On Friday, October 13, some people across the United States prepared themselves for a “Global Day of Jihad.” State and federal law enforcement officials promised to increase police presence and patrols to mitigate security concerns. Several schools across the U.S. canceled classes for safety. The SAG-AFTRA labor union even canceled planned pickets in Los Angeles and New York due to “potential…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
New York University law student Ryna Workman was removed as president of the Student Bar Association last month and had a job offer rescinded after expressing “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination” and assigning blame to the system of apartheid in Israel for “the tremendous loss of life.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Chinese-language posts claimed the Biden administration called for substantial budget cuts and layoffs of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, citing a statement from a White House spokesperson.
But the claim is false. The individual cited by social media users is not a White House spokesperson, and the statement was a critique of the prospective impact of Republican legislators’ proposed spending cuts, not an administration announcement.
The claim was shared here on Chinese media platform NetEast on Sept. 30.
“Extremely dangerous signals! President Joe Biden has called for budget cuts to eliminate 12,000 FBI agents and nearly 1,000 ATF agents, according to a White House spokesman. The United States is really running out of money!” the claim reads in part.
The claim emerged as Democratic and Republican congressional legislators temporarily averted a partial government shutdown by passing a 45-day temporary funding bill just hours before a midnight deadline on Oct. 1.
The bill was a stopgap that forgoes large-scale aid to Ukraine and fails to resolve fundamental budgetary differences between the two parties.
The claim was widely shared by Chinese-speaking social media users, including an influential Weibo user with more than a million followers who also shared a 21-second clip of the alleged White House official as evidence.
However, the claim is false. Below is what AFCL found.
Not a White House spokesperson
A reverse image search on Google found the corresponding video published here on USA Today’s official YouTube account on Sept. 30, 2023.
The video shows Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget – not a White House spokesperson – describing the potential effects of a federal government shutdown.
The clip’s 40-second part matches the video shared in the misleading social media posts.
“Their [Republican legislators’] bill includes devastating 30 percent cuts. You heard me: 30 percent cuts,” she says. “It would eliminate 12,000 FBI agents, almost 1,000 ATF agents, and more than 500 local law enforcement.”
Young’s comments regarding layoffs of federal employees were a critique of recent budget cuts proposed by Republican legislators in light of the looming government shutdown.
Further searches found the full video published on the White House’s official YouTube channel and transcript on its website.
Young went on to note that the proposed budget cuts would potentially impact over ten million citizens in various ways, before calling for “extreme House Republicans” to stop playing politics and keep the government running.
The White House released a fact sheet later the same day which reiterated many points from Young’s speech.
Edited by Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Zhuang Jing for Asia Fact Check Lab.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists. Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.”
He never said he had evidence, because he didn’t.
Rumsfeld, who enjoyed his verbal games, was the quintessential bullshitter and liar for the warfare state. This encounter took place when Rumsfeld and his coconspirators were promoting lie after lie about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and conflating false stories about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to build a case to wage another war against Iraq, in order to supplement the one in Afghanistan and the war on “terror” that they launched post September 11 and the subsequently linked anthrax attacks.
A year later on February 5, 2003, U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U. N. Security Council and in a command performance assured the world that the U.S. had solid evidence that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” repeating that phrase seventeen times as he held up a stage prop vial of anthrax to make his point. He said, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” He was lying, but to this very day his defenders falsely claim he was the victim of an “intelligence failure,” a typical deceitful excuse along with “it was a mistake.” Of course, Iraq did not have “weapons of mass destruction” and the savage war waged on Iraq was not a mistake.
Scott Ritter, the former Marine U.N. weapons inspector, made it very clear back then that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but his expertise was dismissed, just as his current analysis of the war in Ukraine is. See his recent tweet about Senator Diane Feinstein in this regard:
Thirteen months after Rumsfeld’s exchange in the news conference, the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, knowing it had no justification. It was a war of aggression. Millions died as a result. And none of the killers have been prosecuted for their massive war crimes. The war was not launched on mistaken evidence; it was premeditated and based on lies easy to see. Very, very easy to see.
On January 28, 2003, eleven days before Powell performance, I, an independent writer, wrote a newspaper Op Ed, “The War Hoax,” saying:
The Bush administration has a problem: How to start a war without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a justification, they may have to create one. Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. . . . Yet once again, the American people are being played for fools, by the government and the media. The open secret, the insider’s fact, is that the United States plans to attack Iraq in the near future. The administration knows this, the media knows it, but the Bush scenario, written many months ago, is to act as if it weren’t so, to act as if a peaceful solution were being seriously considered. . . . Don’t buy it.
Only one very small regional Massachusetts newspaper, the North Adams Transcript, was willing to publish the piece.
I mention this because I think it has been very obvious for a very long time that the evidence for United States’ crimes of all sorts has been available to anyone who wished to face the truth. It does not take great expertise, just an eye for the obvious and the willingness to do a little homework. Despite this, I have noticed that journalists and writers on the left have continued to admit that they were beguiled by people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden, con men all. I do not mean writers for the mainstream press, but those considered oppositional. Many have, for reasons only they can answer, put hope in these obvious charlatans, and some prominent ones have refused to analyze such matters as the JFK assassination, September 11th, or Covid-19, to name a few issues. Was it because they considered these politicians and matters known unknowns, even when the writing was on the wall?
Those on the right have rolled with Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump in a similar manner, albeit for different reasons. It causes me to shake my head in amazement. When will people learn? How long does it take to realize that all these people are part of a vast criminal enterprise that has been continuously waging wars and lying while raking in vast spoils for the military-industrial complex. There is one party in the U.S. – the War Party.
If you have lived long enough, as have I, you reach a point when you have, through study and the accumulation of evidence, arrived at a long list of known knowns. So with a backhand slap to Donald Rumsfeld, that long serving servant of the U.S. war machine, I will list a very partial number of my known knowns in chronological order. Each could be greatly expanded. There is an abundance of easily available evidence for all of them – nothing secret – but one needs to have the will for truth and do one’s homework. All of these known knowns are the result of U.S. deep state conspiracies and lies, aided and abetted by the lies of mass corporate media.
My Known Knowns:
Donald Rumsfeld, as a key long time insider to U.S. deep state operations, was surely aware of my list of known knowns. He was just one of many such slick talkers involved in demonic U.S. operations that have always been justified, denied, or kept secret by him and his ilk.
One does not have to be a criminologist to realize these things. It is easy to imagine that Rumsfeld’s forlorn ghost is wandering since he went to his grave with his false “unknown unknowns” tucked away.
When he said, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice-versa,” he did say it, of course. Despite double-talkers like him, evidence of decades of U.S. propaganda is easy to see through if one is compelled by the will-to-truth.
“Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.” – Norman O. Brown
Note: If you think I too have no evidence, look at this for many of them.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The FBI used a search warrant to raid the home of freelance journalist Tim Burke on May 8, 2023, in Tampa, Fla., seizing most of his electronic devices, after Burke obtained outtakes of a 2022 Fox News interview by Tucker Carlson with the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.
The Committee to Protect Journalists signed on to a coalition letter calling on the Justice Department to make public information about its role in the raid on Burke’s home and how Justice officials believe he broke the law.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The summer of 2020 was a hinge point in American history. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police inspired racial justice demonstrations nationwide. At the time, the FBI was convinced that extreme Black political activists could cross the line into domestic terrorism – a theory federal agents had first termed “Black identity extremism.”
That summer, Mickey Windecker approached the FBI. He drove a silver hearse, claimed to have been a volunteer fighter for the French Foreign Legion and the Peshmerga in Iraq, and had arrest records in four states that included convictions for misdemeanor sexual assault and menacing with a weapon, a felony. He claimed to the FBI that he had heard racial justice activists speak vaguely of training and violent revolution in Denver.
The FBI enlisted Windecker as a paid informant, gave him a recording device and instructed him to infiltrate Denver’s growing Black Lives Matter movement. For months, Windecker spied on activists and attempted to recruit two Black men into an FBI-engineered plot to assassinate the state’s attorney general.
Windecker’s undercover work is the first documented case of FBI efforts to infiltrate the 2020 racial justice movement. Journalist Trevor Aaronson obtained over a dozen hours of Windecker’s secret recordings and more than 300 pages of internal FBI reports for season 1 of the podcast series Alphabet Boys.
This episode of Reveal is a partnership with Alphabet Boys and production company Western Sound.
Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
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This post was originally published on Reveal.
