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Category: fbi

  • FBI Is Recklessly Misusing Trump-Era Espionage Policy To Create ‘Climate Of Fear’ Among Scientists

    On the Tuesday before Christmas, Dr. Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, was convicted by a federal jury of lying to the U.S. about his involvement with China’s government and failing to disclose income from China on his tax returns. He faces up to five years in federal prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

    Lieber had been prosecuted as part of the Justice Department’s China Initiative, which was established in 2018 to crackdown on Chinese economic and scientific espionage.

    An investigation by MIT Technology Review found that instead of focusing on economic espionage and national security, the China Initiative appeared to be an umbrella term for cases with almost any connection to China, whether they involve state-sponsored hackers, smugglers, or, increasingly, academics accused of failing to disclose all ties to China on grant-related forms.

    The post FBI Is Recklessly Misusing Trump-Era Espionage Policy To Create ‘Climate Of Fear’ Among Scientists appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A Secretive Border Patrol Unit Worked With the FBI to Investigate Journalists

    U.S. Customs and Border Protextion / U.S. Department of Homeland Security logo

    A shocking exposé reveals how a secretive Customs and Border Protection division investigated as many as 20 journalists and their contacts by using government databases intended to track terrorists. Those investigated include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza, along with others at The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. We speak to Jana Winter, the investigative correspondent who broke the story at Yahoo News, who says it’s unclear if the surveillance program was discontinued. “These were career officials who are still running this secretive unit with no rules and no procedures for how they access these databases,” says Winter. “They target Americans who are located in the United States who are not suspected of any crime whatsoever.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with a shocking Yahoo News exposé about a secretive Customs and Border Protection unit that investigated as many as 20 journalists and their contacts by using government databases intended to track terrorists. Those investigated by CBP’s so-called Counter Network Division include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza, along with others at The Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Members of Congress and their staff may have also been targeted.

    The explosive revelations are detailed in a 500-page report by the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog unit, the Office of Inspector General. It opened the probe after news reports that a Border Patrol agent named Jeffrey Rambo conducted a leak investigation in 2017 by accessing government travel records of the reporter Ali Watkins, who was with Politico at the time and now works for The New York Times. Rambo also shared the information he gathered with the FBI.

    In response to the report, the Justice Department declined to pursue criminal charges for misuse of government databases and lying to investigators, citing, quote, “the lack of CBP policies and procedures concerning Rambo’s duties.”

    On Monday, the AP demanded an explanation. In a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, AP Executive Editor Julie Pace wrote, quote, “This is a flagrant example of a federal agency using its power to examine the contacts of journalists. While the actions detailed in the inspector general’s report occurred under a previous administration, the practices were described as routine,” unquote.

    An AP spokesperson told Democracy Now!, quote, “We are deeply concerned about this apparent abuse of power. This appears to be an example of journalists being targeted for simply doing their jobs, which is a violation of the First Amendment,” they said.

    For more, we’re joined by Jana Winter, the investigative correspondent for Yahoo News whose major new exposé is headlined “Operation Whistle Pig: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that investigates Americans.”

    Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jana. Take us through what took place and why this was called Operation Whistle Pig.

    JANA WINTER: First, thanks for having me on. Second, there’s a lot of tentacles here, so just bear with me.

    Operation Whistle Pig was a leak investigation started by a Border Patrol agent named Jeffrey Rambo, who was detailed to CBP’s Counter Network Division. And initially, his leak investigation targeted Ali Watkins and Senate staffer James Wolfe, but it spread to as many as 20 other journalists.

    And I’d also like to mention that we have no information that this is not occurring today. The same people are in charge. The same people are regularly — air quotes — kind of “vetting” journalists who they think might have information they would like to have or who they want to reach out to.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jana, if you could, could you talk about why they began targeting Ali Watkins and the Senate Intelligence Committee staffer and how they originally — how this Rambo initially contacted her?

    JANA WINTER: Well, it began, as one definitely would not suspect, with an order from the White House to look at forced labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo, specifically about what companies were using cobalt mined by child labor to produce consumer goods, like phones in China. So, Rambo gets a tasking to come up with a plan to find these data points to give to the White House, who would then, in theory, hit them, hit the companies, with sanctions under a Tariff Act of 1930.

    So Rambo puts together a list of reporters and NGO workers and government officials from other agencies and people from academia who might provide information on these data points about what companies are using forced labor. On that initial list are reporters who specialize in this kind of reporting, like Martha Mendoza from the AP.

    Rambo also created another list. He was looking for a national security reporter with buzz who could, unbeknownst to the reporter herself, publish articles that were not necessarily accurate, that would overstate the capabilities of U.S. law enforcement, to essentially trick these companies into altering their shipping patterns, which would be enough evidence to hit them with sanctions under the Tariff Act of 1930. So that’s where Ali Watkins comes in. He saw — Rambo saw her article trending on Twitter and thought, “OK, I’ll use Ali Watkins.” And that’s how it happened.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of Rambo himself, any sense of how high up in the chain of command the knowledge of this surveillance of reporters’ activities went?

    JANA WINTER: Yeah, I want to be really clear. I mean, Rambo is obviously the fall guy here. There was a Washington Post story a long time ago that talked about him being this rogue agent — and if only. I mean, now we know, based on all of these documents, that everything he did, on every single step of the way, from his plan targeting journalists to reaching out to journalists, to the vetting of journalists, to looking into their sources, to contacting the FBI, to running a leak investigation in-house, to then contacting the FBI again — all of this was done with the knowledge and under the orders of his boss, Dan White, who was referred for criminal prosecution for multiple things, including making false statements to investigators. And he is now back at his job running his division, and DHS will not talk about this or say anything publicly about what is going on.

    But this goes all the way up. This is not — these aren’t political appointees who were tasked with something at CBP; these were career officials who are still running this secretive unit with no rules and no procedures for how they access these databases, and they target — you know, targeting Americans who are located in the United States who are not suspected of any crime whatsoever.

    AMY GOODMAN: But let’s be clear, Jana, talking about it not being a rogue operation, as you point out in your piece, one of the keepsakes that Rambo has from his time in the Washington area is a large glass globe with cobalt blue oceans and clear land, an award from CBP for his work that came with a cash bonus. The globe is a reminder that before the press coverage, before the press coverage, he was lauded for his work at the National Targeting Center, including on the Watkins/Wolfe case.

    JANA WINTER: Yeah.

    AMY GOODMAN: The plaque on the globe reads: “Jeffrey Rambo — In Honor and Recognition of Your Dedication to the National Targeting Center Counter Network Division [in] 2017.” And at his going-away party, his boss even cited his work on the leak investigation. Jana?

    JANA WINTER: Yeah, he was a hero inside CBP, until this became public. So, he definitely has been thrown under the bus here, whether — not saying what he did was great at all, but this was something that — I mean, they also made him the Five Eyes representative for all of DHS. There’s one person that does that for their annual or biannual, or something, meeting. He was a hero internally and was completely blindsided by them throwing him under the bus and saying, you know, “Oh, we’re going to investigate this guy. We have no idea what this is. This is a completely rogue agent who did all of these things.” And his life has been severely impacted by this.

    But I think it’s important to — I mean, no offense, but not to focus on Rambo here. I mean, this is much bigger than him. It’s going on today. The administration is silent, burying their heads in the sand like we won’t notice. And the same people, despite criminal referrals, are back at work doing these same things.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, Jana, let’s go back. In response to your Yahoo News report, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has called on DHS’s inspector general to turn over its investigation to Congress immediately. Wyden said in a statement Sunday, “If multiple government agencies were aware of this conduct and took no action to stop it, there needs to be serious consequences for every official involved, and DHS and the Justice Department must explain what actions they are taking to prevent this unacceptable conduct in the future.” Of course, Senator Wyden is chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Can you talk about even the report, this 500-page report that you got a hold of, that the senators are saying they can’t get?

    JANA WINTER: I mean, first of all, that’s ridiculous. I just think — I mean, personally, just as a regular person, I’m super disappointed with many aspects of this, including the oversight aspect. I think CBP launched an investigation into one of their own. DHS inspector general did what they do, which is launch an investigation to follow up. And they recommended things for prosecution. I don’t know — they did not answer my questions about if they had provided this report to Congress.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Oh, I was going to ask.

    JANA WINTER: Yeah, they didn’t answer that. I don’t want to be too negative on them, because they were literally the only agency that got back to me, out of everyone, under deadline, and actually said something that was responsive to something I asked — not this particular question. But so, I don’t really know if they were supposed to hand it over to Congress. I imagine they should have done that.

    But there are so many — I think we’re looking at this from the wrong end. I think that this is by design. I think this is not some, “Oh, of course, all the agencies knew about this, and that was a mistake.” It’s, no, this was a division created to avoid, you know, the pesky bureaucracy involved with sharing sensitive information and databases. The person running the team, Rambo’s boss, who, again, was referred for criminal prosecution and is back at work running the same team, told investigators during all this that their division pushes the limits, they are the guidelines, there are no other ones, they’re the ones making the decisions, they’re the ones making the rules. And DOJ was certainly involved, because this material was passed on to the FBI, and it was — there’s no way to say that it wasn’t used during the prosecution of James Wolfe, the Senate aide. It’s just not possible. You can see the travel records. He lied about the travel records. He went to jail for lying about these things. There’s a direct connection. DHS oversees this. The White House right now — this is not just a Trump political moment. This is an ongoing division that exists to skirt these rules. And the people who run it said as much to OIG investigators.

    So this is not — you know, I just think — I don’t know. I’m interested to see if Wyden can get any traction, obviously, since we have been ignored in every capacity. And frankly, his office has been ignored in this exact capacity for quite a while.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jana?

    JANA WINTER: And the [inaudible] — no, you go ahead. Sorry.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You mentioned the FBI. Could you talk about their involvement in this? And also you mentioned the case against Wolfe. I don’t know if many listeners of our program are aware of that. Could you talk about that case specifically?

    JANA WINTER: Sure. So, James Wolfe used to be the director of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee. And he went to jail for — went to prison for two months for — after pleading guilty to charges — I guess, in the beginning, here’s what happened. So, Rambo is looking into contacting these reporters. He’s looking at Ali Watkins, who’s then a Politico rising star national security reporter. He vets her, meaning he runs all of her travel — you know, looks at her travel, sees that she’s traveling with this older gentleman, older by more than 30 years, who he later identifies as this Senate aide. This is James Wolfe. So, Rambo starts this leak investigation.

    Before he even arranges to meet Ali Watkins, under an alias and all sorts of other weird things, he reaches out to an FBI contact of his who’s now at headquarters, and says, “I’ve got something I think is in your swim lane. Please call me immediately.” So, Rambo is working with the FBI very early on this, on what he sees is a reporter who is getting classified information from this man that he thinks she is dating. Ali Watkins continues to say that she did not receive information from that person, and James Wolfe was never convicted or even charged with leaking classified information, just to be clear. But the FBI, Jeff Rambo passed along all of Ali’s travel records, Facebook posts, all sorts of other data that they had run from her, her connections to the terror watchlist, which dragged up Arianna Huffington — who is objectively not a terrorist, I think we all know — and continued to pull all of these records. And he wanted to hand over — Rambo wanted to hand over all of this information to the FBI the day after he met with Ali Watkins. He said, you know, “I believe that she is leaking information” — I mean, “she’s receiving leaked information from him. Let’s pass this to the FBI as a leak investigation.”

    His boss, Dan White, again, the same one who’s still there now, he said, “No, no, no, why don’t we just take him in it and continue to investigate her in-house? Let’s see if she has any sources within the Department of Homeland Security.” So they ran a whole other investigation, which is Operation Whistle Pig, named after the whiskey that Rambo drank when he was meeting with Ali Watkins at the bar. There are so many parts of this where, yeah.

    So, over time, Rambo has amped up his investigation, but he finds out that the FBI is actually not pursuing his probe, until he gets back to San Diego at the end of his detail to the Targeting Center, and he gets a call that says, “Hey, it’s the FBI. We have just opened up a new leak investigation unit in-house, and we would love all this information again.” So, they make him sign —

    AMY GOODMAN: Jana, we have 30 seconds.

    JANA WINTER: OK. So, basically, we have no idea how many other reporters have been investigated by the FBI, thanks to this unit that has no rules and no procedures and continues to operate today.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jana Winter, investigative correspondent for Yahoo News. We will link to your major new exposé, “Operation Whistle Pig: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that investigates Americans.”

    When we come back, we speak with one of the workers at a Buffalo Starbucks that just won a historic victory after they voted to unionize last week, making them the first to do so among Starbucks’ 9,000 stores in the United States, then to Memphis to speak with one of 1,400 Kellogg’s workers who have now been on strike for two months. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Historic and Long Overdue Exonerations of Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam for the 1965 Assassination of Malcolm X

    Compelling evidence of innocence known to the FBI and NYPD was hidden from the defense at trial and only recently revealed through a reinvestigation of the case

     

    NEW YORK – November 18, 2021 – David B. Shanies Law Office (or “Shanies Law”) and the Innocence Project proudly announced today the long overdue exonerations for Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, two innocent men wrongly convicted 55 years ago for the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X.

    With the agreement of the New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Shanies Law and the Innocence Project joined in a motion today to vacate the 1966 convictions of Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam, which was granted by the Honorable Ellen N. Biben, Administrative Judge for the New York County Supreme Court, Criminal Term. The joint motion was the culmination of a collaborative reinvestigation of the case, which began in January 2020 and unearthed new evidence of Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam’s innocence, including FBI documents that had been available at the time of trial but were withheld from both the defense and prosecution.

    “Today marks a significant and long overdue milestone for Muhammad Aziz and the memory of Khalil Islam” said David B. Shanies. “These innocent men experienced the agony of decades in prison for a crime they did not commit. They were robbed of their freedom in the prime of their lives and branded the killers of a towering civil rights leader. Muhammad is now 83, and Khalil passed away years ago without ever having had the chance to see his name cleared. They, their families, and their communities have endured decades of unspeakable pain and suffering. The tragic and unjust events of the past can never be erased but exonerating these men is a righteous and well-deserved affirmation of their true character. We are grateful to the New York County District Attorney’s Office for its collaboration, transparency, and fairness during the past two years that led to this exoneration.”

    “What was widely known 55 years ago is now being formally acknowledged: that Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam are innocent, and that they should have never been arrested, charged, or convicted for a murder they did not commit,” said Deborah Francois, an attorney with Shanies Law. “Muhammad’s and Khalil’s convictions were the product of gross official misconduct and a criminal justice system weighed against people of color. Their exoneration was decades in the making and is proof that we need—and are able—to do better.”

    “The assassination of Malcolm X was a historic event that demanded a scrupulous investigation and prosecution but, instead, produced one of the most blatant miscarriages of justice that I have ever seen.”

    Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project and Special Counsel, stated, “The assassination of Malcolm X was a historic event that demanded a scrupulous investigation and prosecution but, instead, produced one of the most blatant miscarriages of justice that I have ever seen. Officially correcting the false historical narrative around one of the most significant events in 20th century US history allows us to learn from and prevent future miscarriages of justice. Indeed, as George Orwell once said: he who controls the past controls the future. Nowhere is that seen more clearly than in this case.”

    Vanessa Potkin, director of Special Litigation at the Innocence Project added, “It took five decades of unprecedented work by scholars and activists and the creation of a Conviction Integrity Program at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office willing to engage in a true joint re-investigation for these wrongful convictions to be officially acknowledged and rectified. The recently unearthed evidence of Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam’s innocence that had been hidden by the NYPD and FBI not only invalidates their convictions, – it also highlights the many unanswered questions about the government’s complicity in the assassination – a separate and important issue that, itself, demands further inquiry.”

    The Innocence Project and Shanies Law acknowledge in particular the extraordinary efforts of Charles King, Deputy Chief of the Conviction Integrity Program, and Senior Trial Counsel Peter Casolaro, who worked previously on the case of the Exonerated Five. Together with the New York County District Attorney’s office, they led a cooperative and transparent conviction review process that made this achievement possible.

