Some of the most enduring photos of the civil rights movement were taken by Ernest Withers. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Withers earned the trust of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders. But as it turns out, he was secretly taking photos for the federal government as well. This week, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Wesley Lowery brings us the story of Withers in an adaptation of the podcast “Unfinished: Ernie’s Secret,” from Scripps News and Stitcher.
Lowery starts by explaining how Withers earned his reputation as a chronicler of the civil rights movement. We tour a museum of Withers’ photographs with his daughter Roz, who deconstructs his famous “I Am a Man” photo of striking sanitation workers. Civil rights leader Andrew Young explains that without Withers’ photographs, they wouldn’t have had a movement.
We then learn that after Withers’ death, a Memphis reporter named Marc Perrusquia followed up on an old lead about the photographer: that he was secretly working for the FBI. Perrusquia gained access to thousands of reports and photos taken for the FBI by Withers. We hear excerpts from several reports and meet the daughter of the agent who recruited Withers. During the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the bureau recruited thousands of informants as part of a covert program originally created to monitor communists in America but ended up targeting the civil rights movement, as well as other individuals and groups.
We close with reflections on Withers by people who knew him. While some believe Withers betrayed the cause of civil rights, others are more forgiving. They say his actions were part of a larger narrative about the U.S. government’s unchecked power to spy on its own citizens and extinguish ideas and movements it felt were a threat.
While welcoming efforts to update U.S. air quality standards for soot, environmental and public health advocates on Friday warned that the Biden administration’s new proposal falls woefully short of what’s needed to protect vulnerable communities from deadly pollution.
Because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declined to make any changes during the industry-friendly Trump administration, the United States currently relies on 2012 standards for soot, or fine particulate matter (PM2.5) from sources such as construction sites, fires, power plants, and vehicles.
“EPA is not living up to the ambitions of this administration to follow the science, protect public health, and advance environmental justice.”
The EPA is now proposing to strengthen the primary annual PM2.5 standard—which is about public health—from 12 micrograms per cubic meter to 9-10 micrograms per cubic meter, but over a two-month period the agency will take public comment on a range of 8-11 micrograms per cubic meter.
The rule would not alter the secondary annual PM2.5 standard, which is meant to protect public welfare, including animals, crops, and nature. It also would retain existing primary and secondary standards for both PM2.5 over a 24-hour period and larger inhalable particles known as PM10.
The agency estimates the new standard would prevent up to 4,200 premature deaths and 270,000 lost workdays each year while resulting in as much as $43 billion in net health benefits in 2032. EPA Administrator Michael Regan claimed that “our work to deliver clean, breathable air for everyone is a top priority” and framed the proposal as “grounded in the best available science.”
However, campaigners and representatives from overburdened communities argued Friday that the EPA should listen to pleas for cleaner air from people at risk—rather than business groups fearmongering about potential economic impacts—and impose even stricter standards, which could reduce health issues like asthma and heart attacks and save thousands more lives annually.
“This delayed proposed rule on soot is a disappointment and missed opportunity overall. Though aspects of EPA’s proposal would somewhat strengthen important public health protections, EPA is not living up to the ambitions of this administration to follow the science, protect public health, and advance environmental justice,” said Earthjustice attorney Seth Johnson.
\u201cBad air quality is the world\u2019s leading environmental killer. In the United States, air pollution is associated with 100,000 to 200,000 deaths each year. We can make big improvements on this problem with tighter government standards, but today, @EPA failed to meet the mark.\u201d
Sierra Club senior director of energy campaigns Holly Bender agreed that the rule “does not fully reflect the serious danger of this pollutant, the scientific record, or the positive impact stronger standards would have on communities across the country.”
“The health burdens of air pollution are disproportionately borne by communities of color near heavily polluting facilities and infrastructure, like power plants, factories, and roads, and this standard is a long-overdue step toward correcting enduring environmental and health injustices faced by fenceline communities,” she stressed. “Anything short of the most protective standards gives a pass to the biggest polluters.”
Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition executive director Yvonka Hall also lamented that “with the new soot rule proposal, the EPA and the Biden administration have missed a vital opportunity to enact transformational change, to advance environmental justice, and to protect the most vulnerable Americans.”
“Thanks to redlining, Black people are more likely to live, work, play, and pray in communities that are toxic,” Hall pointed out. “With this proposal, we have missed the chance to right some of those historical wrongs.”
Noting that “Black children go to the emergency room for asthma 10 times more often than their white counterparts in the city of St. Louis” and “it’s eight times more often for Black adults,” Jenn DeRose, a Missouri-based Sierra Club campaigner, emphasized that “we need strong reductions in particulate matter pollution in my city and across the country to address problems created by generations of environmental racism targeted at Black communities.”
Latinos are also “far more likely to live and work in areas where air quality is the poorest, and regularly breathe soot and smog, which can cause and exacerbate respiratory illness,” said Laura Esquivel, the Hispanic Federation’s vice president of federal policy and advocacy. “This rule falls short of taking steps to mitigate the decades of neglect and harm done to the health of our communities and to the health of Latino children in particular.”
\u201c”In #Appalachia, our people are breathing fugitive mine dust and toxic emissions from numerous industries. Time and again, state regulatory practices have fallen short in curbing the impacts of these industries.”\u201d
Echoing the campaigners, Anita Desikan, a senior analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union on Concerned Scientists, said that “the science is clear—PM pollution causes serious health problems, and the biggest impacts are hitting Black, Latinx, and low-income people, many of whom are already overburdened with exposure to multiple pollutants.”
“Over the past decade, study after study has shown how breathing PM pollution causes real, meaningful damage,” Desikan continued. “Today’s proposal gets us closer to where we need to be—but the problem is urgent and the solution is long overdue. EPA needs to act quickly, follow the science, and finalize the strongest possible rule.”
While Dr. Doris Browne, former president of the National Medical Association, the largest U.S. organization representing Black physicians, expressed gratitude for the Biden administration’s efforts in the official EPA statement announcing the proposal, other public health leaders were far more critical.
American Lung Association president and CEO Harold Wimmer said that the proposed rule “misses the mark and is inadequate to protect public health from this deadly pollutant,” citing scientific research to advocate for an annual standard of 8 micrograms per cubic meter and a 24-hour standard of 25 micrograms per cubic meter.
Declaring that “health organizations and experts are united in their ask of EPA to finalize the national standards for particle pollution” at those levels, Wimmer pledged that his group “will file detailed technical comments and provide testimony at the public hearing to urge EPA to strengthen the final standards,” and encouraged the public to do the same.
Air Alliance Houston executive director Jennifer Hadayia highlighted that “during the recent cold snap, we were exposed to 24-hour industrial flares that spewed particulate matter across the region. And, our state regulatory agency—the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality—does nothing to stop it.”
“We applaud the EPA for stepping in where our state will not, but we wish they had gone further,” said Hadayia. “A stronger 24-hour standard would protect more Houstonians from the recent flares.”
\u201cToday’s proposed EPA soot rule is both late and disappointing. Why?\n\n1) It’s too high and will lead to 20,000 more people dying annually.\n2) It only proposes to strengthen the annual, not the daily or 24 hour standard.\n\nWe need the Biden EPA to do BETTER.\nhttps://t.co/woZhKfq306\u201d
Critics of the proposal also want the EPA to reconsider not just the primary, or health-based, standards, but also the secondary, or welfare-based, ones.
“Because countless people and organizations like the National Parks Conservation Association spoke out and demanded the Biden administration take action, they’ve taken this modest step toward cleaner air, but it doesn’t go far enough,” said Ulla Reeves, campaigns director for the organization’s Clean Air Program.
“Beyond the harm it causes people, soot wreaks havoc on our national parks’ plants, wildlife, waters, and our views,” Reeves said. “People deserve to visit national parks and not only breathe clean air but also experience the natural world free from this haze and soot pollution.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Depending on what political echo chamber you’ve been viewing it from, the ongoing release of information about the inner workings of pre-Musk Twitter known as “the Twitter Files” might look like the bombshell news story of the century, or it might look like a complete nothingburger whose importance is being wildly exaggerated by the far right.
From where I’m sitting, the Twitter Files look like entirely newsworthy revelations which add new detail to information that had already been spilling out about the way government agencies have been inserting themselves into Silicon Valley’s processes of regulating online speech. Right wing punditry has of course been exaggerating the significance of the releases and spinning them in all kinds of disingenuous ways, and Musk himself plainly has a partisan agenda in releasing the information in the way that he has been, but it’s not actually difficult to separate that from the value of the information being released.
Many liberals and leftists have struggled to grasp this (in my view simple and obvious) distinction, but we’re now seeing articles coming out in publications like The Guardian and Jacobin explaining to their respective audiences that it should actually concern anyone who opposes government tyranny to see secretive agencies taking it upon themselves to control the way people talk to each other on the internet.
“Make no mistake: while some criticisms of the project coming from left of center certainly have merit, that doesn’t mean the disclosures aren’t important, or that the accuracy of the information contained in the files is somehow undermined by the political slant of some of those reporting on it,” writes Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “The Twitter Files give us an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the workings of Twitter’s opaque censorship regime, and expose in greater detail the secret and ongoing merger of social media companies and the US national security state.”
To dismiss the revelations from the Twitter Files is a mistake. They provide important details about the creeping enmeshment of social media firms with US intelligence agencies and law enforcement. https://t.co/5e7HyibtHh
The Twitter Files show an outrageous and unacceptable amount of overlap between Twitter management and many US government agencies — including the CIA — in not just the censorship and shadowbanning of unauthorized speech but also whitelisting and amplifying actual psyops of the US military. The justifications for this have ranged from fighting “Covid misinformation” to combating “foreign influence” (the latter of which is odd because those efforts seem to have focused primarily on domestic speech), but what apparently went completely unquestioned the entire time was whether these government institutions have any business inserting themselves into the regulation of public speech at all.
This bizarre assumption that governments need to involve themselves in policing online speech has been rapidly normalizing itself around the western world. Here in Australia we’ve got government officials suddenly babbling about the need to restrict the spread of “conspiracy theories” after a shooting that left two police officers dead. The EU has its controversial Digital Services Act, which Elon Musk is interestingly an enthusiasticsupporter of despite being publicly warned that Twitter could be banned throughout the European Union if Twitter doesn’t sufficiently restrict speech on the platform.
And what’s important to remember about the Twitter Files is that Twitter has historically been the least compliant with government demands for speech regulation of all the major platforms. Everything we’re learning about what’s been happening in Twitter has surely been happening to a much greater extent with Google/YouTube and Meta/Facebook/Instagram.
1.THREAD: The Twitter Files TWITTER AND "OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES"
Do you remember voting for government agencies to insert themselves into the regulation of online speech? I don’t remember any such vote. I don’t remember any politician campaigning to do this or any part of the public being asked for their permission at all. It sure seems like they appointed that authority to themselves without the permission of the electorate, solely for their own benefit. It’s almost like democracy is an illusion and our rulers do whatever they want to us, up to and including restricting the ways we’re allowed to communicate with each other, in whatever way benefits them and their agendas.
Online speech has nothing to do with the government. Nothing whatsoever. Governments have no more business regulating online speech than they have regulating what consenting adults do in the bedroom, and until very recently this was universally understood as one of the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy. But with a little narrative-diddling over the last few years they’ve managed to intertwine themselves with the online platforms we use to communicate with each other worldwide.
And as all this information comes out we’re seeing imperial narrative managers working to manipulate the debate into an argument about what kinds of government interventions in public speech are acceptable and how far they should go, rather than whether the government should be involving itself in the business of online speech regulation at all. One of main jobs of an empire propagandist is to get people arguing over how ugly imperial agendas should be rolled out, rather than if they should.
This is insane. Let the powerful involve themselves in the regulation of public speech and they will regulate it to their advantage every time. This should be obvious to everyone.
The response to all this should not be mitigated. The response should not be to get bogged down in partisan bickering and culture war distractions. The response should not quibble about whether this or that activity was technically legal or a breach of the First Amendment or not. The response should be an unequivocal, “No. This is not your area. Out. Now.”
_________________
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The bipartisan Congressional committee investigating the January 6th insurrection recommended that former president Donald Trump face criminal charges for sparking the attempted coup. We look back at the case of Guy Reffitt, the first person to be prosecuted for his role in the violent insurrection.
On Jan. 6, 2021, teenager Jackson Reffitt watched the Capitol riot play out on TV from his family home in Texas. His father, Guy, had a much closer view: He was in Washington, armed with a semiautomatic handgun, storming the building.
When Guy Reffitt returned home, Jackson secretly taped him and turned the recordings over to the FBI. His father bragged about what he did, saying: “I had every constitutional right to carry a weapon and take over the Congress.”
Guy Reffitt was the first person to stand trial for his role in the riot, and the case has divided his family.
This week, Reveal features the story of the Reffitt family by partnering with the podcast Will Be Wild from Pineapple Street Studios, Wondery and Amazon Music. Hosted by Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, Will Be Wild’s eight-part series investigates the forces that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection and what comes next.
With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, we were reminded that in the eyes of the government and its corporate accomplices, “we the people” possess no rights except for that which the Deep State grants on an as-needed basis.
Totalitarian paranoia spiked. What we have been saddled with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it has conspired to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority. In a Machiavellian attempt to expand its powers, the government unleashed all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace in order to justify its demands for additional powers to protect “we the people” from emerging threats, whether legitimate, manufactured or overblown.
