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DEEP STATE n. A hard-to-perceive level of government or super-control that exists regardless of elections
and that may thwart popular movements or radical change. Some have said that Egypt is being manipulated by its deep state. A Wordnado of Words in 2013 - NYTimes.com , Dec 21, 2013 "For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.... I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations." President Harry Truman "For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence - on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed." President John_F._Kennedy, speech on April 27, 1961 |
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While the rank-and-file military are among the most patriotic of Americans and show unwavering support for the Constitution, there is a class of elite national security establishment who, whatever they may say on ceremonial occasions, believe they are above the Constitution. The "national security establishment" is colloquially known as the Deep State. In the past military leaders were part of the ruling class, intelligence agencies did not exist and there were no danger of a rogue national security establishment in 1789. That why for all their brilliance, the Framers of the Constitution did not foresee the emergence this treat. JFK assassination was the Rubicon, they crossed, and the tail started wagging the dog. Brennan 2016 elections machinations were yet another vivid demonstration that the national security establishment spinned out of control.
This threat emerged only after WWII and national security state when Truman established intelligence agencies which comprise the core of the Deep State ( CIA, NSA FBI and Pentagon. Add to this State Department and you get what is called "Trumanites". They brought with them the three cornerstone of the USA foreign policy
- Exceptionalism - our unique status should exempt us from the rules we expect others to follow.
- Militarism - favor the use of force to advance US security and priority matters of national interest.
- Hegemony - America ought to fight hard not to let any other power challenge our post WWII position.
Gradually the national security bureaucracy became so large and omnipotent that the Madisonian branches of government became mainly ceremonial institution providing legitimacy to the ruling elite via national election. Something like the British House of Lords, symbolically important but in reality without much power. Intelligence agencies Nomenklatura, not Trump, are moving the nation toward autocracy, operated at an increasing removed from constitutional limits and restraints manner (Welcome to the Potemkin Village of Washington Power The American Conservative)
Tufts law professor Michael Glennon points out in a recent essay in Humanitas that the Cold War brought something new and ominous in military-civilian relations. The national security bureaucracy became so large and omnipotent that the Madisonian branches of government became something like the British House of Lords, symbolically important but in reality without much power. The executive, legislature, and judiciary became a kind of Potemkin village, with real national security power lodged in, as Glennon describes it, “a largely concealed managerial directorate, consisting of the several hundred leaders of the military, law enforcement and intelligence departments.” As this bureaucracy grew, Glennon argues, “those managers…operated at an increasing remove from constitutional limits and restraints, moving the nation slowly toward autocracy.”Glennon also points out that, prior to Trump, there was an unwritten pact between the bureaucracy and the Madisonian government: never publicly disagree. While national security policies have long been crafted and maintained by deep state bureaucracies, everyone played along and told the public these were the result of “intense deliberations.” Yet a few people noticed that, whether under Republican or Democrat administrations, national security policies never really changed, intelligence operations were never disrupted, and even peacenik-seeming presidential candidates became warlike presidents. For decades, neither elected officials nor bureaucratic leaders publicly acknowledged that American national security policy was being run by what Glennon describes as a “double government,” with elected officials largely impotent.
However, with the staggering intelligence failure that was 9/11 and two protracted and losing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, some have begun to question whether the “grown-ups” in the national security bureaucracy are even competent. Trump gave voice to those concerns in the 2016 campaign, and the result has been a breakdown in the Cold War truce between the two components of the double government. Leaders of the national security establishment, who know they have real power, took precautions in the unlikely event of a Trump victory and then proceeded to try to overturn Trump’s election. When they failed, they partnered with Congress to have Trump removed through impeachment, taking full advantage of the fractured nature of civilian control of national security institutions. Impeachment witnesses, such as Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, have been unanimous in their implicit belief that the foreign policy of the United States should be managed by a professional class of bureaucrats, not by the elected president.
The American constitutional order is thus in great peril. Those obsessed with getting rid of the president should consider that, were Trump to be removed, it could be the constitutional equivalent of Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon.
In the mind of ordinary American the term "Deep State" and "democracy" happily coexist. Most do not even understand that they are infected with what in famous George Orwell novel 1984 is called "Doublethink." The existence of uncontrollable elite in the form of the "Deep State" that core of which constitute Wall Street bankers, MIC and the top brass of the intelligence agencies is incompatible with the existence of the democracy, unless we assume that democracy exists for the top 1% or even less of the population. It is something like modernized feudalism for all the rest. This strange, but stable combination is called neoliberalism. As neoliberalism came to power with coup d'état facilitated by thinks tanks specifically created for this purpose (the army of "professional revolutionaries" in Bolsheviks terms ;-) neoliberalism and Deep State are closely interrelated. This interrelation is reflected in the Sheldon Wolin term "Inverted totalitarianism" which is the actual name of the somewhat strange social order established in the USA since 70th which US propaganda calls democracy.