     

    History of the Case and Previous Attempts to Exonerate the Innocent Men

    On February 21, 1965, at an event in the Audubon Ballroom in New York, a group of men ambushed Malcolm X as he began speaking to the audience and fatally shot him. Mujahid Abdul Halim, then known as Talmadge Hayer, was captured at the scene and arrested by the New York City Police Department (“NYPD”). Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam were arrested at their homes several days later and charged with the murder of Malcolm X, along with Mr. Halim. In the aftermath of the tragic incident, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) became involved immediately and worked closely with the NYPD and DANY during the investigation and prosecution of the case.

    No physical evidence implicating Mr. Aziz or Mr. Islam in the murder has ever existed. Nor is there any evidence connecting either man to Mr. Halim. The case against them rested solely on highly contradictory and implausible eyewitness testimony procured under dubious circumstances. Mr. Halim, after initially denying guilt in his testimony, retook the stand to admit his role in the murder and affirm that Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam had nothing to do with it.

    “My father’s exoneration is a welcome but long overdue relief to our entire family.”

    Furthermore, both men had alibis. Each was at home with their respective families at the time of Malcolm X’s murder. At trial, both men testified in their own defense and presented testimony from their respective spouses, friends, and others who either saw them or called them at their homes around the time of the murder. Mr. Aziz was tending to both his legs, wounded in a recent beating by police officers, and hospital records showed he was treated on the very morning of the day of the murder.

    Despite the significant weaknesses in the cases against them, Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam were convicted in 1966 for the murder of Malcolm X and sentenced to life in prison. They served a combined 42 years in prison, several of them in solitary confinement.

    In 1977, Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam moved to vacate their convictions, based in part on two affidavits from Halim. In those affidavits, Mr. Halim identified his true co-conspirators for the first time and reiterated the innocence of Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam. The information in Mr. Halim’s affidavits was supported by FBI and NYPD documents that remained hidden from the defense and prosecution. The motion to vacate the convictions was denied in 1978 – 43 years ago, and nearly a decade before Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam were paroled.

    In the decades following Malcolm X’s murder, it has been widely acknowledged that Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam were innocent and wrongly convicted. Many credible scholars, authors, investigative journalists, and documentarians, including at least three Pulitzer Prize-winning historians, have studied the assassination, and the overwhelming consensus among them is that Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam are innocent. Government officials and leaders in the Black community consistently called for Aziz and Islam’s release. Most recently, in 2020 Netflix released a documentary titled “Who Killed Malcolm X?,” which chronicled the exhaustive research into FBI files and other evidence highlighting their innocence and delving into the identity of one of the true killers.

    “My wrongful conviction was a terrible injustice that resulted from the deliberate and dishonest actions of corrupt officials.”

    Mr. Islam passed away in 2009, losing the chance to see the day that his name was finally cleared. Mr. Aziz, now 83, was released on parole in 1985 and has (along with his family) continued to bear the burden of being viewed in the eyes of the law and the public at large as one of the murderers of an unparalleled human rights leader, Malcolm X.

    “I am deeply grateful for the strong and unwavering support and advocacy from my lawyers, David Shanies, Deborah Francois, Mark O’Donoghue, and the Innocence Project’s Barry Scheck and Vanessa Potkin,” said Mohammad Aziz. “My wrongful conviction was a terrible injustice that resulted from the deliberate and dishonest actions of corrupt officials. It has caused unspeakable harm to my family and to me. The lost time and relationships with my family and loved ones can never be recovered.” 

    “My father’s exoneration is a welcome but long overdue relief to our entire family,” said Khalil Islam’s eldest son, who shares his father’s name. “We are pleased to see justice finally being served, but it is heartbreaking to know that he passed away without ever seeing his name cleared for his wrongful conviction. To the day he died he never stopped fighting to prove his innocence.”

    For more information about Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam and the history of their wrongful convictions, please visit www.theXonerated.com.

     

    About David B. Shanies Law Office

    The David B. Shanies Law Office is a public interest law firm representing victims of wrongful convictions, police and prosecutorial misconduct, anti-LGBTQ+ bias, prison abuse, sexual exploitation, and other injustice. 100% of the firm’s work is devoted to civil rights litigation and exonerations. Through its active trial and litigation practice and vast experience in wrongful conviction cases, the firm has exonerated and freed innocent people from prison, brought about major policy and legislative reforms, and won tens of millions of dollars in compensation for its clients through trials and settlements.  

    About the Innocence Project

    The Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, is a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to freeing the staggering number of innocent people who are wrongfully incarcerated and reforming the systems responsible for their unjust imprisonment. Since its founding in 1992, the Innocence Project has exonerated more than 200 people and advanced transformative laws, standards, and the practices to help make our criminal legal systems more just and equitable for all.

    The post Historic and Long Overdue Exonerations of Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam for the 1965 Assassination of Malcolm X appeared first on Innocence Project.

    This post was originally published on Innocence Project.

  • CPJ concerned over FBI raid on home of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe

    Washington, D.C., November 15, 2021 — The Committee to Protect Journalists today expressed concern about the harmful precedent set by recent Federal Bureau of Investigation raids on the homes of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and his associates.

    According to media reports, the FBI seized O’Keefe’s cellphones during a November 6 raid on his home in Mamaroneck, New York, as part of a court-ordered investigation into the theft of a diary belonging to Ashley Biden, U.S. President Joe Biden’s daughter. In a statement, Project Veritas wrote that authorities also raided the apartments and homes of other current and former members of the organization, and confiscated unspecified materials.

    Project Veritas acquired the diary in 2020 but turned it over to law enforcement, those media reports said.

    Founded by O’Keefe in 2011, Project Veritas is a nonprofit group that conducts exposés on groups it perceives as left-leaning, and has amplified disinformation on topics including COVID-19 vaccines and alleged election fraud, according to the independent nonprofit fact-checking group First Draft.

    “While we do not endorse some of the tactics Project Veritas employs, the FBI’s recent raids on the organization’s founder and his associates represent a concerning overreach by law enforcement,” said CPJ U.S. and Canada Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “The government must provide a clear link between members of Project Veritas and alleged criminal activity before searching their homes for information about source material. Conducting raids without this kind of link sets a dangerous precedent that could allow law enforcement to search and confiscate reporters’ unpublished source material in vague attempts to identify whistleblowers.”

    Some pages of the diary were published on a right-wing blog during the 2020 U.S. presidential election campaign, according to those news reports, which said that the Justice Department under the Trump administration first opened an investigation into the theft.

    On a November 10 letter to U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in New York, lawyers representing Project Veritas stated that the outlet had received the diary lawfully, the New York Times reported. On November 11, Torres ordered prosecutors to pause their “extraction and review of the contents” of O’Keefe’s phones, according to Politico.

    When CPJ called the FBI for comment, a representative who answered requested that CPJ submit questions via email. CPJ emailed questions to the bureau’s New York office but did not immediately receive any reply.

    A representative from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York told CPJ via phone that the office could not comment on the case.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • US citizens v FBI: Will the government face charges for illegal surveillance?

    Muslim citizens are suing the FBI for subjecting them to undercover surveillance after 9/11 in violation of rights

    On Monday, the US supreme court will hear arguments in a case which could determine whether the US government faces accountability for its mass surveillance of Muslim Americans after 9/11.

    The nine justices will be asked to decide on whether Muslim US citizens who were subjected to undercover surveillance by a paid informant at their southern California mosque can receive redress through the courts.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Reporting A Federal Crime

    “I tried to report a crime last week.  It was a serious crime, too.  Rather, it was a whole bunch of federal crimes.  It was impossible to find anybody interested. Over the past year, I have developed first-hand knowledge of what I believe is a major international fraud.  The principal is an American citizen who is defrauding investors in a financial technology bank scam based overseas, and the investors include people in the United States and in at least three foreign countries.”

    The post Reporting A Federal Crime appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • So You Go Deaf at a Protest: *MIC/MICC* at the Helm

    *Military Industrial Complex, or Lawrence Wilkerson’s, Military Industrial Congressional Complex*

    You get a story on the supposed Havana Syndrome, and then you also get the concept of mass psychogenic illness (you know, it’s all in your head, buster, those heart palpitations, the sweats, the throbbing veins, after getting mRNA “vaccinated”) explained, and, well, no huge outrage on these weapons of mass destruction created by USA, Israel, UK, France other shit-holes. None. Yes, of course, China and Russia, they have their directed energy weapons, their lasers, their rail guns.

    As a collective, we just take it up the rear end daily, a thousand times, with these illustrations of the perversion of the inventors (scientists) and the CEOs and their armies of Eichmanns and then their armies of wrench turners and computer motherboard makers to help build these tools of oppression and murder. .

    Get this one here:

    The United Kingdom deployed an American-made Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), in essence, a sound cannon, during the London 2012 Olympics. Products like LRAD represent a shift from military to domestic usage of directed energy weapons, Dawson noted, explaining:

    DEW manufacturers seem to be developing more hand-held versions of what was industrial-scale military weaponry. So they are transitioning from something that was the size of a truck used in Afghanistan or Iraq and turning it into something more like a taser that can be held by a police officer. In fact, the Taser Corporation, as well as other manufacturers of crowd-control weaponry, are listed in the WikiLeaks files as being manufacturers of directed energy weapons.”

    LRADs are used at airports to deter wildlife from runways. But they are also commonly used by law enforcement against protestors, such as at Occupy Oakland, the George Floyd protests, and at the 2017 Women’s March.

    EU police officer deploys an LRAD

    [An EU police officer deploys an LRAD near a popular refugee crossing point on the Greek – Turkish border, May 21, 2021. Giannis Papanikos | AP]

    LRAD focuses a piercing and unbearable noise at those at whom it is pointed, leaving targets dizzy and suffering headaches. It is undoubtedly effective, but also poses a risk to human health. The National Institutes of Health advises that permanent hearing loss can begin when exposed to sounds of more than 85 dB. Yet police LRADs are capable of producing sounds of higher than 150 dB. There are serious concerns that the LRAD will be used liberally and illegally to disperse peaceful demonstrations. This is already happening: in 2017, the city of New York was forced to pay $748,000 to Black Lives Matter protestors targeted with LRAD. The NYPD suspended its use.

    So, look at the thug, with earplugs and fake mask on, while using a weapon turned on refugees. Now if this is not a picture of the Great White Sadistic Race, then, I can’t begin to help you, kind reader.

    Our tax dollars at this murderous work —

    Read Alan MacLeod’s piece here — Havana Syndrome, Directed Energy Weapons, and the New Cold War

    It’s the supplements, stupid!

    So, from illegal and unethical and monstrous weapons against we the people, to the power of the Food and Drug Administration’s prostitutes in the employ of Big Pharma and Big Med:

    Yep, emergency use authorization to approve the universal jabbing of hundreds of bottles of boosters on the wall, that FDA is something else —

    Resveratrol, a plant-derived polyphenol found in grapes, could be eliminated in supplement form like pyridoxamine (B6) was a number of years ago due to an FDA back-channel that lets Big Pharma turn supplements into drugs. If Big Pharma asks the FDA to remove resveratrol, the agency’s job of eliminating these supplements is made much easier if it gets the “mandatory filing” requirement that it wants. We need to fight for major changes in the law and to block this “mandatory list” from ever passing to protect our access to important supplements.

    Resveratrol has been available as a supplement for years. But we know from FDA documents that the agency rejected a “new supplement” notification for resveratrol, stating that resveratrol doesn’t meet the legal definition of a supplement because a drug company started investigating it as a drug in 2001, and the agency has no evidence that resveratrol was sold as a supplement before that date. This means that the drug company could, at any time, petition the FDA to remove resveratrol supplements from the market. This is what happened to pyridoxamine, a form of B6, and it still isn’t available as a supplement even though no drug ever came to market; it could also happen to CBD and l-glutamine.

    So, imagine, all those supplements, all those proven natural elements to keep us out of the medical system. Out of the death chambers of doctors’ offices and mass murder hospitals. You know, this FDA and CDC and NIH group of liars, or in some camps, poison delivery villains:

    Rumble — Expert Testimony provided by Dr. Christina Parks, Ph.D, to the Michigan House of Representatives in hearing on HB 4471. This is an unedited screen recording. This science of viruses, what they can and cannot do, and that is a huge discussion point, though I see this doctor talking to glazed eyes in the Michigan House — Eight minutes to get illuminated so please, watch. This absurdity, using boosters of those mRNA jabs to stop the Delta Variant? Makes zero sense. Listen, watch, and enlighten yourself.

    If there are no national leaders, folks with bully pulpits, with media stages, to really drill down on the absurdity of this country, these trillions lost/stolen of our tax dollars, then the cascading number of stories will continue to come out with no umph, no fanfare, no repercussions.

    The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed.

    “Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.” Can you believe that headline? Not “admits” but “acknowledges”. Not “killed children while targeting an aid worker based on flimsy evidence” but “was a tragic mistake”. How many times did New York Times editors rewrite this? Imagine if this had been a Russian airstrike.

    It’s the CIA (and assassinations) Stupid! 

    And so, we get back to the USA, CIA, all those nefarious mutants from the UK, Israel, et al. I was almost five when Dag Hammarskjoild was murdered (1961). This documentary goes around the evidence, gets into the ugly reality of MI6 and CIA and apartheid whites wanting to eradicate the Blacks in, well, Black Africa. Lo and behold, the documentary that looks into the UN chief’s murder exposes another reality — a clandestine group using fake medical doctors and fake clinics to inoculate Blacks (poor, of course) with HIV, to help spread the deadly virus.

    Former President Harry Truman told reporters two days after Dag Hammarskjöld’s death on Sept. 18, 1961 that the U.N. secretary-general  “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him.’”

    The mystery of the second U.N. secretary-general’s death festered until the 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? by British researcher Susan Williams, who uncovered new evidence that pointed to the likelihood that U.S., British and South African intelligence had a hand in his death in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia, today’s Zambia. He was on his way to negotiate a cease-fire in Katanga’s separatist war from the Congo.

    Williams’ findings led to an independent commission that called on the U.N. to reopen its 1962 probe in the killing, which ended with an open verdict. “The possibility … the plane was … forced into descent by some form of hostile action is supported by sufficient evidence to merit further inquiry,” the commission concluded.

    All roads lead to hell, when it comes to USA, Israel, UK, EU and Canada. Exterminate all the Brutes!

    “I wanted to push the boundaries of conventional documentary filmmaking and find a freedom to tell this story by any means necessary.” Director Raoul Peck sits down to discuss the creative intentions behind documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes.

    Check out more on Dag over at Consortium News —

    Oh, the truths of the day, around 6 million people dead because of the War on Terror. Six million!

    New Byline Times report which found that

    “at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died overall due to the War on Terror – a staggering number which is still probably very conservative.”

    Image

     

    The post So You Go Deaf at a Protest: *MIC/MICC* at the Helm first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Since 9/11, FBI Has Destroyed People Based On Their Race, Religion, Or Country Of Origin

    This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter, a project of Shadowproof. Become a paid subscriber and help us expand our work.

    [Editor’s Note: To mark the 20th anniversary of the rise of the American security state after the September 11th attacks, The Dissenter presents a retrospective on this transformation in policing and government. Each entry in the series, “Twenty Years In A Security State,” will connect with whistleblower stories where possible.]

    Former FBI special agent Terry Albury is one of the very few people within the bureau, who challenged racial profiling, surveillance, and abusive informant recruitment practices.

    Albury, who is a Black man, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act during President Donald Trump’s administration after he provided documents to the Intercept. He accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to about four years in federal prison.

    A New York Times Magazine profile by journalist Janet Reitman detailed Albury’s life and career as an FBI special agent and what led to his disclosures.