The state of our nation suffered. The nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. The combined blowback from a contentious presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in Americans being subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, and the criminalization of lawful activities.
Thought crimes became a target for punishment. 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. 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. In 2022, those who criticized the government—whether that criticism manifested itself in word, deed or thought—were flagged as dangerous alongside consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information.”
Speech was muzzled. Those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech continued to push for social media monitoring, censorship of flagged content that could be construed as dangerous or hateful, and limitations on free speech activities, particularly online. Of course, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act. If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
Kill switches aimed to turn off more than just your car. Vehicle “kill switches” were sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, but they were a perfect metaphor for the government’s efforts to not only take control of our cars but also our freedoms and our lives. For too long, we have been captive passengers in a driverless car controlled by the government, losing more and more of our privacy and autonomy the further down the road we go.
Currency went digital. No matter how much money the government pulls in, it’s never enough, so the government came up with a new plan to make it even easier for its agents to seize Americans’ bank account. In an Executive Order issued in March 2022, President Biden called for the federal government to consider establishing a form of digital money. Digital currency will provide the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.
The government spoke in a language of violence. Police violence killed three people a day. Warrior cops—trained in the worst-case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—did not make us or themselves any safer. Despite this, President Biden’s pledged to expand law enforcement and so-called crime prevention through a $30 billion “Fund the Police” program.
Cancel culture became more intolerant. Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs. Everything has now become fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.
Homes were invaded. Government agents routinely violated the Fourth Amendment at will under the pretext of public health and safety. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways the government and its corporate partners-in-crime used surveillance technology to invade homes: with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, and other monitoring devices.
Political theater kept the public distracted. Having devolved into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population, the political scene provided ample diversions with its televised Jan. 6 committee hearings, the Russia-Ukraine crisis, the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings, and more.
Bodily integrity was undermined. Caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, concerns about COVID-19 mandates and bodily integrity remained part of a much larger debate over the ongoing power struggle between the citizenry and the government over our property “interest” in our bodies. This debate over bodily integrity covered broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccinations to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Although the Supreme Court overturned its earlier rulings recognizing abortion as a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment, it did nothing to resolve the larger problem that plagues us today: namely, that all along the spectrum of life—from the unborn child to the aged—the government continues to play fast and loose with the lives of the citizenry.
The government’s fiscal insanity reached new heights. The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) hit $30 trillion. That translates to roughly $242,000 per taxpayer. It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens). That debt is also growing exponentially: it is expected to be twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2051.
Surveillance got creepier. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business was monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted. With every new AI surveillance technology that was adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry were marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.
Precrime became more fact than fiction. Under the pretext of helping overwhelmed government agencies work more efficiently, AI predictive and surveillance technologies were used to classify, segregate and flag the populace with little concern for privacy rights or due process. All of this sorting, sifting and calculating was done swiftly, secretly and incessantly with the help of AI technology and a surveillance state that monitors your every move. Where this becomes particularly dangerous is when the government takes preemptive steps to combat crime or abuse, or whatever the government has chosen to outlaw at any given time.
The government waged psychological warfare on the nation. The government made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded. Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government weaponized violence; surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns; digital currencies, social media scores and censorship; desensitization campaigns; fear; genetics; and entertainment.
Gun confiscation laws put a target on the back of every American. Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others) gained traction as a legislative means by which to allow police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats. Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
The burden of proof was reversed. Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head. Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government. The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
The Supreme Court turned America into a Constitution-free zone. Although the Court’s rulings on qualified immunity for police who engage in official misconduct were largely overshadowed by its politically polarizing rulings on abortion, gun ownership and religion, they were no less devastating. The bottom line: there will be no consequences for cops who brutalize the citizenry and no justice for the victims of police brutality.
The FBI went rogue. The FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people ran the gamut from surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, and intimidation tactics to harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.
The government waged war on political freedom. In more and more cases, the government declared war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
The military industrial complex waged more wars. America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine conveniently followed on the heels of a long line of other crises which have occurred like clockwork in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms.
The Deep State went global. We’ve been inching closer to a new world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which saw governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, shifted this transformation into high gear. This new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations owes its existence in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations. This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.
Authoritarian madness escalated. You didn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist or even anti-government to recognize the slippery slope that starts with well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate. When any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and an utter disregard for the rights of the individual, there should be reason for concern.
The takeaway: the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it rests—as it always has—at the local level, with “we the people.”
Unless we work together to push back against the government’s overreach, excesses and abuse, 2023 will be yet another terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for freedom.
New reporting from The Washington Post details how the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came to the decision to search former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence for government documents earlier this year. The search of the Palm Beach, Florida, property, which took place in August, yielded more than 13,000 government documents that Trump had…
Legal experts were stunned after former President Donald Trump’s lawyers found more documents marked classified in his Florida storage facility months after the Justice Department launched its criminal investigation into national security documents Trump kept after leaving the White House. Lawyers for Trump in recent weeks found at least two items marked classified at a storage unit in West Palm…
Robin Amer of USA Today’s investigative podcast The City shares the story behind a massive illegal dump that appeared in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood in the ’90s. Local kids remember playing on the 21-acre, six-story mountain of debris, and adults recall the seemingly endless stream of dump trucks that rumbled down the street to the formerly vacant lot at all hours of the day and night. Wind blowing over the dump covered the neighborhood in thick dust, affecting the health of nearby residents. When community leaders confronted the man responsible for the dump, they found he was just one part of a larger operation.
The FBI was using the North Lawndale dump and the man who created it as part of an investigation into political corruption called Operation Silver Shovel. The operation would bring down politicians and city officials who accepted bribes for allowing things like the illegal dump to happen in their districts. But after the indictments and the operation’s end, no one wanted to take responsibility for cleaning up the dump – not the FBI, not the City of Chicago and not the man who created it. The debris sat for years, leaving North Lawndale residents feeling angry and used. The civic neglect and institutional racism that allowed the dump to happen in the first place has continued, long after the last truck of debris was carted away.
So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online.
While the DHS’s hotly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to “curb speech it considers dangerous”:
According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
Docs show Facebook and Twitter closely collaborating w/ Dept of Homeland Security, FBI to police “disinfo.” Plans to expand censorship on topics like withdrawal from Afghanistan, origins of COVID, info that undermines trust in financial institutions. https://t.co/Zb3zmI1dQF
The report reveals pervasive efforts on the part of the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with the FBI, to push massive online platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to censor content in order to suppress “threats” as broad as fomenting distrust in the US government and US financial institutions.
“There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use,” The Intercept reports.
“Emails between DHS officials, Twitter, and the Center for Internet Security outline the process for such takedown requests during the period leading up to November 2020,” says The Intercept. “Meeting notes show that the tech platforms would be called upon to ‘process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.’”
While these government agencies contend that they are not technically forcing these tech platforms to remove content, The Intercept argues that its investigation shows “CISA’s goal is to make platforms more responsive to their suggestions,” while critics argue that “suggestions” from immensely powerful institutions will never be taken as mere suggestions.
“When the government suggests things, it’s not too hard to pull off the velvet glove, and you get the mail fist,” Michigan State University’s Adam Candeub tells The Intercept. “And I would consider such actions, especially when it’s bureaucratized, as essentially state action and government collusion with the platforms.”
This is absolutely wild. The government is secretly transforming "national security" agencies into a new Narrative Police.
“If a foreign government sent these messages,” said the former ACLU president, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”
The current CISA chief is seen justifying this aggressive government thought policing by creepily referring to the means people use to gather information and form thoughts about the world as “our cognitive infrastructure”:
Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.
Another CISA official is seen suggesting the agency launder its manipulations through third party nonprofits “to avoid the appearance of government propaganda”:
To accomplish these broad goals, the report said, CISA should invest in external research to evaluate the “efficacy of interventions,” specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can be countered and how quickly messages spread. Geoff Hale, the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for trust information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
But as a former ACLU president tells The Intercept, if this were happening in any government the US doesn’t like there’d be no qualms about calling it what it is:
“If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages,” noted Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”
Indeed, this report is just another example of the way western powers are behaving more and more like the autocracies they claim to despise, all in the name of preserving the values the west purports to uphold. As The Intercept reminds us, this business of the US government assigning itself the responsibility of regulating America’s “cognitive infrastructure” originated with the “allegation that Russian agents had seeded disinformation on Facebook that tipped the 2016 election toward Donald Trump.” To this day that agenda continues to expand into things like plots to censor speech about the war in Ukraine.
[Thread]
Hundreds of former agents of a notorious Israeli spying organization are now working in key positions at the world’s biggest tech/comms corporations, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
Other examples of this trend coming out at the same time include Alan MacLeod’s new report with Mintpress News that hundreds of former agents from the notorious Israeli spying organization Unit 8200 are now working in positions of influence at major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon (just the latest in MacLeod’s ongoing documentation of the way intelligence insiders have been increasingly populating the ranks of Silicon Valley platforms), and the revelation that The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté were barred from participating in a Web Summit conference due to pressure from the Ukrainian government.
We’re told we need to defeat Russia in Ukraine in order to preserve western values of freedom and democracy, and in order to facilitate that aim we’re getting less and less free speech. Less and less free thought. Less and less free press. Less and less democracy.
I keep thinking of the (fictional) story where during World War II Winston Churchill is advised to cut funding for the arts to boost military funding, and he responds, “Then what are we fighting for?” If we need to sacrifice everything we claim to value in order to fight for those values, what are we fighting for?
Dissent is becoming less and less tolerated. Public discourse is being more and more aggressively disrupted by the powerful. We’re being shaped into the exact sort of homogeneous, power-serving, tyrannized, propagandized population that our leaders criticize other nations for having.
Any journalists or press freedom advocates out there care about a US gov’t ally, Ukraine, pressuring a media conference to cancel two journalists? https://t.co/sPwaQAIiTV
If the powerful are becoming more tyrannical in order to fight tyranny, what’s probably actually happening is that they are just tyrants making up excuses to do the thing they’ve always wanted to do.
As westerners in “liberal democracies” we are told that our society holds free speech, free thought and accountability for the powerful as sacrosanct.
Our leaders are showing us that this is a lie.
The problem with “western values” is that the west doesn’t value them.
In reality, those who best exemplify “western values” as advertised are the ones who are being most aggressively silenced and marginalized by western powers. The real journalists. The dissidents. The skeptics. The free thinkers. The peace activists. Those who refuse to bow down to their rulers.
Our ongoing descent into tyranny in the name of opposing tyrants calls forth a very simple question: if defeating autocracy requires becoming an autocracy, what’s the point of defeating autocracy?
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In so many of the little places of everyday life in which life is lived out, somehow democracy doesn’t exist. And one of the creeping hands of totalitarianism running through the democracy is the Federal Bureau of Investigation… Because why does the FBI do all this? To scare the hell out of people… They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things.
That is how the government plans to get rid of activists and dissidents who stand in its way.
This has always been the modus operandi of the FBI (more aptly referred to as the Federal Bureau of Intimidation): muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.
Indeed, the FBI has a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures.
Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the FBI’s targets were civil rights activists, those suspected of having Communist ties, and anti-war activists. In more recent decades, the FBI has expanded its reach to target so-called domestic extremists, environmental activists, and those who oppose the police state.
Back in 2019, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism, without any apparent thought for the Constitution’s prohibitions on such overreach.
That misguided pledge sheds a curious light on the FBI’s latest nationwide spree of SWAT team raids, surveillance, disinformation campaigns, fear-mongering, paranoia, and strong-arm tactics.
In March 2021, under the pretext of carrying out an inventory of U.S. Private Vaults, FBI agents raided 1400 safe deposit boxes in Beverly Hills, seizing “more than $86 million in cash as well as gold, jewelry, and other valuables from property owners who were suspected of no crimes.”
In April 2021, FBI agents raided Rudy Giuliani’s home and office, seizing 18 electronic devices. More than a year later, Giuliani has yet to be charged with any crimes.
In June 2022, Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official under the Trump Administration, was led out of his home in pajamas while federal law enforcement officials raided his home.
Politics aside, the message is clear: this is how the government will deal with anyone who challenges its authority.
You’re next.
Unfortunately, while these overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear, none of this is new.
The government has been playing these mind games for a long time.
As Betty Medsger, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, noted in 1971, the FBI was engaged in practices that had never been reported, probably were unconstitutional, and were counter to the public’s understanding of the agency’s purpose.
The objective: target anti-government dissenters for wide-scale harassment, widespread surveillance and intimidation in order to enhance their paranoia and make them think there was an “FBI agent behind every mailbox.”
Medsger, the recipient of stolen government files that provided a glimpse into the workings of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency, would later learn that between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted an intensive domestic intelligence program, termed COINTELPRO, intended to neutralize domestic political dissidents.
As Congressman Steve Cohen explains, “COINTELPRO was set up to surveil and disrupt groups and movements that the FBI found threatening… many groups, including anti-war, student, and environmental activists, and the New Left were harassed, infiltrated, falsely accused of criminal activity.”
Sound familiar? The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, John Lennon, and hundreds more.
Among those most closely watched by the FBI was King, a man labeled by the FBI as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” All told, the FBI collected 17,000 pages of materials on King.
With wiretaps and electronic bugs planted in his home and office, King was kept under constant surveillance by the FBI with the aim of “neutralizing” him. He even received blackmail letters written by FBI agents suggesting that he either commit suicide or the details of his private life would be revealed to the public. The FBI kept up its pursuit of King until he was felled by a hollow-point bullet to the head in 1968.
