 pigeons kept in banana boxes.

    Accusations of animal cruelty followed.  The birds were then transferred to an NGO Save Animals Value Environment (SAVE), whose chairman, Rumpy Madan, took a deep interest into why some of the pigeons had special magnetic rings attached to them.  The matter was then taken to the intelligence agencies, where intelligence seemed in short supply.  “We have been told,” stated Madan at the time, “that it is a case of apprehended danger.”  These birds, she went on to say, “can be easily trained for spying or messaging purposes and they have a unique quality of returning to its trainer even after covering huge distances.”

    With such heaped-upon praise, and clumsy reasoning – is the pigeon really spying if ignorant of it? – we should hardly be surprised about absurd reports that same month of a grey pigeon being “arrested” by India’s border security force (BSF) in Indian Punjab.  The feathered intruder was duly accused for allegedly spying for Pakistan.  It had in its possession, allegedly, a small letter in Urdu with a threatening message to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi: “Modi, we’re not the same people from 1971.  Now each and every child is ready to fight against India.”  The pigeon was duly punished: its wings were clipped to prevent it returning.

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  • Have You Ever Wondered How Modern Spy Agencies Got Started?

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  • Lawfare and Covert Action: An Interim Hypothesis

    Economic history has its overt and covert sides. Now the State has been almost completely privatized, i.e., conveyed to the so-called hedge funds. It may be safe to say that the West has been converted into one huge financial derivative system.

    To understand this without drowning in jargon it is easiest to describe the structure as global extortion or blackmail. As Whitney Webb has shown the murder of Jeffrey Epstein was probably a blunt attempt to eliminate one of the visible faces of the extortion hub for managing public officials. There is another level of extortion that is applied to the public purse. In foreign parts this is the manipulation of the money market through public debt. However there is also an area which has yet to be adequately mapped. For simplicity we can call this “lawfare.”

    Lawfare is the application of civil and criminal judicial process to bankrupt targeted opposition by initiating litigation against regime opponents before captured venues where punitive civil damages deplete or eliminate the personal assets of individuals using ideologically constructed complaints which while not criminal are capable of mustering mass moral condemnation even without substantiation. Here the old Inquisition procedures apply where a presumption of guilt and the reversal of the burden of proof are imposed.

    A second more insidious strategy is pursued which is less obvious. Analogous to classical foreign debt extortion, the State uses the threat of physical or economic penalties to conceal the use of extorted funds intended for covert action. Traditionally drug and gun dealing have been used to generate funds whose political origins have to be concealed. One reason the CIA and SIS have a vested interested in these illegal markets is that they provide money off the books for operations that — were they funded through official appropriations — would create less deniable paper trails. The deniability of an operation at arm’s length relies on hiding cash flow. This is one of the conclusions from Douglas Valentine’s work on the Bureau of Narcotics and DEA where he explained why and how these agencies became subordinated to covert action arms of the State. Thomas Röper in recent preliminary investigations found another tool by which lawfare can benefit the secret services.

    Röper started by asking who and what Doctors Without Borders are and why the Russian government was accusing the group of espionage? He reported how difficult it was to find any published reports explaining where this group’s millions originate. However a crowd query produced something remarkable. At least in Germany he received multiple reports from people summoned before German courts who were told that they would receive consideration (such as in plea bargaining) if they donated money to its German franchise Ärzte ohne Grenzen. The frequency with which this was reported more than suggested a pattern or even a policy.

    An extrapolation of the number of civil or criminal settlements of this sort easily pointed to double-digit millions. Now if one considers — as I have argued in the past- that the Antifa and BLM groups in the US are actually armed propaganda groups analogous to those formed in Vietnam in the CIA Phoenix Program, then the enormous million-dollar settlements in US civil actions awarded to these groups or rioters and arsonists make more sense. Namely the city governments sued have been compelled to deplete their budgets with transfers of tax money (actually public debt) to covert operatives. Thus these political warfare actions are funded openly by court judgements. The NGO, whether duly constituted or merely implied, receives public money, tax exempt and with no personal attribution or paper trail linking the flow of funds to the sponsoring entity.

    How do the hedge funds benefit? Aside from arbitrage these funds have direct influence over insurance rates and other financial levers that can be applied selectively or collectively to the targeted jurisdiction or entity. Failure to empty the coffers means that the risk ratings that establish the cost of any entity’s future financing must deteriorate. In other words a punitive extortion cycle is anchored in the model.

    The result is the perpetual hostage status of the target and full deniability that any planned operation underlies the action. That adds more depth to the term Webb used to title her book: One Nation Under Blackmail.

    The post Lawfare and Covert Action: An Interim Hypothesis first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Watchlisted: You’re Probably Already on a Government Extremism List

    In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.

    — Hunter S. Thompson

    According to the FBI, you may be an anti-government extremist if you’ve:

    a) purchased a Bible or other religious materials,

    b) used terms like “MAGA” and “Trump,”

    c) shopped at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Cabela’s, or Bass Pro Shops,

    d) purchased tickets to travel by bus, cars, or plane,

    e) all of the above.

    In fact, if you selected any of those options in recent years, you’re probably already on a government watchlist.

    That’s how broadly the government’s net is being cast in its pursuit of domestic extremists.

    We’re all fair game now, easy targets for inclusion on some FBI watch list or another.

    When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out dragnet searches of customer transactions—warrantlessly and without probable cause—for “extremism” indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we’re all in trouble.

    Clearly, you don’t have to do anything illegal.

    You don’t even have to challenge the government’s authority.

    Frankly, you don’t even have to care about politics or know anything about your rights.

    All you really need to do in order to be tagged as a suspicious character, flagged for surveillance, and eventually placed on a government watch list is live in the United States.

    This is how easy it is to run afoul of the government’s many red flags.

    In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

    We’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent now.

    It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

    For instance, a so-called typo in a geofence search warrant, which allows police to capture location data for a particular geographic area, resulted in government officials being given access to information about who went where and with whom within a two-mile long stretch of San Francisco that included churches, businesses, private homes, hotels, and restaurants.

    Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

    Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

    Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

    Nationwide, there are upwards of 123 real-time crime centers (a.k.a. fusion centers), which allow local police agencies to upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data and intelligence with state and federal agencies culled from surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, social media monitoring, drones and body cameras, and artificial intelligence-driven predictive policing algorithms.

    These data fusion centers, which effectively create an electronic prison—a digital police state—from which there is no escape.

    Yet this crime prevention campaign is not so much about making America safer as it is about ensuring that the government has the wherewithal to muzzle anti-government discontent, penalize anyone expressing anti-government sentiments, and preemptively nip in the bud any attempts by the populace to challenge the government’s authority or question its propaganda.