    “There is this mythology surrounding the war on terrorism, and the FBI, that has given agents the power to ruin the lives of completely innocent people based solely on what part of the world they came from, or what religion they practice, or the color of their skin,” Albury told Reitman. “And I did that. I helped destroy people, for 17 years.”

    Albury was the only Black agent in the regional office for most of the time that he worked for the FBI’s terrorism squad in Minnesota. He was a special agent in the FBI’s Minneapolis Field Office from 2012 to August 28, 2017.

    It was on February 19, 2016, that Albury shared screen shots of documents from a “counter-radicalization program known as Shared Responsibility Committees” (SRCs).

    Reitman described the SRCs as an idea to “bring together local and federal law enforcement with various members of the community — imams, teachers, psychologists, coaches, social workers — to come up with intervention strategies to help “off-ramp” young people they feared might be radicalizing.”

    Albury was concerned that SRCs were simply a shrewd way for the FBI to grow its network of informants by enticing local police agencies and nonprofit organizations with large sums of cash that could fund “community-engagement workshops” or other events.

    As The Intercept reported, a “potentially violent extremist” could be referred to an SRC. The members would develop a plan to help the individual, whether that was through mental health or substance abuse treatment or housing and education. But the FBI was under no obligation to let members know if that person would remain under investigation. Nor were they required to inform the SRC if they planned to arrest or charge the person with a crime.

    Any information shared with the FBI could be passed on by the bureau to other U.S. security agencies or even foreign government agencies while SRC members, as the Intercept noted, were required to sign confidentiality agreements. They had no legal protection, which contributed to fears that SRC members might be liable if an individual they helped engaged in violence.

    Later that same year, Albury provided the Intercept with an internal presentation showing the FBI’s proposed plan for “infiltrating mosques and Muslim student associations” in order to recruit Yemeni students as informants.

    The FBI wanted information from sources on al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), but targeting individuals “based solely on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion or activities protected by the First Amendment, or a combination of only such factors” is supposed to be prohibited by the bureau’s guidelines.

    The Intercept’s Cora Currier recalled how the FBI’s informant network grew to more than 15,000 following the 9/11 attacks. “ In 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained documents showing that the FBI had used ‘mosque outreach’ programs ostensibly meant to build relationships with Islamic communities in order to collect intelligence.”

    With the perceived threat of the Islamic State, the FBI ramped up their reliance on informants and sting operations. From 2014-2016, there were more than 100 “Islamic State-related cases” in federal courts and over half of them involved confidential human sources or undercover agents, according to the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School.

    ‘There Was Nothing Connecting The Kid To Terrorism’

    By 2017, Albury provided the Intercept with screenshots of a cache of documents that reflected the incredible expansion of the FBI and the “secret rules” that agents followed while exercising great power within the United States.

    One of the internal policy guidelines indicated profiling still occurred, despite Attorney General Eric Holder’s public opposition.

    “Behind the scenes, the FBI had reportedly pushed back against any rules from Holder that would ban consideration of race, ethnicity, and religion in counterterrorism investigations,” Currier reported.

    Guidelines contained loopholes that allowed for the cultivation of sources of a “particular ethnicity when investigating a terrorist organization made up of members of that ethnic group.” The FBI could focus on the demographics of a community when collecting intelligence, and FBI agents could specifically pursue informants in Somali communities to help them fight al Shabab in Somalia.

    Also, the documents Albury provided showed the FBI will require a supervisor’s approval if an undercover agent or informant wants to pose as someone and join a religious, political, or academic group. However, if an FBI agent makes a determination that a group is “illegitimate” or an informant takes it upon themselves to spy on a group, then the guidelines may not necessarily matter.

    Albury was part of the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Minneapolis and involved in developing informants. It often required him to target Somali immigrants, people who fellow agents derogatorily referred to as “skinnies.”

    “In all his years as an FBI agent,” Albury shared, “[he] had never heard the sort of unabashed hatred for any group of people as he did for the Somalis, whom agents denigrated for their poverty, or their food, or the habit some Somali immigrant women had of tucking their cellphones inside their hijabs while shopping at Walmart or driving a car.”

    Albury shared many details with Reitman from one investigation into the little brother of Adaki, an al Shabab fighter who traveled from Minnesota to Somalia. An informant code-named Cottonball worked with the FBI for a year and made “wildly contradictory claims” about this young kid. However, there was little that Albury believed he could do to help him so he was not “screwed for life.”

    There was nothing connecting the kid to terrorism. Albury knew this after spending months completing a process known as ‘baseline collection’: scouring his social media, checking his phone records, running his name through the D.M.V. database as well as myriad other secret and top-secret government databases. But now his name was in the system. That meant any number of government agencies — the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, ICE — could have access to his file.”

    “Now, any time he applied for a passport, or a job that required a background check, or a driver’s license, or simply had his name run through any sort of government database, for the rest of his life, it would show up that he’d been looked at by the FBI, which would inevitably be viewed as suspicious. That was what was so insidious about the process, Albury thought. And it wasn’t just this kid — there were thousands of Minneapolis Muslims in the system just like him and untold millions elsewhere in the country.

    Albury’s job recruiting informants involved dangling the possibility of a green card if they worked for the FBI. He could also threaten to deport people who were unwilling to be informants. Yet another technique involved suggesting misinformation would be spread about them in the community if they did not collaborate.

    “I don’t think anyone fully appreciates how demoralizing it is to be sitting across the table from a peace-loving man or woman from a foreign country, insinuating all kinds of baseless BS, attempting to coerce them to spy on their equally peaceful community, but it was also my job,” Albury said.

    “What the FBI was directing us to do was to go into these communities and instill fear and then generate this paranoia within these people so that they know that they’re under suspicion perpetually.”

    Creating A Database Of American Muslims

    Albury further elaborated, “Say you’d get an alert from the CIA or some other intelligence source that an ISIS recruiter had been trying to recruit teenagers and young men from a specific Syrian refugee camp during a specific time period. This happened all the time. That would give the FBI license to look at every male Syrian refugee between certain ages who had been at that camp and then come into the United States after the time the recruiter was supposed to have been there.”

    “And so the FBI would look at all of those kids, and they could keep looking at those kids, and their friends, and maybe all the kids in a 30-block radius because they could say they had ‘credible intelligence’ to suggest that some of these people had terrorist sympathies,” according to Albury.

    Why would it be important for the FBI to have thick files on Arab or Muslim kids, who are entirely innocent? What purpose could that serve?

    “It achieves ‘intelligence,’” Albury asserted. “And that is a nebulous, wonderful-sounding word that everyone likes to throw around, but based on my experience, the entire purpose of these assessments was to create a database of American Muslims.”

    In 2013 and 2014, the CLEAR Project and Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit on behalf of American Muslims who refused to act as FBI informants and were placed on the No Fly List to coerce them into spying on their communities.

    Muhammad Tanvir, a lead plaintiff, rejected multiple requests by FBI agents to work as an informant in Queens, New York. He contended it would have violated his religious beliefs. He also had no information to share. Tanvir later learned he was on the No Fly List and was instructed to speak with FBI agents. The agents were willing to remove Tanvir from the list so long as he became an informant.

    CCR used the watchlisting guidance from the National Counterterrorism Center, which was released by drone whistleblower Daniel Hale to bolster their lawsuit alleging a violation of religious freedom and due process rights.

    Over the following years, the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court. On December 10, 2020, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a unanimous decision upholding the rights of American Muslims to pursue damages for the alleged violations of their religious freedom.

    “A damages remedy is not just ‘appropriate’ relief as viewed through the lens of suits against Government employees. It is also the only form of relief that can remedy some [religious freedom] violations. For certain injuries, such as respondents’ wasted plane tickets, effective relief consists of damages, not an injunction.”

    In other words, it was not enough to remove their names from the No Fly List. People like Tanvir had a right to their day in court against those responsible for the suffering they endured.

    To Albury, this was vindication. “That Thomas, of all people, wrote the majority decision—that blew my mind,” and, “It made me feel like I actually accomplished something.”

    The post Since 9/11, FBI Has Destroyed People Based On Their Race, Religion, Or Country Of Origin appeared first on Shadowproof.

    This post was originally published on Shadowproof.

  • Top Gymnasts Blast FBI for Not Taking Nassar’s Sexual Abuse Case Seriously

    This week some of gymnastics’ biggest stars shared scathing testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the FBI’s failure to stop Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics doctor and serial sexual abuser. 

Lawyers say that after the FBI was first told of Nassar’s crimes, he abused another 120 people before his 2016 arrest. We feature the testimony of Simone Biles, the four-time Olympic gold medalist, who is widely considered to be the greatest gymnast of all time, and speak with gymnast Rachael Denhollander, who was the first to publicly accuse Nassar of sexual abuse and says the case exposes a systemic failure to take sexual abuse seriously. “Something we need to be asking as we’re watching this unfold is: What are we not seeing?” Denhollander says. “What happens to the survivors who don’t have an army of 500 women? What happens to the survivors who don’t have Olympians headlining their case and raising the profile of the gross negligence and corruption that’s taking place in our system?” We also speak with Mark Alesia, who was an investigative reporter at The Indianapolis Star in 2016 and helped to break the story about Nassar’s sexual abuse of gymnasts. “The FBI did not take the gymnasts’ complaints seriously,” Alesia says.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    Some of gymnastics’ biggest stars offered scathing testimony Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the FBI’s failure to stop serial sexual abuser, USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. Lawyers say in the time between when the FBI was first told of Nassar’s crimes and his 2016 arrest, Nassar abused another 120 people. FBI Director Christopher Wray apologized to the gymnasts in the Senate hearing. Last week, the FBI fired an agent involved in the investigation into Nassar. Both the gymnasts and senators on the Judiciary Committee called out Justice Department leadership for failing to appear at Wednesday’s hearing. Attorney General Merrick Garland is expected to testify next month.

    This is the testimony of Simone Biles, the four-time Olympic gold medalist, who is widely considered to be the greatest gymnast of all time.

    SIMONE BILES: Over the course of my gymnastics career, I have won 25 World Championship medals and seven Olympic medals for Team USA. That record means so much to me, and I am proud of my representation of this nation through gymnastics.

    I am also a survivor of sexual abuse. And I believe without a doubt that the circumstances that led to my abuse and allowed it to continue, are directly the result of the fact that the organizations created by Congress to oversee and protect me as an athlete — USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee — failed to do their jobs.

    Nelson Mandela once said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” It is the power of that statement that compels and empowers me to be here in front of you today. I don’t want another young gymnast, Olympic athlete or any individual to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during and continuing to this day in the wake of the Larry Nassar abuse. To be clear — sorry.

    SEN. DICK DURBIN: Take your time.

    SIMONE BILES: To be clear, I blame Larry Nassar, and I also blame an entire system that enabled and [perpetuated] his abuse.

    USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee knew that I was abused by their official team doctor long before I was ever made aware of their knowledge. In May of 2015, Rhonda Faehn, the former head of the USA Gymnastics Women’s Program, was told by my friend and teammate, Maggie Nichols, that she suspected I, too, was a victim. I didn’t understand the magnitude of what all was happening until The Indianapolis Star published its article in the fall of 2016 entitled “Former USA Gymnastics doctor accused of abuse.” Yet, while I was a member of the 2016 U.S. Olympic team, neither USAG, USOPC, nor the FBI ever contacted me or my parents. While others had been informed and investigations were ongoing, I had been left to wonder why I was not told until after the Rio Games.

    This is the largest case of sexual abuse in the history of American sport. And although there has been a fully independent investigation of the FBI’s handling of the case, neither USAG nor USOPC have ever been made the subject of the same level of scrutiny. These are the entities entrusted with the protection of our sport and our athletes, and yet it feels like questions of responsibility and organizational failures remain unanswered. As you pursue the answers to those questions, I ask that your work be guided by the same question that Rachael Denhollander and many others have asked: “How much is a little girl worth?”

    I sit before you today to raise my voice so that no little girl must endure what I, the athletes at this table and the countless others who needlessly suffered under Nassar’s guise of medical treatment, which we continue to endure today. We suffered and continue to suffer because no one at FBI, USAG or the USOPC did what was necessary to protect us. We have been failed, and we deserve answers.

    Nassar is where he belongs, but those who enabled him deserve to be held accountable. If they are not, I am convinced that this will continue to happen to others across Olympic sports. In reviewing the OIG’s report, it truly feels like the FBI turned a blind eye to us and went out of its way to help protect USAG and USOPC. A message needs to be sent: If you allow a predator to harm children, the consequences will be swift and severe. Enough is enough.

    AMY GOODMAN: That’s Simone Biles, the four-time Olympic gold medalist, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday about the FBI’s failure to stop serial sexual abuser, USA Gymnastics doctor, now imprisoned, Larry Nassar. Biles mentioned Rachael Denhollander, who, in 2016, was the first gymnast to publicly speak out against Nassar. On Thursday, Rachael Denhollander spoke to Democracy Now!

    RACHAEL DENHOLLANDER: I am so proud of the athletes who testified and the light that they’re shedding in these dark spaces. But to see over and over and over again the depth of systemic failure and just the incredible damage that was done to them and to all of the survivors who came after they reported, when that didn’t need to happen, is a very heavy burden to bear.

    And I think something we need to be asking as we’re watching this unfold is: What are we not seeing? Because the reality is, most survivors of sexual assault who report will tell you that this is a story that they could tell, too. It is very difficult to get law enforcement to take reports of sexual assault seriously, to pursue the case with diligence, to prosecute it to the fullest extent of the law. And we need to start looking at what we saw yesterday and ask what we’re not seeing. What happens to the survivors who don’t have an army of 500 women? What happens to the survivors who don’t have Olympians headlining their case and raising the profile of the gross negligence and the corruption that’s taking place in our system? …

    In 15 months, the FBI did absolutely nothing, except allow over a hundred little girls to continue being abused. … So we need to be looking at what has to change in this case, but it’s not just a problem with this case. We’ve got to start asking: What’s got to change in the system, so that survivors that we don’t see aren’t going through what these women went through, and have a justice system that they can truly rely on? Those are hard questions, but they’ve got to be asked. And these words are cheap if they’re not followed by action.

    AMY GOODMAN: That’s Rachael Denhollander, the first gymnast to speak out publicly against Larry Nassar.

    For more, we’re joined by Mark Alesia, who Denhollander first contacted in 2016, when he was part of the investigative team at The Indianapolis Star. She told him, quote, “I am willing to do anything you need. I want this to end.” Mark’s team then broke the story about Dr. Nassar’s abuse. He is now director of university communications at Indiana State University.

    Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Mark. We talked to you just after Nassar’s trial and sentencing, that remarkable moment when one woman, one gymnast after another stood up and talked about how he had wrecked their lives, but talked about surviving. Now we have the top gymnasts, some of the most famous women in the world, like Simone Biles, testifying before the Senate. They specifically focused on the FBI. Tell us this story from the beginning. You were there. How is it that the FBI dropped the ball so completely? And are we going to see criminal charges against FBI agents?

    MARK ALESIA: Well, I don’t know if we’re going to see those charges, but I think it was Senator Leahy who said there are a whole lot of people who ought to be in jail after this.

    What happened was, the FBI did not take the gymnasts’ complaints seriously. They didn’t — offices in different cities didn’t communicate with each other. And there were conflicts of interest. There was an FBI agent who was talking to the president of USAG, Steve Penny, about getting a job with the U.S. Olympic Committee, and that they were so chummy that in one of the emails, Steve Penny told the FBI agent that he would like to, quote, “body slam the reporters” — myself, Marisa and Tim. That’s Steve Penny. And, by the way, he’s one of the people who isn’t in jail.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about why Indianapolis is so important. You mentioned the U.S. Olympic Committee. Talk about who first came forward to the FBI and what happened to that complaint.