John Lennon, a vocal peace protester and anti-war activist, was another high-profile example of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.
Lennon was singled out for daring to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, his phone calls monitored and data files illegally collected on his activities and associations.
For a while, at least, Lennon became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.
Years after Lennon’s assassination, it would be revealed that the FBI had collected 281 pages of files on him, including song lyrics.
J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, directed the agency to spy on the musician. There were also various written orders calling on government agents to frame Lennon for a drug bust. “The FBI’s files on Lennon … read like the writings of a paranoid goody-two-shoes,” observed reporter Jonathan Curiel.
As the New York Timesnotes, “Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds. They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power. ‘The U.S. vs. John Lennon’ … is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.”
Indeed, all of the many complaints we have about government today—surveillance, militarism, corruption, harassment, SWAT team raids, political persecution, spying, overcriminalization, etc.—were present in Lennon’s day and formed the basis of his call for social justice, peace and a populist revolution. As Adam Cohen of the New York Times points out, “The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics.”
The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, echoed these concerns about the government’s abuses:
“Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the 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. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.”
Fifty years later, we’re still having this same debate about the perils of government overreach.
For too long now, the American people have allowed their personal prejudices and politics to cloud their judgment and render them incapable of seeing that the treatment being doled out by the government’s lethal enforcers has remained consistent, no matter the threat.
The lesson to be learned is this: whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now, rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.
All of the excessive, abusive tactics employed by the government and its henchmen today will eventually be meted out on the general populace.
At that point, when you find yourself in the government’s crosshairs, it will not matter whether your skin is black or yellow or brown or white; it will not matter whether you’re an immigrant or a citizen; it will not matter whether you’re rich or poor; it will not matter whether you’re Republican or Democrat; and it certainly won’t matter who you voted for in the last presidential election.
At that point—when you find yourself subjected to dehumanizing, demoralizing, thuggish behavior by government bureaucrats who are hyped up on the power of their badges and empowered to detain, search, interrogate, threaten and generally harass anyone they see fit—remember you were warned.
Former President Donald Trump is facing his greatest legal peril yet, as New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil lawsuit Wednesday against Trump, three of his children and his family business for widespread financial fraud. The suit alleges they overvalued assets by billions of dollars in order to secure more favorable financial arrangements, then deflated those values to pay less in taxes. If the lawsuit is successful, the Trump Organization could be barred from conducting business in the state of New York. “He’s gotten away with this for decades. Now he’s going to have to answer in civil court,” says award-winning reporter David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump for years. Also on Wednesday, a three-judge federal appeals panel, including two who were appointed by Trump, allowed the Justice Department to continue reviewing the documents seized by the FBI from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:Former President Donald Trump suffered two major legal setbacks Wednesday. New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil lawsuit against Donald Trump, three of his adult children — Donald Jr., as well as Ivanka and Eric — and other executives at the Trump Organization, accusing them of widespread financial fraud. James accused the Trumps of inflating their business’s net worth by billions of dollars, while deceiving lenders, insurers and tax officials with false and misleading financial statements.
ATTORNEYGENERALLETITIAJAMES:Claiming you have money that you do not have does not amount to the art of the deal. It’s the art of the steal.
AMYGOODMAN:In a second legal setback for Trump, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Justice Department can resume its use of classified records seized at his Mar-a-Lago estate in its investigation of Trump’s mishandling of government documents. The judges, including two who were appointed by Trump, rejected key parts of an order by Federal District Judge Aileen Cannon that put the DOJ’s investigation on hold while a special master reviews the documents.
To talk about these two stories, we’re joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, who’s been covering Trump and writing books about him since the 1980s. He’s co-founder of DCReport and author of many books, includingIt’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.
David Cay Johnston, welcome back toDemocracy Now!So, let’s start with Letitia James. Talk about the significance of this civil suit against Donald Trump and his three adult children.
DAVIDCAYJOHNSTON:Well, Letitia James’s 220-page lawsuit identifies 200 acts of fraud. In some cases, Trump overvalued real estate he owned by 65 times. Worse, for Trump, Donald often says, when something is amiss, “Well, I just did what the lawyers told me to do,” or “I did what the accountants told me to do.” James shows in her filing that Trump got an appraisal for one of his buildings in Manhattan of $200 million. He then valued it at more than $500 million and, in his financial statement, attributed the value to the appraisers. You know, real estate can involve ranges. You say your house is worth $300,000; the tax collector says it’s worth $350,000. But you’re not going to be able to assert that that house is worth $30,000 or $3,000. And that’s effectively what Donald was doing.
And what he got out of this, Amy, is, by inflating his net worth, he was able to borrow more money and borrow on better terms, which hurts all the rest of us because there’s not an unlimited amount of money out there to borrow. And then, by deflating the values for property tax purposes, he avoided paying the amount of property tax he should have paid on those properties. So it was a double win for him, and he’s gotten away with this for decades. Now he’s going to have to answer in civil court.
AMYGOODMAN:So, talk about the significance of this, what he and his children face, and the fact that although this is civil, that could bring down his empire in New York, he’s also — Letitia James is referring this for criminal charges to theIRSand the Manhattan DA.
DAVIDCAYJOHNSTON:Well, let’s do the civil side first. You and I, as natural persons, have a right to our life. Corporations are artificial persons. They are creatures of the state, and they exist only by the grace of the state and their compliance with the law. She is proposing that the Trump Organization and its affiliated organizations, these corporations, be put out of existence. She wants the court to rule that he may not serve on any board. So he could still own property, but he would have to own it directly in his own name, which exposes him to all sorts of legal liability. He would not be able to borrow any money from any bank that is certified to be a bank in New York, which means if he wants to borrow money, he’d end up going to some little bank in the middle of Iowa. All of this is just devastating to his business. And the same restrictions would apply to his three older children and two of his former executives. And keep in mind that the New York State Attorney General’s Office, which only has civil authority, previously got the fake Trump University shut down and the Trump Foundation, which was a fraud, and collected damages, significant damages in those cases.
Now, on the criminal side, Letitia James’s office has been working with Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, on his criminal case. He killed a criminal case on racketeering, but Bragg has apparently continued to look into Trump in the area of taxes. And it’s very clear the civil complaint makes out what, if verified and found by a court to be true, are criminal actions, many criminal actions, by Trump, his children, the other executives and the companies themselves. She has also referred this to the Southern District of New York, the federal prosecutors in Manhattan and to the Internal Revenue Service.
NERMEENSHAIKH:David, could you also talk about the second legal setback that Trump has faced, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the Justice Department can resume its use of classified records seized at his Mar-a-Lago estate in its investigation of Trump’s mishandling of government documents? Talk about the significance of that and whether you think, overall, this may disqualify Trump from running for president in the next election.
DAVIDCAYJOHNSTON:Well, Donald Trump — Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago was the subject of a search warrant. UnarmedFBIagents in mufti, so that you didn’t know — they didn’t have jackets on saying ”FBI” — came, executed a search warrant. Trump then went to court, and a judge that he appointed wrote one of the most incoherent decisions by a judge I’ve ever read in my life. Aileen Cannon did not seem to even understand that theFBIis part of the intelligence community in the U.S. And she banned theFBIand the Justice Department from pursuing, with the use of these documents, whether Donald Trump had endangered American national security, particularly the identities of spies and cooperating agents.
The Justice Department appealed this decision, and a three-judge panel on the 11th Circuit — two of the judges appointed by Donald Trump, one by Barack Obama — all agreed that this decision by the judge is nonsense. I mean, they, in legal terms, slapped her around for being an idiot. And they said that, of course, the Justice Department may go back and continue to use these documents in an effort to assess how much damage has been done to American national security and pursue the criminal cases.
This is very, very bad for Donald Trump. The government has made clear that they are looking at Trump for violation of the Espionage Act. And, of course, there’s a fundamental question of: Where are the missing files that, according to the Justice Department, identify people who might be, for example, a high-level official inside of the Kremlin or Tehran or some other place, who are providing us with useful information? So, this is very bad for Trump.
AMYGOODMAN:David Cay Johnston, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, co-founder and editor ofDCReport.org.
Coming up, protests are escalating in Iran after a 22-year-old woman died in police custody after being detained for allegedly improperly wearing a hijab. Also later, we’ll speak with the deputy foreign minister of Cuba. Stay with us.
Originally published at The Dissenter, a Shadowproof newsletter
In 2019, longtime national security journalist William Arkin appeared on “Democracy Now!” and spoke out against liberals in the United States who believed the FBI (and CIA) could save the country from President Donald Trump.
“The FBI, in particular, has a deplorable record in American society, from Martin Luther King and the peace movements of the 1960s all the way up through Wen Ho Lee and others who have been persecuted by the FBI,” Arkin stated. “And there’s no real evidence that the FBI is that competent of an institution to begin with in terms of even pursuing the prosecutions that it’s pursuing.”
“But yet we lionize them. We hold them up on a pedestal, that somehow they are the truth-tellers, that they’re the ones who are getting to the bottom of things, when there’s just no evidence that that’s the case,” Arkin added.
Arkin has a proven record of speaking out against perpetual war and challenging the immense power of the national security state. He co-authored the 2011 book, Top Secret America: The Rise of the American Security State and also wrote the book American Coup, which he describes as documenting the “creeping fascism of homeland security.”
When Arkin appeared on “Democracy Now!”, he had just left NBC News and circulated a letter that criticized the media organization for “emulating” the national security state in the era of Trump.
I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I’d also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including results). I accept that there’s a lot to report here, but I’m more worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step back and think why so little changes with regard to America’s wars.
I recount all of the above to show you why I setup an interview with Arkin about the Justice Department and FBI’s handling of the investigation into Trump and his possession of documents at Mar-a-Lago. He has the credibility to offer important insights into what pursuing an Espionage Act prosecution against a former US president may mean for the United States.
Arkin is currently the senior editor for intelligence at Newsweek. He has written multiple reports related to the Justice Department’s investigation into former President Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified information. His reporting revealed that the FBI had an informant, who had knowledge of what documents Trump had in his possession and where they were located. He later reported more details on Trump’s “private stash” of documents.
In the 30-minute interview, which was recorded on August 19, Arkin outlines the timeline of events, what the DOJ investigation may mean for Trump’s potential 2024 presidential campaign, and why he believes the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago has sparked one of the biggest political disasters in the history of the bureau.
*Below is a transcript of the interview with minor edits to improve clarity.
WILLIAM ARKIN: It’s important to just talk about the background of what happened at Mar-a-Lago because this has been going on since Trump left office. So even though most people were not aware, there’s been a battle between the Trump camp and the National Archives since January 2021 about this whole question of what records the Trump administration had taken with them from the White House.
If you talk to Trump people, they’ll tell you, oh, we had such a rushed departure—and of course the reason is because Donald Trump did not accept the terms of the election—that we by mistake took boxes to Mar-a-Lago. Indeed, in January of this year the Trump camp delivered 15 boxes of presidential records to the National Archives, and it was in the course of that delivery that I think the National Archives came to see that these were not complete sets of records, that there were a lot of presidential records which were still being held by the Trump camp, and they requested additional records.
And basically this has been going on now since January 2022 this year and that culminated by a grand jury subpoena, which was delivered to the Trump camp in the end of May, and that subpoena basically said here are specific documents and types of documents that we would like you to return and the next step essentially was that three FBI agents and a Justice Department official visited Mar-a-Lago on June 3, and they retrieved some documents. But they also in the process of that inspected the storage room at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump was keeping his presidential materials and recognized that there were additional materials with additional classified information.
Now the FBI knew that there were additional materials. They asked the Trump [camp] to put better locks on the door of the storage room. They knew that they were there. So when the search occurred on August 8, it was a surprise to most people. Maybe not so much to the people who had been following this back and forth. But it does raise the question as to whether or not what Merrick Garland, the attorney general says, is true, which is did they in fact exhaust all the possibilities for getting the additional documents.
Now we know that they took 27 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago last week. So that’s a total of 42 boxes of documents, and the 27 boxes of documents that they took under this search warrant included 11 sets of classified documents and an additional leather box that they had retrieved that contained top secret sensitive compartmented information.
Mar-a-Lago (Photo: Government Accountability Office)
I reported earlier last week that the FBI had a confidential human source inside the Trump camp that essentially let them on to the fact that Donald Trump was secreting additional documents away. And at this point based upon my reporting, it looks like the FBI had two targets in their raid on Mar-a-Lago. One was to retrieve the additional boxes that they knew were in the storage room, and two was to find this stash of documents that Donald Trump was evidently segregating from those 27 boxes, which the FBI concluded as part of their investigation that Donald Trump had no intention of returning.
I wouldn’t say that the search at Mar-a-Lago was a cover for the fact that they knew that Donald Trump had additional material, but Donald Trump himself has given us clues to the fact that there were two separate searches. Because we know that the storage room was entered. We know that they entered the bedroom in the presidential office. Donald Trump is the one who said that they broke into his personal safe. And in fact when the FBI returned Donald Trump’s passports earlier this week, it was evident that they had gotten them from somewhere that wasn’t the storage room. It pretty much confirmed what Donald Trump had claimed—that his personal safe had been broken into.
It’s kind of a game of chicken between the FBI and the Trump camp. Right, Donald Trump can’t say, oh, I was secreting away particular documents, and that’s what the FBI is really going after. He’s just going to go on this straight I’ve-been-politically-persecuted line, and that’s what he’s going to stick with. And of course once the Trump camp gets their act together and figures out what they’re actually going to say, the reality is they’re probably going to argue, why did [the FBI] execute the search warrant at all because we were cooperating with the National Archives? And if they had asked us for additional boxes, we would have returned them.