    As J.D. Tuccille writes for Reason, “[A]t a time when government officials rage against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that is often just disagreement with whatever opinions are currently popular among the political class, fusion centers frequently scrutinize peaceful dissenting speech.”

    These fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censors and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies.

    It’s a setup ripe for abuse.

    For instance, an investigative report by the Brennan Center found that “Over the last two decades, leaked materials have shown fusion centers tracking protestors and casting peaceful activities as potential threats. Their targets have included racial justice and environmental advocates, right-wing activists, and third-party political candidates.”

    One fusion center in Maine was found to have been “illegally collecting and sharing information about Maine residents who weren’t suspected of criminal activity. They included gun purchasers, people protesting the construction of a new power transmission line, the employees of a peacebuilding summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.”

    This is how the burden of proof has been reversed.

    Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.

    Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.

    Consider some of the many ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.

    Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.

    Disinformation eradication campaigns. In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

    Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

    Thought crimes programs. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State. It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

    Security checkpoints. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots.

    Surveillance and precrime programs. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to warrantlessly identify and track someone’s movements in real-time, whether or not they have committed a crime.

    Mail surveillance. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts.

    Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

    Vehicle kill switches. Sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, “vehicle kill switches” could quickly become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to put the government in the driver’s seat while rendering null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures. As such, it presumes every driver potentially guilty of breaking some law that would require the government to intervene and take over operation of the vehicle or shut it off altogether.

    Biometric databases. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level with a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

    Limitations on our right to move about freely. At every turn, we’re tracked in by surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. For instance, license plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, police can track vehicles in real time.

    The war on cash. Digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme.

    These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.

    In this way, the groundwork is being laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen.

    What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

    In effect, you will disappear.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms are already being made to disappear.

    The post Watchlisted: You’re Probably Already on a Government Extremism List first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We the Exploited

    Americans have become easy prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists.

    But don’t be fooled into thinking the government is protecting you.

    To the contrary, the U.S. government is selling us (or rather, our data) to the highest bidders.

    By the way, those highest bidders also include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.”

    Your phones, televisions and digital devices are selling you out to politicians who want your vote.

    “Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages,” writes journalist Evan Halper.

    In this way, “we the people” have been reduced to economic units to be bought, bartered and sold by all and sundry.

    On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

    Those intimate details, in turn, have become the building blocks of massive databases accessed by the government and its corporate partners in crime, vulnerable to data breaches by hackers, cyberattacks and espionage.

    For years now, and with little real oversight or restrictions, the government has been compiling massive databases comprised of all manner of sensitive information on the citizenry.

    Biographical information. Biometric information. Criminal backgrounds. Travel records.

    There is not a single person in the U.S. who is not in some government database or another, and these databases are increasingly being shared between agencies, fusion centers, and the police.

    The government has also, with little oversight and few guidelines, been adding to its massive trove of data on Americans by buying commercially available information (CAI) from third-party sources. As a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed:

    “[Commercially purchased data] can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections, and speech of U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons. It can be misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals. Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government’s ability to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations.”

    In other words, this is the diabolically sneaky way in which the government is attempting to sidestep the Fourth Amendment, which requires that government agents have probable cause and a warrant before spying on Americans or searching and seizing their private property.

    It’s bad enough that the government is building massive databases comprised of our personal information without our knowledge or consent, but then they get hacked and we suffer for it.

    Earlier this year, for instance, several federal agencies, state governments and universities were targeted in a global cyberattack that compromised the sensitive data of millions of Americans.

    Did that stop the government’s quest to keep building these databases which compromise our privacy and security? Of course not.

    In fact, the government has also been selling our private information. According to Vice, Departments of Motor Vehicles in states around the country have been selling drivers’ personal information “to thousands of businesses, including private investigators who spy on people for a profit.”

    Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and the government has become a master at finding loopholes that allow it to exploit the citizenry.

    Thus, although Congress passed the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) in 1994 to prevent the disclosure of personal information, it hasn’t stopped state DMVs from raking in millions by selling driver data (names, dates of birth, addresses, and the cars they own) to third parties.

    This is just a small part of how the government buys and sells its citizens to the highest bidders.

    The why is always the same: for profit and power, of course.

    Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism.

    Have you shopped at Whole Foods? Tested out target practice at a gun range? Sipped coffee at Starbucks while surfing the web? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX News or MSNBC? Played Candy Crush on your phone? Walked through a mall? Walked past a government building?

    That’s all it takes for your data to be hoovered up, sold and used to target you.

    Incredibly, once you’ve been identified and tracked, data brokers can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been reading, viewing, buying, etc.

    Once you’ve been identified in this way, you can be tracked endlessly.

    No one is spared.

    In this regard, we are all equals: equally suffering the indignity of having every shred of privacy stripped away and the most intimate details of one’s life turned into fodder for marketers and data profiteers.

    This creepy new era of for-profit surveillance capitalism—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—is made possible with our cooperation.

    All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the “Agree” button at the end so you can get to the next step—downloading software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or computer—those signify your written consent to having your activities monitored, recorded and shared.

    Think about it.

    Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to influence and/or control you.

    With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.

    The technology has advanced so far that marketers (political campaigns are among the worst offenders) can actually build “digital fences” around your homes, workplaces, friends and family’s homes and other places you visit in order to bombard you with specially crafted messages aimed at achieving a particular outcome.

    If anyone else stalked us in this way—tailing us wherever we go, tapping into our calls, reading our correspondence, ferreting out our secrets, profiling and targeting us based on our interests and activities—we’d call the cops.

    Unfortunately, the cops (equipped with Stingray devices and other Peeping Tom technologies) are also in on this particular scam.

    It’s not just the surveillance and the buying and selling of your data that is worrisome.

    The ramifications of a government—any government—having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.

    Imagine what a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany could have done with this kind of unadulterated power.

    Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany’s footsteps will do with this kind of power. Society is definitely rapidly moving in that direction.

    We’ve made it so easy for the government to stalk us.

    Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

    Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

    Chances are, as the Washington Post has reported, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat assessment score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

    In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals (so they can be rounded up and detained in times of distress) who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

    The government has the know-how.

    As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

    Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands, especially when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home—add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.

    This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, stalker, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

    It turns out that we are Soylent Green.

    The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.

    Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, soylent green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”

    Oh, how right he was.

    Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us.

    We, too, are being bred like cattle but not for food.

    Rather, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re being bred, branded, bought and sold for our data.

    As the insidious partnership between the U.S. government and Corporate America grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, there’s virtually no way to opt out of these assaults on your digital privacy short of being a modern-day Luddite, completely disconnected from all technology.

    What we desperately lack and urgently need is an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.

    Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We the Exploited

    Americans have become easy prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists.

    But don’t be fooled into thinking the government is protecting you.

    To the contrary, the U.S. government is selling us (or rather, our data) to the highest bidders.

    By the way, those highest bidders also include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.”