Many have noted that the indictments of Trump ring of lawfare by the Biden administration. Donald Trump has now been indicted four times, and in blatant overkill, now faces 91 criminal charges. In New York alone he was hit with 34 felonies for the payments to Stormy Daniels. Trump also faces felony charges for claiming the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud and then seeking to invalidate the outcome of that election through allegedly unlawful means.
These criminal cases rest on the assumption that Trump knew his claims of election fraud were false, making his actions to overturn the election an illegal conspiracy. However, what anti-Trumpers declare disinformation is what Trumpers and others consider their First Amendment free speech right to speak the truth. So far, the US has no official 1984-style Ministry of Truth or “science” that declares what is misinformation – though Biden sought to create one with the Nina Jankowicz Disinformation Governance Board.
Trump challenged the election results in some states and asked officials there to find evidence of fraud. Later he asked Vice President Pence to reject the Electors from those states. A candidate in any election has the right to challenge the vote count. The Constitution presents some procedures for doing this, which Trump followed.
Yet, in 2000, 2004, and particularly in 2016, when Democrats lost the election, they also challenged the final vote. The US clearly has undemocratic presidential elections, where winning the popular vote does not mean you win the election, a consequence of the Constitution giving us no right to vote for president.
In 2000, the Supreme Court did intervene to stop the recount of votes for president in Florida that would have made Al Gore the president. In 2004, Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer and others objected to certifying the Ohio elector votes for Bush, which would make him the victor. In 2016, after the Hillary Clinton-CIA-FBI Russia collusion hoax – the biggest national security state hoax since their WMDs in Iraq – had failed to stop Trump, Democratic activists tried to convince electors to switch their votes from Trump. Two did. Some even received death threats if they voted for Trump. No one was charged with obstructing an official proceeding in either case.
Trump stands accused of violating the Espionage Act, treason, by possessing classified documents in his private mansion – something we know Biden did as Vice President and Clinton did as Secretary of State. Trump – unlike Biden or Clinton at the time – was President of the United States, the highest official of the Executive Branch of the government. Even the American Bar Association states the President has “broad authority to formally declassify most documents.”
Glenn Greenwald asked:
What is it that Donald Trump did exactly that was illegal? He definitely sued in court multiple times and lost, which is absolutely his right to do. He told Mike Pence what he heard from his lawyers was Mike Pence’s ability to do, even if it wasn’t, which was act as that vice presidential role and reject as certified results, ones that he regarded had evidence of fraud and send them back to the states. He arranged for an alternative state of electors to be ready to be anointed in the event he could prove that there was a fraud. But what about this is criminal? Which of these steps is illegal?
In Georgia state court Trump was charged with 13 felony conspiracy counts under their RICO anti-racketeering law used against mobsters. The law makes everyone who did anything as part of the conspiracy a full member of the criminal ring and equally responsible for crimes committed by others, as long as they were committed as part of the conspiracy. The prosecutor outlandishly claimed this conspiracy began one day after the 2020 election, when Trump gave a speech saying he won. This is criminalizing our First Amendment free speech rights.
National Security State Lawfare to Fix 2024 Election for Biden
The Biden administration is using the Department of Justice to eliminate his only serious challenger in the presidential race. This lawfare election fixing is unprecedented in US history, though presidents have been “elected” in underhanded ways, as in 1824, 1876, 1960, 2000. Even more ominously, this lawfare is being engineered by the national security state. They have opposed Trump since he first condemned US wars in the Middle East during the 2016 Republican primary debates, and called out the national security state hoax of weapons of mass destruction to instigate the war on Iraq.
It now looks like the 2024 presidential election will not be decided by our vote, but by the national security state intervening beforehand to remove Biden’s most formidable challenger.
Trump could have brought the same charges against Biden in 2020, when Biden, years after no longer holding a government position, had secret documents in his house. However, there would have been national outrage and popular mobilizations against “fascism” if Trump’s Department of Justice had indicted Biden for treason in the run-up to the election. But today, progressive people either approve of lawfare against Trump, or are silent.
In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter mass protests, people called for defunding the police and prison network, and regarded prosecutors as covering for police brutality. Now, the left and liberals champion the prosecutors of Trump, not questioning their credibility. Greenwald noted, “They really have come to be a political movement that reveres institutions of power because they regard them as being their political allies.”
Voters for Democrats now Trust the FBI and CIA
A Gallup poll a year ago, before the indictments of Trump corroborates this: 79% of Democrat voters say the FBI is doing an excellent or good job; only 29% of Republican voters do. And 69% of Democratic voters say the CIA is doing a good job; only 38% of Republican voters do. We live in a different era from what we grew up in, even 20 years ago at the start of Bush’s war on Iraq. Now most Democrats like the CIA and FBI and most Republicans don’t. Now all the Democrats in Congress vote to continually fund the war in Ukraine, while only Republicans vote against.
It’s a bygone era when Republicans were the war hawks and a wing of the Democrats were pro-peace. Unfortunately most leftists and progressives still live in that era.
Today many who want to defend free speech, stop endless war, stop censorship, oppose the “deep state,” find a hearing with Trump Republicans, while the Democrats have become advocates of war and state censorship.
Lawfare Indictments against Trump will be directed against us
These lawfare charges to remove Trump from the presidential race, presented by the national security police agencies along with the Democratic Party and neo-con Republicans, will be used against viable future third parties. They will be a threat to our constitutional rights and our ability to organize against the 1%. Already, in part thanks to the absence of progressive outcry, the RICO law prosecution of Trump in Georgia is used against Stop Cop City protestors in Atlanta.
We should protest the indictments against Trump and the harsh criminal sentences against his January 6 supporters because if the left would ever move off the sidelines and become a force, they will be subject to similar prosecutions, only in an even more draconian way. Working class forces who effectively take on the bosses will suffer the same treatment.
McCarthyism of the Left
Unfortunately, anti-Trump sentiment infects and blinds much of the left milieu. Very few oppose these national security police state attacks on Trump or the lawfare manipulation of the 2024 election. We protest the New York Times’ McCarthyite attack on anti-war activists, but McCarthyism also exists in the left, where people are baited, and fear being baited – not as Reds, but as Trump supporters often simply for not condemning him enough. Consequently, they either participate in Trumper-baiting themselves or are intimidated into not standing up to it. This left McCarthyism is widespread and functions to push people towards voting for the supposed “lesser evil” Democratic Party and towards defending the actions of the national security police state.
We see this left McCarthyism with cheering the harsh sentences of January 6 defendants, most of who were non-violent. We see it in progressives’ not demanding answers for what the 100-200 undercover FBI and other police agency undercover agents in the crowd were actually doing that day. We see it in their not demanding answers about what the federal agents who had infiltrated the Proud Boys and other groups months before January 6 actually knew of January 6 plans. Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, was in regular contact with the Secret Service for months prior to January 6. We see it in progressives’ failure to question the reasons behind the deliberate lack of defense of the Capitol. We see it in progressives not standing up for Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who were non-violent on January 6, and did not even enter the Capitol, but were given 18 and 22 years for a charge often used against radicals: “seditious conspiracy.” These sentences are precedents that will be used against us. But left McCarthyism, fear of being baited as soft on Trump, makes progressives keep their mouths shut.
Unfortunately, as the Democratic Party shifted far to the right, and now is in open collusion with the FBI and CIA, becoming increasingly owned by the national security state, more and more of the left has capitulated to the identity politics ideology of that Party and the belief that it represents the “lesser evil” to Trump “fascism.” How far this left will degenerate, and how long until there is a national reaction to national security state fixing the 2024 election is unclear. The left is digging themselves into a hole, and giving the police state the opportunity to cover them up when they try to get out of it.
A longtime aide to former President Donald Trump has told investigators examining his retention of government records Trump used to write “to-do” lists for her on the back of notecards that were marked classified. ABC News reported that the aide, Molly Michael, made investigators aware of these notecards the day after the FBI had executed a search warrant of his property in August 2022. Michael…
Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.
The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.
Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.
This last point is particularly disturbing.
Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.
In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.
Advances in technology have enabled the government to deploy a veritable arsenal of surveillance weapons in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.
What this adds up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
Flagging you as a danger based on your feelings. Customs and Border Protection is reportedly using an artificial intelligence surveillance program that can detect “sentiment and emotion” in social media posts in order to identify travelers who may be “a threat to public safety, national security, or lawful trade and travel.”
Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels.
Flagging you as a danger based on your DNA. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc.
Flagging you as a danger based on your face. 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.
Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations.
Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every dollar we spend, 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.