So, yes, it’s true that Trump has kind of argued they were my private papers. They weren’t belonging to the National Archives. But it’s sort of irrelevant because if you don’t consider what it was that the FBI really going after, you wouldn’t understand why they would have thought it necessary to execute this extraordinary and unprecedented of a personal residence of a former president, which has never been done in our history.
If you understand that the FBI obviously felt that Donald Trump was not planning to return everything, that they knew from their confidential human source and their investigation that it existed (and more or less where it existed), and that they were concerned that Donald Trump would weaponize that material. And that could be using it for monetary gain or using it as part of his election efforts. We don’t really know the answer there.
But if you consider all of those, then the search begins to make some sense, even though I think politically it’s been a disaster for the FBI, and as much as the mainstream might be rallying around the FBI and saying, oh, poor FBI, the truth of the matter is that it seems like this is another naive investigation on the part of the FBI and Justice Department that thinks that because we have all of the paperwork in order that it makes sense to execute this but I think in fact it’s probably strengthened Donald Trump’s hand within the Republican Party and also within the electorate, who feel like in fact after six years of investigations if they haven’t indicted him yet that it is persecution.
And there’s some validity to that. Let’s just imagine for a moment that Bernie Sanders was president, and that the FBI was going after him for six years. I mean people would be screaming bloody murder. Either indict him or stop it. And so I imagine in the coming weeks we are either going to see Donald Trump indicted finally for a peripheral question, which is possession of these documents. Not the content of the documents, but possession of them.
Or we’re going to see a political disaster in the making, which is that everyone is going to rally behind Donald Trump within the Republican camp and basically say this is an outrageous act on the part of the Biden administration, even though I believe that it didn’t have political overtones to it or undertones to it. That they inadvertently stepped into something like the Mueller investigation or like Comey talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails, where they just didn’t understand what the political fallout of their actions were going to be.
FBI Director Christopher Wray (Photo: Federal Bureau of Investigation)
KEVIN GOSZTOLA: What is your assessment of the divisions or factions or the nature of the FBI or Justice Department—not necessarily just right now but in the FBI or Justice Department up to this moment—and their relationship to Donald Trump?
Because I think it’s so important for people to know the deeper context, and since you’ve done this reporting on administrations for so long, how extraordinary it was that they had such a different posture to the president than some of the more recent previous presidents in history. Because this relationship is completely unlike Obama. It’s completely unlike George W. Bush. It’s completely unlike what we have with Joe Biden. There’s no reason for antagonism to exist between those prior presidents.
ARKIN: Well, we’ve never had a Donald Trump before. That’s the most important ingredient here. The FBI has always been a political organization, though it would like to portray itself as not one. During the civil rights era or during the communist scare of the 1950s or doing the period of time where it was basically persecuting those who were against the war in Vietnam, etc, the FBI has always hewed in the direction of being a right-wing institution with an antagonism towards the left.
With Donald Trump, the shift began to be apparent that the FBI, in fact, had a lot of people within its ranks who were anti-Trump. In fact, the long bipartisan era of the FBI was over. We live in a topsy-turvy world where the Rachel Maddows of the world are cheering the FBI on and the right-wing hates them. That’s unprecedented in modern history, that the left somehow thinks that the CIA and FBI are going to protect us from Donald Trump rather than the right [supporting these agencies]. Even like the left is quasi-cheerleaders for perpetual war and for the continuation of the war in Syria and for the war in Ukraine, etc. Whereas the right is much more of a traditional American isolationist entity.
Look, Donald Trump isn’t smart enough to articulate and/or represent the actual currents, which exist within American society, but there are currents that exist within American society. It’s Washington DC, and the New York bubble and the LA bubble versus the rest of the country, or urban versus rural. Whatever way you want to describe it. Donald Trump was elected because of that divide. Because of that increasing divide between officialdom and the rest of the American population.
So the FBI, which has always been seen in the mainstream’s eyes as being a neutral party, became a very political party. They just did. They became a political party. And at the same time that Barack Obama was being criticized during the 2016 presidential election cycle for not doing about the accusations vis a vis Russian collusion and Russian intervention—Obama said, well, I’m not going to do more because I don’t want to put my finger on the scale of the election. It’s up to the American people to decide who is the next president.
But they wanted the FBI to put their finger on the scale, and that was what happened when Comey had a press conference right prior to the election and stated Hillary [Clinton] broke the law but we’re not going to indict her. That just pissed everybody off on both sides, but most importantly, what it did was introduce the idea that Hillary Clinton was a lawbreaker and hadn’t been held accountable whereas Donald Trump was being accused of being lawbreaker and people were assuming that he was guilty.
I’m sorry. I live in a country where I still believe innocent until proven guilty. Donald Trump is innocent. He’s innocent of claims of collusion. He’s innocent of claims of cooperation. He’s innocent of all these claims until he is proven guilty. So while we might be comfortable in the mainstream saying Donald Trump’s lies about the election—I mean, listen to NPR. They say it in that way, and it should be Donald Trump’s claims about the election. By saying the word lies, you are already declaring what your political position is. That’s not impartial journalism as I understand it to be.
So Donald Trump is innocent until proven guilty, and now this search warrant has been executed. I hope as a citizen that either the Justice Department brings charges against Donald Trump or it starts to reevaluate whether it continues to spend its resources and our money in going after this guy.
GOSZTOLA: Let me ask you a few specific questions. Do you actually believe that this is a mistake on Donald Trump’s part that he has these boxes? I seem to get from the way you are setting up the timeline that that seems like a very convenient excuse at this hour. Have you seen any evidence that they really made this mistake with this many boxes of documents?
ARKIN: I mean, Melania’s shoes might have taken 42 boxes themselves. We don’t know how many boxes were actually removed from the White House in that six-hour period on January 20. But I think it’s important that you think because Donald Trump screwed up and didn’t have a normal transition and boxes ended up going to Mar-a-Lago that shouldn’t have gone to Mar-a-Lago, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t Donald Trump’s fault. I mean, this is his trick, right? They were sent by mistake, but if it had been a normal transition, they wouldn’t have been sent by mistake.
You have to ultimately say that this falls on Donald Trump in terms of what direction was given to the White House staff and his subordinates in terms of preparing the White House for the Biden administration to come into the office. So, yes, I can see that the documents might have ended up in Mar-a-Lago by mistake, but the mistake is that Donald Trump didn’t accept the results of the election and didn’t facilitate an ordinary transition.
Why it’s so important then to see the decision-making on the part of the FBI and the Justice Department about this extraordinary search is that it obviously has to be about something bigger than just run-of-the-mill secrets. And I know that some people will think, well wait a minute? Top secret documents are documents that could cause exceptionally grave damage to the United States. But I’ve been in this business a long time, and I also am a former intelligence officer in the US military, and I can tell you there’s a heckuva lot of top secret documents that have no meaning outside of just the source of information that is just describing what we know.
A lot of this [information] is classified because of the possibility that its release would divulge intelligence sources and methods, and some of those intelligence sources and methods, such as our satellite capabilities, are well-known anyhow. But I understand that people have this idea that somehow Donald Trump stole secrets, when I’m kind of doubtful that there was really much material that was in there that was intentional or detrimental to US national security in a specific way.
However, we know that Donald Trump during his entire presidency took documents to his residence, asked for copies of documents, ripped pages out of documents that were delivered to him, squirreled away documents that were interesting to him, and those documents dealt with everything from Russiagate and the political travails of Donald Trump to nuclear capabilities of Iran and North Korea and possibly even Russia and China. So we know that it’s a wide variety of documents—things that Donald Trump found interesting. That’s basically this leather box or this separate stash of documents that were in his personal safe, and that was really the focus.
I think in the end people will be surprised that it’s not really an argument about the sensitivity of the documents per se. It’s just about the documents. It’s just about the documents. They don’t need to argue that the documents are highly classified or whatever. That’s terminology that we use in the news media. And it’s kind of bullshit.
If Donald Trump just had a bunch of personal letters that belonged to the National Archives under the Presidential Records Act, they would still be making the same arguments as to why we need to retrieve those letters from the Trump camp. So I think it was really only in the case of documents that they thought that Donald Trump had personally segregated—and might use in the future, that were the ones that they were concerned about.
Photo: Trump White House Archives
GOSZTOLA: That’s the problem, right? We get this from your reporting. It does a good job of communicating this. It doesn’t seem like the FBI is moved to conduct the search just because Donald Trump has [these boxes]. Because we see the ongoing conversations with representatives over returning the boxes. But there’s something about the stash. There’s some kind of fear that they have that he’s going to do something with the documents that he has privately, and obviously, we’re at an important point in time.
There’s a Trump circus, but there’s also an election circus. We are dominated from 2023 to November 2024 will be primaries and general electon, wall-to-wall media. And you know this better than anyone having survived alongside it—how much elections dominate and overshadow important national security journalism and other stories that should be given attention rather than this horse race coverage.
It’s hard not to think based upon what you’ve been reporting that there is some motivation that, okay, we have a small window of time to do this before Donald Trump might start his campaign. And also these documents, as your sources told you, [Trump] is going to weaponize this information.
So I think it’s worth asking you what your assessment is of the Russiagate counter-investigation. That is the investigation into the people who were investigating Donald Trump and the abuses of power that they were alleged to have committed by people who were empowered, like Durham, to investigate these people and what was happening. There have been some things related to Carter Page, and there’s been some isolated examples. [The Trump camp has] tried to craft a narrative that people within these institutions were trying to, as they would put it, take down Donald Trump. That’s how they present it to the American people.
If the FBI is going in there to take this stash of documents, and it is proven out that there are documents related to the Russia investigation that Donald Trump was keeping because he thought they exonerated him or whatever, that seems pretty bad as far as the FBI and the idea that it’s supposed to be a neutral institution. I mean, obviously, historically it’s always acted politically. But if the FBI is going above and beyond to seem like it’s not a political organization, how do you green light a search when it is going to be so patently obvious later that you are taking this step?
ARKIN: Let’s talk about it in the context of 2024. First of all, we have to understand that what was been revealed as result of the 2016 election and Russiagate is that there was FBI wrongdoing. Whether you consider minor or not, the truth of the matter is that we’ve had FBI agents go to jail already for falsifying FISA applications, for using official email and text to campaign against Donald Trump as a candidate, and even people who were involved in the investigations who are supposed to be neutral parties essentially declaring that they are anti-Trump.
I don’t take from that that it’s big or little. I don’t want to quibble about whether or not the FBI is or isn’t pro- anti-Trump, but what we see is they make mistakes. Tons of them. This is not a perfect institution. We should stop seeing it as a perfect institution.
If you understand that this is a flawed institution, where the lawyers are saying, well, you can do this, you can do that, and you can do this and you can do that, and now the FBI has to decide are we publicly going to be able to do this, that the reality in the end is the FBI seems to operate on the idea that if the paperwork is immaculate that the political consequences are going to be neutral. That’s where the FBI has gotten it wrong over and over again. The paperwork can be immaculate, and yet they can be doing exactly wrong thing politically.
If I’m a smart Justice Department official, I’m going to say we got to let the chips fall where they may. If the raid on Mar-a-Lago helps Donald Trump, we still have to do what’s legally correct to do. Now you might ask, well, did they exhaust all the possibilities in talking to the Trump camp? Did they absolutely have to do this? What evidence did they have that Donald Trump was going to weaponize the information? Was there some imminent reason for them to have to do it now? Etc etc.
In the end, if I’m a Justice Department official appearing before the news media, I might answer every question that I understand that you are arguing the political consequences, but our job is to enforce the law. And Donald Trump was breaking the law, and we needed to enforce the law and it took us this long to get to the place where it was obvious that Donald Trump was not going to return the material that he had in his possession.
All of this is going to come out in the coming weeks or months, but whether or not it is going to benefit Donald Trump in this election cycle, and then specifically, in 2024, we’ll have to see. I’m fearful that the effect of this is going to be that more people will lose respect for the government. More people will see Washington as persecuting Donald Trump, and that the Biden administration and the Biden Justice Department are not going to be able to get off that merry-go-round and that’s going to add to the Trump camp’s constituency.
We already see that prominent Republicans from all walks of life except for two people on the planet (Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) have all rallied behind Donald Trump on this issue. I would say that this is perhaps one of the largest crises in the FBI’s history. They may not understand it themselves. They may have made mistakes here in what they did, and they may have been legally justified to do what they did. But politically I believe it will be seen as a disaster.
GOSZTOLA: Finally I want to put to you the issue of the Espionage Act being part of the conversation. A lot of my work has been watching and monitoring and covering the developments in individual Espionage Act prosecutions over the last decade-plus. Those individuals and their attorneys would also say that they were charged for materials that would not cause exceptionally grave damage, and yet the book was thrown thrown at them and they had their lives ruined and their careers ended. So why shouldn’t the same be true for Donald Trump?
I think it presents a crisis. I think it’s part of this crisis of the liberals and the Democratic Party establishment really feeling strongly about pushing forward with whatever the Justice Department is about to do. What’s your sense of the risk if Donald Trump were to be charged with violating the Espionage Act?
You’re talking to people about the potential charges that could be brought. Is this even a distinct possibility? You said unlawful possession, which can be within that law. But there are other laws. Do you think it would be a more minor law to keep the Espionage Act out of the conversation?