    Your phones, televisions and digital devices are selling you out to politicians who want your vote.

    “Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages,” writes journalist Evan Halper.

    In this way, “we the people” have been reduced to economic units to be bought, bartered and sold by all and sundry.

    On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

    Those intimate details, in turn, have become the building blocks of massive databases accessed by the government and its corporate partners in crime, vulnerable to data breaches by hackers, cyberattacks and espionage.

    For years now, and with little real oversight or restrictions, the government has been compiling massive databases comprised of all manner of sensitive information on the citizenry.

    Biographical information. Biometric information. Criminal backgrounds. Travel records.

    There is not a single person in the U.S. who is not in some government database or another, and these databases are increasingly being shared between agencies, fusion centers, and the police.

    The government has also, with little oversight and few guidelines, been adding to its massive trove of data on Americans by buying commercially available information (CAI) from third-party sources. As a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed:

    “[Commercially purchased data] can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections, and speech of U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons. It can be misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals. Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government’s ability to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations.”

    In other words, this is the diabolically sneaky way in which the government is attempting to sidestep the Fourth Amendment, which requires that government agents have probable cause and a warrant before spying on Americans or searching and seizing their private property.

    It’s bad enough that the government is building massive databases comprised of our personal information without our knowledge or consent, but then they get hacked and we suffer for it.

    Earlier this year, for instance, several federal agencies, state governments and universities were targeted in a global cyberattack that compromised the sensitive data of millions of Americans.

    Did that stop the government’s quest to keep building these databases which compromise our privacy and security? Of course not.

    In fact, the government has also been selling our private information. According to Vice, Departments of Motor Vehicles in states around the country have been selling drivers’ personal information “to thousands of businesses, including private investigators who spy on people for a profit.”

    Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and the government has become a master at finding loopholes that allow it to exploit the citizenry.

    Thus, although Congress passed the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) in 1994 to prevent the disclosure of personal information, it hasn’t stopped state DMVs from raking in millions by selling driver data (names, dates of birth, addresses, and the cars they own) to third parties.

    This is just a small part of how the government buys and sells its citizens to the highest bidders.

    The why is always the same: for profit and power, of course.

    Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism.

    Have you shopped at Whole Foods? Tested out target practice at a gun range? Sipped coffee at Starbucks while surfing the web? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX News or MSNBC? Played Candy Crush on your phone? Walked through a mall? Walked past a government building?

    That’s all it takes for your data to be hoovered up, sold and used to target you.

    Incredibly, once you’ve been identified and tracked, data brokers can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been reading, viewing, buying, etc.

    Once you’ve been identified in this way, you can be tracked endlessly.

    No one is spared.

    In this regard, we are all equals: equally suffering the indignity of having every shred of privacy stripped away and the most intimate details of one’s life turned into fodder for marketers and data profiteers.

    This creepy new era of for-profit surveillance capitalism—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—is made possible with our cooperation.

    All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the “Agree” button at the end so you can get to the next step—downloading software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or computer—those signify your written consent to having your activities monitored, recorded and shared.

    Think about it.

    Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to influence and/or control you.

    With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.

    The technology has advanced so far that marketers (political campaigns are among the worst offenders) can actually build “digital fences” around your homes, workplaces, friends and family’s homes and other places you visit in order to bombard you with specially crafted messages aimed at achieving a particular outcome.

    If anyone else stalked us in this way—tailing us wherever we go, tapping into our calls, reading our correspondence, ferreting out our secrets, profiling and targeting us based on our interests and activities—we’d call the cops.

    Unfortunately, the cops (equipped with Stingray devices and other Peeping Tom technologies) are also in on this particular scam.

    It’s not just the surveillance and the buying and selling of your data that is worrisome.

    The ramifications of a government—any government—having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.

    Imagine what a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany could have done with this kind of unadulterated power.

    Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany’s footsteps will do with this kind of power. Society is definitely rapidly moving in that direction.

    We’ve made it so easy for the government to stalk us.

    Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

    Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

    Chances are, as the Washington Post has reported, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat assessment score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

    In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals (so they can be rounded up and detained in times of distress) who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

    The government has the know-how.

    As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

    Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands, especially when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home—add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.

    This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, stalker, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

    It turns out that we are Soylent Green.

    The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.

    Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, soylent green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”

    Oh, how right he was.

    Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us.

    We, too, are being bred like cattle but not for food.

    Rather, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re being bred, branded, bought and sold for our data.

    As the insidious partnership between the U.S. government and Corporate America grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, there’s virtually no way to opt out of these assaults on your digital privacy short of being a modern-day Luddite, completely disconnected from all technology.

    What we desperately lack and urgently need is an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.

    Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Geopolitics of Al-Aqsa Flood

    Photo Credit: The Cradle

    Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was meticulously planned. The launch date was conditioned by two triggering factors.

    First was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flaunting his ‘New Middle East’ map at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he completely erased Palestine and made a mockery of every single UN resolution on the subject.

    Second are the serial provocations at the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, including the straw that broke the camel’s back: two days before Al-Aqsa Flood, on 5 October, at least 800 Israeli settlers launched an assault around the mosque, beating pilgrims, destroying Palestinian shops, all under the observation of Israeli security forces.

    Everyone with a functioning brain knows Al-Aqsa is a definitive red line, not just for Palestinians, but for the entire Arab and Muslim worlds.

    It gets worse. The Israelis have now invoked the rhetoric of a “Pearl Harbor.” This is as threatening as it gets. The original Pearl Harbor was the American excuse to enter a world war and nuke Japan, and this “Pearl Harbor” may be Tel Aviv’s justification to launch a Gaza genocide.

    Sections of the west applauding the upcoming ethnic cleansing – including Zionists posing as “analysts” saying out loud that the “population transfers” that began in 1948 “must be completed” – believe that with massive weaponry and massive media coverage, they can turn things around in short shrift, annihilate the Palestinian resistance, and leave Hamas allies like Hezbollah and Iran weakened.

    Their Ukraine Project has sputtered, leaving not just egg on powerful faces, but entire European economies in ruin. Yet as one door closes, another one opens: Jump from ally Ukraine to ally Israel, and hone your sights on adversary Iran instead of adversary Russia.

    There are other good reasons to go all guns blazing. A peaceful West Asia means Syria reconstruction – in which China is now officially involved; active redevelopment for Iraq and Lebanon; Iran and Saudi Arabia as part of BRICS 11; the Russia-China strategic partnership fully respected and interacting with all regional players, including key US allies in the Persian Gulf.

    Incompetence. Willful strategy. Or both.

    That brings us to the cost of launching this new “war on terror.” The propaganda is in full swing. For Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Hamas is ISIS. For Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, Hamas is Russia. Over one October weekend, the war in Ukraine was completely forgotten by western mainstream media. Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel tower, the Brazilian Senate are all Israeli now.