Flagging you as a danger based on your public activities. Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies.
Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. 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.
Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals.
Flagging you as a danger based on your car. 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.
Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.
Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.
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.
Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.
Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.
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 police state wants us silent, servile and compliant.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
President Kennedy’s World Peace speech on June 10, 1963,where he championed nuclear disarmament and lasting peace with the Soviet Union, is given renewed attention with a Kennedy now running for president and by the present war with Russia. JFK supposedly underwent a transformation after the near mutual nuclear annihilation with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. It is claimed JFK had decided to withdraw from Vietnam, break up the CIA and the power of the Pentagon chiefs, and end the Cold War.
In his World Peace speech President Kennedy states,
I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament–and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude–as individuals and as a Nation–for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward–by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.
World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor–it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.
We [the US and Soviet Union] are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.
So far so good. But then he adds:
To secure these ends, America’s weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint.
And again:
The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today.
In other words, the US that stands for peace, the Communist bloc instigates conflict. Not exactly putting into action his words, “every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward.” This has similarity to President Eisenhower’s farewell address warning us of the military-industrial complex after he spent eight years building it up.
Coming to his final words, Kennedy says, just six months after almost precipitating a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war.”
This World Peace speech is heralded by many progressive and libertarian people.
However, if “America’s weapons are nonprovocative… designed to deter”; if “Our military forces are committed to peace”; if “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war,” then Kennedy is saying US has been for peace and he is continuing that policy. His speech did not proclaim major policy change, but signaled a preservation of the present one.
We are told this speech, like the claim he planned to pull the troops out of Vietnam, posed a threat to the Pentagon chiefs. And we are told after the defeat at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba (April 1961), JFK vowed, “I will splinter the CIA up into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind.” This statement, said in private (contradicted by later Kennedy statements), is said to have made the CIA, like the Pentagon, seek revenge. This supposedly led, less than six months after his June 10 speech, to his murder on November 22.
Kennedy’s November 22, 1963 Speeches
His speeches he was to give that evening show the actual “peace” policy he was carrying out was really one of military escalation. From the first speech he was to give in Dallas:
In the past 3 years we have increased our defense budget by over 20 percent; increased the program for acquisition of Polaris submarines from 24 to 41; increased our Minuteman missile purchase program by more than 75 percent; doubled the number of strategic bombers and missiles on alert; doubled the number of nuclear weapons available in the strategic alert forces; increased the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe by 60 percent; added 5 combat ready divisions and 5 tactical fighter wings to our Armed Forces; increased our strategic airlift capabilities by 75 percent; and increased our special counter-insurgency forces by 600 percent.
From his second speech on November 22:
We have radically improved the readiness of our conventional forces – increased by 45 percent the number of combat ready Army divisions, increased by 100 percent the procurement of modern Army weapons and equipment, increased by 100 percent our ship construction, conversion, and modernization program, increased by 100 percent our procurement of tactical aircraft, increased by 30 percent the number of tactical air squadrons, and increased the strength of the Marines. As last month’s “Operation Big Lift” – which originated here in Texas – showed so clearly, this Nation is prepared as never before to move substantial numbers of men in surprisingly little time to advanced positions anywhere in the world. We have increased by 175 percent the procurement of airlift aircraft, and we have already achieved a 75 percent increase in our existing strategic airlift capability. Finally, moving beyond the traditional roles of our military forces, we have achieved an increase of nearly 600 percent in our special forces – those forces that are prepared to work with our allies and friends against the guerrillas, saboteurs, insurgents and assassins who threaten freedom in a less direct but equally dangerous manner.
Do these actions by JFK show the Soviet leaders his desire for “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time”?
With good reason few believe the government’s story that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. Since thousands of documents the government still conceals from us, we are left with unanswered questions. Maybe it was the CIA and FBI and Mafia and anti-Castro Cubans, or a sub-grouping in them.
The National Security State Campaign to Remove Trump
But we do have evidence the CIA, FBI, NSA, and DIA and other secret national police agencies have targeted a president – in the unsubstantiated stories of Russian election interference and Trump collusion with Russian President Putin. This national security police state hoax is reminiscent of the Weapons of Mass Destruction lie they fed us to start a war on Iraq. They conjured up this Russia collusion story to sway a US presidential election and continued it during Trump’s presidency. And in 2020, they suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop case to sway a second election. They now attempt to imprison him for treason.
Regardless your opinion of Trump, this is a documented case of the US national security state seeking to neutralize a president. Those who assert a US police state operation against Kennedy do not attempt to bolster this with the proven operation against Trump. It would make sense for them to argue that while evidence of the CIA plot to kill Kennedy remains a state secret, in Trump’s case their plots are now out in the open.
Moreover, Trump, though a racist and sexist bully, did advocate for the issues that are said to make JFK a target: to bring US troops home, have peaceful relations with Russia, and reign in national security state agencies.
For instance, Trump said at a press conference (October 21, 2019):
I got elected on bringing our soldiers back home. Now, it’s not very popular within the Beltway, because, you know, Lockheed doesn’t like it, and these great military companies don’t like it. It’s not very popular.
As we defend American lives, we are working to end American wars in the Middle East …. It is also not our function to serve other nations as law enforcement agencies. (February 28, 2019).
I want to bring our troops back from the endless war. They’ve been going on for 19 years in the area. But I’m going to bring them home from Syria. (Watch How Progressives Respond When Trump Isn’t Wrong) There is more here.
Concerning the security state police agencies, Trump condemned the collusion of the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton, and FBI when asked if he would publicly criticize President Putin for Russia’s interference when they met. In response former CIA head John Brennan declared, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance [with President Putin] in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous.” This sounds the same as the CIA’s alleged attitude towards JFK.
President Trump wrote (Mar 15, 2019):
New evidence that the Obama era team of the FBI, DOJ & CIA were working together to spy on (and take out) President Trump, all the way back in 2015.
Unelected deep state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself. (September 6, 2018).
This does not mean Trump was any more serious about “draining the swamp” than JFK in carrying out his World Peace speech – and in the end, the president is not in control of the national security state, but the reverse.
While President Trump did advocate US ruling class interests around the world and prioritized business interests above our welfare, the national security state did not forgive him for repudiating its endless war agenda. He wanted to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
He befriended DPRK leader Kim Jong Un, an anathema to Washington, later explaining, “We have a good relationship with North Korea, we’re not in a war. Having a good relationship with leaders of other countries is a good thing.” (October 22, 2020).
Even worse, he said, “Some people hate the fact that I got along well with President Putin of Russia. They would rather go to war than see this” (July 18, 2018). He was gotten out of office, and then they instigated a war.
Of course, liberals would never uphold Trump, like they did Kennedy, Obama (in 2007-2008), Bernie, Jesse Jackson (1984), among others, as a leader who could move the US towards the dream of being a model for the world and make the US government actually represent the people.
Kennedy embodied progressives’ hope that a genuinely progressive democrat could become president and redeem the country, fulfill the promise of its ennobling principles and supposed exceptional nature. To MAGA people, Trump personifies the conservative realization of this same chauvinist dream.
Trump brought about a redirection in the US no more than Kennedy. But the popularity of both presidents in different sectors of the population does signify the common yearning of US people across the board for curtailing the immense power of the national security state. Now this national security state is using lawfare to intervene in the 2024 election process to disqualify and imprison Biden’s main challenger. That issue should be determined by the voters.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the case involving former President Donald Trump’s improper storage of government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, may have violated the civil rights of a litigant in a separate criminal case — likely providing fuel to those who have already questioned the ability of the Trump-appointed judge to be impartial in his trial.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
For the past 14 years, relatives of four men jailed on terrorism charges in Newburgh, New York, have accused the FBI of entrapment. On Thursday, a federal judge agreed and ordered the release of three of the men known as the Newburgh Four: David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen. The men had been sentenced in 2010 to 25 years in prison for a government-orchestrated bombing plot of a New…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A federal judge has unsealed additional parts of the affidavit that accompanied a search warrant of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property last year, revealing that the former president did not, at the time, defend his improper retention of government documents by claiming that he had “declassified” them before leaving the White House. Trump presently faces 37 federal charges from the Department of…
This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Veteran national security reporter James Risen joins us for an in-depth look at his new book, The Last Honest Man, about the work of Senator Frank Church to rein in the FBI, CIA and other agencies after the Vietnam War, Watergate and other fiascos had shaken the public’s trust in the U.S. government. Church, a Democrat, chaired a Senate committee that in 1975 began investigating the intelligence…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Former President Donald Trump claimed on Saturday that he had the “absolute right” to keep documents after leaving the White House but legal experts say that defense won’t hold up in court. Trump, who pleaded not guilty earlier this month to 37 charges related to his handling of classified documents, has repeatedly claimed that he had the right to take the documents under the Presidential Records…
On March 9th, 2023, Matt Taibbi appeared before Congress regarding the revelations uncovered by the “Twitter Files,” which demonstrated the US federal government and social media companies worked together to censor information and accounts unfavorable to US interests. The same day, an IRS agent visited Taibbi’s home in New Jersey. Matt Taibbi joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the case opened against him, as well as the role of the FBI and multiple law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the Foreign Influence Task Force which identified accounts and stories for censorship from Twitter.
Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author, and co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast.
Studio: Adam Coley, David Hebden
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Chris Hedges:
The journalist Matt Taibbi has been targeted by the Democratic Party for exposing extensive government blacklists used to censor left-wing and right-wing critics. Given access to the internal traffic of Twitter by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, he documented cases where the FBI and other government agencies repeatedly suppressed news and commentary. The censored content was almost exclusively produced by those critical of the dominant narrative advanced by the Democratic Party and the old establishment-wing of the Republican Party, which has joined forces with the Democrats. Threads that were censored include: those from the yellow vest movement, activists from the Occupy movement, Global Revolution Live, negative stories about Joe Biden, reports on the Ukrainian Energy Company, Burisma, that paid Hunter Biden about $1 million a year while his father was vice president, positive stories about Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, reports about Ukrainian human rights abuses, and details of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The accounts were flagged and usually disappeared. The so-called, “Moderation requests,” were sent by an entity called the Foreign Influence Task Force. The Foreign Influence Task Force is an FBI led inter-agency task force that includes numerous government agencies, including Homeland Security, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department. It flags what it considers objectionable content for about two dozen social media companies, including Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and Wikimedia. In March, Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were called to testify before the select subcommittee on weaponization of the federal government. While Taibbi was testifying on March 9, an IRS agent visited his house in New Jersey. Taibbi discovered that the IRS opened a case against him on the day he published a Christmas Eve Twitter thread from a letter House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent to the IRS commissioner inquiring about Taibbi’s case.
It was a Saturday, it was Christmas Eve, Taibbi did not owe taxes, the case was four years old. All this suggests that the IRS case was politically motivated and the FBI was monitoring Taibbi. Taibbi ran into the buzzsaw of orchestrated character assassination when he testified. The Democratic members of the committee rarely let Taibbi speak, they delivered vicious and insulting diatribes, which were then broadcast on outlets such as MSNBC and CNN, part of the effort to further discredit him. The ranking committee member Stacey Plaskett, sent Taibbi a letter accusing him of lying to Congress and threatened Taibbi with a 5-year prison sentence. Joining me to discuss this wholesale censorship and the efforts by the ruling establishment, especially the Democratic Party, to discredit him and his work is Matt Taibbi. Matt, let’s go back to December 24, 2022. You’re in the Park 55 Hotel in San Francisco and explain what you’re doing.
Matt Taibbi:
Well, I was putting together the final touches on a story about … It was going to be called, Twitter and Other Government Agencies. About a week and a half into the Twitter files project, we found a series of documents that had come to Twitter through the Foreign Influence Task Force, and it was basically a pile of reports that came from various government agencies. Sometimes we could tell which ones they were, sometimes not. But in essence, most of them were simply a few paragraphs of text along with a gigantic Excel spreadsheet of account names. And they would say things like, we assess that the following are related to Russia’s Internet Research Agency or are working to further anti-Ukraine objectives, or whatever. And we would check and see that sometimes all of the accounts were gone, sometimes it was a percentage of them, but in most cases there was some kind of action. And this was an important story that we put out. I was very nervous about it. It included information about the CIA, the DNI, Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and that’s what I was preparing to do on Christmas Eve.
Chris Hedges:
And we should be clear that before you made this release on December 24, the FBI had already denounced your work on the Twitter files saying it was, “The product of conspiracy theorists,” this is quoting them, “Who fed the public ‘misinformation,’ whose sole purpose was discrediting the agency.”
Matt Taibbi:
Right. Yeah. In fact, I even referenced the FBI’s quote in the beginning of the thread. Sarcastically I said, of course, my sole purpose isn’t discrediting the FBI; there are other agencies I want to discredit as well. And the idea of that was to, among other things, make the public aware that the FBI had commented on the story in a way that was intended to intimidate a little bit, in addition to not answering the questions that we sent. But yes, they had already made it known that they were paying attention to the story, and that was unnerving, certainly on one level.
Chris Hedges:
Let’s talk about the Foreign Influence Task Force. You said you estimate that it has a staff of about 80. What is it? Who’s on it, to the extent that know? When was it set up? And how does it work?
Matt Taibbi:
I don’t know a whole lot about when it was set up. Other reporters have done some work on that. Lee Fong, who is one of the Twitter Files reporters, had done some work on it. He was where we got the number 80 for staff for the FITF. As far as we could determine it was mostly comprised of FBI, Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The FITF became the throughway junction for government requests for content moderation. And the system they worked out was requests that came from the federal government would come through the FBI, and anything that came up through the states would come through DHS. And they had a very specific means of doing that. They had a communications platform they called Teleporter. It was like a one-way door.
It was a little bit like Mission Impossible. There was a way to rig it so that once content went through there, it wouldn’t last very long. It would delete after a period of time. But we recovered some of the stuff that was in there. But that’s what the FITF does. And what’s interesting about it, there are two things that are interesting. One, it claims that it’s only monitoring foreign material, but we found ample evidence of them looking even at the accounts of very small following American domestic account holders. And the other thing is, these are not personnel that are trying to make cases, they’re monitoring social media. It’s FBI agents who aren’t trying to put together something for trial, they’re watching.
Chris Hedges:
They’re not producing evidence.
Matt Taibbi:
Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They’re not compiling anything toward any case. Yeah.
Chris Hedges:
Which is exactly how, in the McCarthy era, the FBI worked. They’d show up even at high schools, Elaine Schreker has written about this, with a list. There was no evidence, there was a list of names, and all of those teachers were gone. And not only were they gone, they were blacklisted.
Matt Taibbi:
Well, right. And that’s why one of the major reforms that came out of the Church Committee was a change in the whole idea of what the FBI would do. They had to have some kind of predicate to initiate an investigation. We don’t have that anymore. They started to make that change right around 2008 or so. But now it’s firmly entrenched that the FBI is a counterintelligence operation that has a criminal division to it. It’s in the intelligence gathering business as much as it is the case making business.
Chris Hedges:
So the FITF has an industry meeting, explain what that is. And you had told me that, at first it was monthly, and then it was weekly as the 2020 election approached.
Matt Taibbi:
So the moment that was the light bulb moment for a lot of us on the Twitter Files story was when we first found emails that talked about what you referred to, the industry meeting. And you would see something would be forwarded to one of the members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Department, and there would be an agenda, and it would come from the FITF, and you would see the agenda for what they call the industry meeting. And all these people would be CC’d on the email. It would be probably two dozen companies or more. And it would say something like OGA briefing, (Ukraine). Right? So that would be at the top.
And OGA as you know, is usually a euphemism for either intelligence generally or the CIA specifically. We had emails that showed that the CIA attended a couple of these meetings, that they asked to be there. So we thought that that was pretty damning stuff because among other things, not only did it show that all of these companies were in regular contact with federal enforcement agencies, but that there was this rather elaborate anticompetitive situation going on that I don’t think anybody’s even thought about that angle of it. The antitrust component of this where you have 20 or 25 tech companies getting together and making secret agreements on what kind of content they’re going to show the public. I think that’s very serious. And it was all basically in one email. So that was the kind of thing where you could show the public one picture and it would be powerful that way.
Chris Hedges:
Was there any indication that they were producing content?
Matt Taibbi:
No. Although we did have some indication from a couple of sources, and we were never able to really report this, but we heard it from enough people that I think it’s worth mentioning that there were some indications that the government had some input into the drafting of the terms of service of some of these companies. So we would see that the FBI was assigning lots of people to monitor different communications for possible violations of terms of service. And we even saw Twitter personnel complaining about that. One of the lawyers is saying, “My God, it’s like they’re entering search terms looking for violations of our terms of service.” So we know they were doing that, but there’s a big question as to whether they were also working on the other end to help devise what those terms were, and the implications of that are obviously pretty serious.