ARKIN: We now know that the Espionage Act was only being referenced because of section 793(d) of the Espionage Act, which is an area of the Espionage Act that deals with if you are in possession of classified documents and the federal government asks you to return them, and you don’t return them, you’re in violation of 793(d) of the Espionage Act.
It’s called the Espionage Act, what it’s been called since 1917, but it also happens to be just one of a handful of laws that deal with security classification. The rest of the security classification system exists under executive order. That’s why Donald Trump and his people are arguing that he declassified everything. But it’s not altogether true. Some elements of classified information do fall under statute, such as atomic energy information or information about the identities of CIA sources, etc. Those fall under statute.
So it’s unfortunate that the Espionage Act is the place where this is contained, this provision about returning classified material in your possession, because it’s abused in a way because we don’t have modern legislation. Perhaps one of the solutions will be that we will finally have a law passed, which will specify what is classified and unclassified information and what is the modern security classification system and where are the authorities and what’s against the law and what’s not against the law.
That does influence Julian Assange’s problems in the courts. It influences other whistleblowers who have been charged with the Espionage Act, and even if they were not guilty of espionage, as we think of it, they are charged under the Espionage Act. So we need to clean this up because I don’t think that we have a law in a proper way that really specifies what the true state of play is here.
If I support Julian Assange, I want Donald Trump to spur along a better articulation of what is the actual purpose of the Espionage Act. To have say for instance Julian Assange, a foreign national charged under the Espionage Act—espionage against who? If he committed espionage against Australia, then he should be charged in his own country of his nationality.
In some ways, if I’m a supporter of Julian Assange, I want to see that Donald Trump helps to clarify what is this law and what it can really be used for. Because in the cases of [Chelsea] Manning, in the cases of Tom Drake, in the case of Julian Assange, I think it’s been misapplied. And in the case of journalism, there have been attempts at various times within our recent past going back to the Reagan administration, where the federal government has sought to use the Espionage Act as a way of suppressing a free press.
Again, if I’m really interested in the future, I would want to see Congress step in finally and establish an omnibus law that deals with security classification in this country. That’s more important than Donald Trump.
In a Press Conference on Wednesday 10 August, former President Donald Trump said that on Monday, two days earlier, more than 30 FBI agents raided his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida. The FBI refused to allow Mr. Trump’s attorney or any other witnesses to be present during the razzia which lasted over 9 hours. Mr. Trump was suggesting they might have used the opportunity to plant evidence against him.
And why not?
It is clear that the Trump residence Mar-a-Lago raid was not about a bunch of documents that he may have taken with him from the White House. It was about much more. And it is not over yet. US Attorney General Merrick Garland, has intimidated that never before in the Justice Department’s 152-year history, was such an extensive investigation of a former President carried out.
These are dark times for our nation,” former President Trump declared in response to the FBI’s Monday morning raid on his Mar-a-Lago private residence. He compared the event to “an assault” that “could only take place in broken, Third-World countries.”
The President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute, Paul du Quenoy, calls the The Mar-a-Lago Raid “a Desperate Act of a Corrupt Establishment.”
The former President remains a political force to be reckoned with, as he claims the 2020 elections were stolen and he allegedly has proof that it was. Yet, the documented proof was not even admitted to be examined in any of the State Courts, to which he presented it, nor by the Supreme Court.
Whether Trump’s case was right or wrong is of lesser importance. The outright rejection of looking at a case presented by a former President is so unusual that it raises a myriad of questions.
Donald Trump’s 2016 election win took many by surprise. How can the public elect such a clown was the general mainstream reaction. Throughout his Presidency – and even before – he was lambasted in the US and around the world in ways no former US President was dealt with by international diplomacy and media.
Is it because Mr. Trump, against all odds and against the past and present wannabe world trend, is not a globalist, but a staunch nationalist?
It is the times of the Globalists. There is no more left and right, socialism and communism, Democrats and Republicans. There are only globalists and anti-globalists.
The World Economic Forum, or WEF-driven global agenda under the Great Reset and UN Agenda 2030, drives towards a One World Order (OWO), run by a small elite.
The WEF’s eternal CEO, Klaus Schwab, has made it clear during the last WEF Conference in May 2022 in Davos that “We have the Means to Improve the State of the World.” What he really meant to say is that, we this small but important group of people in this room, have the power to impose the shape of the world. See this.
This concept of taking full control of the world is one of the corporate financial giants of the sorts of BlackRock, Vanguard, StateStreet and more of Wall Street banking titans and private billionaire oligarchs. The WEF, generously funded by them, represents their extremely powerful interests around the globe. See WEF Leadership and Governance, Board of Trustees and more.
This One World Globalist concept is diametrically opposed to the world vision of Donald Trump. He is a nationalist à la “Make America Great Again” and wants the US to continue in a leading role in the world. But contrary to what the media have been indoctrinating the world at large with, not as a sole empire, but rather as a key player in a multi-polar world.
During the Seventy-fifth Session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020, Mr. Trump called upon the leaders of all countries, recommending to them to do likewise for their countries — make them strong, independent, as autonomous sovereign nations. This is not precisely a globalist view. But it is a view liked by most countries, and even more so by the people around the world.
By now, most everybody knows that a One World Order would be equal to a One World Tyranny, an OWT. For that reason, in the hearts of people and many politicians in the US and around the world, Mr. Trump is very popular.
Of course, most of them don’t dare to say so, because the media has slandered Trump and his, as well as any non-globalist views, to such an extent that openly admitting a sovereign nationalist opinion would be looked at as utterly shameful.
It is therefore no coincidence that last Wednesday, 10 August 2022, just two days after the FBI raid on his residence, the former President was subpoenaed to appear before the New York State Attorney General (AG), Letitia James, for a six-hour deposition on his Real Estate company’s business practices. Except for stating his name, Trump repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Other than that, not much transpired to the public from this deposition.
What is interesting is not the deposition in itself, but the two apparently independent parallel events against a former President, the FBI raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, and the six-hour questioning by the New York State AG.
These legal actions against the former President will be blown out of proportion by the media, so as to diminish his power and chances to run again for President in 2024; and they are also aiming at preventing the Republicans – most of whom support Trump — to take over both the House and the Senate in the Mid-Term Elections this coming fall.
Although Trump said he would announce in September 2022 whether he plans to run for President in 2024, this recent video looks like “candidate” Trump is already on his campaign trail – on Telegram channel, sounding like a Trump Comeback Speech. .
If elections were held today, Trump would beat Biden by a landslide of 45 to 32, or by a margin of 40%. See Newsweek poll
It is clear these legal fiascos – and there may be more to come – are last-ditch efforts to prevent the WEF’s Globalists House of Cards Would-be-Empire from further disintegrating. The crumbling Globalist Cult will do whatever they can to prevent Donald Trump from running for President in 2024.
On July 29, 2022, the FBI raided the Uhuru House in St. Petersburg, Florida and the Uhuru Solidarity Center in St. Louis, Missouri. The raids were connected with the indictment of a Russian national who is accused of attempting to “cause turmoil in the United States” by engaging with “Unindicted Co-Conspirators” to act as agents of the Russian Federation.
The African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) is the organization targeted by the FBI for a very simple reason. It is a Black organization which has dared to confront and oppose U.S. imperialism. The alleged connection with the Russian government kills two birds with one stone. The Russiagate hoax is continually resuscitated as it gives new life to claims of election and other interference and Black people’s organizations are as always the first to be targeted by the State.
The specter of a Biden administration-authorized Department of Justice (DOJ) initiated McCarthy-era witch hunt was posed in bold relief last week as FBI agents took aim at a Black liberation organization that has been a sharp critic of the U.S./NATO-backed war in Ukraine and a defender of poor nations threatened with U.S. sanctions, coups, embargoes and blockades. These include Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Iran.
Replete with flash/bang grenades deployed at 5:00 am on Friday, July 29 to startle African Peoples Socialist Party (APSP) leader Omali Yeshitela and his wife at their home in St. Louis, Missouri, FBI agents, carrying federal search warrants, ordered them to come out with their hands up. They were handcuffed and ordered to sit on the curb.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States raided the offices and homes of members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement.
At 5 am in the morning on July 29, FBI agents in St. Louis, Missouri, targeted the Uhuru Solidarity Center and the homes of 80 year-old APSP founder Omali Yeshitela and the African People’s Solidarity Committee chair Penny Hess. FBI agents simultaneously busted into the Uhuru House and the group’s radio station Black Power 96.3 LFM in St. Petersburg, Florida.
FBI agents told Yeshitela, the founder of the APSP, that they raided his home in north St. Louis because they had indicted a Russian national named Aleksandr Ionov.
Ionov is a Moscow resident who the U.S. Justice Department claims engaged in a campaign to “influence” U.S. political groups and “interfere” in US elections. He founded a group called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia that hosted international solidarity conferences, which Yeshitela attended.
No one allegedly connected to Ionov was charged with a crime nor were they issued a grand jury subpoena.
Members of the Uhuru Movement and various leaders of other solidarity groups condemned the FBI raids as a continuation of the history of attacks on Black activists, like Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, and Marcus Garvey, as part of COINTELPRO under FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Armed FBI Agents Deploy A Drone And Flash-Bang Grenades
Uhuru is the Swahili word for freedom or independence, and the Uhuru Movement was founded 50 years ago to complete the Black revolution of the 1960s. Its organizers are involved in the global struggle against white colonialism in the US that goes back centuries. They engage in campaigns for reparations for slavery and education and community development in areas impacted by structural racism.
As Yeshitela recalled, he was in his home with his wife and organizer Ona Yeshitela, when FBI agents alerted them to their presence with a loudspeaker. They were instructed to come out of their home with their hands up and nothing in their hands.
While talking through the loudspeaker, FBI agents set off flash-bang grenades in the neighborhood. They broke a window to the basement.
Omari led the way down the stairs with his wife following him, and as Ona shared, “This big ol’ drone met me coming down the stairs, like it’s going to attack me.”
“When I get outside, what I see is that there was an armored vehicle in front of the house. There are combat-clad FBI agents all over the place carrying automatic weapons. They not only are in front of the house. They are occupying the porch and the yard of the neighbors next door. And this is a really poor and economically depressed community what we live in,” Omari said.
FBI agents handcuffed and detained Omari and Ona. Both were instructed to sit on a curb, but they refused.
Omari was then told that they apparently had a search warrant related to the indictment of a Russian national and somehow his name and his wife’s name were linked to this person. But FBI agents would not show him a search warrant.
It became clear to Omari that the FBI agents did not intend to arrest him, and this was all a “big show” for those in the community who were watching.
Ransacking The Uhuru House And The Group’s Solidarity Center
Omari told the press the FBI agents seized their cellphones and took all of their devices, computers, and other electronics in their home. They also put tape over a doorbell security camera so his neighbors would not have footage of the raid.
FBI agents used a battering ram to bust down the door of the Uhuru House, which is the movement’s office in St. Petersburg, and Omari claimed a 40-year archive on the movement was seized by agents.
A report from the Associated Press indicated, “Akile Anai, who describes herself as director of agitation and propaganda for the African People’s Socialist Party, said agents searched her car and took her cellphone and laptop computer on Friday in addition to raiding the Uhuru House.”
The African People’s Solidarity Committee operates out of the solidarity center in south St. Louis. It is the white arm of the Uhuru Movement that goes “behind enemy lines” to enlist support for black liberation in white communities. They have organized for decades.
“[The FBI] took a battering ram. They also had drones,” when they raided the solidarity center and an apartment above the center, according to Penny Hess, the white chair of the African People’s Solidarity Committee.
Jesse Nevelsky is the white national chair of the Uhuru Movement, and he lives with his partner in the apartment above the solidarity center. He said local and county police helped the FBI conduct the raid.
The FBI put Nevelsky and his partner, who also works for the organization, in handcuffs and moved them out of the building while six or seven FBI agents pointed assault rifles at them.
“Then they took five and a half to six hours to ransack both the solidarity center and the apartment upstairs and took computers, cellphones, hard drives, files, notebooks, and a whole long list of things,” Nevelsky shared.
‘All The Makings Of A Witch Hunt’
On September 24, 2010, the FBI raided the homes of 23 antiwar, labor, and international solidarity activists in Chicago, Minneapolis, and other parts of the Midwest. They were issued grand jury subpoenas and informed they were under investigation for “materially supporting” foreign terrorist organizations.
The FBI targeted the activists for their solidarity work with organizers in Colombia and Palestine. They later learned an undercover FBI agent infiltrated their group and attempted to entrap them. None were ever charged with any crimes.
Like the raids against the Uhuru Movement, FBI agents seized notebooks, family photos, membership lists for antiwar groups, and other political documents.
The activists formed the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, and along with the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression in Chicago, they put out a statement condemning the latest FBI raids.
“We oppose all efforts by the U.S. government to target activists in any progressive movement in this country. We call for an end to investigations, political harassment, and threats against activists and our movements,” the groups declared.
“The DOJ is alleging that those raided collaborated with a ‘Russian asset’ to spread ‘Russian propaganda.’ At a time when the US is engaged in an imperialist proxy war with Russia in the Ukraine, these raids have all the makings of a witch hunt.”
The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) also put out a statement against the FBI’s “repression and intimidation tactics.”
“BAP believes that these raids continue the history of state repression directed against Black people in the U.S.,” the group asserted. “This repression now occurs under the guise of opposing ‘adversary’ nations but regardless of how these actions are characterized, Black people still bear the brunt of surveillance and police violence.”