In a way, the concept of Corporatism and the concept of "deep state" are very close. Corporatism presuppose the merger of government and corporations. It can be done openly as was the case in Mussolini Italy, or via back door including the "revolving door" mechanism as it was done in the USA. In both case corporations control the government, although in Mussolity case thier absolute power is moderated by the esitable of the fascist party with its program. In the latter case, the case of the USA inverted totalitarism regime a tiny part of power of the "surface state" is preserved. But enough to provid the legitimacy to the rule of the "Deep State" or "Inner Party in terms of Orwell dystopia 1984.
Deep State just adds another component to pre-existing since the end of WWII concept of military industrial complex (see Eisenhower warning about MIC which is a warning about the victory of corporatism in the USA ) -- intelligence agencies. With this addition elections became simply device to legitimize the governance of the current elite, with undesirable for the elite candidates filtered before they can compete in election by various means, including radical as was the case with JFK assassination. Elections serve just of Potemkin village legitimizing the candidate that was chosen by tiny elite (the top 1% or 0.1% depending on how you count).
With the exception of deep social crisis like was the case with election of Trump, who definitely was less preferred by the deep state candidate then Hillary Clinton but manage to win )or more correctly the faction of the elite that tanded behind Trump managed to win) due to the crisis of neoliberalism in the USA due to which the current elite lost legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of population. And, especially, working people and lower middle class which constitute the majority of voters. As many observers pointed out, the election of Trump was essentially a middle finger shown to the current neoliberal elite in the USA, particularly the Clinton's wing of Democratic Party which betrayed working class as a part of "Clintonization" of the Party in early 90th duing which it became the party of Wall Street and later, under Obama, the second war party. The same happened with Labor Party in the UK under war criminal Blair.
Elections serve just of Potemkin village legitimizing the candidate that was chosen by tiny elite, an important part of which are now intelligence agencies, which acquired political role. The problem of control by the civil society of intelligence agencies so far is unresolved. |
We can say that Deep State emerged simultaneously with powerful intelligence agencies after WWII. In case of the USA it was Truman who created added CIA to the roster of intelligence agencies and as such he can be called a godfather of the US deep state. This concept became more well known recently in view of color revolution against Trump launched by Clinton wing of Democratic party (so called "soft neoliberal" wing) in association the supporting them elements of intelligence agencies such as State Department, CIA and FBI.
The concept of the Deep State is related to the answer the another fundamental question: Can democracy exists in a state with powerful intelligence agencies like NSA, CIA, FBI (which plays the role of counterintelligence agency in the USA; look at Russiagate) and the State Department (which has functions, which duplicate those of CIA). Thus the concept of the "deep state" can be viewed as a reformulation of the iron law of oligarchy on a new level (state level), explaining the role of intelligence agencies as an immanent part of the ruling elite. For example, the neoliberals elite which rules the USA since late 70th (Carter not Reagan was the first neoliberal president of the USA).
The concept of the Deep State is related to the answer the another fundamental question: Can democracy exists in a state with powerful intelligence agencies like NSA, CIA, FBI |
Intelligence agencies acquired a special status under corporatism. They became the backbone and the intellectual center of the Media-Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) which also now includes major Wall Street banks (which historically have very close ties with CIA; CIA was formed by lawyers which served their interests such as Allen Dulles). Under neoliberalism the financial oligarchy became an important part of MIC (especially oligarchy of such banks as Goldman Sachs and Citibank)becaue the power of the US military secure their global expansion. Recently Silicon Valley mega corporations also joined it. And all of them are closely connected to NSA and CIA (especially Amazon, Google and Facebook). In a way, military-industrial complex mutated into Media-Military-Financial-Industrial-Silicon Valley complex.
This is a new unelected aristocracy with huge financial resources and zero accountability. Members of this clan stand above law and can't be easily demotes from their positions by civil authorities. They now are a new incarnation of the "royal court", or in more modern term Nomenklatura, which can, like in old times, to depose a monarch (or Supreme Leader) or even kill him. |
This is a new unelected aristocracy with huge financial resources and zero accountability. Members of this clan stand above law and can't be easily demotes from their positions by civil authorities (on intelligence agencies level, J. Edgar Hoover who managed to die in his official position, much like the USSR members of Politburo, is an excellent example here). They now are a new incarnation of the "royal court", or in more modern term Nomenklatura, which can, like in old times, to depose a monarch (or Supreme leader) or even kill him.