    Egyptian intel claims it warned Tel Aviv about an imminent attack from Hamas. The Israelis chose to ignore it, as they did the Hamas training drills they observed in the weeks prior, smug in their superior knowledge that Palestinians would never have the audacity to launch a liberation operation.

    Whatever happens next, Al-Aqsa Flood has already, irretrievably, shattered the hefty pop mythology around the invincibility of Tsahal, Mossad, Shin Bet, Merkava tank, Iron Dome, and the Israel Defense Forces.

    Even as it ditched electronic communications, Hamas profited from the glaring collapse of Israel’s multi-billion-dollar electronic systems monitoring the most surveilled border on the planet.

    Cheap Palestinian drones hit multiple sensor towers, facilitated the advance of a paragliding infantry, and cleared the way for T-shirted, AK-47-wielding assault teams to inflict breaks in the wall and cross a border that even stray cats dared not.

    Israel, inevitably, turned to battering the Gaza Strip, an encircled cage of 365 square kilometers packed with 2.3 million people. The indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, schools, civilian apartment blocks, mosques, and slums has begun. Palestinians have no navy, no air force, no artillery units, no armored fighting vehicles, and no professional army. They have little to no high-tech surveillance access, while Israel can call up NATO data if they want it.

    Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”

    The Israelis can merrily engage in collective punishment because, with three guaranteed UNSC vetoes in their back pocket, they know they can get away with it.

    It doesn’t matter that Haaretz, Israel’s most respected newspaper, straight out concedes that “actually the Israeli government is solely responsible for what happened (Al-Aqsa Flood) for denying the rights of Palestinians.”

    The Israelis are nothing if not consistent. Back in 2007, then-Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin said, “Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.”

    Ukraine funnels weapons to Palestinians

    Only one year ago, the sweaty sweatshirt comedian in Kiev was talking about turning Ukraine into a “big Israel,” and was duly applauded by a bunch of Atlantic Council bots.

    Well, it turned out quite differently. As an old-school Deep State source just informed me:

    “Ukraine-earmarked weapons are ending up in the hands of the Palestinians. The question is which country is paying for it. Iran just made a deal with the US for six billion dollars and it is unlikely Iran would jeopardize that. I have a source who gave me the name of the country but I cannot reveal it. The fact is that Ukrainian weapons are going to the Gaza Strip and they are being paid for but not by Iran.”

    After its stunning raid last weekend, a savvy Hamas has already secured more negotiating leverage than Palestinians have wielded in decades. Significantly, while peace talks are supported by China, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – Tel Aviv refuses. Netanyahu is obsessed with razing Gaza to the ground, but if that happens, a wider regional war is nearly inevitable.

    Lebanon’s Hezbollah – a staunch Resistance Axis ally of the Palestinian resistance – would rather not be dragged into a war that can be devastating on its side of the border, but that could change if Israel perpetrates a de facto Gaza genocide.

    Hezbollah holds at least 100,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, from Katyusha (range: 40 km) to Fajr-5 (75 km), Khaibar-1 (100 km), Zelzal 2 (210 km), Fateh-110 (300 km), and Scud B-C (500 km). Tel Aviv knows what that means, and shudders at the frequent warnings by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that its next war with Israel will be conducted inside that country.

    Which brings us to Iran.

    Geopolitical plausible deniability

    The key immediate consequence of Al-Aqsa Flood is that the Washington neocon wet dream of “normalization” between Israel and the Arab world will simply vanish if this turns into a Long War.

    Large swathes of the Arab world in fact are already normalizing their ties with Tehran – and not only inside the newly expanded BRICS 11.

    In the drive towards a multipolar world, represented by BRICS 11, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), among other groundbreaking Eurasian and Global South institutions, there’s simply no place for an ethnocentric Apartheid state fond of collective punishment.

    Just this year, Israel found itself disinvited from the African Union summit. An Israeli delegation showed up anyway, and was unceremoniously ejected from the big hall, a visual that went viral. At the UN plenary sessions last month, a lone Israeli diplomat sought to disrupt Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi’s speech. No western ally stood by his side, and he too, was ejected from the premises.

    As Chinese President Xi Jinping diplomatically put it in December 2022, Beijing “firmly supports the establishment of an independent state of Palestine that enjoys full sovereignty based on 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. China supports Palestine in becoming a full member of the United Nations.”

    Tehran’s strategy is way more ambitious – offering strategic advice to West Asian resistance movements from the Levant to the Persian Gulf: Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hashd al-Shaabi, Kataib Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and countless others. It’s as if they are all part of a new Grand Chessboard de facto supervised by Grandmaster Iran.

    The pieces in the chessboard were carefully positioned by none other than the late Quds Force Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani, a once-in-a-lifetime military genius. He was instrumental in creating the foundations for the cumulative successes of Iranian allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine, as well as creating the conditions for a complex operation such as Al-Aqsa Flood.

    Elsewhere in the region, the Atlanticist drive of opening strategic corridors across the Five Seas – the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean – is floundering badly.

    Russia and Iran are already smashing US designs in the Caspian – via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – and the Black Sea, which is on the way to becoming a Russian lake. Tehran is paying very close attention to Moscow’s strategy in Ukraine, even as it refines its own strategy on how to debilitate the Hegemon without direct involvement: call it geopolitical plausible deniability.

    Bye bye EU-Israel-Saudi-India corridor

    The Russia-China-Iran alliance has been demonized as the new “axis of evil” by western neocons. That infantile rage betrays cosmic impotence. These are Real Sovereigns that can’t be messed with, and if they are, the price to pay is unthinkable.

    A key example: if Iran under attack by a US-Israeli axis decided to block the Strait of Hormuz, the global energy crisis would skyrocket, and the collapse of the western economy under the weight of quadrillions of derivatives would be inevitable.

    What this means, in the immediate future, is that he American Dream of interfering across the Five Seas does not even qualify as a mirage. Al-Aqsa Flood has also just buried the recently-announced and much-ballyhooed EU-Israel-Saudi Arabia-India transportation corridor.

    China is keenly aware of all this incandescence taking place only a week before its 3rd Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. At stake are the BRI connectivity corridors that matter – across the Heartland, across Russia, plus the Maritime Silk Road and the Arctic Silk Road.

    Then there’s the INSTC linking Russia, Iran and India – and by ancillary extension, the Gulf monarchies.

    The geopolitical repercussions of Al-Aqsa Flood will speed up Russia, China and Iran’s interconnected geoeconomic and logistical connections, bypassing the Hegemon and its Empire of Bases. Increased trade and non-stop cargo movement are all about (good) business. On equal terms, with mutual respect – not exactly the War Party’s scenario for a destabilized West Asia.

    Oh, the things that a slow-moving paragliding infantry overflying a wall can accelerate.