    MARK ALESIA: That would have been, I believe, McKayla Maroney, very early on. She wasn’t taken seriously. I think she testified that the agent said, “That’s it?” And then —

    AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go — I want to go to the Olympic gold medalist McKayla Maroney testifying before the Senate Wednesday.

    McKAYLA MARONEY: This was very clear, cookie cutter pedophilia and abuse. And this is important, because I told the FBI all of this, and they chose to falsify my report and to not only minimize my abuse, but silence me yet again. I thought, given the severity of the situation, that they would act quickly for the sake of protecting other girls. But instead, it took them 14 months to report anything, when Larry Nassar, in my opinion, should have been in jail that day. The FBI, USOC and USAG sat idly by as dozens of girls and women continued to be molested by Larry Nassar.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, Mark Alesia, talk about how you got involved, the tip, how you ended up going down to Louisville to interview Rachael Denhollander.

    MARK ALESIA: My teammates and I, Marisa Kwiatkowski and Tim Evans at The Indianapolis Star, we did a story. The first one was right on the eve of the Rio Olympics in 2016. And after that story came out, we received an email from Rachael saying, “I wasn’t abused by a coach, but this was a doctor. And if you’re interested, I will speak out, and I will speak out by name.” I drove down to Louisville, and I interviewed Rachael. She came off as intelligent, sincere, passionate, utterly credible. And —

    AMY GOODMAN: Then a lawyer and a mother of three.

    MARK ALESIA: And a lawyer and a mother of four now, I believe. And, yes, everything.

    And what really, I think, bothers me — well, it angers me; it doesn’t just bother me. It’s five years after that. It’s five years after that, and those women had to show up in front of a congressional committee and bare their soul again to make people understand what happened. These survivors, five years later, they are still looking for answers. They are still looking for justice. And that’s outrageous.

    And there’s another piece to this, too. The survivors also have been trying, unsuccessfully, to get Michigan State University to release 6,000 pages of documents from an investigation into Nassar that they are withholding because of attorney-client privilege.

    AMY GOODMAN: Now, this is amazing. Michigan State, the president has had to resign, but he wasn’t criminally charged. That’s where the, you know, U.S. Olympic Committee’s doctor, Nassar, worked, at Michigan State. And he abused these girls, these young women, for decades.

    MARK ALESIA: Right. And it’s also important to understand that for about maybe 10 or 15 years earlier, adults — or, gymnasts had come forward to adults to complain about Nassar, but it always went nowhere. That included one situation with a law enforcement department. It included a Michigan State coach, a gymnastics coach. It included people who couldn’t possibly believe that that great, wonderful Larry Nassar could do such a thing. Adults had failed these children at every level. This is just an absolute tragedy. And again, it is outrageous that five years later it’s still going on, with so many unanswered questions and so many people who were responsible for allowing Nassar to continue going without being held accountable.

    AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the three-time Olympic gold medal gymnast, two-time Olympic team captain, Aly Raisman, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday.

    ALY RAISMAN: It is unrealistic to think we can grasp the full extent of culpability without understanding how and why USAG and USOPC chose to ignore abuse for decades and why the interplay among these three organizations led the FBI to willingly disregard our reports of abuse. Without knowing who knew what when, we cannot identify all enablers or determine whether they are still in positions of power. We just can’t fix a problem we don’t understand. And we can’t understand the problem unless and until we have all of the facts. If we don’t do all we can to get these facts, the problems we are here to address will persist, and we are deluding ourselves if we think other children can be spared the institutionalized tolerance and normalization of abuse that I and so many others had to endure.

    AMY GOODMAN: That is three-time Olympic gold medal gymnast, two-time Olympic team captain, Aly Raisman, who has really been the forceful leader of this movement to bring Nassar down, but not only him, because, as Simone Biles says, the whole system is broken.

    But, interestingly, the attorney general, Merrick Garland did not appear, though the head of the Justice Department was asked to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Apparently, he’s going to appear in October. Christopher Wray did, the head of the FBI, and apologized, though he said he wasn’t there at the time. He said it was abhorrent, what had taken place. What do you make of this, Mark?

    MARK ALESIA: Well, I just — again, I feel so badly for the survivors. I believe it was Aly Raisman who said it’s going to take her months just to get over the experience of testifying before the committee. But I’m sure she felt she had a duty to do that. And I would hope that the people at the very top of our judicial system will recognize their duty to these women, who have represented our country so well on an international stage.

    But, you know, I think it’s also important — Rachael Denhollander, kind of typically for her, she can cut straight to the crux of an issue, but she’s not just looking at abuse in gymnastics. She is talking about the ordeal of women who report sexual assaults and what they go through in all walks of life.

    AMY GOODMAN: Especially, I mean, you’re talking about gold medalists, world-renowned women; if they are not taken seriously, what is everyone else supposed to think? The last point, Mark Alesia, and it’s one you made with us right after the trial, is that these women came forward — it’s not like they run track, where it’s very clear who wins first, second and third. The whole sport is judged by committees. And that’s where they were incredibly brave in coming forward, because when you rock the boat, these committees don’t have to take your scores, your speeds; they can decide if you’re a troublemaker or not, and ice you out.

    MARK ALESIA: Right. And I think by the time a lot of the people who had testified at the Nassar sentencing, they were probably done or close to done with their gymnastics careers. But that’s certainly just sort of one factor in a system where people are sort of groomed to be pleasers and, as you said, not to rock the boat, certainly not with their coach.

    AMY GOODMAN: And you could extend that coach to the workplace. You could extend it certainly to communities, to places of religious worship, and beyond. Well, this may well just be the beginning. We’ll see where this Senate Judiciary Committee goes. Mark Alesia, we want to thank you so much, reporter with the investigative team at The Indianapolis Star which broke the story in 2016 about Dr. Nassar’s sexual abuse of gymnasts. His team helped to expose USA Gymnastics’ failure to report allegations of sexual abuse by coaches and authorities. Now he is no longer with The Indianapolis Star.

    Coming up, as Congress debates a $3.5 trillion bill to expand the nation’s social safety net and to increase taxes on the rich, we look back at Occupy Wall Street, which began 10 years ago today. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • FBI Report Reveals New Connections Between 9/11 Hijackers And Saudi Religious Officials

    A long-suppressed FBI report on Saudi Arabia’s connections to the 9/11 plot has revealed that Saudi religious officials stationed in the United States had more significant connections to two of the hijackers than has been previously known. The 2016 report was released late Saturday night under an executive order from President Joe Biden, who promised to make it public no later than the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The 16-page document was a final inventory of circumstantial evidence and leads from the FBI’s investigation of Saudi ties to the plot; it was heavily redacted.

    The post FBI Report Reveals New Connections Between 9/11 Hijackers And Saudi Religious Officials appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • FBI Terrorism Stings: Two Decades of National Security Theater

    The post FBI Terrorism Stings: Two Decades of National Security Theater appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Many FBI Files on 9/11 Remain Classified. Victims’ Families Want Them Released.

    A U.S. flag and a flower are placed near a victim's name at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at Ground Zero on September 8, 2021, in New York.

    With families of 9/11 victims threatening to protest his appearance at events commemorating the 20th anniversary of the attacks, President Joe Biden took the notable step last week of ordering the Justice Department and other agencies to disclose new portions of their long-secret files on the Qaida plot.

    The executive order on Sept. 3 appears to stave off the prospect that the president might be picketed on the eve of 9/11 memorial services, just days after the final, chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

    What remains in doubt is whether the declassification of FBI documents will resolve the mysteries that still surround the case or provide evidence to support the families’ claims in a federal lawsuit that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia bears some responsibility for the attacks.

    “He has the power to give us closure,” a spokesperson for the families, Brett Eagleson, said of the president. “He has now made us a promise, but he still needs to fulfill it.”

    The relatives’ years-long fight against Justice Department secrecy has lately centered on a list of 45 FBI documents that the government has identified as relevant to the families’ lawsuit in a federal district court in New York.

    Lawyers for the families said those documents represent only a small fraction of the government files they should be entitled to under a 2018 judge’s order. That order limits the plaintiffs to information on a handful of figures who have been tied to the first two Qaida hijackers to arrive in the United States, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.

    The two Saudis flew into Los Angeles from Bangkok on Jan. 15, 2000. Although they had been trained as terrorists, they spoke almost no English and had only the vaguest notions about how to operate in a Western society, people who knew them told the FBI after the attacks.

    The pair quickly made their way to a new mosque that the Saudi government had built in Culver City, California, not far from Sony Pictures Studios. During a purportedly chance meeting at a nearby cafe, they were invited to settle in San Diego by Omar al-Bayoumi, a shadowy middle-aged Saudi graduate student who had already been investigated by the FBI as a possible spy for the kingdom.

    The CIA had been following Hazmi and Mihdhar as they met with other Qaida operatives in Malaysia in early January 2000. The agency somehow lost their trail when the hijackers flew with their own Saudi passports to Thailand and on to Los Angeles. Even after the CIA learned in March 2000 that at least one of the terrorists had entered the country, it did not notify the FBI until late August 2001.

    CIA officers would later interrogate the architect of the plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, about why he sent the first two hijackers to Southern California and whether they had any support network waiting there. (The bipartisan 9/11 Commission found his account implausible.) But most FBI agents investigating the attacks had limited access to the CIA’s intelligence, and even less of that information has since been made public.

    Among the other potential pieces of evidence that have never emerged from the government’s investigation are closed-circuit videotapes showing Hazmi and Mihdhar’s arrival at Los Angeles International Airport. Former FBI investigators said they were never able to locate any tapes despite their repeated requests, leaving questions whether anyone had met the hijackers’ plane.

    The FBI’s handling of evidence it did gather has raised even sharper questions. Just last week, representatives of the 9/11 families wrote to the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, asking that he investigate whether the FBI might have deliberately hidden or destroyed some evidence to avoid its disclosure.

    That request followed claims by the government in federal court that it could no longer find some materials and information it had gathered in the inquiry, including FBI witness interviews and telephone records of people linked to the hijackers. Among the items that the bureau has said it had lost is a home video from a party in San Diego where Bayoumi introduced the two hijackers to a group of his friends.

    A report in 2020 by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine recounted that soon after the FBI launched Operation Encore, a follow-on investigation to the original 9/11 case, in 2007, agents learned that FBI archivists were about to dispose of evidence seized from Bayoumi in the days after the attacks.

    Those materials included a diagram that seemed to show the trajectory of a plane crashing to the ground — resembling the way that American Airlines Flight 77, which Hazmi and Mihdhar helped to hijack, had flown into the Pentagon. A former commercial airline pilot who reviewed the diagram in 2012 told FBI agents there was “a reasonable basis” to suspect that it might have been used in preparation for the attacks, according to a newly disclosed statement in the federal litigation.

    At the center of the 9/11 families’ lawsuit is the theory that Bayoumi and a Saudi religious official based in Los Angeles, Fahad al-Thumairy, provided help to the two hijackers. In an interview with the 9/11 Commission, Bayoumi claimed he had no idea the men were Qaida members. Thumairy told the commission staff he did not even recall meeting the two men.

    Most of the U.S. national security establishment has long discounted the possibility that the Saudi royal family might have knowingly supported the plot. The kingdom viewed Osama bin Laden as a subversive enemy, and the attacks had overwhelmingly negative repercussions for Saudi interests.

    But questions remain about the ties between the Qaida operatives and Saudi religious institutions. Saudi clerics operated with considerable autonomy before 9/11, propagating the kingdom’s conservative Wahhabi doctrine around the world with generous funding from the state. They also supported a number of charities tied to al-Qaida and other militant Islamist groups.

    After 9/11, two teams of FBI investigators began to examine the activities of Saudi religious officials who had been operating in the United States. By 2006, the bureau had quietly forced dozens of accredited diplomats and others to leave the country, usually without filing any criminal charges.

    Operation Encore, which is also referred to as “the subfile case,” concentrated closely on Hazmi and Mihdhar and the people who assisted them in California. But the investigators also left behind big holes: Although they discovered that Bayoumi was not actually studying and was being paid indirectly by a Saudi defense agency, for instance, they were unable to determine whether he had ties to the kingdom’s intelligence services or its religious bureaucracy.

    Encore received little support from senior FBI officials, agents involved in the effort said. It was effectively shut down in 2016, when the chief of a New York counterterrorism task force disbanded the small team of investigators and analysts who were working the case.

    However, as ProPublica revealed last year, a senior analyst on the Encore team left an important marker behind. Before moving on to a new post, other investigators said, the analyst compiled a detailed 16-page summary of the Encore findings and filed it electronically so that it could not be easily deleted from the FBI’s computer system. That document, dated April 4, 2016, is one that Biden specifically ordered the Justice Department to review for declassification “no later” than Sept. 11 of this year.

    Until last month, the Justice Department had argued repeatedly in court that the FBI could not disclose key documents from the 9/11 inquiry because its investigation was ongoing. Since 2017, though, virtually no significant investigative activity has been cited in FBI files that have been shared with lawyers for the families.

    During his campaign, Biden wrote to the 9/11 families that he supported their quest for “full truth and accountability” in the attacks, promising new transparency if he was elected. After more than 1,700 family members warned him to avoid memorial events this year unless he made good on his pledge, the Justice Department announced on Aug. 9 that the FBI had finally closed the Encore investigation and would work to “identify additional information appropriate for disclosure.”

    That wasn’t good enough, the families responded. As they moved forward with plans for anti-Biden protests one day before the 20th anniversary, the president issued his executive order.

    The aggressive secrecy of the Justice Department peaked under the Trump administration and former Attorney General William Barr, who asserted in 2019 that materials from the FBI investigation must be protected as state secrets. But efforts to safeguard both intelligence sources and Saudi sensitivities date back to the Bush and Obama administrations.

    “The Bush administration was cozy with the Saudis, and Obama didn’t want to fight and was concerned about keeping Saudi support because of ISIS,” one former senior intelligence official said. “Now, there is an opportunity for this administration to say, yes, the Saudi relationship is important, but we can take a different approach to this issue.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • White House’s release of declassified 9/11 documents may implicate Saudi royal family

    US president Joe Biden recently announced that he will sign an executive order to facilitate the release of classified documents about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The move is the result of a long-running campaign by victims’ families to determine whether the government of Saudi Arabia played a hand in the atrocities.

    Throughout the 20 years since the attacks, it appears that successive US administrations and the US intelligence community alike have gone out of their way to suppress evidence that might implicate one of Washington’s staunchest allies. This refusal to release the documents speaks volumes about the US’s fawning treatment of one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies. It also raises big questions about the US’s flagrant double standards in the Middle East during its so-called ‘War on Terror’.

    Documents finally redacted after three presidents in a row refuse

    On 3 September, Biden ordered the US Justice Department to release documents produced as part of a Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) probe into the 9/11 attacks. Groups representing families of 9/11 victims have lobbied hard for years for their release. In response, Biden committed to declassifying the documents during his 2020 presidential campaign.

    As the anniversary of the attacks approached, these groups released a statement urging Biden not to attend memorial events unless his administration declassified the documents. The administrations of former presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all refused to do so.

    Saudi involvement?

    Many victims’ families have been particularly motivated by a suspicion that the government of Saudi Arabia might have been involved in planning the attacks. On 3 September, Reuters reported:

    Family members of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks asked a U.S. government watchdog on Thursday to investigate their suspicions that the FBI lied about or destroyed evidence linking Saudi Arabia to the hijackers.

    These suspicions have been heightened by the fact that Saudi Arabia is, after Israel, the US’s second staunchest ally in the Middle East. Throughout the presidencies of Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, Washington all entered into profitable arms deals with the country’s royal family. Successive US administrations, therefore, have had an incentive to suppress information that could reveal Saudi involvement in 9/11. Politico reported in April 2017 that the 9/11 Commission’s “own members protested drastic, last-minute edits that seemed to absolve the Saudi government of any responsibility”.