“The APSP has the right to freely associate with people around the world, to hold any political beliefs it may choose, and to express them without fear of intimidation, persecution, or prosecution,” BAP proclaimed.
US Justice Department Alleges Russian National ‘Directed’ Uhuru Movement
APSP founder Omari Yeshitela attended a conference hosted by Aleksandr Ionov’s organization on September 20, 2015, that was called “A Dialogue of Nations: the Right to Self-Determination and the Construction of a Multipolar World.”
Yeshitela and other Uhuru Movement members are labeled as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the indictment against Ionov. Particularly, it accuses Yeshitela of entering into a partnership with Ionov while knowing he was an agent of the Russian government.
One of the other “unindicted co-conspirators” in the indictment is Louis J. Marinelli, who was the founder of CalExit, a right-wing campaign in the style of Brexit that called for California to secede from the United States.
Marinelli, who is white, was previously linked to the Russian government in US news media reports, but the FBI did not raid Marinelli’s home or the homes of any individuals linked to the secession campaign.
The indictment maintains that Ionov worked with FSB or Russian intelligence officers to “use members of U.S. political groups as foreign agents of Russia within the United States.” He allegedly “recruited members of various political groups within the United States and other countries, including Ukraine, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, to attend conferences in Russia.”
“The purpose of the conferences was to encourage the participating groups to advocate for separating from their home countries,” the indictment further contends. “At these conferences, Ionov entered into partnership with some of the U.S. separatist groups, including groups from Florida and California.”
“Thereafter, Ionov exercised direction or control over these groups on behalf of the FSB. Ionov also monitored and regularly reported on their activities to the FSB.”
But Yeshitela repeatedly stated that he had not received any Russian money, and Ionov never “influenced” the agenda of the Uhuru Movement. “We’re 50 years old. The Russians didn’t create us.”
Kalambayi Andenet, who is the international president of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, was even more pointed in her statement. “Don’t insult our intelligence by saying Russia, China, or anyone will lead the African working class to liberation. The African working class will lead our own struggle.”
Earlier this year, after Russia deployed its military forces and launched attacks in Ukraine, Yeshitela said he participated in a webinar with Ionov that was titled, “Ain’t No Russian Ever Called Me A Ni**er.”
In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
The burden of proof has been reversed.
No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.
Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.
Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.
Consider all the ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.
Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.
Disinformation eradication campaigns. In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association. In the government’s latest assault on those who criticize the government—whether that criticism manifests itself in word, deed or thought—the Biden Administration has likened those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This latest government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative. 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. In this way, government and corporate censors claiming to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns are, in fact, laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention. 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.
Thought crimes. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State. It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.
Security checkpoints and fusion centers. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes. Fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.
Surveillance, precrime programs. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to warrantlessly identify and track someone’s movements in real-time, whether or not they have committed a crime. 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. With the increase in precrime programs, threat assessments, AI algorithms and surveillance programs such as SpotShotter, which attempt to calculate where illegal activity might occur by triangulating sounds and images, the burden of proof has been turned on its head by a surveillance state that renders us all suspects and overcriminalization which renders us all lawbreakers.
Mail surveillance. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”
Threat assessments and AI algorithms. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.
No-knock raids. No-knock, no-announce SWAT team raids are what passes for court-sanctioned policing in America today, and it could happen to any one of us. Nationwide, SWAT teams routinely invade homes, break down doors, kill family pets (they always shoot the dogs first), damage furnishings, terrorize families, and wound or kill those unlucky enough to be present during a raid. No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters such as serving a search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day. Police carry out tens of thousands of no-knock raids every year nationwide.
Militarized police. America is overrun with militarized cops—vigilantes with a badge—who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” It doesn’t matter where you live—big city or small town—it’s the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, trained to act as judge, jury and executioner in their interactions with the public, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry. This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.
Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.
Asset forfeiture schemes. Americans no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme. As libertarian Harry Browne observed, “Asset forfeiture is a mockery of the Bill of Rights. There is no presumption of innocence, no need to prove you guilty (or even charge you with a crime), no right to a jury trial, no right to confront your accuser, no right to a court-appointed attorney (even if the government has just stolen all your money), and no right to compensation for the property that’s been taken.”
Vehicle kill switches. Sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, “vehicle kill switches” could quickly become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to put the government in the driver’s seat while rendering null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures. As such, it presumes every driver potentially guilty of breaking some law that would require the government to intervene and take over operation of the vehicle or shut it off altogether. The message: we cannot be trusted to obey the law or navigate the world on our end.
Bodily integrity. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level. The debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws and forced breath-alcohol tests to forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no real privacy, no real presumption of innocence, and no real control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials. The groundwork being laid with these mandates is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. Yet the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—is really only beginning. Get ready, folks, because the government has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.
Limitations on our right to move about freely. We think we have the freedom to go where we want and move about freely, but at every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. For instance, license plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, police can track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.
The war on cash and the introduction of digital currency. Digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. The rationale (by police) is that cash is the currency for illegal transactions given that it’s harder to track, can be used to pay illegal immigrants, and denies the government its share of the “take,” so doing away with paper money will help law enforcement fight crime and help the government realize more revenue. A cashless society—easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and locked down—plays right into the hands of the government (and its corporate partners).
The Security-Industrial Complex. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn. What this has amounted to is a war on the American people, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield. As a result, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.
These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
The ramifications of empowering the government to sidestep fundamental due process safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to put a target on the back of anyone who happens to be in the same place where a crime takes place.
The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
A Russian-owned superyacht docked in Fiji has left for the United States after a Fiji court ordered its removal, saying it was a waste of money to maintain amid legal wrangling over its seizure.
Fiji’s Supreme Court lifted a stay order which had prevented the US from seizing the superyacht Amadea.
A US Justice Department’s Taskforce has focused on seizing yachts and other luxury assets of Russian oligarchs in a bid to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine.
The 106m Amadea arrived in Fiji on April 13 after an 18-day voyage from Mexico.
It was seized by Fiji authorities after the country’s High Court granted a US warrant last month that linked the yacht to sanctioned Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov.
The FBI has said the US$300 million luxury vessel had running costs of $25 million to $30 million per year, and the United States would pay to maintain the vessel after it was seized.
However, Fiji’s government has been footing the bill while an appeal by the vessel’s registered owner, Millemarin Investments, worked its way through the country’s courts.
Ordered to ‘sail out of Fiji’
The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that public interest demanded the yacht “sail out of Fiji waters”, because having it berthed in Fiji was “costing the Fijian government dearly,” according to the judgment.
The vessel “sailed into Fiji waters without any permit and most probably to evade prosecution by the United States,” it added.
Anthony Coley, a spokesperson for the US Justice Department, posted on Twitter that the Amadea set sail for the United States on Tuesday “after having been seized as the proceeds of criminal evasion of US sanctions against Russian oligarch Suleyman Kerimov.”
The United States alleged Kerimov beneficially owned the Amadea, although lawyers for the vessel had denied this and told the court it was owned by another Russian oligarch, Eduard Khudainatov, the former chief of Russian energy giant Rosneft, who had not been sanctioned.
Last month, another luxury yacht reportedly owned by Khudainatov worth some $700 million was impounded by police in Italy.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Today, with authorization from the Fijian High Court and under a new flag, the Amadea set sail for the United States after having been seized as the proceeds of criminal evasion of US sanctions against Russian oligarch Suleyman Kerimov. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/JHiYUDKcmQ
Just weeks after a number of Republican candidates in Michigan were purged from the primary ballot for failing to attain enough signatures on their nomination papers, a GOP candidate who did qualify was arrested for his participation in the breach of the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
Ryan Kelley was arrested at his home on Thursday morning on charges relating to his involvement in the Capitol attack. According to a statement from prosecutors, he faces misdemeanor charges for being on restricted grounds of the Capitol building and for engaging in disorderly conduct, among others.
Kelley, who has acknowledged being at the Capitol that day, has denied ever entering the actual building. However, the Justice Department received multiple tips regarding his actions, including videos and images of him in a restricted area on the Capitol grounds, climbing structures and encouraging others to follow him. Some of those tips came about just 10 days after the attack took place.
Kelley was in Washington D.C. on January 6 due to his belief that the election was “stolen” from former President Donald Trump through election fraud. (No claims of fraud have ever been substantiated.) Kelley has pushed such claims himself, speaking at a November 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally in Lansing, Michigan, and encouraging the crowd to “stand and fight” for Trump and against the election’s outcome.
According to a Target Insyght and Michigan Information and Research Service poll published in late May, Kelley had the support of 19 percent of Republican voters across the state. His second-place competitor, businessman Kevin Rinke, had 15 percent, and businesswoman Tudor Dixon came in third place with just 9 percent. Notably, because all of the candidates are not household names in Michigan, 49 percent of respondents in the poll said they were still undecided.
The U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) has released its Annual Statistical Transparency Report disclosing the use of national security surveillance laws for the year 2021—and to no one’s surprise it documents the wide-ranging overreach of intelligence agencies and the continued misuse of surveillance authorities to spy on millions of Americans. Specifically, the report chronicles how Section 702, an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), that authorizes the U.S. government to engage in mass surveillance of foreign targets’ communications, is still being abused by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to spy on Americans without a warrant.
Specifically, the report reveals that between December 2020 and November 2021, the FBI queried the data of potentially more than 3,000,000 “U.S. persons” without a warrant.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Jackson Reffitt watched the Capitol riot play out on TV from his family home in Texas. His father, Guy, had a much closer view. He was in Washington, armed with a semiautomatic handgun, storming the building.
When Guy Reffitt returned home, Jackson secretly taped him and turned the recordings over to the FBI. His father bragged about what he did, saying: “I had every constitutional right to carry a weapon and take over the Congress.”
Guy Reffitt was the first person to stand trial for his role in the riot, and the case has divided his family.
This week, Reveal features the story of the Reffitt family by partnering with the podcast Will Be Wild from Pineapple Street Studios, Wondery and Amazon Music. Hosted by Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, Will Be Wild’s eight-part series investigates the forces that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection and what comes next.
Fiji’s Court of Appeal has ruled that the Russian luxury yacht Amadea, seized by the US government but docked in western Fiji, will stay in the country for at least another month.
Defence lawyers acting for the vessel’s registered owners, Millemarin Investment Limited, sought a stay order in the Fiji Court of Appeal after High Court judge Justice Deepthi Amaratunga refused their application.
The Amadea, which arrived in Fiji on April 12 after an 18-day crossing from Mexico, is according to the US government owned by Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov.
Kerimov faces money laundering charges in the US and is also part of a wider network of oligarchs, close associates of the Russian President Vladimir Putin who are sanctioned by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.
“The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Kerimov as part of a group of Russian oligarchs who profit from the Russian government through corruption and its malign activity around the globe, including the occupation of Crimea,” the Department of Justice said in a statement issued Thursday morning in Washington DC.
“According to court documents, Kerimov owned the Amadea after his designation. Additionally, Kerimov and those acting on his behalf and for his benefit caused US dollar transactions to be routed through US financial institutions for the support and maintenance of the Amadea.”
US police boarded boat
On Thursday, Fijian police with US law enforcement who have been in the country since the Amadea arrived in Fiji from Mexico, boarded the yacht.
Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov … reported to be facing money laundering charges in the US and a close associate of President Vladimir Putin. Image: Wikipedia/RNZ
Justice Amaratunga told the court on Friday afternoon the Fiji Mutual Assistance Act, which facilitated the enforcement of US seizure action, limited his ability to stay his earlier order.
Haniff and Tuitoga lawyers received their stay on Friday evening, keeping the Amadea in Lautoka while they take the 30 days allowed to appeal the ruling to execute US seizure orders.
Meanwhile, the boat has a team of US marshals, the US Coast Guard, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and Fiji police.
The skipper and some crew are believed to still be on the vessel.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) reported on Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched through the electronic data of Americans 3.4 million times in 2021.
The searches were revealed in the ODNI’s “Annual Statistical Transparency Report Regarding the Intelligence Community’s Use of National Security Surveillance Authorities” for calendar year 2021. The data shows that there was nearly a tripling of these unconstitutional searches from 1.3 million in 2020.
In typical fashion the ODNI report waives away this intensification of the surveillance state by claiming it was a technical matter related to vital national security matters, the details of which are never explained.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has asked for public comments regarding privacy and civil liberties issues concerning the government’s efforts to counter domestic terrorism. On April 25, 2022, Defending Rights & Dissent submitted public comments calling attention specifically to the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts’ implications for First Amendment-Protected Activities.
Interesting Teach-in, well, discussion, with the speakers below. You will hear Scott Ritter divert from some of these speakers saying that the actions by Russia in Ukraine are legal, ethical and necessary.
Here is Ritter, just interviewed, Strategic Culture. Note that Ritter is called a traitor (for looking at the Russian military and political angles) and a Putin Stooge (this is it for Western Woke Culture) and he’s been banned on Twitter for a day, and then back up, and the seesaw of social media continues (more McCarthy: The New Democratic Opperative). You do not have to agree with militarism, but here we are, so the Western Woke Fascist Media and the Mendacious Political Class want nothing to do with, well, military minds looking at Russia (Ritter studied Russia big-time, and studied their military big time, both Soviet Union and Russia). He also is married to a Georgian. But again, this is it for the Western Intellect (sic).