Chris Hedges:
Terms of service. That’s what you’re allowed to disseminate and what you can’t.
Matt Taibbi:
Right. So Twitter has all sorts of policies about what it can disallow and why they can disallow it. They have policies about harm, about expressing hate towards a certain group, so that if the government had any kind of role in helping draft policies like that for not just Twitter, but for other platforms, that would be significant. We didn’t find that kind of smoking gun, but we certainly heard it from some people.
Chris Hedges:
Let’s talk about the select subcommittee on weaponization of the federal government. It’s run by the Republicans. You were kind of crucified for cooperating by the establishment, I don’t know, I don’t want to call it liberal, whatever it is, media, democratic allied media. Talk about the committee and what happened there.
Matt Taibbi:
Well, so this is Jim Jordan, the congressman from Ohio. He’s the House Judiciary Chair. He has a subcommittee, the Weaponization of Government Committee. And he invited Michael Shellenberger and me to testify about the Twitter Files. And we were very happy to do it for one very big reason, which was that none of the stories we were doing, no matter how explosive they were, we’re getting picked up by national media. So we thought this was a unique opportunity to get in front of a big audience that would hear some of this stuff for the first time. And I have to say, Jim Jordan, I thought was very sincere in his appreciation for the First Amendment. I think this is, he’s kind of a throwback to the days when members of Congress could hate each other about certain issues, but agree about some pretty basic things. And I think he really does believe in the First Amendment, is my guess.
He worked on a SHIELD law for reporters too. But they brought us in and we testified, and instead of engaging with the material, the democratic members, one after the other, just went after us personally. And they didn’t let us speak. And this ended up actually being a big moment because audiences didn’t get to hear about the Twitter Files, but they saw the way we were being treated, and it got them so angry that they went and educated themselves about what the material was. I thought it was a politically disastrous move by the Democrats. I didn’t understand it.
Chris Hedges:
Well, let’s talk about what they did. I mean, like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, I watched that, she didn’t let you speak at all. I mean, you couldn’t even get three words before she cut you off saying, “It’s my time.” And the smears and insults were quite remarkable. I mean, be specific about what they did.
Matt Taibbi:
So the ranking member Plaskett called me, a so-called journalist. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, her line of questioning was devoted to the idea that I was a paid scribe of Elon Musk and that I was making a fortune doing the Twitter Files story, and that was my entire motivation. When she asked me about how much money I was making and I told her truthfully, that actually I didn’t think I’d actually made that much on it, she wouldn’t let me answer that question.
I was told by another member from Texas that I had had to take off my tinfoil hat and learn to appreciate the FBI’s efforts to keep us all protected. Daniel Goldman, the member from New York, got mad at me when I said I couldn’t agree or disagree with Robert Mueller’s indictments of purported GRU members. He’s a lawyer, I thought he should know, but indictments aren’t something you can agree or disagree with. When I said that, he got upset, shut me down and reclaimed his time again. But that was the pattern. Basically, they were accusing us of being un-American, financially motivated, basically paid operatives of Elon Musk and somehow connected to the Russians. And that was the entire theme of their questioning.
Chris Hedges:
And then outlets like MSNBC, Mehdi Hasan, followed up on all of that. Explain what they did.
Matt Taibbi:
All they did is they took those clips, and that’s how they built their stories about what happened in that hearing. And we weren’t the only ones they did that to by the way, the Weaponization of Government Committee has had other hearings where they’ve had people who were, let’s say, FBI whistleblowers, and it’s the same formula every time. These people get accused, they’re taking payoffs from somebody, they get accused of being in league with Russia, or in league with insurrectionists, or whatever it is. And then there’s a little sound bite that gets produced and that ends up being broadcast on MSNBC or CNN, and that’s the entirety of the report. Which Chris, there was so much frustration on our part because a lot of what the Twitter Files that were about, they weren’t even partisan stories. That’s what’s so amazing about it. I thought, I guess somewhat naively in retrospect, that at least some of the stuff we put out would be reported on or would attract some interest. But it turned out not to be that way. It turned out to be we were the enemy for even bringing this up, which was remarkable.
Chris Hedges:
I want to talk about censorship, because we’re talking about blacklists. We’re talking about wholesale censorship embraced by government agencies and the Democratic Party, and the old, as I said, wing of the Republican Party that’s defected from Trump. Liz Cheney types, who essentially have now been incorporated into the Democratic Party. But this is a change for the old ACLU, Anthony Lewis liberals. It’s something new.
Matt Taibbi:
Yeah, I mean, I’m old enough to have been an intern and worked in the same office with Nat Hentoff, if you remember-
Chris Hedges:
Oh, I know Nat. Yeah.
Matt Taibbi:
Yeah, yeah. And that was back in the day when the Village Voice was the Bible of American liberalism and Nat Hentoff’s views on free speech. He would pick up the smallest case of somebody trying to trample on free speech, speech rights, and he would make the biggest deal out of it. And that was a big thing in American intellectual life at the time. We did not truck anybody messing with the First Amendment-
Chris Hedges:
Well, I just want to interrupt, because people like Nat would defend wing free speech, like the famous case with the neo-Nazis marching through Skokie, Illinois.
Matt Taibbi:
Right. And to American liberalism back then, as you know, the rationale behind that was not hard to understand. If you don’t protect the right of people to march in Skokie, the next thing that’s going to happen is that every mayor in every small town in Alabama, Mississippi, and the panhandle of Florida is going to prevent the NAACP from marching. I mean, this stuff’s not rocket science. It was really simple reasoning, but it’s gone out of style. There’s been this massive public relations campaign that has told a whole generation of young people that counter-speech and allowing certain kinds of people to talk doesn’t work, and de-platforming does. And people believe it. And this is the rationale behind this new movement. And they see Donald Trump as the evidence that more stringent measures are needed. And it’s provided the cover for this incredible sort of revolution and technological censorship that we found in the Twitter Files.
Chris Hedges:
I want to talk about Mehdi Hasan, who I have zero respect for.
Matt Taibbi:
He’s a good interviewer though.
Chris Hedges:
No, he’s a bully. I mean, it’s the classic technique. He seized on these incredibly minor errors. We’ve all made them. We used to run error boxes in the New York Times. You’ve made them, I’ve made them, we all make them. But they were really almost irrelevant. I mean, you confused a timeline, you had a misplaced acronym. But then he blows this up into evidence that you’ve lied to Congress. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seconds this accusation. And that’s when the Plaskett sends this letter. And that’s the first step into trying to destroy. If you look at the pattern and the attacks on Julian Assange, it’s the same. You essentially discredit their reporting, then you begin a sustained campaign of character assassination. And once they’re isolated the way Julian was, you can pretty much do whatever you want to them. And it hasn’t gone as far obviously as it has with Julian, but I certainly see that pattern being played out against you.
Matt Taibbi:
Yeah. So I made a big mistake with Mehdi. I mean, I had a beef with MSNBC for years because I used to be a regular guest on the channel. I was the last person I think on MSNBC who was invited on, who expressed any kind of skepticism at all about the Russia case. And even then it was quite mild. But after that, I wasn’t invited back on. And I always thought that MSNBC owed it to its audience to at least answer critics about its wrong reporting on the Russia story. So I thought it would’ve been hypocritical to refuse an invitation to come on Mehdi’s show. I did come on, and I wasn’t prepared. I was overconfident. I thought I had everything locked up. I thought the worst thing that could happen to me is that I’d sound a little bit stupid on air, but he found some errors and that rattled me on air.
But the problem was he misunderstood what those errors meant. He thought they were far more significant than they were. In fact, I basically confused the Center for American Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the latter being a part of the Homeland Security Agency. And he thought that I was basically saying an intelligence agency was involved with content moderation when it wasn’t. In fact, both CIS and CISA were involved in this one program, and he didn’t understand that. So he thought it was a really huge, significant, intentional error. It was actually picayune, meaningless error.
But then he took the additional step of trying to get members of Congress interested in prosecuting me for lying to Congress. And it was at this point that I tweeted at him and I said, “Mehdi, come on. All jokes aside now, it’s time to get serious. You’re trying to put me in jail for this stuff and you’re wrong.” And nothing. And that was a real eyeopener for me. I mean, I get all’s fair and love and war, even on Twitter everything’s in bounds. But this is no joke. And they really mean it I think. I think that they really want to press this stuff as far as they can.