  • First published at The Cradle.

    • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Dianne Feinstein: National Security State Diva

    The tributes for the late Democratic Senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, heaped up as word got out. Having served as San Francisco mayor and a senator for three decades from what, on paper at least, is meant to be a progressive state, Feinstein proved herself to be an establishment creature of gusto and brass.

    The tributes have been laudatory in their endorsed, burnished sexism – womanhood heralded as a bulwark for the National Security State (NSS). They do show, on some level, that she could play and scrap on the imperial board along with her male colleagues in ways equally apologetic, shallow and vulgar. As a member of the George W. Bush administration, former national security advisor and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice ceremonially saluted Feinstein as one who would “always be remembered as an extraordinary human being in American political history”.

    Republicans such as Ted Cruz flattered and gushed with totemic, boyish reverence at this “trailblazer for women”. The CIA Director, William Burns, praised her role as “the first woman to chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”

    It all made sense: the senator was a paid-up member of the NSS with a ring seat, lounge points and frequent flyer miles in the game of empire. Voting for war came naturally, be it the bombing of Serbia in 1999 or supporting the October 2002 Iraq war resolution, the latter endorsed despite Feinstein’s briefing by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter that no evidence had been found suggesting that Iraq continued to possess weapons of mass destruction.

    According to Ritter, he met the senator along with a half-dozen staffers and aides in a conference room in the Capitol building only to face the following: “Your position is causing us some difficulty,” she grumbled. “You are making the US look bad in the eyes of the world.” When confronted by Ritter about whether she had seen “unequivocal proof that Iraq retained WMD,” the senator admitted: “I have seen no such intelligence.” The agenda had been set, the dish pre-cooked for an invasion deserving the condemnation of being a crime against peace.

    What must surely strike some of her flower garlanding adulators as curious is that Feinstein’s devotion to the national security state was so profound it led her to formulate a critical, contemporary argument of dangerous import: Publishers, even if based in a foreign jurisdiction and not being US nationals, should still be prosecuted for publishing the national security details of the United States, even material disclosing war crimes, atrocities and the like. The reasoning for this is evident in a Wall Street Journal article in December 2010; her unwavering target: Julian Assange.

    From the outset, the senator insisted that the release of the “250,000 secret State Department cables” by WikiLeaks had damaged the US national interest and endangered “innocent lives.” Assange “should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.” Feinstein, with no sound evidence or reason, told her readers that the Australian publisher “continues to violate the Espionage Act of 1917,” a wartime relic that criminalises the possession or transmission by an unauthorised person of “information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe would be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

    She goes on to tell her readers that Assange was undoubtedly “aware of this law,” a clumsy, sinister stab at journalists that they best know their place when it comes to showing the undergarments of the US imperium.

    Feinstein proves ignorant of the bumbling journalists at the Guardian, who left the key for decrypting the files public and vulnerable prior to the now infamous “dump” of documents. “Guardian investigations editor, David Leigh, recklessly, and without gaining our approval,” WikiLeaks stated at the time, “knowingly disclosed the decryption passwords in a book published by the Guardian.”

    Feinstein shows a deep, unquestioning interest in the advice from November 27, 2010, sent by US State Department Legal Advisor Harold Hongju Koh. To read such advice is to understand the current indictment against Assange, and the legal theory that so enthralled the Trump administration and the Department of Justice.

    Tediously, and not acknowledging the fact that the US State Department cables had already been, in their entirety, published by other outlets (Cryptome, anybody?), Koh rambles about ground rather familiar to the current prosecution effort: The documents Assange had disclosed would, “Place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals – from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security”.

    Other meretricious views follow with boring banality, all intent on showing the US imperium as faultless and noble. The disclosure, Koh argues, risked compromising “ongoing military operations, including operations to stop terrorists, traffickers in human beings and illicit arms”; and the jeopardising of “on-going cooperation between countries – partners, allies and common stakeholders – to confront the common challenges from terrorism to pandemic diseases to nuclear proliferation that threaten global stability.” The NSS is truly troubled when its lid gets blown.

    Instead of expectorating at such erroneous gabbling (no evidence of these claims has ever been proven), California’s good senator chewed the cud with bovine diligence, steaming away at the claim that Assange broke “the law and must be stopped from doing more harm”. And as for the First Amendment? “[T]he Supreme Court has held that its protections of free speech and freedom of the press are not a green light to abandon the protection of our national interests.”

    The senator, in views that anticipated the current indictment against the publisher, goes on to undercut the constitutional buttressing offered by the First Amendment by denying Assange the tag of “journalist”. “He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.”

    Not content with stopping there, Feinstein went further in sharply condemning the publisher’s attempts to create a “social movement” (how dare he?) that would involve exposing the secrets of the US imperium. For the senator, the secret is always good, the clandestine, necessary.

    Throughout her Congressional tenure, notably as chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Feinstein would continue to condemn the very leaks that oxygenate the democratic polity and check imperial overreach. In 2012, she condemned a spate of leaks disclosing the US role in the “Stuxnet” cyberattack that crippled Iran’s nuclear program, the executive decision-making process behind extrajudicial killings by US drones in Pakistan and Yemen and the infiltration of an al-Qaeda Yemeni affiliate by an agent. People, she exclaimed with resignation to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “just talk too much. And this didn’t used to be the case, but suddenly, it’s – it’s like a spreadable disease.”

    While Feinstein continues to be feted, Assange continues to battle a cobbled, cod nasty legal document of spurious stretching that should make any lawyer blush. But as we are not dealing with the law here so much as vengeful politics against everything from concrete revelations to what Umberto Eco called the “empty secret,” the matter is almost academic. Feinstein, now passed, finds herself on the fast track for canonisation by the NSS. Truly something to make any progressive Californian proud.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • China’s Spy Base in Cuba?

    On the heels of China’s weather/spy balloon downed by a US F-22 comes a report of the construction of a Chinese listening post in Cuba. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., supports the Biden administration’s claim that China is setting up a spy station in Cuba. Gaetz calls it a “stationary aircraft carrier right off the coast of Florida.”

    That is pretty rich given that the US is arming Taiwan (which the present US administration confirms is a province of the People’s Republic of China), and certainly Taiwan’s location makes an excellently situated listening post for the CIA. Thus it appears more so, using Gaetz’s analogy, that Taiwan is being made to serve as a stationary US aircraft carrier right off the coast of Fujian. Nonetheless, China’s presence in Cuba does not violate American sovereignty. Contrariwise, the US’s meddling in Taiwan is viewed as objectionable and provocative by Beijing.

    And where is the evidence for Gaetz’s claim?

    Western media asked Wang Wenbin, spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for comment on 9 June 2023:

    AFP: Reports by US media outlets say that China and Cuba have agreed to set up a Chinese spy facility capable of monitoring communications across the southeastern part of the US. Officials in Washington and Havana have said these reports are not accurate. Does the Chinese foreign ministry have a comment?