Like we can’t watch Graham Phillips work, without being called, well, Russian Stooges. The Mainlining Mendacious Media calls him a Russian Sympathizer. Imagine that. For years,, he’s been a sympathizer (he is British, speaks Russian and goes to the actual places with camera in hand. Look at the one on Ossetia, the breakaway republic of Georgia. It is delightful (note the dinner he is served by the typical family):
Here, from, “The Ukrainian Conflict Is a U.S./NATO Proxy War, but One Which Russia Is Poised to Win Decisively – Scott Ritter” by Finian Cunningham, April 9, 2022
Question: Do you think that Russia has a just cause in launching its “special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24?
Scott Ritter: I believe Russia has articulated a cognizable claim of preemptive collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. The threat posed by NATO expansion, and Ukraine’s eight-year bombardment of the civilians of the Donbass fall under this umbrella.
Question: Do you think Russia has legitimate concerns about the Pentagon sponsoring biological weapons programs in laboratories in Ukraine?
Scott Ritter: The Pentagon denies any biological weapons program, but admits biological research programs on Ukrainian soil. Documents captured by Russia have allegedly uncovered the existence of programs the components of which could be construed as having offensive biological warfare applications. The U.S. should be required to explain the purpose of these programs.
Question: What do you make of allegations in Western media that Russian troops committed war crimes in Bucha and other Ukrainian cities? It is claimed that Russian forces summarily executed civilians.
Scott Ritter: All claims of war crimes must be thoroughly investigated, including Ukrainian allegations that Russia killed Ukrainian civilians in Bucha. However, the data available about the Bucha incident does not sustain the Ukrainian claims, and as such, the media should refrain from echoing these claims as fact until a proper investigation of the evidence is conducted, either by the media, or unbiased authorities.
While one may be able to mount a legal challenge to Russia’s contention that its joint operation with Russia’s newly recognized independent nations of Lugansk and Donetsk constitutes a “regional security or self-defense organization” as regards “anticipatory collective self-defense actions” under Article 51, there can be no doubt as to the legitimacy of Russia’s contention that the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass had been subjected to a brutal eight-year-long bombardment that had killed thousands of people.
Moreover, Russia claims to have documentary proof that the Ukrainian Army was preparing for a massive military incursion into the Donbass which was pre-empted by the Russian-led “special military operation.” [OSCE figures show an increase of government shelling of the area in the days before Russia moved in.]
Finally, Russia has articulated claims about Ukraine’s intent regarding nuclear weapons, and in particular efforts to manufacture a so-called “dirty bomb”, which have yet to be proven or disproven. [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a reference to seeking a nuclear weapon in February at the Munich Security Conference.]
The bottom line is that Russia has set forth a cognizable claim under the doctrine of anticipatory collective self defense, devised originally by the U.S. and NATO, as it applies to Article 51 which is predicated on fact, not fiction. (Ritter, Russia, Ukraine & the Law of War: Crime of Aggression)
[Nuremberg Trials. 1st row: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Heß, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel. 2nd row: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel. (Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality/Still Picture Records LICON, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S)]
All the speakers, except maybe excluding John Kiriakou, have great points to make: Andrei Martyanov, expert on Russian military affairs, author The Real Revolution in Military Affairs; Chris Kaspar de Ploeg, author Ukraine in the Crossfire; James Carden, Adviser U.S.-Russia bilateral commission during the Obama administration & Ex. Editor of The American Committee for East-West accord; Scott Ritter, former U.S. Marine Intelligence officer, UN Arms Inspector, exposed WMD lie in U.S. push to invade Iraq; John Kiriakou, CIA whistleblower and Radio Sputnik host; Ron Ridenour, peace activist, author The Russian Peace Threat; Gerald Horne, historian, author, Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston; Jeremy Kuzmarov, CAM Managing Editor and author of The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce.
Imagine, the provocations.
The US government invoked self-defense as a legal justification for its invasion of Panama. Several scholars and observers have opined that the invasion was illegal under international law.
Oh, those Freedom Fighters, the back-shooting, civilian-killing, village-burning Contras:
Appendix A: Background on United States Funding of the Contras
In examining the allegations in the Mercury News and elsewhere, it is important to understand the timing of funding of the Contras by the United States. The following dates explain the periods during which the United States government provided funding to the Contras or cut off such funding.
Anastasio Somoza Debayle was the leader of Nicaragua from 1967 until July 1979, when he was overthrown by the Sandinistas. When President Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, he promptly canceled the final $15 million payment of a $75 million aid package to Nicaragua, reversing the Carter administration’s policy towards Nicaragua. On November 17, 1981, President Reagan signed National Security Directive 17, authorizing provision of covert support to anti-Sandinista forces. On December 1, 1981, Reagan signed a document intending to conceal the November 17 authorization of anti-Sandinista operations. The document characterized the United States’ goal in Nicaragua as that of interdicting the flow of arms from Nicaragua to El Salvador, where leftist guerrillas were receiving aid from Sandinista forces.
In late 1982, Edward P. Boland, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, introduced an amendment to the Fiscal Year 1983 Defense Appropriations bill that prohibited the CIA, the principal conduit of covert American support for the Contras, from spending funds “for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua.” However, the CIA could continue to support the Contras if it claimed that the purpose was something other than to overthrow the government. In December 1983, a compromise was reached and Congress passed a funding cap for fiscal year 1984 of $24 million for aid to the Contras, an amount significantly lower than what the Reagan administration wanted, with the possibility that the Administration could seek supplemental funds later.
This funding was insufficient to support the Administration’s “Contra program” and the decision was made to approach other countries for monetary support. In April 1984, Robert McFarlane convinced Saudi Arabia to contribute $1 million per month to the Contras through a secret bank account set up by Lt. Col. Oliver North.
In October 1984, the second Boland amendment took effect. It prohibited any military or paramilitary support for the Contras from October 3, 1984, through December 19, 1985. As a result, the CIA and Department of Defense (DOD) began withdrawing personnel from Central America. During this time, however, the National Security Council continued to provide support to the Contras.
In August 1985, Congress approved $25 million in humanitarian aid to the Contras, with the proviso that the State Department, and not the CIA or the DOD, administer the aid. President Reagan created the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office (NHAO) to supply the humanitarian aid. In September 1985, Oliver North began using the Salvadoran air base at Ilopango for Contra resupply efforts.
On October 5, 1986, a plane loaded with supplies for the Contras, financed by private benefactors, was shot down by Nicaraguan soldiers. On board were weapons and other lethal supplies and three Americans. One American, Eugene Hasenfus, claimed while in custody that he worked for the CIA. The Reagan Administration denied any knowledge of the private resupply efforts.
On October 17, 1986, Congress approved $100 million in funds for the Contras. In 1987, after the discovery of private resupply efforts orchestrated by the National Security Council and Oliver North, Congress ceased all but “non-lethal” aid in 1987. The war between the Sandinistas and the Contras ended with a cease-fire in 1990.
Although the Contras were often referred to as one group, several distinct factions made up the Contras.
In August 1980, Colonel Enrique Bermudez, a former Colonel in Somoza’s National Guard, united other former National Guard officers and anti-Sandinista civilians to form the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN). This group was known as the Northern Front because it was based in Honduras. In February 1983, Adolfo Calero became the head of the FDN.
In April 1982, Eden Pastora split from the Sandinista regime and organized the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE) and the Sandinista Revolutionary Front (FRS), which declared war on the Sandinista regime. Pastora’s group was based in Costa Rica and along the southern border of Nicaragua, and therefore became known as the Southern Front. Pastora refused to work with Bermudez, claiming that Bermudez, as a member of the former Somoza regime, was politically tainted. The CIA decided to support the FDN and generally declined to support the ARDE.
Again, let’s think about what is actually happening in Ukraine, and where the country is, and what the Russians in that country are facing, and, gulp, where is Ukraine? Thousands of miles away, like Panama and Nicaragua are from USA?
As the war in Ukraine rages on, I visited the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk as an embedded reporter with the Russian army.
Both of the republics are the trigger of the current conflict.
Russian President Vladimir Putin declared their independence on February 24, 2022, something a lot of people were waiting for since the CIA backed coup in Ukraine of February 2014. That coup had resulted in the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and new laws forcing the Ukrainian language on Russian-speaking residents. Luhansk and Donetsk consequently voted on their independence and Ukraine attacked them, precipitating the war.
European support for the so-called Maidan coup was considerable: the Dutch MP Hans van Baalen from the ruling Dutch VVD party (Mark Rutte), for example, was at the protests that helped trigger the coup, as was the former Prime Minister of Belgium Guy Verhofstadt. Both were seen cheering on the crowds, surrounded by right-extremists on the stage, shouting “democracy.”
So what is preemptive defense? Right to Protect? What is big ugly history of Nazi’s in Poland and Ukraine? What is that all about, uh, Americanum?
So, plans by ZioLensky for Dirty Bombs from the wasteland of Chernobyl, not a provocation?
How many were immolated in Waco? Why? Mount Carmel Center became engulfed in flames. The fire resulted in the deaths of 76 Branch Davidians, including 25 children, two pregnant women, and David Koresh himself.
Oh, the impatience of the USA, FBI, ATF, Attorney General, Bill Clinton, the lot of them.
Or, dropping bombs on Philly, to kill, well, black people:
How many died, and what happened to the city block? Bombs dropped on our own people, again! Police dropped a bomb on a West Philly house in 1985. The fire caused by the explosion killed 11 people, an atrocity that Philadelphia still grapples with today.
Oh, the irony.
Black Lives Do Not Matter, here, or in Ukraine. Below, representation of those lives killed by cops, of all races, in one year. Many of these in a year, 60 percent, did not involve a person with a gun, and a huge number, 40 percent, involved people going throug mental health crises.
[Foreign students trying to reach the Ukrainian border said they were thrown off trains, not allowed on buses, and made to wait hours in the cold before crossing over.]
Yes, the first casualty of war is truth, and with the USA as the Empire of Lies and Hate, the casualty is now a larger framework of a Zombie Nation of virtue signalers and those who want the fake news to be real, please!
So far as I know, this is the first war in modern history with no objective, principled coverage in mainstream media of day-to-day events and their context. None. It is morn-to-night propaganda, disinformation and lies of omission — most of it fashioned by the Nazi-infested Zelensky regime in Kiev and repeated uncritically as fact.
There is one thing worse than this degenerate state of affairs. It is the extent to which the media’s malpractice is perfectly fine to most Americans. Tell us what to think and believe no matter if it is true, they say, and we will think and believe it. Show us some pictures, for images are all.
There are larger implications to consider here. Critical as it is that we understand this conflict, Ukraine is a mirror in which we see ourselves as we have become. For more Americans than I wish were so, reality forms only in images. These Americans are no longer occupants of their own lives. Risking a paradox, what they take to be reality is detached from reality.
This majority — and it is almost certainly a majority — has no thoughts or views except those first verified through the machinery of manufactured images and “facts.” Television screens, the pages of purportedly authoritative newspapers, the air waves of government-funded radio stations — NPR, the BBC — serve to certify realities that do not have to be real, truths that do not have to be true.
Before proceeding to Bucha, the outrage of the moment, I must reproduce a quotation from that propaganda-is-O.K. piece The Times published in its March 3 editions. It is from a Twitter user who was distressed that it became public that the Ghost of Kiev turned out to be a ghost and the Snake Island heroes didn’t do much by way of holding the fort.
‘Why can’t we just let people believe some things?’ this thoughtful man or woman wanted to know. What is wrong, in other words, if thinking and believing nice things that aren’t true makes people feel better? (Patrick Lawrence, Special to Consortium News)
Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo- Events in America, has been cited by yours truly several times. It is a completely amazing work, sixty years ahead of its time, and it is almost completely ignored!.
I describe the world of our making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life. …. The reporter’s task is to find a way to weave these threads of unreality into a fabric the reader will not recognize as entirely unreal. (Boorstin)
Reign of Terror situates the War on Terror as part of a longer story of domination that can be traced back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial and slaveholding behemoth.
Former Brazilian president, and frontrunner in the upcoming October 2022 presidential election, Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva is putting four of his one-time accusers of corruption and money laundering in the dock. The initial charges and inquiries — all 25 of them — were completely dismissed earlier this month. Lula’s legal battles — including his sentence of 12 years and 11 months in prison, a sentence that was later increased to 17 years — are part of the infamous and multifaceted “Car Wash” investigations into corruption at state and private companies, such as Petrobras and Odebrecht, as well as among businessmen and politicians. In fact, it was during Lula’s administration that Brazil’s federal police were provided with the legal tools and mechanisms to initiate the Car Wash operations. As years went by, FBI agents operating from the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia became party to these investigations.
Today, a new coordinated psychological operation has been sprung to convince every living patriot across the Five Eyes sphere of influence that the enemy of the free world who lurks behind every conspiracy to overthrow governments, and western values are Russia and China.
Over the past months, slanderous, and often conjectural stories of Chinese and Russian subversion have repeatedly been fed to a gullible western audience desperate for an enemy image to attach to their realization that an obvious long-term conspiracy has been unleashed to destroy their lives. While the left has been fed with propaganda designed to convince them that this enemy has taken the form of the Kremlin, the conservative consumers of media have been fed with the narrative that the enemy is China.
The reality is that both Russia and China together have a bond of principled survival upon which the entire multipolar order is based. It is this alliance which the actual controllers of today’s empire wish to both destroy and ensure no western nation joins… especially not the USA.