Chris Hedges:
You’ve raised this, but it’s important, about the National Guard Technology support staffer who posted documents online, and then the response of the media, which like you, I found just terrifying.
Matt Taibbi:
So this is the so-called Pentagon leaker story, where you have a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman from Massachusetts, and God knows how he gets access to this kind of intelligence, but he does. And he’s in a Discord room where he is playing Minecraft, which is a game I play with my kids, and they’re passing around some intelligence. And what’s incredible about this is that the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Bellingcat track down this person and essentially deliver them up to the authorities. And now they’re doing stories based on the stuff that he was leaking. Can you ever remember, Chris, journalists working to turn in essentially sources? It’s a total violation of what journalism is. We’re not on the side. We’re not part of the government’s investigatory apparatus, but they see themselves that way. And when they pair up with these organizations like Bellingcat, which are sort of government funded, what they call open source intelligence agencies, it’s a totally new role for the media. And they see themselves as doing the right thing by putting the right people in the crosshairs of government.
Chris Hedges:
Is this driven by fear of Trump? Would you say that’s the engine?
Matt Taibbi:
I would hope so. Right? Because that’s at least a reason. But I worry sometimes that it’s an even baser phenomenon in that this is group think, it’s careerism, and it’s a new kind of political movement that I think is developing where there’s a new sensation I think within the media business for sure that I had not clued into for a long time. But it’s this belief that whatever we were doing before, when the type of approach that we were taking to reporting no longer works, we can’t just put stuff out there and hope that the public makes the right decisions.
We have to act and make sure that they do the right thing with the information, which means that we have to have lockstep discipline about what we say. We have to filter out things that we think the public can’t handle, and we have to exaggerate things that we think they need to know. And this is a new vision for how information is disseminated. Again, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on it. But to me, it reminds me of something that you would’ve seen in the Soviet Union in the late twenties or early thirties, or in other countries that have authoritarian traditions.
Chris Hedges:
Well, isn’t it because their own credibility has been shredded?
Matt Taibbi:
Well, yes. Yes. But to me that’s exactly the wrong way to respond to-
Chris Hedges:
Well of course, but that’s the way they’re responding. I mean, they’re not trusted. I mean, what’s the approval rating for the press? It’s probably in the single digits. Who knows? I mean, it’s pretty low.
Matt Taibbi:
Well, they’re probably looking up at Congress right now, right? So they’re [inaudible 00:29:28] remarkable. You would think it’s impossible, right? It’s like the Woody Allen joke, they’re a notch below child molester at this point. But as you know, the only way to win back trust in media is to be straight with people, and to own up to mistakes, and to look people in the eye and say, “We got this wrong. We’re going to try to be square with you the next time.” They’re not doing that. Instead they’re locking arms and saying, “We are the only source of information. We have legitimacy because we’re credentialed, and that gives us authority that other people lack, and we want you to discount any information you get from any other source.” And they’re going with that. I mean, I think you know as well as anybody else that this is a belief system that’s become pervasive.
Chris Hedges:
Great. Thanks Matt. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at ChrisEdges.SubStack.com.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146
We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.
Rather, we are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.
Case in point: the FBI.
The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.
Clearly, this is not a government agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.
Indeed, this same government agency has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.
Basically, it works like this: in order to justify their crime-fighting superpowers, the FBI manufactures criminals by targeting vulnerable individuals and feeding them anti-government propaganda; then, undercover agents and informants equip the targeted individuals with the training and resources to challenge what they’ve been indoctrinated into believing is government corruption; and finally, the FBI arrests the targeted individuals for engaging in anti-government, terrorist activities.
This is what passes for the government’s perverse idea of being tough on crime.
For example, undercover FBI agents pretending to be associated with ISIS have been accused of seeking out online and befriending a 16-year-old with brain development issues, persuading him to secretly send them small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and then the moment Mateo Ventura, turned 18, arresting him for providing financial support to an Islamic terrorist group.
If convicted, the teenager could spend up to 10 years in prison.
Yet as The Intercept explains, “the only ‘terrorist’ he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old… This law enforcement tactic has been criticized by national security researchers who have scrutinized the FBI’s role in manufacturing terrorism cases using vulnerable people who would have been unable to commit crimes without prolonged government assistance and encouragement… the Ventura case may indicate that authorities are still open to conjuring terrorists where none existed.”
In another incident, the FBI used an undercover agent/informant to seek out and groom an impressionable young man, cultivating his friendship, gaining his sympathy, stoking his outrage over injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government, then enlisting his help to blow up the Herald Square subway station. Despite the fact that Shahawar Matin Siraj ultimately refused to plant a bomb at the train station, he was arrested for conspiring to do so at the urging of his FBI informant and used to bolster the government’s track record in foiling terrorist plots. Of course, no mention was made of the part the government played in fabricating the plot, recruiting a would-be bomber, and setting him up to take the fall.
These are Machiavellian tactics with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings, but it is especially dangerous for anyone whose views could in any way be characterized as anti-government.
As Rozina Ali writes for the New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”
For instance, it was reported that the FBI had been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.
All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.
What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.
Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.
This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.
To go after terrorists, they become terrorists.
To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers.
To go after thieves, they become thieves.
For instance, when the FBI raided a California business that was suspected of letting drug dealers anonymously stash guns, drugs and cash in its private vaults, agents seized the contents of all the safety deposit boxes and filed forfeiture motions to keep the contents, which include millions of dollars’ worth of valuables owned by individuals not accused of any crime whatsoever.
It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy.
This certainly isn’t a constitutional democracy, however.
Some days, it feels like the FBI is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.
In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.
USA Today estimates that agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.
In a stunning development reported by the Washington Post, a probe into misconduct by an FBI agent resulted in the release of at least a dozen convicted drug dealers from prison.
In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.
For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”
Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.
The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”
The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.
Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
The powers-that-be are not acting in our best interests.
Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.
Think about it.
Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.
In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.
Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.
Are you getting the picture yet?
The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.
The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms. It is, 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 source of the threats to our freedoms.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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In an interview shortly before his death Daniel Ellsberg said the US runs a “covert empire”, which is a really good way of putting it. A giant globe-spanning cluster of nations consistently moves in alignment with the dictates of Washington, but they all keep their official flags and their official governments, so it doesn’t look like an empire despite functioning as one in every meaningful way.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>Daniel Ellsberg (1931-2023)
Oil on canvas. pic.twitter.com/kHBxRIML32
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 16, 2023
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We really don’t pay enough attention to the fact that all the most influential media platforms are owned and operated by extremely wealthy people who have every motive to keep us all focused on culture wars and electoral politics so we don’t focus on class war and direct action.
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It’s surreal how saying the FBI constantly grooms mentally ill people to get involved in terrorist plots makes you sound like a kooky crackpot, but it’s actually a well-documented fact that we just don’t talk about much for some reason.
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The only time Trump was praised by the mass media was when he bombed Syria. The only time Biden was condemned by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.
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The New York Times publishing an article which criticizes Ukrainian Nazis for wearing Nazi insignia, not because Nazism is wrong but because it’s bad war propaganda, was one of the most New York Times things that has ever happened.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>The decision by some Ukrainian soldiers to wear patches with Nazi icons threatens to reinforce Russian propaganda used to justify the invasion. It also could give the symbols mainstream life after the West's decades-long efforts to eliminate them.https://t.co/TdhO6pKpFG
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 5, 2023
The article even admitted that western reporters have been avoiding acknowledging the problem because they don’t want to play into “Russian propaganda”, and have actually asked Ukrainian soldiers to remove Nazi patches before taking photos. If you choose not to report something because it would hurt your side’s propaganda efforts, then you are not a journalist, you are a propagandist.
What’s funny about the “Nazis in Ukraine” controversy is that Nazis in Ukraine is not even the strongest argument against western proxy warfare in that nation. Western propagandists could just say “Yes Ukraine has a Nazi problem but we believe the benefits of protecting Ukrainian democracy outweigh the negatives of some skinheads getting rocket launchers here and there” or whatever, and most westerners would swallow it. The only reason propaganda outlets like The New York Times feel the need to keep diddling this issue and manipulating people’s minds and gaslighting everyone about it is because they’re so habituated to pushing for complete and total narrative control on US foreign policy, so it never occurs to them to cede even the slightest amount of ground or yield even the most obvious admissions to avoid looking ridiculous.
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The world is ruled by thugs and tyrants, the most thuggish and tyrannical of whom pour a tremendous amount of energy into convincing their populations that only other countries are ruled by thugs and tyrants.