So in a way the concept of "deep state" implies and emphasizes the hypertrophied role of three letter agencies among unelected government bureaucracy. They are joined at the heap with financial oligarchy, MIC and Silicon Valley in national politics. Especially in formulating foreign policy. Influence of MIC on the US foreign policy is nothing new and power of neocon, who are, in essence, lobbyists of MIC attests that. They dominate the USA foreign policy since then end of WWII. After all one of the most plausible hypotheses of why JFK was killed ( most probably via CIA plot ) because his policies limited the power of intelligences agencies (especially CIA which he hated) and international expansion which Wall Street and MIC depended upon to maintain the current rate of profits.
But devil is always in details and some features of the USA Deep State are unique and different the deep state in other neoliberal countries such as EU, GB, Turkey, or Russia. BTW the term "deep state" originated in Turkey.
The "deep state" victory over voters and political dominance is always "incomplete." The "surface state" is still keeping some positions and periodically even try to counterattack deep state in certain areas (Church Committee.) Second, the merger of interests of three letter agencies like CIA/NSA/ FBI also has its own internal contradictions. For example NSA and CIA competes for funds. State Department, which is forth most important intelligence agency in the USA (and the oldest of all four) now lost its independence and can generally be viewed as a subsidiary of CIA, see Emailgate and Strzogate for details ). Alliance of CIA and Wall Street also can never be absolute. They have somewhat different worldviews on both the USA foreign policy priorities and methods of achieving them. Also there is a fierce competition between intelligence agencies for state resources, which pitch, for example, CIA against NSA and both of then against DIA (just look at Sacrifice of Michael Flynn to neocons story). As we can see from Syria war such differences can lead to essentially supporting hostile to each other groups of insurgent while trying to achieve the same color revolution based "regime change" in the country.
The statement that relations between three letter agencies are far from harmonious are supported by leaked story about how CIA ('humint") was very concerned about recent rise of status and capabilities of NSA ("sigint") and tried to duplicate its capabilities ( Vault 7 scandal) They lie to each other and try to poach funds from the other agencies. Vault 7 scandal is a strong confirmation that CIA brass is very concerted about increased role and influence of NSA in the era on Internet communications and is trying to counterattack and undermine it.
Add to this a special, more independent, status and role of military intelligence which also now is not in best relations with both CIA and NSA. Destiny of General Flynn, who served as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and in 2017 was entrapped by FBI with the help of NSA and CIA is a strong sign there not much love left between DIA and other agencies (with DIA probably being the most competent of them all three). So in certain areas they are more like spiders in the cage with CIA perfectly capable attacking NSA and DIA and vise versa. That gives us some hope.
The rise of intelligence agenizes inevitably led to conversion of the state into national security state and we can talk about "election democracy" in such state only with great reservations. Yes some freedom to chose candidatures still exist (as Sanders and, possibly, Trump emergence in 2016 elections attests), but the final choice is more often then not is determined by intelligence agencies, not so much by voters (FBI derailing of Sanders in favor of establishment candidate -- Hillary Clinton -- quite vividly attests this fact; not that Sanders fought a good fight in this respect serving more like a sheep dog in the elections).
Two party system invented by elite of Great Britain proved to be perfect for inverted totalitarism type of regimes, including the US neoliberalism. But there is second trend here which increase the elite control of the county: this is dramatic transfer of power to institutions of "deep state", which in certain sense now like TBTF are beyond civil control. As well as a secret alliance between Wall Street and CIA and other three letter agencies.
All those factors essentially make Presidential and Congress election in the USA truly optional, serving mostly ceremonial, decorative function. Yes elections still continue to exist and sometime provide good theater, within the strict rules of an emasculated "two parties, winner takes all" system, which if you think about it is not that different from one party elections in the USSR.
They still have a role in legitimizing the current rulers, although actual rules are not the same as those who were elected. This is especially true about the two recent US Presidents: George W Bush and Barack Obama. And that explains why Barack Obama foreign policy is essentially a continuation of policy of George W Bush with minor tweaks. Just the fact that neocon Victoria Nuland who worked for Cheney was promoted to the key role of the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs tells that Obama controls very little in foreign policy area and that 'deep state" is functioning autonomously and without control of "surface state".
The USA political system does not have a single government. It actually has two distinct governments. They are called "surface state" or Madisonians and "deep state" or Trumanites (national security establishment in alliance with selected members of financial oligarchy, media owners and technocrats). The latter term emerged because it was Harry Truman who signed National Security Act of 1947 which created major three letter agencies (CIA, DOD, FBI and NSA).
Simplifying the complex relation between those two US governments (sometimes Madisonians fight back and have Trumanites to make a temporary retreat) we can say that:
In other words, the "Deep state" represent the actual government of the society by unelected elite, which is composed of high-level officials within the intelligence services, military, law enforcement, judiciary and, often, organized crime. It should be viewed as an extended and more realistic variant of military industrial complex dominance (see Media-Military-Industrial Complex) as it includes selected members of financial oligarchy along with industrialists, Internet moguls, and media owners. In British author John le Carré’s latest novel, A Delicate Truth, a character describes the Deep State as
“… the ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster.”