Every day we read that secret lists of millions of Chinese communist party members have infiltrated western national governments or that espionage honey pots have targeted politicians, or Russia is subverting western democracies, and preparing false flags to invade its neighbors.
In all cases, the stories pumped out by mainstream media rags reek of 1) Five Eyes propaganda psy-op techniques, and often unverified accusations, while 2) deflecting from the actually verifiable British Intelligence tentacles caught repeatedly shaping world events, regime change, infiltration, assassination and conspiracies for over a century including the push to overthrow Trump under a color revolution.
Among the most destructive of these conspiracies orchestrated by British Intelligence during the past century was the artificial creation of the Cold War which destroyed the hopes for a multipolar world of win-win collaboration guided by a U.S.-China-Russia alliance as envisioned by FDR and Henry Wallace.
When reviewing how this perversion of history was manufactured, it is important to hold firmly in mind the parallels to the current anti-China/anti-Russian operations now underway.
Cold War Battle Lines are Drawn
Historians widely acknowledge that the actual catalyst for the Cold War occurred not on March 5, 1946, but rather on September 5, 1945. It was at this moment that a 26-year-old cipher clerk left the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa with a list of code names for supposed spies planted within the British, Canadian and American governments controlled by the Kremlin. In total this young defector took telegram notes attributed to his boss Colonel Zabotin and 108 other strategic documents that supposedly proved the existence of this Soviet conspiracy to the world for the first time.
The young clerk’s name was Igor Gouzenko, and the scandal that emerged from his defection not only created one of the greatest abuses of civil liberties in Canadian history, but a sham trial based on little more than hearsay and conjecture. In fact, when the six microfilms of evidence were finally declassified in 1985, not a single document turned out be worthy of the name (more to be said on that below).
The outcome of the Gouzenko Affair resulted in the collapse of all U.S.-Canada-Russia alliances that had been fostered during fires of anti-fascist combat of WWII.
Voices like Henry Wallace (former Vice-President under FDR) watched the collapse of potential amidst the anti-Communist hysteria and sounded the alarm loudly saying:
Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.
In “Soviet Mission Asia,” Wallace revealed the true agenda for the conspiracy that would infiltrate nation states of the west and orchestrate the next 75 years of history saying:
Before the blood of our boys is scarcely dry on the field of battle, these enemies of peace try to lay the foundation for World War III. These people must not succeed in their foul enterprise. We must offset their poison by following the policies of Roosevelt in cultivating the friendship of Russia in peace as well as in war.
This fight against those actual top-down controllers of fascism whom Wallace had bravely put into the spotlight would sadly not prove successful. Between 1945 and the collapse of Wallace’s Progressive Party USA presidential bid in 1948, those strongest anti-Cold War voices both in the USA and in Canada were promptly labelled “Russian agents” and saw their reputations, careers and freedoms destroyed under the CIA-FBI managed spectre of the Red Scare and later McCarthyism. In Canada, Wallace’s Progressive Party co-thinkers took the form of the Labor Progressive Party (LPP) then led by Member of Parliament Fred Rose, LPP leader Tim Buck and LPP National Organizer Sam Carr — all three would represent the anti-Cold War fight to save FDR’s vision in Canada and all of whom would figure prominently in the story of Igor Gouzenko.
The Gouzenko Hoax Kicks Off
When Prime Minister King heard those claims made by Gouzenko, he knew that it threatened the post war hopes for global reconstruction and for this reason was very hesitant to make the unverifiable claims public for many months or even offer the defector sanctuary for that matter.
After the story was eventually strategically leaked to American media, anti-communist hysteria skyrocketed forcing King to establish the Gouzenko Espionage Royal Commission on February 5, 1946 under Privy Council Order 411. Earlier Privy Council Order 6444 had already been passed extending the War Measures Act beyond the end of the war and permitting for detention incommunicado, psychological torture and removing Habeus Corpus of all those who would be accused of espionage.
By February 15, 1946 the first 15 targets were arrested and held for weeks in isolation in Ottawa’s Rockliffe Military Barracks without access to family or legal counsel. All those arrested without charge suffered weeks of psychological torture, sleep deprivation and were put on suicide watch with no communication with anyone but inquisitors from the Royal Commission. Both Judges who presided over the show trial were rewarded with Orders of Canada and were made Supreme Court Justices in the wake of the affair.
With a complete disregard for any notion of civil liberties (Canada still had no Bill of Rights), lead counsel E.K. Williams blatantly argued for the creation of the Royal Commission “because it need not be bound by the ordinary rules of evidence if it considers it desirable to disregard them. It need not permit counsel to appear for those to be interrogated by or before it”.
During the show trial, none of the defendants were allowed to see any evidence being used against them and everyone involved including RCMP officers were threatened with 5 years imprisonment for speaking about the trial publicly. The only person who could speak and write boundlessly to the media was the figure of Igor Gouzenko himself. Whenever appearing on TV or in court, Gouzenko who was to charge over $1000 for some interviews and received generous book deals, and government pensions for life, always appeared masked in a paper bag on his head. Even though this cipher clerk never actually met any of the figures standing trial, his testimony against them was treated like gold.
By June 27, 1946 the Royal Commission released its final 733 page report which, along with Gouzenko’s own books, became the sole unquestionable gospel used and re-used by journalists, politicians and historians for the next decades as proof of the vast Russian plot to undermine western values and steal atomic secrets. There was, in fact, nowhere else to go for a very long time if a researcher wished to figure out what actually occurred.
As it so happened, all trial records were either destroyed or “lost” in the days after the commission disbanded, and if people wanted to look at the actual evidence they would have to wait 40 years when it was finally declassified.
The result of the trials?
By the end of the whole sordid affair, 10 of the 26 arrested were convicted and imprisoned for anywhere from 3-7 years. While these convictions are themselves often cited as “proof” that the Gouzenko evidence must have been valid, on closer inspection we find that this is merely the effect of a game of smoke and mirrors.
It must first be noted that of the 10 found guilty, not one indictment or conviction of espionage was found. Instead, five defendants were found guilty of assisting in the acquisition of fake passports during the 1930s which were used by Canadian volunteers to fight with the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalions in the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascist coup while the other five were convicted of violating Canada’s Official Secrets Act during WWII entirely on Gouzenko’s testimony. The other 16 targets were released without ever having been charged of a crime. The two leaders of the supposed spy ring that received the longest sentences were Labor Progressive Party leaders Fred Rose and Sam Carr who had been the loudest advocates of FDR’s international New Deal and the exposure of the financial sponsors of fascism that aimed at world empire (more to be said on this in an upcoming report).
When the Gouzenko evidence was finally declassified in 1985, Canadian journalist William Reuben wrote a fascinating analysis called “The Documents that Weren’t There” where he noted the absence of anything one could reasonably call “evidence” among the thousands of items.
After spending weeks investigating the six reels of declassified microfilm, Reuben found only what could be described as “a hodgepodge, reminiscent of one of Professor Irwin Corey’s double talk monologues”.
Listing the vast array of telephone directories from 1943, RCMP profiles, lists of travel expense vouchers and passport applications, Reuben asked:
What is one to make of this jumble? With no indication as to when any of the exhibits were obtained by the RCMP, how they related to espionage or any wrongdoing and for the most part, no indication of when they were placed in evidence at the hearings it is impossible to determine their significance, authenticity or relationship to other evidence.
In short, not a single piece of actual evidence could be found.
Additionally when reviewing the 8 handwritten telegrams of Russian notes outlining the spy code names and instructions from the Kremlin which Gouzenko originally took from his embassy in 1945, no forensic evidence was ever attempted to match the handwriting with Colonel Zubatov to whom it was attributed and who always denied the accusation.
Reuben goes further to ask where are the 108 secret documents that Gouzenko famously stole and upon which the entire case against the accused spies was based? These documents were not part of the declassified microfilms, and so he noted: “as with the eight telegrams, there is no physical evidence to prove that the originals existed or came from the Soviet Embassy”.
He also asked the valid question why it was only on March 2, 1946 (six months after Gouzenko’s defection) that any mention was made of the 108 documents?
Could the lack of evidence and the long gap in time be related to Gouzenko’s five and a half month stay at Ottawa’s Camp X spy compound under the control of Sir William Stephenson before his defection was made public? Could those apparent 108 documents used by Gouzenko’s dodgy dossier have anything to do with the Camp X Laboratory which specialized in forging letters and other official documents?
If you find yourself thinking about the parallels of this story to the more recent case of the Brookings Institute’s Igor Danchenko who was found to be the “source” of the dodgy dossiers used to create RussiaGate by MI6’s Christopher Steele, Richard Dearlove and Rhodes Scholar Strobe Talbott, then don’t be shocked. It means you are using your brain.
What was Camp X?
Camp X was the name given to the clandestine operations training center in the outskirts of Ottawa Canada on December 6, 1941.
It was created by the British Security Cooperation (BSC) headed by Sir William Stephenson- a spymaster who worked closely with Winston Churchill. BSC was created in New York in 1940 as a covert operation set up by the British Secret Service and MI6 to interface with American intelligence. Since the USA was still neutral in the war, Camp X was used to train the Special Operations Executive, as well as agents from FBI’s Division 5 and OSS in the arts of psychological warfare, assassination, espionage, counter-intelligence, forgeries and other forms of covert action.
The leadership cadre that was to survive the purge of OSS in October 1945 and go on to lead the new CIA when it was formed in 1947 were all trained in Camp X.
In his book Camp X: OSS, Intrepid and the Allies’ North American Training Camp for Secret Agents, historian David Stafford notes that Gouzenko’s attempts to contact media and government offices on the night of September 5, 1945 were met with cold shoulders and even Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King himself wanted nothing to do with the man, writing in his diary: “if suicide took place let the city police take charge and secure whatever there was in the way of documents, but on no account for us to take the initiative.”
It was only due to the combined direct intervention of Stephenson and Norman Robertson (head of External Affairs and leading Rhodes Scholar) after an emergency meeting, that King was persuaded to give Gouzenko sanctuary. King had not even known about Camp X’s purpose at the time.
While King wished to defend FDR’s vision for a post-war world of cooperation with Russia, Stafford notes:
Stephenson vigorously opposed King’s view. Like SIS headquarters in London, BSC (British Security Cooperation) for most of the war had operated a counter espionage section to keep an eye on Communist subversion… he was convinced, even before the Gouzenko affair, that BSC could provide the nucleus of a post-war intelligence organization in the Western Hemisphere. The cipher clerk’s defection provided him a golden opportunity. 1
Canadian Journalist Ian Adams had reported that Gouzenko’s “defection came at a wonderful time when there was tremendous resistance from the scientists involved in developing the atomic bomb. They wanted to see an open book on the development of nuclear power with everybody collaborating so that it wouldn’t become the ungodly arms race that it did become and is today. So if Gouzenko hadn’t fallen into the western intelligence services’ lap, they would have had to invent somebody like him.”
A Final Word on the Real Infiltration of Western Governments
As Henry Wallace and FDR understood all too well, the real subversive threat to world peace was not the Soviet Union, or China… but rather the supranational financial-intelligence-military architecture that represented the globally extended British Empire that had orchestrated the dismemberment of Russia during the Crimean War, the USA during the Civil War and China during two Opium Wars. This was and is the enemy of the Labour Progressive Party of Canada that took the form of the Fabian Society CCF run by 6 Rhodes Scholars and it was this Rhodes Scholar/Round Table agency that was resisted by Canadian nationalists O.D. Skelton and Ernest Lapointe, and which fully took over Canada’s foreign ministry with their deaths in 1941.
This same hive of Rhodes Scholars and Fabians increasingly took control of American foreign policy with the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the ouster of Wallace and the rise of the new Anglo-American Special Relationship manufactured by Churchill, Stephenson and their lackies in the USA. This is the beast that infiltrated and undermined labor unions across the Five Eyes during the Cold War and ensured that pesky patriots like Paul Robeson, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and many others who resisted, would not be long for this world.
This is the structure whose hands have shown themselves time and again behind the dodgy dossiers that started the Iraq War, to the false intelligence used to justify wars in Libya, and Syria. It is the same structure which has been caught managing the regime change in the USA since 2016 with its assets cooking up dodgy dossiers accusing Russia of putting their puppet into the White House, to orchestrating mass vote fraud in the elections of 2020.
This is the same operation which has always aimed at dismembering the USA, Russia, China and every other nation state who may at any time utilize the power of their sovereignty to declare political and economic independence from this supranational parasite and choose to work together to establish a world of win-win cooperation rather than tolerate a new technocratic feudal dark age.
Stephenson immediately flew two of his top SIS officials in from the BSC HQ in New York to manage the Gouzenko affair for the next 8 months: Peter Dwyer (head of counter-espionage for BSC) and Jean-Paul Evans. Evans is an interesting figure whose SIS successor was none other than triple agent Kim Philby who replaced him when he left his post as British liaison to the FBI and CIA in 1949. Evans himself went onto work with leading Round Table controller and soon Governor General Vincent Massey in the creation of a new system of promoting the arts in Canada pouring millions of dollars into modernist/abstract art, music and drama under the Canada Council which grew out of the Massey-Levesque Royal Commission for the Arts in Canada. This body founded in 1957 took over the reins of control from the CIA and Rockefeller Foundations who had formerly enjoyed a near monopoly sponsoring such things as part of the post-WWII cultural war against communism. Stafford notes that “the man who impressed Ottawa with his love of the arts had also played an important part in the history of Anglo-Canadian secret intelligence.”