    Bogus justification for meddling in the Middle East

    But the reality is that Washington’s deceitfulness runs even deeper. Because the 9/11 attacks were used as a ruse to provide bogus justification for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to topple the Taliban and the Ba’athist government of Saddam Hussein respectively. Yet there is evidently significantly less reason to believe that either of these actors had any connection to 9/11 when compared with Saudi Arabia.

    In spite of this rather obvious reality, there were no calls in the aftermath of 9/11 to take any kind of action whatsoever against Saudi Arabia, let alone to invade it and replace its government. Yet despite much thinner evidence linking them to the attacks, the Bush administration instead launched invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. What could explain this stunning paradox?

    Revealing double standards

    The answer lies in examining the criteria on which the US bases its treatment of other countries. As The Canary has extensively argued, US administrations of both parties do not base their treatment of other countries on their publicly-stated criteria of human rights and democracy. (Indeed, if the true motivation behind Washington’s foreign policy was to spread democracy, as George W. Bush claimed, then Saudi Arabia would probably top the list of countries to invade given its status as one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies.) Rather, Washington bases its stance towards other nations according to how obedient they are to US geo-strategic and economic interests.

    When it comes to Saudi Arabia, the evidence speaks for itself. In the final year of World War II, the US entered into a deal with the Saudi royal family to ensure continued privileged access to the country’s ample oil reserves. Ever since, the Saudi royals have been rewarded for this with the most fawning treatment imaginable. As then-US president Donald Trump put it in a November 2018 statement:

    The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region.

    Opening up the region to Western oil companies in Afghanistan…

    When it comes to Afghanistan and Iraq, on the other hand, the Taliban and the government of Saddam Hussein had fallen afoul of the US foreign policy establishment due to their growing unwillingness to serve US interests. This was particularly so in terms of providing favorable access to their countries’ oil reserves. And that resulted in a desperate scramble by the Bush administration to somehow tie them to 9/11.

    In the case of Afghanistan, Washington attempted to strike a deal with the Taliban in the late-1990s to allow the US-based petroleum giant Unocal to build an oil pipeline through the country to the Caspian Sea. When it became clear that the Taliban was unlikely to accommodate this process, Unocal withdrew from negotiations and the plans were shelved. When 9/11 came along, it gave the Bush administration its perfect ruse to topple the Taliban in order to install a more friendly government that would allow the building of the pipeline. (Though there were considerable delays, probably owing to the chaos caused by the US invasion, construction of the pipeline finally began in February 2018. The New York Times reported at the time: “The United States has supported pipelines to bypass Russia and alleviate former Soviet states’ economic dependence on it.”)

    Since this motivation would have surely provoked widespread scorn, Washington weaponized 9/11 by issuing allegations that the Taliban were ‘harboring terrorists’ and had links to al-Qaeda to whip up public and congressional support for invasion. On both counts, these allegations were dubious. A 2011 report by the Center on International Cooperation describes the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban as “complicated and often tense”, adding that they “knew little about each other”. Nonetheless, the ploy seemingly paid off: only one congress member voted against the invasion while public opinion polls at the time put support for it at around 80%.

    …and Iraq

    A similar, and even more duplicitous, dynamic played out with respect to Iraq. Saddam Hussein had been a close US ally, and even received US military funding in the 1980s. But throughout the 1990s, the relationship began to sour over his invasion of Kuwait. In the early 2000s, Hussein’s status as a US enemy was cemented when he fully nationalised Iraq’s oil industry and closed off access to Western petroleum companies. Unfortunately for the Bush administration, however, his connection to 9/11 was simply nonexistent – even Bush himself said after the invasion “I don’t think we ever said — at least I know I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein”.

    So his administration concocted a narrative, which the media dutifully repeated, that would nonetheless play on public fears that had been ignited by the attacks. It fabricated bogus claims that Hussein’s government had been developing ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to provide a ruse for invading the country. (To demonstrate the absurdity of denouncing Iraq for purportedly having ‘weapons of mass’ destruction, consider that the only nuclear armed state in the entire region is the US’s number one ally, Israel.) As was the case with Afghanistan, the true purpose of the invasion was to create a more favorable environment for US oil companies. Even members of the US’s own military have admitted this reality. Former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq gen. John Abizaid said in 2007: “Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that”.

    Some of the Bush administration’s leading figures, meanwhile, had extensive ties to the very corporations that ultimately benefited from the invasion, such as the former CEO of oil giant Halliburton, Dick Cheney, who served as Bush’s vice president. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were highly profitable for such US private contractors, which received billions in contracts for both wars. Halliburton itself ultimately became the largest single US government contractor in Iraq and by 2013 had received over $39bn in contracts.

    The final piece of evidence could be coming soon

    Clearly, the US foreign policy and intelligence establishment have a vested interest in suppressing evidence of potential Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. After all, this would make even further nonsense of the entire edifice of bogus justification that the Bush administration built in order to manufacture consent for invading Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Though his administration is hardly a decisive break from the bipartisan consensus for endless war, Biden’s decision to declassify the documents should nonetheless be welcomed. It might end up providing the final piece of evidence needed to determine whether one of the US’s own allies in the Middle East played a hand in the worst domestic terrorist atrocity in US history.

    Featured image via Flickr – Stacy Herbert and Wikimedia Commons – Michael Foran

    By Peter Bolton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It Is Time to Recalibrate the Government

    The executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal, object of my solicitude. The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.

    ― Thomas Jefferson, (Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville(

    It is time to recalibrate the government.

    For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

    By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

    We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

    This COVID-19 pandemic has provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.

    These kinds of crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.

    That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

    Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

    This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.

    “The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

    Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.

    There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

    The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.

    So what can we do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?

    It won’t be easy.

    We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.

    This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

    We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.

    We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.

    We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.

    We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.

    In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.

    That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.

    In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.

    The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

    In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.

    Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.

    We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

    Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.

    Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

    Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?

    As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”

    Clearly, our leaders have stopped listening to the American people.

    We are—and have been for some time—the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government—from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

    We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American. We are relatively expendable in the eyes of government—faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars.

    What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?

    In V for Vendetta, as in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, it takes an act of terrorism for the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny: in Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.

    These acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.

    This way lies madness.

    Then again, this madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.

    How to do this? It’s not rocket science.

    There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.

    Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.

    Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.

    Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.

    That’s their job: make them do it.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

    The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.

    The post Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It Is Time to Recalibrate the Government first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Same FBI

    What the FBI didn’t say at the time was that at least a dozen participants in the “plot” were FBI informants, while one of the plot’s “planners” was an active-duty FBI agent.  The accused are now arguing in court that they were entrapped.  They likely were. While the courts already have ruled in similar cases that that is not a defense, it is the way the FBI does business.  The FBI entraps hapless people all the time, arrests them, charges them with domestic terrorism offenses or other serious felonies, claims victory in the “war on domestic terrorism,” and then asks Congress for more money to entrap more people.

    The post The Same FBI appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Thordarson’s Fabrications: Another Hole in the Julian Assange Prosecution

    The tyrannical, brutal cynicism of keeping Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison remains one of the more inglorious marks of the British legal system and, it should be said, its sponsors and colluders. Having won his case against extradition to the US, if only in deeply qualified terms, the UK keeps the WikiLeaks publisher banged up as the appeals process stutters.

    The case against Assange could have been thrown out under any number of grounds. Unfortunately, the judgment halting his extradition to the US on 17 charges based on the Espionage Act and one charge of computer intrusion was framed in purposely narrow terms, ignoring the patently political nature of the proceedings.  Were it not for District Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s January 4 ruling accepting the state of his precarious health, risk of suicide and the dangerous conditions he would face in the US legal system, the publisher would no doubt be facing special administrative measures and, most likely, the life-sucking interior of a supermax.

    A central, and impairing problem in the ruling, was its comfortable acceptance of virtually everything submitted by the prosecution, including the contention that Assange was no journalist, and that he conspired with various associates to hack and make off with classified material.  The judgment also refused to consider – given the ongoing investigation in Spain against the security firm UC Global – that the Central Intelligence Agency had compromised the legal credibility of proceedings by bugging Assange’s privileged conversations in the Ecuadorian embassy.  “This court has no access to the information discovered from this investigation,” reasoned a dismissive Baraitser.  Sordid proposals by US intelligence officials to abduct or assassinate Assange, adduced in court by two anonymous witnesses formerly in the employ of UC Global, could be dismissed as having no bearing on the case.

    As if this was not sufficient to sink the matter and open the prison doors of Belmarsh to the founder of WikiLeaks, another dire revelation was made in the Icelandic biweekly Stundin on June 26.  A vital prosecution witness wished to come clean on his testimony.  Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson, that sketchiest of characters, admitted that the testimony gleefully used by US prosecutors had been riddled by fabrications.

    In 2011, Thordarson piqued the interest of the FBI after planning a DDoS attack on an Icelandic website in concert with Hector Xavier Monsegur (“Sabu”).  Monsegur, posing as a member of the hacking outfit LulzSec, had become an informant for the FBI.  With touted links to WikiLeaks and Assange (Thordarson was not the shy, retiring type), the FBI sought the teenager’s services.  Thordarson had, in fact, been a noisy volunteer tasked with raising money for the organisation.  During the course of his revenue raising operations, he embezzled over $50,000.

    Not content with these additions to his resume, the teenager shamelessly rode the WikiLeaks reputation train, making contacts with journalists, being subsidised on trips where he could claim to be an official representative of the organisation.  During this time, he pilfered material from WikiLeaks, copying the documents of Renata Avila, a lawyer assisting Assange and the organisation.

    The DoJ indictment does not explicitly name Thordarson or the Icelandic nexus, but little is left to the imagination, given that Assange was visiting Iceland “in early 2010” to aid the country’s politicians and media outlets prepare the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative.  The IMMI resolution, unanimously adopted in the Icelandic Parliament on June 16, 2011, aimed to make Iceland a safe haven for journalists and whistleblowers by protecting freedom of expression and freedom of information.

    The indictment alleges that Assange, in early 2010 and while in contact with Chelsea Manning for reasons of obtaining “classified information […] met a 17-year old in NATO Country-1 (‘Teenager’), who provided [him] with data stolen from a bank.”  The indictment goes on to claim that Assange asked the “Teenager” in question “to commit computer intrusions and steal additional information, including audio recordings of phone conversations between high-ranking officials of the government of NATO Country-1, including members of the Parliament of NATO Country-1.”

    This nasty filling to the superseding indictment expanded the allegedly conspiratorial nature of Assange’s conduct, a measure undoubtedly designed to tag a few more years to any prison sentence that would be handed down.  This would also blacken Assange’s journalistic credentials and any claims to free speech protections.

    No longer a callow teenager and having served time for financial fraud and sexually abusing minors, Thordarson told Stundin “that Assange never asked him to hack or to access phone recordings of MPs.”  He now insists that he had “received some files from a third party who claimed to have recorded MPs and had offered to share them with Assange without having any idea what they actually contained.”  Thordarson failed to go through the files, or even verify whether they had audio recordings as claimed by the third party source.  The allegation that Assange instructed him to access computers in order to find such recordings is also dismissed as false.

    The Stundin article also delves into the chat logs and new documents “never before published”.  While Thordarson did gather them himself – a warning of self-partiality there – they do cover conversations with WikiLeaks staff and his unauthorised contact with various hacking groups, connections made when moderating the online IRC WikiLeaks forum.

    The logs are not flattering.  They reveal a person prone to embellishment and mendacity.  The big headed “Siggi” considered himself a “chief of staff”, the fictional director of communications in WikiLeaks, and second in pecking order in terms of finding recruits for the organisation. Independently of WikiLeaks, he urged hackers to target Icelandic entities and websites with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.  Thordarson, roguishly, gives the impression that such conduct was expected of him by Assange, though there is no evidence that he was ever spurred on to do so.  Further to that point, any purported instructions by Assange to pursue such an enterprise would have been at odds with his fruitful relationship with Icelandic politicians and press outlets at that point.

    The sinister conclusion to draw here, notably through the FBI link, is that a DDoS attack was conducted against the websites of several Icelandic government entities with the approval of US authorities.  Linking Monsegur to the supposedly WikiLeaks-directed Thordarson would be one way of implicating Assange.  The US authorities, reasons Ögmundur Jónasson, Iceland’s Interior Minister at the time, “were trying to use things here [in Iceland] and use people in our country to spin a web, a cobweb that would catch Julian Assange.”

    Despite having chalked up a decent prison record and possessing the profile of a fully-fledged sociopath, Thordarson was revisited by US authorities in 2019.  The prosecution of Assange, seen as a legal and risky cul-de-sac by Obama era officials, became a priority for President Donald Trump’s Attorney General William Barr.  In May 2019 Siggi was offered an immunity deal by the DoJ’s deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s National Security Division, Kellen S. Dwyer.  In addition to giving Thordarson immunity from prosecution by US authorities for his testimony, Stundin revealed the guarantee by the DoJ that they “would not share any such information to other prosecutorial or law enforcement agencies.”  Iceland’s law enforcement authorities would be kept in the dark.

    The Stundin exposé might have been an early birthday present of sorts for Assange, who turned 50 on July 3.  But instead of hearing news of an impending release, the Australian publisher had to content himself with faithful commemorations held in his honour and sketchy coverage about these latest revelations in the mainstream press.  The UK continues to remain Washington’s deputised jailor, while Thordarson, emboldened by his agreement with the DoJ, continues his habitual forgeries.

    The post Thordarson’s Fabrications: Another Hole in the Julian Assange Prosecution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • FBI collusion with discredited witness may undermine entire Assange extradition case

    A star prosecution witness in the US extradition case brought against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has admitted he lied in his testimony to US authorities. But there’s another dimension too, as previously leaked emails clearly show that the witness was groomed by the FBI.

    Altogether, this may provide an opportunity for a legal challenge to the prosecution’s case.

    Lied

    Stundin exclusively published details of how the witness, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, lied to US authorities.

    WikiLeaks tweeted that the fabrication of evidence was in exchange for a deal with the FBI:

    Icelandic MP and WikiLeaks volunteer Birgitta Jonsdottir said she was suspicious about Thordarson from the beginning:

    I warned Julian from day one, there’s something not right about this guy… I asked not to have him as part of the Collateral Murder team

    As reported by The Canary, Thordarson is a convicted felon in relation to several offences, including paedophilia. He pleaded guilty to these offences. Also, in December 2014, Thordarson was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison on 18 charges of embezzlement, theft, and fraud.

    Groomed

    These two extracts from emails understood to be between Thordarson and FBI agents provide an insight into their relationship:

    Alleged FBI emails

    Alleged FBI email

    But as Wired pointed out, Thordarson was not just groomed by email. Rather, “The FBI flew [Thordarson] internationally four times for debriefings, including one trip to Washington D.C.”. And as part of their ongoing communications with Thordarson, the FBI paid him $5k.

    Forewarned

    In June 2019, WikiLeaks published a press statement claiming the US department of justice (DoJ) would be using Thordarson in its prosecution case as part of an “FBI entrapment operation”:

    Significantly, the press release added:

    While the case would collapse in the U.S. due to the prosecution’s reliance on testimony by Thordarson and [Hector] Monsegur, who are not credible witnesses, the United States can conceal their witnesses’ identities during UK extradition proceedings in order to boost their chances of winning.

    And this reflects to some extent what happened in the superseding indictment, with Thordarson referred to as “Teenager” and Monsegur as his nickname “Sabu”.

    Legal challenge?

    Under English law, where a law enforcement agency is shown to have directly fabricated or colluded in the fabrication of evidence, there are grounds to seek dismissal of convictions or the prosecution case.

    A famous example of this was the Guildford Four case. Alastair Logan, one of the solicitors who represented the defendants, summed up:

    The case against the Guildford Four involved massive failure to disclose evidence, the disappearance of material evidence, perjury, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and perversion of the course of justice, forgery, criminal behaviour towards people in detention, withholding and concealment of the alibi evidence in relation to Gerard Conlon [one of the four], witness tampering, concealment of evidence, misuse of the powers under the Prevention of Terrorism Act to intimidate alibi witnesses and destroy their credibility, threatening and interfering with witnesses, fabrication of evidence and conspiracy.