    Wang Wenbin: I am not aware of what you mentioned. It is well known that the US is an expert on chasing shadows and meddling in other countries’ internal affairs. The US is the global champion of hacking and superpower of surveillance. The US has long illegally occupied Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay for secretive activities and imposed a blockade on Cuba for over 60 years. The US needs to take a hard look at itself, stop interfering in Cuba’s internal affairs under the pretext of freedom, democracy and human rights, immediately lift its economic, commercial and financial blockade on Cuba, and act in ways conducive to improving relations with Cuba and regional peace and stability, not otherwise.

    And again on 13 June 2023:

    Prensa Latina: Although China and Cuba denied the recent reports, the US government said over the weekend that it had information about this alleged spy center that they say China has been operating in Cuba. What is your comment about it?

    Wang Wenbin: I made clear China’s position on this last week. Over the past few days, we have seen self-conflicting comments from US officials and media on the so-called allegation of China building “spy facilities” in Cuba. This is another example of “the US negating the US.”

    What is true can never be false, and what is false can never be true. No matter how the US tries with slanders and smears, it will not succeed in driving a wedge between two true friends, China and Cuba, nor can it cover up its deplorable track record of indiscriminate mass spying around the world.

    Thus, Gaetz has once again revealed the absurdity/mendacity of American politicians. Besides, what does it matter if China is building a listening post in Cuba? Is there any country on the planet that believes that the US is not spying on them? What is it that the Five Eyes are doing? What are all those eyes in the sky doing? Do US embassies and consulates not function as intelligence gathering bases? The US collects intelligence on friends and foes alike.

    It even surveilles its own citizens. Don’t Americans know this? That is why Edward Snowden faces arrest should he return home. It is a moral contradiction that a whistleblower who exposes government illegality would be arrested by that same government for exposing its illegal actions.

    This plays into another US narrative of the Threat of China. (See Paolo Urio, America and the China Threat: From the End of History to the End of Empire, 2022. Review.) Fox News cites an unnamed Biden administration official on the awareness

    of a “number of” efforts by the People’s Republic of China “around the world to expand its overseas logistics, basing, and collection infrastructure.” These outposts would allow the People’s Liberation Army “to project and sustain military power at a greater distance.”

    That is the rules-based order writ large. The US can do whatever it pleases. It can build military bases around the world and listen in on whoever it wants. But there are rules for the rest of the world to obey.

    What does Gaetz propose doing? He supports “an Authorization for Use of Military Force to take out the Chinese assets in Cuba.”

    Is this what American citizens need now, another war with a powerful country their government chooses to regard as an adversary — all this while the US and its NATO minions are going down to ignominious defeat in Ukraine?

  • Uneasy Locations: The Russian Embassy Site in Canberra

    They think we are mugs – and it’s insulting. It’s all fine for politicians to be swimming, swerving and tossing about in the goo of paranoia that is surveillance, chatting to the ghost called foreign interference; but to expect the rest of the citizenry to be morons is rather poor form. But the formula has always been such: We terrify you; you vote us in, and we increase the budget of the national security state.

    Regarding the business of the Russian embassy site in Canberra, this is all the more stunning. Australia’s parliamentarians rarely pass bills and motions at such speed, but the measure to ensure that the Russian embassy would not have a bit of real estate 500 metres from the people’s assembly was odd, at best. On June 15, legislation was whizzed through, effectively extinguishing Russia’s lease.

    It was also prompted by a rather bruising matter: the Russians had already been triumphant in the Federal Court. They had been granted the lease for the Yarralumla site in December 2008 by the National Capital Authority. But the 99-year lease was cancelled by the same body on the basis that “ongoing unfinished works detract from the overall aesthetic, importance, and dignity of the area reserved for diplomatic missions.”

    Russia duly challenged the cancellation and won. In May, the court found in its favour, negating the cancellation of the lease. This seemed to have a curiously unifying effect in Parliament: agents of the Kremlin would be a mere stone’s throw away from the elected chamber.

    Members of the Albanese government were tediously, predictably, on message, claiming that their intelligence services were all cognisant of a threat no one else could possibly take seriously. According to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the government had “received very clear security advice as to the risk presented by a Russian presence close to Parliament House.” The whole parliamentary measure had taken place “to ensure the lease site does not become a formal diplomatic presence.”

    The cabinet’s most eager of beavers, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, affirmed the Prime Minister’s concerns. “The principal problem with the proposed second Russian embassy in Canberra is its location,” she suggested. “The government has received clear national security advice that this would be a threat to our national security and that is why the government is acting decisively to bring this longstanding matter to a close.”

    This entire comic episode also led Albanese to anticipate Russian stroppiness and reference to precedents in international law. This prompted the remark that Russia was not “in a position to talk about international law, given their rejection of it so consistently and so brazenly with their invasion of Ukraine.”

    Over stiffening, proud vodkas at the eventual Russian embassy site, Australian officials will be able to do a merry jig and say that they have been tearing strips off international law for decades. From race relations to illegal invasions, the good guys have been wondrously bad. Remember Iraq in 2003, when we deviously and cowardly subverted the United Nations Charter and aided the destruction of a sovereign country? (Oh, the laughter!) Or those negotiations with an impoverished East Timor over its access to natural resources? (We almost got away with bugging the negotiators – but for those insufferable whistleblowers well read in international law and principle!)

    Such officials will also be able to recall the efforts of Australian intelligence agents to undermine international law during the Cold War, playing a starring role in overthrowing Chile’s democratically elected Allende government in the 1970s, at the very same time the Central Intelligence Agency was conferencing on how to get rid of that pesky Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. It was beautifully, if diabolically symmetrical.

    Saliently stunning in this splutter of rage from Australia’s politicians is that any embassy position near Parliament House, notably from Russia, would make any difference at all. Two issues spring to mind.

    The first is that Australia’s all commanding superior, the US government, tends to privilege technology to the point of childish obsession. For all their technological genius in specific, idiosyncratic areas, the Russians have tended towards the craft, cut and cultivation of human contacts in intelligence. The embassy’s proximity would not matter one jot.

    The other aspect of the embassy debate is cringingly odd. Why bother listening to anything Australia’s Parliament has to say that might influence the events of the world? Vassal states are poor fare in the marketplace of intelligence and policy; their returns for any foreign power are junk food quality, limp cold chips and hardly worth bothering about. (Recently, the politicisation of sexual assault is all the rage – there is, what might be politely called in diplomatic channels, a woman problem in the great chambers of the capital.)

    The true clearance stores for Australian intelligence lie in the bowels of the US State Department, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. Yes, the fallback position is always that Australia is a “Five Eyes” member in the sacred Anglophone intelligence sharing agreement that makes it a target. But why go for the inferior imitation if you can get the original?