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If people and digital records survive the Earth’s next act of nuclear warfare, let the record show that we were seeing clear warning signs every day and overwhelmingly ignored them.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus said that the country has started to receive nuclear weapons from Russia, a long-threatened provocation and the latest sign of the worsening relationship between Russia and the U.S. https://t.co/XrExrtoXoN
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 14, 2023
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Saying “America didn’t bomb Nord Stream, Ukraine did!” is like saying “Will Smith didn’t slap Chris Rock, his hand did!” It’s a distinction without any meaningful difference, no matter how hard they try to spin it as an independent act that the US would’ve had no control over.
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There’s no basis for the belief that today’s CIA and FBI are any less depraved than they were in the days of Dulles and J Edgar Hoover.
Seriously, what’s changed since that time? There was a cold war back then? There’s a cold war now. The laws, rules and policies were drastically changed and the people who did those bad things were punished? They were not.
There’s no basis whatsoever for the belief that the CIA and FBI did bad things in the past but don’t do bad things currently. It’s believed because it is comfortable, and for no other reason.
We learn about bad things the CIA and FBI did “in the past” because they stand nothing to lose by us learning about bad things they wanted to do and already did. Later on what’s happening today will be “in the past” and we’ll learn what they were up to in this slice of spacetime.
All the conditions which existed during the most notorious acts of depravity by those agencies are also the case today. Cold war. Hot war. Dissident groups. The fight for US hegemony. That’s all happening currently, and there’s no reason to believe they’re any nicer and cuddlier about it today.
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class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>US accuses Chinese warship of unsafe maneuver in the Taiwan Strait; China accuses US warships of being on the wrong side of the fucking planet. https://t.co/RtPFgXoW5e
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 4, 2023
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If western governments need to keep ramping up censorship, propaganda and the persecution of journalists in order to defend western freedom and democracy, is it really freedom and democracy? And is it worth defending?
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The only way to get a good read on what manipulators are really about is to ignore their words and watch their actions, because they only use language to manipulate and extract what they want from people. Apply this to politicians and governments, and to narcissists in your life.
Example: if you ignore the US government’s stories about its love of freedom and democracy and rules-based order and just look at its actions, what you see is a violent and tyrannical regime which works continually to destroy and subvert nations around the world which disobey it.
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One of the hardest lessons I’ve ever had to learn in life is that projection cuts both directions. We project our bad qualities and motives onto others, wrongly assuming that they have the same character flaws as us, but we can also project our positive traits onto others who might not have them.
In a world full of narcissists, sociopaths and manipulators, this is important to be aware of — whether you’re looking at politicians, governments, or your own interpersonal relations. In the past I’ve suffered serious consequences for assuming that someone must have healthy and relatable reasons for their harmful actions toward me and projecting my own good motives onto them, when really all they wanted was to use and subjugate me.
You can’t assume that someone is operating from the same inner motivations as you, whether those imagined motivations are negative or positive. Some people just suck, and do things you would never do because of motives that would never even occur to you.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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Featured image by Treehill via Wikimedia Commons.
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.
We speak in depth with journalist Jonathan Eig about his new book, King: A Life, the first major biography of the civil rights leader in more than 35 years, which draws on unredacted FBI files, as well as the files of the personal aide to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, to show how Johnson and others partnered in the FBI’s surveillance of King and efforts to destroy him, led by director J.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
We speak in depth with journalist Jonathan Eig about his new book, King: A Life, the first major biography of the civil rights leader in more than 35 years, which draws on unredacted FBI files, as well as the files of the personal aide to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, to show how Johnson and others partnered in the FBI’s surveillance of King and efforts to destroy him, led by director J. Edgar Hoover. Eig also interviewed more than 200 people, including many who knew King closely, like the singer, actor and activist Harry Belafonte. The book has also drawn attention for its revelation that King was less critical of Malcolm X than previously thought.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A sharp sound. Followed by body numbness. Difficulty speaking. Extreme head pain. Since 2016, U.S. officials across the world – in Cuba, China and Russia – have reported experiencing the sudden onset of an array of eerie symptoms. Reporters Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson try to make sense of this confusing illness that has come to be called Havana syndrome. This episode is built from reporting for an eight-part VICE World News podcast series by the same name.
The reporters begin by tracking down one of the first people to report Havana syndrome symptoms, a CIA officer working in Cuba. This “patient zero” explains the ways Cuban intelligence surveil and harass American spies working on the island and his own experience of suddenly being struck with a mysterious, painful condition. When he reports the illness to his bosses at the CIA, he learns that other U.S. officials on the island are experiencing the same thing.
A CIA doctor sees reports from the field about this strange condition happening in Cuba. He’s sent to Havana to investigate the cause of the symptoms and whether they may be caused by a mysterious sound recorded by patient zero. But during his first night on the island, the CIA doctor falls ill with the same syndrome he is there to investigate.
In the third segment, reporters Entous and Anderson head to Havana to visit the sites where people reported the onset of their symptoms, looking for answers. The team shares reporting-informed theories about who and what could be causing Havana syndrome.
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This exercise of fitting a square into a circular peg is precisely what now guides New Jersey’s contemporary policing regime. The Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC), the only Department of Homeland Security-affiliated fusion center within the Garden State is led by a former CIA agent trained in international espionage, not state and municipal law enforcement tactics that must adhere to constitutional rights. As New Jersey’s experience makes clear, the way fusion centers operate render them rife for abuse, and offer outdated models of policing.
The Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights’ (CSRR) recent report Shining a Light on New Jersey’s Secret Intelligence System shows how the ROIC wastes limited state resources doubling down on “broken windows policing” – a method consistently rebuked by legal and criminal justice scholars as a tool of mass incarceration. Broken windows models emphasize aggressive enforcement of misdemeanor and non-violent “quality of life” offenses. ROIC intelligence gathering focuses on these methods, as the example of the City of Camden attests. There, ROIC intelligence has given rise to open season on privacy and petty offenses, with police issuing fines for offenses like riding a bicycle without a bell. Invariably, such tactics overwhelmingly target minority communities. Rather than fight terrorism, ROIC intelligence furthers the overreach of the carceral state with little benefit.
This misalignment of input and outcome is not innocuous, but by design. The architecture of the ROIC is not vested in proven or progressive policing, but by the methods native to global spy networks. Indeed, the last two directors of the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, the body overseeing the ROIC, are former CIA agents.
Over the past six months, CSRR has sought accountability for the ROIC’s overreach, by filing several dozen Open Records Act (OPRA) requests into the ROIC’s relationship with county and state law enforcement agencies. Regrettably, those requests were almost summarily stonewalled, allowing the ROIC and its partners to operate in an accountability-free zone.
Shining a Light on New Jersey’s Secret Intelligence System exposes the extent of secrecy shrouding the ROIC and expansively documents those efforts. The report highlights the lack of transparency, the legal regimes that allow agencies to push back against basic public information requests, and the general apparatus that promotes this wall of secrecy.
Like with so many fusion centers across the country, the ROIC is engaging in mission creep far from its original purpose of fighting terrorism by over-policing non-violent crimes and justifying its budget behind closed-off series of feedback loops.
Open-source research shows the ROIC operating in ways banal and embarrassing – and less than strictly observant of civil liberties and civil rights. But even the most basic questions surrounding the ROIC’s budget and role in local and state information-sharing and structure are routinely ignored by various local, state, and county law enforcement agencies.
Responses from law enforcement to basic questions we posed could have provided an opportunity for public discourse on ROIC’s role, policies, and costs. Instead, CSRR received opaque responses, Kafkaesque riddles, and flimsy legal arguments. New Jersey’s law enforcement agencies collectively flouted transparency duties under state open records law with only one law enforcement agency providing one substantive response to exactly one request.
The litany of unpersuasive rejections may have varied in form but the results were the same: obstructive and non-transparent. In one combination of denials, agencies would offer to provide some requested information for an exorbitant sum of money while denying the rest.
The underlying theme put forth was an adherence to a regime of secrecy to protect law enforcement’s long-standing preference of substantially operating in the dark. Law enforcement agencies’ lawyers, across the state, using substantially similar language from various jurisdictions, rely on understandings of case law that, divorced of all the typical chicanery, allows the government to deny a request because the person or group making the request has asked for: (1) something that is too specific; and/or (2) not specific enough.
The irony, of course, is that the purpose of an OPRA request is to shine light into hidden troves being kept from citizens. To pinpoint a specific detailed description of a document when the government entity claiming the exemptions continues to hide behind the same wall of secrecy that gives rise to the request flies in the face of the object and purpose of the OPRA statute.