    In 1989 at the Old Bailey, police evidence against the Guildford Four was shown to have been fabricated. Consequently, the Guildford Four had their convictions quashed and were freed.

    The end?

    As for Thordarson’s alleged admissions, they may provide a further opportunity for the defence to challenge the veracity of the prosecution case as a whole.

    Indeed, barrister Greg Barns SC, adviser to the Australian Assange campaign, told The Canary:

    The admission by a key witness that he was not a witness of the truth is a blow to the extradition case. No doubt US department of justice lawyers will have to assess if there is a case at all which can be brought against Assange. More broadly this development points again to the fact that the Assange case is pure politics.

    Moreover, on hearing of the alleged admissions by Thordarson, exiled NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden tweeted:

    There are many other alleged flaws and errors in the US case, as well as UK procedural irregularities.

    Meanwhile, Assange continues to be held in arbitrary detention, a practice condemned by UN rapporteur Nils Melzer. This farce must end.

    Featured image via YouTube

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • A Remarkable Silence: Media Blackout After Key Witness Against Assange Admits Lying

    As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission. Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again.

    A major witness in the US case against Julian Assange has just admitted fabricat­ing key accusati­ons in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. These dramatic revelations emerged in an extensive article published on 26 June in Stundin, an Icelandic newspaper. The paper interviewed the witness, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, who admitted that he had made false allegations against Assange after being recruited by US authorities. Thordarson, who has several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and financial fraud, began working with the US Department of Justice and the FBI after receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution. He even admitted to continuing his crime spree while working with the US authorities.

    Last summer, US officials had presented an updated version of their indictment against Assange to Magistrate Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser at the Old Bailey in London. Key to this update was the assertion that Assange had instructed Thordarson to commit computer intrusions or hacking in Iceland.

    As the Stundin article reported:

    ‘The aim of this addition to the indictment was apparently to shore up and support the conspiracy charge against Assange in relation to his interactions with Chelsea Manning. Those occurred around the same time he resided in Iceland and the authors of the indictment felt they could strengthen their case by alleging he was involved in illegal activity there as well. This activity was said to include attempts to hack into the computers of members of [the Icelandic] parliament and record their conversations.

    ‘In fact, Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs.’

    Judge Baraitser’s ruling on 4 January, 2021 was against extradition to the US. But she did so purely on humanitarian grounds concerning Assange’s health, suicide risk and the extreme conditions he would face in confinement in US prisons.

    The Stundin article continued:

    ‘With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question.

    ‘Other misleading elements can be found in the indictment, and later reflected in the Magistrate’s judgement, based on Thordarson’s now admitted lies.’

    The Stundin article further details Thordarson’s lies and deceptions, including mispresenting himself as an official representative of WikiLeaks while a volunteer in 2010-2011, even impersonating Assange, and embezzling more than $50,000 from the organisation.

    By August 2011, Thordarson was being pursued by WikiLeaks staff trying to locate the missing funds. In fact, Thordarson had arranged for the money to be sent to his private bank account by forging an email in Assange’s name. That month, Thordarson sought a way out by contacting the US Embassy in Iceland, offering to be an informant in the case against Assange.

    Stundin noted:

    ‘within 48 hrs a private jet landed in Reykjavik with around eight [US] agents who quickly set up meetings with Thordarson and with people from the Icelandic State Prosecutors office and the State Police Commissioner.’

    But it turned out that the US officers did not have permission from the Icelandic government to operate in the country and Ögmundur Jónasson, then Iceland’s minister of interior, ordered them to leave. Meanwhile, the FBI were allegedly complicit in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on the websites of several Iceland government institutions. The FBI had then approached Icelandic authorities, promising to assist them in preventing any future such attacks. In reality, the approach was a ruse to fool Iceland into cooperation in an attempt to entrap Assange.

    Jónasson said that the Americans:

    ‘were trying to use things here [in Iceland] and use people in our country to spin a web, a cobweb that would catch Julian Assange.’

    The US officials left Iceland, flying to Denmark, but taking with them their new informant and ‘star witness’, Thordarson.

    Stundin reported:

    ‘The meeting in Denmark was the first of a few where the FBI enthusiastically embraced the idea of co-operation with Thordarson. He says they wanted to know everything about WikiLeaks, including physical security of staff. They took material he had gathered, including data he had stolen from WikiLeaks employees and even planned to send him to England with a wire. Thordarson claimed in interviews he had refused that particular request. It was probably because he was not welcomed anymore as he knew WikiLeaks people had found out, or were about to firmly establish, that he had embezzled funds from the organization.’

    However:

    ‘After months of collaboration the FBI seem to have lost interest. At about the same time charges were piling up against Thordarson with the Icelandic authorities for massive fraud, forgeries and theft on the one hand and for sexual violations against underage boys he had tricked or forced into sexual acts on the other.

    ‘After long investigations Thordarson was sentenced in 2013 and 2014 and received relatively lenient sentences as the judge took into account that he changed his plea at court and pleaded guilty to all counts.’

    The article continued:

    ‘Incarceration did not seem to have an intended effect of stopping Thordarson from continuing his life of crime. It actually took off and expanded in extent and scope in 2019 when the Trump-era DoJ [Department of Justice] decided to revisit him, giving him a formal status as witness in the prosecution against Julian Assange and granting him immunity in return from any prosecution.’

    A ‘Sociopath’ Who ‘Lied To Get Immunity’

    Under President Obama, the US Department of Justice had decided against indicting Assange, despite devoting huge resources to building a case against him. The stumbling block was ‘The New York Times Problem’: the difficulty in distinguishing between WikiLeaks publications and NYT publications of the same material. In other words, prosecuting WikiLeaks would pose grave First Amendment risks for even ‘respectable’ media such as the NYT.

    But this changed after Trump took office. Stundin explained:

    ‘President Donald Trump’s appointed Attorney general William Barr did not share these concerns, and neither did his Trump-appointed deputy Kellen S. Dwyer. Barr, who faced severe criticism for politicizing the DoJ on behalf of the president, got the ball rolling on the Assange case once again. Their argument was that if they could prove he was a criminal rather than a journalist the charges would stick, and that was where Thordarson’s testimony would be key.

    ‘In May 2019 Thordarson was offered an immunity deal, signed by Dwyer, that granted him immunity from prosecution based on any information on wrong doing they had on him. The deal, seen in writing by Stundin, also guarantees that the DoJ would not share any such information to other prosecutorial or law enforcement agencies. That would include Icelandic ones, meaning that the Americans will not share information on crimes he might have committed threatening Icelandic security interests – and the Americans apparently had plenty of those but had over the years failed to share them with their Icelandic counterparts.’

    Thordarson’s offer of an immunity deal came the month following Assange’s forced removal from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, most likely with US connivance, and subsequent incarceration in the high-security Belmarsh prison.

    It is not clear from the Stundin article why Thordarson has now decided to come clean. But the Stundin journalists noted that a psychiatric assessment that had been submitted to an Icelandic court before he was sentenced diagnosed him as a sociopath:

    ‘incapable of remorse but still criminally culpable for his actions. He was assessed to be able to understand the basic difference between right and wrong. He just did not seem to care.’

    In a new blog piece discussing these revelations, Craig Murray, who had reported from the Old Bailey during the Assange extradition hearing, referred back to the final day of proceedings. Magistrate Baraitser had refused to accept an affidavit from Assange’s solicitor Gareth Peirce addressing the updated indictment on the grounds it was out of time:

    ‘The affidavit explained that the defence had been unable to respond to the new accusations in the United States government’s second superseding indictment, because these wholly new matters had been sprung on them just six weeks before the hearing resumed on 8 September 2020.

    ‘The defence had not only to gather evidence from Iceland, but had virtually no access to Assange to take his evidence and instructions, as he was effectively in solitary confinement in Belmarsh. The defence had requested an adjournment to give them time to address the new accusations, but this adjournment had been refused by Baraitser.

    ‘She now refused to accept Gareth Peirce’s affidavit setting out these facts.’

    Even before the Stundin article was published five days ago, Thordarson’s testimony should have already been recognised as suspect, to say the least. As WikiLeaks noted last year:

    ‘The “Star Witness” of the new superseding indictment is a diagnosed sociopath/ convicted conman/ child abuser/ FBI informant who was found guilty in Iceland of impersonating #Assange’

    The recent Stundin revelations that the updated US indictment against Assange rests on now-admitted lies means that the FBI case is demonstrably a travesty.

    US policy analyst Gareth Porter noted:

    ‘It’s now clearer than ever before that the U.S. indictment of #Assange is based on fraud. A key accuser admits he lied to the help set up Assange. How much evidence does the Justice Department need stop this criminal abuse of power?’

    As the famous US whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted:

    ‘This is the end of the case against Julian Assange.’

    Or, as journalist Glenn Greenwald followed up, more realistically:

    ‘It should be.’

    Jennifer Robinson, a human rights attorney who has been advising Assange and WikiLeaks since 2010, told Democracy Now:

    ‘The factual basis for this case has completely fallen apart.’

    Robinson pointed out:

    ‘the evidence from Thordarson that was given to the United States and formed the basis of the second, superseding indictment, including allegations of hacking, has now been, on his own admission, demonstrated to have been fabricated [our emphasis]. Not only did he misrepresent his access to Julian Assange and to WikiLeaks and his association with Julian Assange, he has now admitted that he made up and falsely misrepresented to the United States that there was any association with WikiLeaks and any association with hacking.

    ‘So, this is just the latest revelation to demonstrate why the U.S. case should be dropped.’

    Robinson expanded:

    ‘it’s significant that the initial indictment for Julian Assange related only to the publications back in 2010, 2011, the Chelsea Manning publications. It was a second, superseding indictment, introduced by the Trump administration, which was based upon Thordarson’s evidence [our emphasis]. Now, any lawyer and even any layperson would be looking at evidence from a convicted felon, who had been convicted of forgery, fraud and sexual abuse allegations associated with minors. That is a problematic source. Now we have him admitting that he lied to the FBI about that evidence. This raises serious concerns about the integrity of this investigation and the integrity of this criminal prosecution, and serious questions ought to be being asked within the Department of Justice about this prosecution and the fact that it is continuing at all.’

    The headline of the article accompanying Robinson’s interview put it succinctly:

    ‘U.S. Case Against Julian Assange Falls Apart, as Key Witness Says He Lied to Get Immunity’

    Tumbleweed In The ‘MSM’

    But all of this is seemingly of no interest to the ‘mainstream’ media. We have not found a single report by any ‘serious’ UK broadcaster or newspaper. Journalist Matt Kennard, head of investigations at Declassified UK, observed fully two days after the story broke:

    ‘I don’t think one US or UK newspaper has reported this. The free press is incredible.’

    Several days on, the ‘mainstream’ media silence is truly remarkable. As we remarked via Twitter:

    ‘The discipline, or blindness, to ignore awkward facts is a reliable feature of corporate “journalism”’

    Of course, it is possible that we have missed something, somewhere in the ‘MSM’; perhaps a brief item at 3am on the BBC World Service. But in a sane world, Stundin’s revelations about a key Assange witness – that Thordarson lied in exchange for immunity from prosecution – would have been headline news everywhere, with extensive media coverage on BBC News at Six and Ten, ITV News, Channel 4 News, front-page stories in the Times, Telegraph, the Guardian and more. The silence is quite extraordinary; and disturbing. Caitlin Johnstone described it as a ‘weird, creepy media blackout’:

    ‘not one major western media outlet outside of Iceland has reported on this massive and entirely legitimate news story. A search brings up coverage by Icelandic media, by Russian media, and by smaller western outlets like Democracy Now, World Socialist Website, Consortium News, Zero Hedge and some others, but as of this writing this story has been completely ignored by all major outlets who are ostensibly responsible for informing the public in the western world.’

    Johnstone continued:

    ‘It’s not that those outlets have been ignoring Assange altogether these last few days either. Reuters recently published an interview with Assange’s fiance Stella Moris. Evening Standard has a recent article out on Assange’s plans to marry Moris in Belmarsh, as does Deutsche Welle. It’s just this one story in particular that they’ve been blacking out completely.’

    She offered an explanation for the silence across the media:

    ‘they’re all generally following the lead of just a handful of top-tier publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. If just those few outlets decide to ignore a major news story that’s inconvenient for the powerful (either by persuasion, infiltration or by their own initiative), then no one else will either. As far as the media-consuming public is concerned, it’s like the major news story never happened at all.’

    More fundamentally:

    ‘Western mass media outlets are propaganda. They are owned and controlled by wealthy people in coordination with the secretive government agencies tasked with preserving the world order upon which the media-owning plutocrats have built their kingdoms, and their purpose is to manipulate the way the mainstream public thinks, acts and votes into alignment with the agendas of the ruling class.

    ‘You see this propaganda in the way things are reported, but you also see it in the way things are not reported. Entire news stories can be completely redacted from mainstream attention if they are sufficiently inconvenient for the mechanisms of empire, or only allowed in via platforms like Tucker Carlson Tonight and thereby tainted and spun as ridiculous right-wing conspiracy theories.’

    Our polite challenges to Paul Royall, editor of BBC News at Six and Ten, and Katharine Viner, editor of the Guardian, went unanswered, despite multiple retweets and follow-up queries by other Twitter users. Of course, this is the standard non-response of even the ‘best’ state-corporate media to uncomfortable questions.

    As we have often observed, the establishment media relentlessly warn of the insidious nature of ‘fake news’: a claim that does have a seed of validity. But it is the state-corporate media themselves who are the primary purveyors of fake news. As Tim Coles, author of ‘Real Fake News’, commented:

    ‘Whenever people in power tell you that fake news is undermining democracy, they really mean that alternative sources of information are challenging their grip on power.’

    In fact, the most dangerous component of ‘MSM’ fake news is arguably propaganda by omission. In ostensible ‘democracies’, the public cannot make informed decisions, and take appropriate action, when the crimes of ruling elites are kept hidden by a complicit media.

    The post A Remarkable Silence: Media Blackout After Key Witness Against Assange Admits Lying first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Holder, Barr, DOJ And FBI Outed In Slimy Plot Against Assange

    A careful read of this stunning investigative piece in Iceland’s Stundin newspaper reveals that in June 2011 Eric Holder (no doubt with Obama’s enthusiastic approval) initiated a disgraceful FBI frame-up of Julian Assange. Displaying their usual incompetence, the FBI thoroughly screwed up the Holder framing assignment by coming up with a child-molesting embezzler and sociopath as their spy and agent provocateur within the Icelandic branch of Wikileaks, thereby creating such a mess that the Minister of the Interior had our federal gumshoes thrown out of Iceland.

    Undeterred by the 2011 mess, in May of 2019 William Barr (probably with equally enthusiastic approval from his boss) stepped into Holder’s shoes by reigniting the disgusting Assange frame-up plot.

    The post Holder, Barr, DOJ And FBI Outed In Slimy Plot Against Assange appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Who Wants To Hear My Crazy, Kooky Conspiracy Theory About 1/6?

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    Glenn Greenwald has a new article out titled “Questions About the FBI’s Role in 1/6 Are Mocked Because the FBI Shapes Liberal Corporate Media” about the backlash against right wing media highlighting the incredibly suspicious fact that rank-and-file participants in the January 6 Capitol riot have been harshly prosecuted while many of its actual leaders and organizers have not been.

    Greenwald goes over the FBI’s extensive and well-documented history of using undercover agents and informants to entrap easily manipulated individuals into participating in “terror” plots that they themselves initiated and then swooping in to save the day, how unlikely it is that such informants and undercover agents would not have been active in the groups responsible for the Capitol riot, and how unacceptable it is that so little is known about what the FBI and other government agencies were actually doing with regard to these groups in the lead-up to an incident they absolutely knew was coming.