  • The Pegasus Effect


    In 2022, we partnered with Al-Haq, Bisan Center for Research and Development, and Mind the Gap consortium to visually depict effect of Israeli spyware and how technologies that uphold Israeli apartheid ripple outward to impact communities thousands of miles away from Palestine.

    Join us as we put a spotlight on “the Pegasus Effect”––or how the captive Palestinian population has been used by the Israeli cyber industry as a laboratory for research and development, with global human rights consequences — at RightsCon, the leading summit on human rights in the digital age. The deadline to register for a virtual ticket is June 2.

    SESSION DETAILS AND HOW TO JOIN:

    When: Tuesday, Jun 6, 2023 at 6:00 pm Palestine/11:00 am ET 

    Session Description:

    The session examines the Pegasus spyware tool, a product of Israeli cyber company NSO group, and explores the implications of this Israeli surveillance industry on human rights.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • When Anti-Government Speech Becomes Sedition

    In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

    — George Orwell

    Let’s be clear about one thing: seditious conspiracy isn’t a real crime to anyone but the U.S. government.

    To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, the charge levied against Stewart Rhodes who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for being the driving force behind the January 6 Capitol riots, one doesn’t have to engage in violence against the government, vandalize government property, or even trespass on property that the government has declared off-limits to the general public.

    To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, one need only foment a revolution.

    This is not about whether Rhodes deserves such a hefty sentence.

    This is about the long-term ramifications of empowering the government to wage war on individuals whose political ideas and expression challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

    This is about criminalizing political expression in thoughts, words and deeds.

    This is about how the government has used the events of Jan. 6 in order to justify further power grabs and acquire more authoritarian emergency powers.

    This was never about so-called threats to democracy.

    In fact, the history of this nation is populated by individuals whose rhetoric was aimed at fomenting civil unrest and revolution.

    Indeed, by the government’s own definition, America’s founders were seditious conspirators based on the heavily charged rhetoric they used to birth the nation.

    Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, and John Adams would certainly have been charged for suggesting that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to protect their liberties and defend themselves against the government should it violate their rights.

    “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

    “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine.

    “When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.”

    Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.”

    Had America’s founders feared revolutionary words and ideas, there would have been no First Amendment, which protects the right to political expression, even if that expression is anti-government.

    No matter what one’s political persuasion might be, every American has a First Amendment right to protest government programs or policies with which they might disagree.

    The right to disagree with and speak out against the government is the quintessential freedom.

    Every individual has a right to speak truth to power—and foment change—using every nonviolent means available.

    Unfortunately, the government is increasingly losing its tolerance for anyone whose political views could be perceived as critical or “anti-government.”

    All of us are in danger.

    In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”

    The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American with an opinion about the government or who knows someone with an opinion about the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

    You see, the government doesn’t care if you or someone you know has a legitimate grievance. It doesn’t care if your criticisms are well-founded. And it certainly doesn’t care if you have a First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

    What the government cares about is whether what you’re thinking or speaking or sharing or consuming as information has the potential to challenge its stranglehold on power.

    Why else would the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies be investing in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram?

    Why else would the Biden Administration be likening those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists?

    Why else would the government be waging war against those who engage in thought crimes?

    Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers.

    For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous.

    For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

    Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

    According to one FBI report, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories, especially if you “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”

    In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.

    There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State.

    Simply liking or sharing this article on Facebook, retweeting it on Twitter, or merely reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties might be enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities and, therefore, puts you in the crosshairs of a government investigation as a potential troublemaker a.k.a. domestic extremist.

    Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

    In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

    As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

    Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

    In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

    And then at the other end of the spectrum there are those such as Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, for example, who blow the whistle on government misconduct that is within the public’s right to know.

    In true Orwellian fashion, the government would have us believe that it is Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war machine’s seedy underbelly.

    Since his April 2019 arrest, Assange has been locked up in a maximum-security British prison—in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day—pending extradition to the U.S., where if convicted, he could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.

    This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.

    This is also why the government fears a citizenry that thinks for itself: because a citizenry that thinks for itself is a citizenry that is informed, engaged and prepared to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, which translates to government transparency and accountability.

    After all, we’re citizens, not subjects.

    For those who don’t fully understand the distinction between the two and why transparency is so vital to a healthy constitutional government, Manning explains it well:

    When freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? … I believe that when the public lacks even the most fundamental access to what its governments and militaries are doing in their names, then they cease to be involved in the act of citizenship. There is a bright distinction between citizens, who have rights and privileges protected by the state, and subjects, who are under the complete control and authority of the state.

    This is why the First Amendment is so critical. It gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers such as Edwards Snowden, Assange and Manning.

    The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.

    A little over 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Washington Post Co. to block the Nixon Administration’s attempts to use claims of national security to prevent the Washington Post and the New York Times from publishing secret Pentagon papers on how America went to war in Vietnam.

    As Justice William O. Douglas remarked on the ruling, “The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

    Fast forward to the present day, and we’re witnessing yet another showdown, this time between Assange and the Deep State, which pits the people’s right to know about government misconduct against the might of the military industrial complex.

    Yet this isn’t merely about whether whistleblowers and journalists are part of a protected class under the Constitution. It’s a debate over how long “we the people” will remain a protected class under the Constitution.

    Following the current trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, watched all the time, and rounded up when the government deems it necessary.

    We’re almost at that point now.

    Eventually, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we will all be seditious conspirators in the eyes of the government.

    We would do better to be conspirators for the Constitution starting right now.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • January 6 Was Not a Revolution


    Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.

    Likewise, an incompetent, historically ignorant, politically naive, diplomatically challenged, shallow, impulsive, narcissistic reality show host elected by a conned citizenry to the highest office in the land can occasionally get a few things right as well.

    I won’t get into a spitting contest over whether the election was rigged to an extent necessary to “steal” it from Trump. Every election is rigged, to varying degrees. To deny that is to be out of touch with how fundamentally corrupt our electoral system is at all levels, and what an abysmal state our last-gasp democracy is in. Recall that on one occasion, election rigging wasn’t up to the task, so a president was elected by judicial fiat.

    Nor will I come anywhere near Trump’s motives or level of involvement in the shambolic insurrection that took place on January 6.

    The important thing he got right was this: We should throw every last bum out of our legislative branch, both House and Senate. I didn’t say assassinate or torture them, although a good case could be made for “disappearing” the entire lot — for good! And for the good of the nation. At least barring them from public life. I include everyone, even Sanders, AOC, the rest of the squad, all of the virtue-signaling mannikins now in Congress who spend more time raising money for their reelection campaigns and their corrupt corporate-oligarchy political parties, than taking care of the business of governing and caring for the people.

    A clean sweep.

    A fresh start.