For example, to date, and despite multiple rounds of open records requests, CSRR could not get a clear answer on what the ROIC budget is, what its basic structure looks like, and what mechanisms are in place to protect civil rights and civil liberties.
This kind of secrecy is precisely what empowers the ROIC’s insidious commitment to broken windows policing. The ROIC serves as what Professor Brendan McQuade describes as an “outsourced intelligence division” for local police departments. Rather than meaningfully contributing to policing, the ROIC’s major efforts are instead aimed at “information sharing” and the creation and provision of “higher level intelligence products” like crime mapping, data on so-called “hot spots,” and predictive analyses.
This sort of language is anodyne and important-sounding but little more than the jargon of spy craft let loose on historically hollowed-out communities of color. Behind all the law enforcement mumbo-jumbo is a commitment to racist broken-windows policing.
New Jersey’s laws meant to ensure that state agencies can be held accountable to the public are failing. It is thus long overdue for the New Jersey legislature to engage in robust oversight of the state’s fusion center – and to reformulate the basic OPRA law at a statutory level to undo years of bad, anti-transparency activist precedent. Otherwise, New Jersey’s Secret Surveillance System will continue to operate with no regard, much less accountability, for civil liberties violations.
The full report, titled “Shining a Light on New Jersey’s Secret Intelligence System,” can be downloaded here.This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Privacy advocates on Wednesday said testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray at a U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing offers the latest evidence that Congress must take action to keep the government from performing mass surveillance on people across the United States, as Wray admitted the bureau has purchased cellphone geolocation data from companies.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Wray at a hearing about national security threats whether the FBI purchases “U.S. phone geolocation information,” showing the location of users.
Wray said the bureau does not currently make such purchases, but acknowledged for the first time that it “previously, as in the past, purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project,” drawing on data “derived from internet advertising.”
He said the project has been inactive “for some time” but said he could only provide more information about it and the past purchase of geolocation data in a closed session with senators, adding that the FBI currently accesses “so-called ad tech location data” through “a court-authorized process.”
“This is a policy decision that affects the privacy of every single person in the United States.”
“I think its a very important privacy issue that [geolocation data purchases] not take place,” said Wyden, an outspoken advocate for privacy rights.
Grassroots social welfare organization Demand Progress called Wray’s admission “both shocking and further proof of the need for Congress to take immediate action to rein in mass surveillance.”
“This is a policy decision that affects the privacy of every single person in the United States,” said Sean Vitka, the group’s policy counsel. “We should have the right to decide when and how our personal information is shared, but instead intelligence agencies continue to obstruct any accountability or transparency around this surveillance.”
The revelation came as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is scheduled to expire at the end of the year and as Congress is expected to soon begin debating its reauthorization.
As written, the provision allows the U.S. government to conduct targeted surveillance of people in foreign countries, but intelligence agencies have also used the law to collect data on Americans.
“Congress must fix this before considering any reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act this year,” said Vitka of Wray’s admission.
Vitka and Fight for the Future director Evan Greer were among the critics who demanded to know “who told [Wray] buying Americans’ location info from data brokers would be legal?”
\u201cThe @FBI bought Americans\u2019 location info without a court order. This is enormous, was illegal, and has countless effects on the #FISAReform debate this year. What it means for what remains of Americans\u2019 privacy is horrifying.\u201d— Sean Vitka (@Sean Vitka) 1678293086
Privacy advocates have long warned that the Supreme Court ruling in the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, in which the court decided government agencies that accessed location data without a warrant were violating the Fourth Amendment, contains a loophole allowing the government to purchase data that it can’t obtain legally.
“The public,” Vitka told Wired, “needs to know who gave the go-ahead for this purchase, why, and what other agencies have done or are trying to do the same.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The surprise premiere of a documentary revealing “shocking new allegations” of sexual crimes committed decades ago by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh sparked new calls on Monday for Senate and Justice Department investigations.
Doug Liman’s Justice premiered Friday as a last-minute addition to the lineup of the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. According to Free Speech for People, the film “includes important new details about specific allegations of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh” and “also reveals disturbing new evidence of misconduct by Kavanaugh and his associates” surrounding the right-wing justice’s 2018 Senate confirmation hearings.
This includes “evidence that Kavanaugh may have knowingly perjured himself” and that the justice’s associates engaged in what his friend referred to as “a cover-up.”
Kavanaugh—the second of three right-wing justices appointed to the nation’s highest court by then-President Donald Trump—was accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford, who is now a Stanford professor, when they were in high school. Kavanaugh also allegedly exposed himself without consent to Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate, during a college party. He has denied both allegations.
Justice producer Amy Herdy said during a post-premiere Q&A in Park City: “I do hope this triggers outrage. I do hope that this triggers action, I do hope that this triggers additional investigation with real subpoena powers.”
To that end, Free Speech for People wrote to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland as well as to Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) seeking a probe of Kavanaugh based on details in the film.
“Some of these details were sent to the FBI during its brief, compressed investigation into similar allegations during Kavanaugh’s 2018 confirmation hearings, although the FBI did not follow up or interview the relevant witnesses,” the group said Monday in a letter to the senators.
\u201c\ud83d\udea8BREAKING:\nWe’re calling for immediate and thorough investigations into new details about specific allegations of sexual misconduct by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.\n\nLearn more below. #InvestigateKavanaugh\nhttps://t.co/wNYucNq0qU\u201d— FreeSpeechForPeople (@FreeSpeechForPeople) 1674511547
The letter states:
Most disturbing, however, is new evidence of conduct by Kavanaugh and his associates (perhaps even before his accusers came forward) concerning the 2018 Senate hearing itself. For example, the film shows a 2018 text message discussion amongst mutual acquaintances of Kavanaugh and Deborah Ramirez, regarding Ramirez’s soon-to-be-public allegations that Kavanaugh had exposed himself to her. According to the text messages shown in the documentary, Kavanaugh asked a mutual friend to go on the record to defend him. Another friend referred to it as “a cover-up.” This indicates consciousness of guilt—and therefore evidence that he may have knowingly perjured himself in the confirmation hearings—and a potential conspiracy to obstruct and defraud the Senate by coordinating a false information campaign.
The Washington Post reports that “the FBI’s national press office did not have a comment on the documentary but reiterated that their services in a nomination process are limited to fact-finding and background investigations.”
\u201cWithin half an hour of the news getting out that Doug Liman\u2019s documentary “Justice” was added to Sundance, new tips came pouring in. \n\n\ud83d\udcfd\ufe0fFootage will be added. \n\nTakeaways from Sundance\u2019s secret Brett Kavanaugh documentary.\n\nNow do Clarence. #DemVoice1 \n\nhttps://t.co/yNTPT1chqe\u201d— Joan Hussey w/free blue check\ud83e\uded0 (@Joan Hussey w/free blue check\ud83e\uded0) 1674403368
“The scope of the background investigation is requested by the White House,” an FBI spokesperson told the Post in a statement. “The FBI does not have the independent authority to expand the scope of a supplemental background investigation outside the requesting agency’s parameters.”
Speaking about the women who stepped forward to share their stories in the film, director Liman told The Guardian: “This was the kind of movie where people are terrified. The people that chose to participate in the movie are heroes.”
The National Sexual Assault Hotline can be reached 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), or through chat at rainn.org. It offers 24/7, free, and confidential support.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
“Armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence & death & conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, maim or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Protest by non-locals [organizers against Cop City] are inherently terrorism.” — Second-in-command Atlanta Police…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
What they [regular people] need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves… what may be called the sociological imagination.
– C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination
In what follows, I offer some conclusions I have arrived at and am skipping all the steps taken to arrive there. Everyone needs to follow their own path to the end.
I know Mills was right when he penned those words long ago. Arguments don’t go too far to convince others; only self-directed investigations do. It is a question of the moral will-to-truth and the desire to be free, plus the imagination to connect the dots using reason that lead to conclusions that make sense. There are many explanations for every public issue and personal problem under the sun that tell us why this or that is true or false. But since we live in an age of non-stop lies and propaganda, determination and the willingness to do our homework is essential. The following summations are the results of my study over many years, and this is a partial list.
There comes a time to state them outright and as clearly and concisely as possible, when silence is betrayal, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said so passionately in his speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” from the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was murdered by U.S. government forces. He said:
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
I feel bound by that deeper loyalty and offer these summations in that spirit.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