    Greenwald also ridicules the way the mass media have used punditry by literal FBI veterans to mockingly dismiss these points as crazy conspiracy theories using fallacious arguments.

    Journalist Whitney Webb also has a new article out titled “Who Is A ‘Terrorist’ In Biden’s America?” about the White House’s new government-wide strategy for confronting the latest big scary boogie man the US public is being trained to fear, namely “domestic terrorism”. Webb flags how the strategy is framed as an approach to countering widely loathed groups like white supremacists, but the White House document describing what it actually does makes it clear that it intends to operate in “an ideologically neutral, threat-driven manner,” as the law “makes no distinction based on political view—left, right or center.”

    “However, the document itself puts ‘anti-government’ or ‘anti-authority’ ‘extremists’ in the same category as violent white supremacists in terms of being a threat to the homeland,” Webb writes. “The strategy’s characterization of such individuals is unsettling.”

    “For instance, those who ‘violently oppose’ ‘all forms of capitalism’ or ‘corporate globalization’ are listed under this less-discussed category of ‘domestic terrorist,’” Webb adds. “This highlights how people on the left, many of whom have called for capitalism to be dismantled or replaced in the US in recent years, could easily be targeted in this new ‘war’ that many self-proclaimed leftists are currently supporting. Similarly, ‘environmentally-motivated extremists,’ a category in which groups such as Extinction Rebellion could easily fall, are also included.”

    (This lines up with an assessment by the ODNI released in March in which the US intelligence cartel places “anarchist violent extremists” and “anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists” on the same level as racially motivated extremist violence. The document says that activism and mere advocacy of political or social positions “may not constitute violent extremism, and may be constitutionally protected,” which of course implies that it “may” not be.)

    Webb describes the dangers in the White House strategy’s “call to essentially fuse intelligence agencies, law enforcement, Silicon Valley, and ‘community’ and ‘faith-based’ organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, as well as unspecified foreign governments, as partners in this ‘war,’ which the strategy makes clear will rely heavily on a pre-crime orientation focused largely on what is said on social media and encrypted platforms.”

    And you can call me a crazy tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist if you like, but I can’t help wondering if these two stories might perhaps be related somehow. If maybe, just maybe, the FBI’s suspicious behavior before and after the Capitol riot has something to do with the agenda to implement authoritarian measures designed to stomp out any revolutionary impulses that might emerge in an increasingly impoverished and oppressed population.

    If maybe, just maybe, the opaque government agencies who run America in alliance with the plutocratic class are deeply afraid of the rising discontent of the masses who greatly outnumber them.

    If maybe, just maybe, the fact that the mainstream narrative about the Capitol riot has been full of plot holes, outright falsehoods and narrative spin from the very beginning and has been used to advance preexisting agendas from day one is a bit odd.

    If maybe, just maybe, the fact that the incoming Biden administration had already been working on adding new domestic terror policies before January 6 should raise a few eyebrows.

    If maybe, just maybe, the fact that Biden has often boasted that he was the original author of the Patriot Act is not irrelevant to the timing of all this.

    If maybe, just maybe, the fact that the Capitol riot was immediately used as an excuse to target the left should have been seen as a warning of things to come.

    If maybe, just maybe, the leftists who jumped aboard the CNN narrative about the Capitol “coup” in the hope that it could be used to rally the left were misguided and should now adopt a more critical posture.

    If maybe, just maybe, the agenda to sustain an unsustainable economic model and an unsustainable empire is expected to require a few more screw turns than the public is likely to accept voluntarily, and precautions are being put in place to prevent a meaningful backlash.

    If maybe, just maybe, there was an agenda to implement frightening new “domestic terror” laws to keep Americans from mobilizing against their rulers, and an excuse was cooked up to manufacture support for that agenda.

    I know I’m being a crazy, mentally ill conspiracy theorist here by using this space to wonder about these things. I know it’s practically against the law to voice theories about what conspiracies might be taking place behind the thick walls of government secrecy which prevent us from seeing anything. I know we’re not supposed to speculate, and are supposed to instead trust that these known liars and abusers are doing the right thing until they see fit to inform us that they are not. I know we’re supposed to wait patiently until all the facts come in from institutions which we all know will never give us the facts.

    I am behaving badly. I am breaking the rules.

    But hey, don’t mind me. I’m just your friendly neighborhood lunatic.

    _________________________

    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Wither Encryption: What Operation Trojan Shield Reveals

    My, were they delighted!  Politicians across several international jurisdictions beamed with pride that police and security forces had gotten one up on criminals spanning the globe.  It all involved a sting by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, led in conjunction with a number of law enforcement agencies in 16 countries, resulting in more than 800 arrests.  The European Union police agency Europol described it as the “biggest ever law enforcement operation against encrypted communication”.

    The haul was certainly more than the usual: over 32 tonnes of an assortment of drugs including cocaine, cannabis, amphetamines and methamphetamines; 250 firearms, 55 luxury cars, and some $48 million in cash, both tangible and digital.

    Operation Trojan Shield arose because of a grand dupe.  It involved recruiting an FBI informant who had developed an adulterated version of the encryption technology platform Anom, to be used on modified cell phones for distribution through a range of organised crime networks.  The platform included a calculator app that relayed all communications sent on the platform back to the FBI.   “You had to know a criminal to get hold of one of these customised phones,” the Australian Federal Police explained. “The phones couldn’t ring or email.   You could only communicate with someone on the same platform.”

    The users were none the wiser.  For three years, material was gathered and examined, comprising 27 million intercepted messages drawn from 12,000 devices.  This month, the authorities could no longer contain their excitement.

    While the criminals in question might well have been mocked for their gullibility, the trumpeting of law enforcement did not seem much better.  A relentless campaign has been waged on end-to-end encryption communication platforms, a war against what policing types call “going dark”.  To add some light to the situation, the agencies pine for the creation of tailored back doors to such communications apps as WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal.

    Few could forget the indignant efforts of the FBI to badger Apple in 2016 to crack the iPhone of Syed Farook, the San Bernardino shooting suspect.  Apple refused.  The battle moved to the courts.  In what has become something of a pattern, the DOJ subsequently dropped the case by revealing that it had “successfully accessed the data stored on Farook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance of Apple Inc.”  The DOJ then requested that a court order of February 16 demanding Apple create software with weakened iPhone security settings be vacated.  By refusing to reveal how it had obtained access to the phone, government authorities had thrown down the gauntlet to Apple to identify any glitches.

    In 2020, a number of international politicians with an interest in the home security portfolio released a joint statement claiming to support “strong encryption, which plays a crucial role in protecting personal data, privacy, intellectual property, trade secrets and cyber security.”  A casual glance at the undersigned would suggest this to be markedly disingenuous.  Among them were: Priti Patel, UK Home Secretary; William P. Barr, US Attorney General; Peter Dutton, Australian Minister for Home Affairs.

    Having given nods of approval for encryption as “an existential anchor of trust in the digital world”, the ministers took aim at the various platforms using it.  On this occasion, it was the “challenges to public safety” posed by the use of encryption technology, “including to highly vulnerable members of our societies like sexually exploited children.”  (The battle against solid encryption is often waged over the bodies and minds of abused children.)  Industry was urged “to address our concerns where encryption is applied in a way that wholly precludes any legal access.” This would involve companies having to police illegal content and permit “law enforcement to access content in a readable and usable format where an authorisation is lawfully issued, is necessary and proportionate, and is subject to strong safeguards and oversight”.

    Cases like Anom demonstrate that there is seemingly no need for such intrusions, bells of alarm, and warnings about safety.  The police have sufficient powers and means, and more besides.  As with such matters, the danger tends to be closer to home: police zeal; prosecutor’s glee; a hatred of privacy.  Joseph Lorenzo Hall, senior vice president at the non-profit Internet Society, is convinced of that fact.  “When law enforcement agencies claim they need companies to build in backdoors to help them gain access to the end-to-end encrypted communications of criminals, examples like Anom show that it’s not the case.”

    John Scott-Railton of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy makes the same point.  “What this case shows is that global law enforcement is perfectly capable of mobilising a multiyear caper to get around exactly the kinds of problems about encryptions that they’ve been talking about without breaking the encryption of the apps that keep you and [me] private.”

    The Australian wing of the operation had even greater extant powers of access to encrypted messages.  The Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 is one of those beastly instruments many law enforcement agencies dream about.  It might also suggest why Australia, a nominally small partner, might have been asked by the FBI to be involved in the first place.  When asked if this was the case, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested that the question be put to US authorities.  For him, the AFP’s hardly impressive technical efforts were to be praised.

    None of this is enough for the Morrison government, which is intent on further pushing the surveillance cart in such proposed laws as the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020, and the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (International Production Orders) Bill 2020 (IPO Bill).  The former would permit the AFP and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission to issue a new range of warrants for combating online crime; the latter would create a system by which Australian agencies would be able to access stored telecommunications from identified foreign communication providers in cases where Australia has a bilateral agreement.

    Operation Trojan Shield has again shown that calls for weakened encryption are to be treated with due alarm.  Almost silly in all of this was the fact that the FBI and fellow agencies made it a demonstrable fact, undercutting their very own arguments for a more invasive surveillance system. The next play is bound to come from the criminal networks themselves, who, wounded by this deception, will move towards more conventional encryption technologies. The battle will then come full circle.  In countries such as Australia, where privacy is a withering tree, the encryption debate is a dead letter.

    The post Wither Encryption: What Operation Trojan Shield Reveals first appeared on Dissident Voice.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz Suggest FBI Attacked Capitol

    Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene speak at an "America First" rally on May 27, 2021, in Dalton, Georgia.

    The evolution — or devolution, if you will — of the right’s January 6 narrative continues apace, but is steering toward strange waters. When it happened, it was deemed an appalling attack against the very fabric of democracy … but Donald Trump didn’t like that, because the attackers were his people, and so the story began to change. It was antifa! Black Lives Matter protesters! No, that didn’t stick. Wait, they were peaceful tourists! See how they stay within the ropes as they carry their Confederate battle flags and lengths of pipe! Ten minutes with the footage from the front stairs and hallways batted that one down.

    “There was a nationwide dragnet to find [the Capitol attackers]. Many of them are still in solitary confinement tonight,” intoned Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night. “But strangely, some of the key people who participated on January 6 have not been charged. Look at the documents; the government calls those people unindicted co-conspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that in potentially every single case they were FBI operatives. Really? In the Capitol on January 6?”

    Thus, by way of Carlson’s fake-clever loaded questions technique does the newest poisoned information pill splash down into the national bloodstream. The FBI did it, why not? This answer, unlike the others, is sure to please Trump, who despises the FBI and all within it. Blame it on them? What a hoot! Why didn’t I think of that?

    It’s important to note that the FBI is certainly not blameless in the broader sense, having caused ongoing and brutal harm to many marginalized communities. However, there is absolutely no evidence that it had anything to do with the Capitol attack.

    The FBI-did-it theory is the brainchild of Darren Beattie, whom you may recall was a Trump speechwriter for about 213 seconds before his deep ties to white supremacists were revealed. After being relieved of his position, Trump put Beattie “on a commission tasked with preserving sites related to the Holocaust,” according to the Independent UK. Beattie’s FBI argument, published earlier this week on his far right website Revolver News, has since been picked up and spread via social media by Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.

    Some fine company Tucker is keeping these days.

    “Even if we set aside these reasons to disbelieve Carlson’s theory and the fact that the government isn’t supposed to cite government agents as unindicted co-conspirators, it’s still a massive leap to assume that these people were government agents,” counter-argues Aaron Blake for The Washington Post. “Carlson initially raises this as a supposedly likely possibility, but then essentially treats it as fact. Is it possible it’s right? Virtually anything is possible. There’s just no genuine reason to believe it, despite Carlson’s presentation.”

    A day later, D.C. police officer Michael Fanone arrived at the Capitol to speak with the 21 Republican House members who voted “no” on giving the officers who defended the Capitol the Congressional Gold Medal. When Fanone met one of them — Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia — Clyde pointedly refused to shake Fanone’s hand. Clyde, you may recall, was the Congress member who recently said the riot looked like “a normal tourist visit.”

    If you believe this rash of dangerous conspiracy theories is going to wind down of its own volition soon, I invite you to think again. Carlson is merely a mouthpiece for the Republican-dominating Trump faction, which believes it is in total control of the party because it is. Floating this “FBI did it” theory is perfect Trump: Bleat some aggravated nonsense to scramble the minds of your foes, deny you actually said anything because you couched it as a question and let the battery acid of your malevolent intentions do its corrosive work on the body politic.

    These are the people who very nearly turned the Department of Justice into Trump’s own personal hand puppet.

    “[Trump and his allies] wanted the Justice Department to explore false claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines had been manipulated to alter votes in one county in Michigan,” reports the Post. “They asked officials about the U.S. government filing a Supreme Court challenge to the results in six states that Joe Biden won. The president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, even shared with acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen a link to a YouTube video that described an outlandish plot in which the election had been stolen from Trump through the use of military satellites controlled in Italy.”

    Trump loyalists want us to believe the election was stolen by Italian satellites, the Capitol was sacked by FBI agents dressed in their finest MAGA gear, and all of it is controlled by a cabal of cannibal pedophiles who run Hollywood and the Democratic Party. These theories are bizarre, wild and baseless, to be sure, but they are also dangerous, grounded in white supremacy and a deep disdain for democracy.

    I would like to believe this is all going to be healthy for the republic in the long run, the lancing of a boil left to swell with pus and rot for too long … but the sheer number of people who will buy into all this is staggering. Maybe they don’t believe it, but they say they do, and they vote for the ones peddling these fictions.

    Soon enough, and to the great thrill of Trump, the arc of this argument will leave Republicans with little alternative but to openly embrace the Capitol attackers as brothers and patriots. It really doesn’t matter if they believe it or not. On a long enough timeline, the platform of “owning the libs” becomes potentially lethal for all involved, and for the country itself.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • QAnon Followers Are Likely Planning More Violence Against Lawmakers, Warns FBI

    A flag for the QAnon conspiracy theory is flown with other right wing flags during a pro-Trump rally on October 11, 2020, in Ronkonkoma, New York.

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned lawmakers that QAnon conspiracy theory followers may be on the verge of carrying out more violence in real life on Democrats and others that they perceive, however falsely, to be threats.

    QAnon followers are evidently growing restless because they believe “they can no longer ‘trust the plan’ referenced in QAnon posts and that they have an obligation to change from serving as ‘digital soldiers’ towards engaging in real world violence,” the FBI warns in a document to lawmakers.

    QAnon followers are conspiracy theorists who follow the word of an anonymous “Q” online, widely speculated to be fringe right wing forum 8Kun administrators Jim and Ron Watkins. The conspiracy theory-riddled posts by Q have no basis in reality but they’ve gained purchase among Donald Trump followers and others on the right. Q often posts what amounts to smear campaigns against Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton.

    But Q hasn’t posted since December of 2020, and some Q followers are evidently anxious that Q’s plan to take down the global cabal of mostly liberal politicians and celebrities who they falsely believe rule the world isn’t being executed. The FBI warns, in turn, that Democrats and others who they perceive to be enemies of the cause could be in danger.

    The lack of direction and action from QAnon may lead the “digital soldiers” to harm “perceived members of the ‘cabal’ such as Democrats and other political opposition — instead of continually awaiting Q’s promised actions which have not occurred,” the FBI document reads.

    The threat from militant QAnon followers is pronounced, the agency writes, following the group’s large presence at the attack on the Capitol on January 6. FBI agents have arrested over 20 self-proclaimed QAnon followers in connection with the Capitol attack — though previous reporting has found that a belief in QAnon was one of the most common shared traits among the Trump mob from that day.