    Yes, there have been a few promising initiatives. But overall, there is no evidence that any of the people in power, and I also include Biden, Harris, and just about everyone in the collection of self-serving mediocrities which populate this and past administrations, know or care the first thing about serving everyday citizens and “promoting the general welfare”.

    I’m sure I’ll get a barrage of comments defending these lacklustre sock puppets of the ruling elite. Let me just recommend in advance: I’m not talking about measuring these phonies by the vapid standards we’ve become accustomed to. The bar has been lowered so many times, it’s not a bar anymore. It’s a broken pipe laying in the mud. Reach deep inside, folks. Use your imagination. Recall the dreams and idealism of your youth. Imagine what the U.S. could be instead of trying to decide how much humiliation and misery we should tolerate.

    I don’t have to defend the necessity of a revolution. I don’t have to defend the necessity of an occasional revolution. As you can see from the above quote, Thomas Jefferson did it for me.

    Even John F. Kennedy recognized that when confronted with extreme abuse of power, we are left with no alternative.

    What he said was unambiguous. If the system isn’t able to self-correct, then the system gets a big bloody nose. In extreme cases, we skip the left hook to the nose and go right for a decapitation. I hear Chanel makes a nice line of designer guillotines. How timely.

    Let’s be clear. At no time in recent history has the need to replace those in power been so urgent and obvious. Real democracy is dead in the U.S. and the country is ruled by oligarchs. Not very smart oligarchs. Not oligarchs with a shred of decency. But money talks. The ruling elite have the money. Most everyday people are scrambling to survive. There’s no contest.

    As much as many of us prefer to ignore or deny, Donald Trump got a few things right. Unfortunately, he suffered from a debilitating case of ADHD. He’d say the right thing, then either contradict himself in action or appoint opponents of his ideas to key positions, who then went on to sabotage whatever occasional flash of brilliance he had. Plus he was an unbroken stallion, and the Deep State realizing they couldn’t control him, deep-sixed his presidency. Most of us are grateful for that but we have to keep in mind that the cure in the long term might be worse than the disease. Turning more power over — perhaps the entire control of our nation — to the invisible autocrats of our intelligence agencies and the untouchable puppet masters of technocratic tyranny is not a very smart idea. If that’s our strategy, we might as well just get it over with and take a blow torch the Constitution. How about during half-time at the next Super Bowl.

    In some incredibly twisted way, Trump was the voice of the people — at least some people — probably not the kind of people anyone here would want to hang out with. But he had (and still has) a lot of followers. His campaign was the first time in a long time that it was publicly acknowledged that a lot of regular folks were tired of getting screwed by a rigged system. Yes, Trump couldn’t have been a worse bearer of this torch. But at least we got a fleeting glimpse of the flames.

    Now we’re back to the default setting: Guys like Biden and gals like Harris spouting slogans that are ear candy and brain anesthetics, woke gender-blenders like Buttigieg striking poses to get a third-leg up on the next presidential election, fake progressives cheerleading their walk-in-place approach to solving the most serious problems in history, and hapless, hopeless, pathetic voters looking at fake radicals like the Squad as the flickering pilot lights for real change. What all of this screams is form without substance. We get fooled again. New boss is the old boss with a focus-group tested bumpersticker on his BMW.

    The sad thing about January 6 — and everybody knows what I’m referring to because the Alice in Wonderland narratives around are still being milked by pundits and politicians alike — is that it had both sides working to make sure it flopped, that instead of representing an actual challenge to power or a wake-up call to the public or a warning label for the buffoons and criminals now holding office, it was a huge embarrassment, an unfunny joke, a reminder that politics is Pro Wrestling, only without sexy ring girls.

    Joe Biden calls January 6: “The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

    Liz Cheney — talk about strange bedfellows, Cheney and Biden — claimed the forces behind January 6 “represent a threat America has never seen before.” Which is certainly easy to say if you’ve never picked up a history book in your life.

    The Congressional resolution which established the investigation of January 6 called the mob assault “one of the darkest days of our democracy.”

    The Democratic Party elites are calling January 6 the domestic equivalent of the 9-11 attacks.

    Did all of these people get their education watching Saturday morning cartoons?

    What are these pathetic snowflakes going to do when some tech-savvy insurrectionist strolls onto the national mall carrying a suitcase nuke and turns DC into a caramelized crater?

    For better or worse, the whole thing was pure spectacle — that’s the way Trump and the MAGA crowd see the world — a pathetic attempt at symbolism wrought by morons. The government was in no danger of being overthrown by such a disorganized, ragtag bunch of urban hillbillies. The real danger lay in the weaponization and politicalization of this non-event by the Democratic Party and the intelligence agencies, which had a number of embedded provocateurs, on the scene as the PR stunt devolved to its disastrous denouement.

    Granted, I can’t prove this. It’s impossible in an era of fake news and fake justice to prove anything. But if a little logic and common sense are applicable here, it’s axiomatic that our internal intelligence agencies knew exactly what was going to happen, and if they didn’t actively engineer this embarrassment, then they let it unfold knowing they could use it against their current and future enemies — that would be the American people. This is a classic, well-established, and usually effective drill.

    Where is this headed? A bill authored by truly one of the most lacklustre congressmen in our history, Adam Schiff, will open a second war on terror, this one targeting domestic terrorism. More surveillance, more eavesdropping, more curtailing of free speech and dissent, more false flags, more fear, more anxiety, the final nails in the coffin of what was once for the world the beacon of civil liberties and respect for human rights. Yes, it’s 9-11 all over again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

    With friends like these, who needs enemies? With people representing us like Adam Schiff, who needs a foreign enemy to destroy our democracy and turn our citizens into slaves?

    Put the right label on it: MADE IN AMERICA! The destruction from within of our country, its ideals, its constitution, its promise of government by the people, its self-anointed role in the world as defender of human rights, guardian of human dignity, promoter of democracy.

    There’s only one remedy:

    A clean sweep.

    A fresh start.

    Maybe these “extreme” ideas are starting to make more sense?

    But you ask: “What will happen? Congress has all sorts of protocols and procedural precedents, established rules and guidelines for committee assignment and processing of legislation. What about all that legislative infrastructure?”

    Exactly! What about it, folks? How about throwing out the babies AND the bathwater? Is any of it serving “we the people”? Sometimes you have to completely raze a building and start from scratch. YES, THAT IS WHAT I’M RECOMMENDING!

    It’s either that or a constitutional convention or … uh-oh … we’re back to what Jefferson and Kennedy said.

    Here’s a pop quiz. Do these words ring a bell? If they do, do they resonate?

    “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

    If that’s too arcane and brainy, then tune into something more street hip, if somewhat less precise.

    REVOLUTION

    The post January 6 Was Not a Revolution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Dangerous Assignment



    The post Dangerous Assignment first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.