    QAnon followers’ participation in the Capitol breach “underscores how the current environment likely will continue to act as a catalyst for some to begin accepting the legitimacy of violent action,” the document says.

    A classified version of the FBI threat assessment was circulated among legislators in February, CNN reports. But lawmakers have been frustrated with the FBI for not investigating the conspiracy theory in more depth, noting that it’s an increasingly large threat to domestic safety and democracy.

    Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) questioned FBI director Christopher Wray in a hearing in April, asking why the agency “cannot or won’t tell the American people directly about the threat” of QAnon, in relation to the threat assessment. Wray responded that the agency is only investigating the conspiracy theory in relation to federal crimes such as those committed on January 6.

    But ignoring the growing threat of right wing extremists has severely hampered the agency’s abilities to prevent violence before, as is evidenced by the very Capitol attack that they’re now investigating. Despite the fact that Heinrich had requested the FBI to look into the threat of QAnon in December, and the fact that at least one government agency had sent them a warning of the violence to come on January 6, the FBI never prepared a formal report on the threat prior to the day.

    At the time, FBI officials said that they didn’t want to impend upon free speech — but, as NPR reported in January, that didn’t stop them from issuing warnings over protests for Black lives.

    And despite the fact that QAnon supporters and right-wing extremists have been on the rise for many years and pose a huge threat in the U.S., the FBI has spent an outsized amount of time investigating left-wing protesters and advocates, even though the right is responsible for nearly all modern domestic terrorism.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Digital Trails: How the FBI Is Identifying, Tracking and Rounding Up Dissidents

    Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.

    —Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times

    Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps.

    With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.

    Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

    This is what it means to live in a suspect society.

    The government’s efforts to round up those who took part in the Capitol riots shows exactly how vulnerable we all are to the menace of a surveillance state that aspires to a God-like awareness of our lives.

    Relying on selfies, social media posts, location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing, government agents are compiling a massive data trove on anyone and everyone who may have been anywhere in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

    The amount of digital information is staggering: 15,000 hours of surveillance and body-worn camera footage; 1,600 electronic devices; 270,000 digital media tips; at least 140,000 photos and videos; and about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones.

    And that’s just what we know.

    More than 300 individuals from 40 states have already been charged and another 280 arrested in connection with the events of January 6. As many as 500 others are still being hunted by government agents.

    Also included in this data roundup are individuals who may have had nothing to do with the riots but whose cell phone location data identified them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    Forget about being innocent until proven guilty.

    In a suspect society such as ours, the burden of proof has been flipped: now, you start off guilty and have to prove your innocence.

    For instance, you didn’t even have to be involved in the Capitol riots to qualify for a visit from the FBI: investigators have reportedly been tracking—and questioning—anyone whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol. One man, who had gone out for a walk with his daughters only to end up stranded near the Capitol crowds, actually had FBI agents show up at his door days later. Using Google Maps, agents were able to pinpoint exactly where they were standing and for how long.

    All of the many creepy, calculating, invasive investigative and surveillance tools the government has acquired over the years are on full display right now in the FBI’s ongoing efforts to bring the rioters to “justice.”

    FBI agents are matching photos with drivers’ license pictures; tracking movements by way of license plate toll readers; and zooming in on physical identifying marks such as moles, scars and tattoos, as well as brands, logos and symbols on clothing and backpacks. They’re poring over hours of security and body camera footage; scouring social media posts; triangulating data from cellphone towers and WiFi signals; layering facial recognition software on top of that; and then cross-referencing footage with public social media posts.

    It’s not just the FBI on the hunt, however.

    They’ve enlisted the help of volunteer posses of private citizens, such as Deep State Dogs, to collaborate on the grunt work. As Dinah Voyles Pulver reports, once Deep State Dogs locates a person and confirms their identity, they put a package together with the person’s name, address, phone number and several images and send it to the FBI.

    According to USA Today, the FBI is relying on the American public and volunteer cybersleuths to help bolster its cases.

    This takes See Something, Say Something snitching programs to a whole new level.

    The lesson to be learned: Big Brother, Big Sister and all of their friends are watching you.

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

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

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

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

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

    The government has the know-how.

    It took days, if not hours or minutes, for the FBI to begin the process of identifying, tracking and rounding up those suspected of being part of the Capitol riots.

    Imagine how quickly government agents could target and round up any segment of society they wanted to based on the digital trails and digital footprints we leave behind.

    Of course, the government has been hard at work for years acquiring these totalitarian powers.

    Long before the January 6 riots, the FBI was busily amassing the surveillance tools necessary to monitor social media posts, track and identify individuals using cell phone signals and facial recognition technology, and round up “suspects” who may be of interest to the government for one reason or another.

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

    All it needs is the data, which more than 90% of young adults and 65% of American adults are happy to provide.

    When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

    As for the Fourth Amendment and its prohibitions on warrantless searches and invasions of privacy without probable cause, those safeguards have been rendered all but useless by legislative end-runs, judicial justifications, and corporate collusions.

    We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers.

    Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.

    This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, social media posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

    For example, police have been using Stingray devices mounted on their cruisers to intercept cell phone calls and text messages without court-issued search warrants. Doppler radar devices, which can detect human breathing and movement within a home, are already being employed by the police to deliver arrest warrants.

    License plate readers, yet another law enforcement spying device made possible through funding by the Department of Homeland Security, can record up to 1800 license plates per minute. Moreover, these surveillance cameras can also photograph those inside a moving car. Reports indicate that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been using the cameras in conjunction with facial recognition software to build a “vehicle surveillance database” of the nation’s cars, drivers and passengers.

    Sidewalk and “public space” cameras, sold to gullible communities as a sure-fire means of fighting crime, is yet another DHS program that is blanketing small and large towns alike with government-funded and monitored surveillance cameras. It’s all part of a public-private partnership that gives government officials access to all manner of surveillance cameras, on sidewalks, on buildings, on buses, even those installed on private property.

    Couple these surveillance cameras with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology and you have the makings of “pre-crime” cameras, which scan your mannerisms, compare you to pre-set parameters for “normal” behavior, and alert the police if you trigger any computerized alarms as being “suspicious.”

    State and federal law enforcement agencies are pushing to expand their biometric and DNA databases by requiring that anyone accused of a misdemeanor have their DNA collected and catalogued. However, technology is already available that allows the government to collect biometrics such as fingerprints from a distance, without a person’s cooperation or knowledge. One system can actually scan and identify a fingerprint from nearly 20 feet away.

    Developers are hard at work on a radar gun that can actually show if you or someone in your car is texting. Another technology being developed, dubbed a “textalyzer” device, would allow police to determine whether someone was driving while distracted. Refusing to submit one’s phone to testing could result in a suspended or revoked driver’s license.

    It’s a sure bet that anything the government welcomes (and funds) too enthusiastically is bound to be a Trojan horse full of nasty, invasive surprises.

    Case in point: police body cameras. Hailed as the easy fix solution to police abuses, these body cameras—made possible by funding from the Department of Justice—turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras. Of course, if you try to request access to that footage, you’ll find yourself being led a merry and costly chase through miles of red tape, bureaucratic footmen and unhelpful courts.

    The “internet of things” refers to the growing number of “smart” appliances and electronic devices now connected to the internet and capable of interacting with each other and being controlled remotely. These range from thermostats and coffee makers to cars and TVs. Of course, there’s a price to pay for such easy control and access. That price amounts to relinquishing ultimate control of and access to your home to the government and its corporate partners. For example, while Samsung’s Smart TVs are capable of “listening” to what you say, thereby allowing users to control the TV using voice commands, it also records everything you say and relays it to a third party, e.g., the government.

    Then again, the government doesn’t really need to spy on you using your smart TV when the FBI can remotely activate the microphone on your cellphone and record your conversations. The FBI can also do the same thing to laptop computers without the owner knowing any better.

    Drones, which are taking to the skies en masse, are the converging point for all of the weapons and technology already available to law enforcement agencies. In fact, drones can listen in on your phone calls, see through the walls of your home, scan your biometrics, photograph you and track your movements, and even corral you with sophisticated weaponry.

    All of these technologies add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence, especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

    These digital trails are everywhere.

    As investigative journalists Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson explain, “This data—collected by smartphone apps and then fed into a dizzyingly complex digital advertising ecosystem … provided an intimate record of people whether they were visiting drug treatment centers, strip clubs, casinos, abortion clinics or places of worship.”

    In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted.

    As Warzel and Thompson warn:

    “To think that the information will be used against individuals only if they’ve broken the law is naïve; such data is collected and remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence… This collection will only grow more sophisticated… It gets easier by the day… it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.”

    As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

    There is no gray area any longer.

  • Image credit: K-Plex
    • The post Digital Trails: How the FBI Is Identifying, Tracking and Rounding Up Dissidents first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Burglary That Exposed COINTELPRO

    The activists exposed COINTELPRO, the FBI’s secret Counterintelligence Program, a global, clandestine, unconstitutional practice of surveillance, infiltration and disruption of groups engaged in protest, dissent and social change. Continue reading

    The post The Burglary That Exposed COINTELPRO appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • FBI Arrests Former Trump Appointee for Role in January 6 Capitol Breach

    Members of the National Guard walk through a security fence surrounding the U.S. Capitol Building on March 4, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) arrested Federico Klein, a former State Department official who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, on Thursday evening, alleging that he was involved in the January 6 attack of the U.S. Capitol building.

    Klein’s arrest marks the first known occasion of a former Trump political appointee being arrested for the breach of the building that day. On January 6, Klein was still working in the White House, and had a top-secret security clearance.

    Klein’s last known role within the State Department was as special assistant in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. He also worked as a “tech analyst” within the Trump 2016 presidential campaign. Before serving Trump, Klein also worked as a researcher for the far right Family Research Council.

    The former Trump official was arrested in Virginia on Thursday and charged with a number of counts relating to the Capitol breach, including unlawful entry, violent and disorderly conduct, obstructing Congress and assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon, according to reporting from Newsweek. Klein, who is also known as Freddie or Fred, is seen in videos filmed during the attack wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat, as well as assaulting officers with a stolen riot control shield.

    Speaking to Politico, Klein’s mother, Cecilia Klein, said she recalled speaking to her son a few weeks ago about the day’s events, and that he had told her he was at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., that day. She did not receive any information from her son about his whereabouts after leaving that area, she added.

    The two Kleins differ greatly in their politics, and tend to avoid discussing such issues altogether. “Fred’s politics burn a little hot,” Cecilia Klein said, “but I’ve never known him to violate the law.”

    The attack on the Capitol building came about just after Trump had finished a speech near the White House, in which he had wrongly insisted to his supporters that the presidential election was “stolen” from them “by emboldened radical left Democrats” and “the fake news media.” He also falsely told his supporters that there was “theft involved” in the election.

    Trump encouraged his supporters during his January 6 speech to go directly to the Capitol to voice their dissatisfaction in person, adding that they would “never take back our country with weakness.”

    Klein’s arrest flies in the face of Trump supporters’ baseless efforts to cast blame for the January 6 attack on leftist instigators disguised as Trump backers, since Klein was clearly aligned with Trump. FBI director Christopher Wray also debunked these false claims earlier this week, stating that there is absolutely no evidence to back up Trump supporters’ wild claims about antifa or any other leftist groups being involved in the breach of the Capitol.

    Klein’s arrest underscores yet again that the vast majority of those involved in the breach of the building were ardent Trump loyalists. So far, more than 300 individuals have been criminally charged for their roles in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Reality Check: COVID, Russia and Biden’s High Approval Rating

    The vaccines will come none too soon for people in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott announced he will end the statewide mask mandate and permit all businesses to reopen without coronavirus restrictions. Continue reading

    The post Reality Check: COVID, Russia and Biden’s High Approval Rating appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • FBI Has Found No Evidence of Antifa Involvement in Capitol Attack, Says Director

    FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies during the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing titled Threats to the Homeland, in Dirksen Senate Office Building on September 24, 2020.

    On Tuesday, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Chris Wray confirmed that the agency has not been able to find evidence of people associated with antifa or other left-wing ideologies in connection with the attack on the Capitol on January 6.

    At a testimony before the Senate, Wray said that there is no evidence that there were “fake” Donald Trump supporters at the Capitol attack and that, “We have not to date seen any evidence of anarchist violent extremists or people subscribing to antifa in connection with the 6th.”

    Wray qualified that the failure to turn up anything that might indict left-wingers was not for lack of trying. “We’re equal opportunity in looking for violent extremism of any ideology,” Wray said. This both-sidesism appears to be exercised to a fault by the FBI: Shortly after the right-wing attack on the Capitol, FBI agents arrested a left-wing activist who was not connected to the attack for expressing leftist beliefs online.

    Though the FBI has not found any evidence of left-wing activity from January 6, Wray told the Senate, “That doesn’t mean we’re not looking.” The FBI has a long history of targeting the left, specifically Black activists. That tradition was on display last summer when the FBI used surveillance technology to target and track Black Lives Matter protesters.

    Since Trump supporters violently attacked the Capitol, Republicans like Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and the former president have vehemently pushed the narrative that it was actually people who subscribe to anti-fascism who showed up in mobs to overturn the results of the election. This has been debunked many times over, including now by Wray.

    Still, the GOP’s disinformation campaign surrounding the Capitol attack has worked: A poll from January found that half of Republicans polled think that anti-fascists were responsible for the Capitol breach. That’s despite the fact that many of the over 260 people who have been charged in federal court for their involvement with the violent coup attempt have stated their allegiance to Trump in court documents; some of the people who were at the Capitol that day have unequivocally said that it was Trump supporters, not the left wing, who were responsible for the attack.

    Wray also denounced the attack as terrorism during the testimony. “That attack, that siege was criminal behavior, plain and simple, and it’s behavior that we, the FBI, view as domestic terrorism,” he said.

    “Jan. 6 was not an isolated event,” Wray continued in his opening statement. “The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now and it is not going away any time soon.”

    Specifically calling out the far right Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, Wray said that the FBI has found people associated with white supremacist movements and militias among the mob on January 6. He noted that, since he began serving as director of the FBI in 2017, arrests for white supremacist violence have increased significantly.

    “When it comes to racially motivated violent extremism, the number of investigations and number of arrests has grown significantly on my watch,” Wray said. “And the number of arrests for example of racially motivated violent extremists who are what you would categorize as white supremacists last year was almost triple the number it was in my first year as director.”

    White supremacy has become so widespread that it has been dominating the caseload that the FBI has taken on, Wray noted. “It has been the biggest chunk of our racially motivated violent extremism cases and itself the biggest chunk of our domestic terrorism caseload overall,” Wray said.

    Right-wing violence, in general, has been on the rise across the globe in the past years and, in the U.S., right-wingers and white supremacists were particularly energized by Trump’s presidency. Though the right has been fearmongering about left-wing violence since protests for racial justice sprang up last year, white supremacists and people with right-wing beliefs have continually been shown to be responsible for the vast majority of domestic acts of terror in the country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • World: There’s a New Administration in Town

    At the very least, it seems the Biden administration is sending a signal to other countries that there is a new administration in America, one that will not tolerate foreign intrusions into US affairs the same way its predecessor did. Continue reading

    The post World: There’s a New Administration in Town appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • Demand The FBI Stop Lying And Stop Spying On Black Protesters

    Once again, Black activists and organizers are demanding our society transform itself and land on the right side of history. However, the state has chosen to greet this opportunity with increased violence and surveillance, doubling down on its commitment to undermine and disrupt Black-led movements for justice by criminalizing & attacking them. When the FBI was exposed for labeling participants of the Ferguson & nationwide uprisings “Black Identity Extremists,” we recognized the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO was alive and well. Is this the legacy that the U. S. government wants to uphold? 60+year-old patterns of social change and state repression are yet again active.

    The post Demand The FBI Stop Lying And Stop Spying On Black Protesters appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.