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Conversion of system of governance to "deep state" which happened in the USA almost immediately after 1947 essentially made large part of federal elections including Presidential elections optional, but they still continue to exist as a ceremonial function for the sake of providing the legitimacy of the government in an emasculated "two parties system" form. While relationship is more complex then simple dominance, in essence "deep state" is the tail that wags the dog. And JFK assassination (Nov 22, 1963) meant first of all the triumph of "deep state" over "surface state". In this sense 9/11 was just the last nail in the coffin of democracy.
The term “Deep State” was coined in Turkey (and actually Wikipedia discusses only it) but it is widespread modern phenomenon which is a typical model of governance in all major neoliberal states, including the USA, GB and France. For example, it able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process. That's why elected candidates swiftly perform "bat and switch" maneuver and conduct polices radically different from those for which they were elected. As any elite dominance project it is deeply anti-democratic although it uses fig leaf of democracy for foreign expansion via color revolutions and wars.
Like in Third Reich, this dominance is supported by relentless propaganda and brainwashing with mechanisms polished since Reagan to perfection. There is now no problem to create an "enemy of the people" when the elite wants and it does not matter which country or individual is selected as an enemy. The essence of elite politics in this area was best formulated by Hermann Goering, President of the Reichstag, Nazi Party, and Luftwaffe Commander in Chief
Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
In other words this is a hidden set of political actors and powerful institutions that are concealed within the wider, “visible” state which, essentially, took over the functions of traditional state, leaving such organization of Executive branch, President, congress and courts mainly ceremonial role. Such transformation is well explained by the Iron Law of Oligarchy and in various forms happened in Third Reich, the USSR, Turkey, China and many other countries.
“When I asked the military advisors if they could assure me that holding fast would not result in the death of five
hundred million human beings, they looked at me as though I was out of my mind, or what was worse, a traitor. The biggest
tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the
Albanians might accuse us of appeasement or weakness. So I said to myself, “To hell with these maniacs. If I can get the
United States to assure me that it will not attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, I will remove the missiles.” That is
what happened, and now I am reviled by the Chinese and the Albanians.… They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger.
It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact? “
Osama Number52
months ago
“The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline,
one with three matches, the other with five.” ― Carl Sagan
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“When I asked the military advisors if they could assure me that holding fast would not result in the death of five hundred million human beings, they looked at me as though I was out of my mind, or what was worse, a traitor. The biggest tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the Albanians might accuse us of appeasement or weakness. So I said to myself, “To hell with these maniacs. If I can get the United States to assure me that it will not attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, I will remove the missiles.” That is what happened, and now I am reviled by the Chinese and the Albanians.… They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact? “r>
Daniel Ellsberg The Doomsday Machine Talks at Google was very interesting talk in which he described why Washington establishment is pro-war as it is (full transcript is availbe from The Singju Post ). In it he addresses how the regime of secrecy allows to built multi-layer lies, which justify of even make noble any criminal action by the US government:
But what made that dangerous at any time, then or now? And the answer was that the government secrets that they were holding onto were secrets about criminal activity, actions that would be extremely embarrassing to a president, because they were illegal or unconstitutional or simply incredibly reckless, dangerous, horrible priorities, unlikely ever to succeed in any sense or to end. The public would not have applauded if they understood the actual strategy and the actual prospects.
... ... ...
Every member of Congress has taken that oath. Every member of the Executive Department has taken that same oath. The president’s wording is a little bit different, protect, preserve and defend or something. But support and defend, everybody else takes it.
And all of us violated it every day. we heard the president lying to Congress and lying to the public about what he intended, where the prospects were, what he was going to do in Vietnam, elsewhere. We all heard the president lying the public into a war, keeping the war going, letting him know the costs would be much less than internal estimates all indicated. And no one broke.
There were no leaks, including me. So was I observing that oath or violating it, when I knew that Congress, which has the exclusive authority to take us to war, at least that’s the best interpretation, I think, controverted by president’s men, was entirely delegating that secretly to a president who was determined to enlarge the war. That’s how you get wars that go on 10 years or 11 years, whatever.
The truth is the United States, as I learned from the Pentagon Papers, when I read all of them, had begun the war in 1945 and ’46, supporting a French effort to reconquer a colony which had declared its independence in August and September of 1945. And actually Ho Chi Minh had been recognized as a head of state, at least of the north, in Paris when they were negotiating in ’45, ’46.
... ... ...
But in terms of American traditions, we thought of ourselves as– we didn’t think– of having run the first war of national liberation. But it could have been called that, the first war of separation for an empire. And we thought of ourselves as anti-imperial. And we still think of ourselves that way, as not an empire like the others. That’s false.
That’s very clear from the Pentagon Papers where we’re deciding who should run Vietnam this year or next year or how they should stay in power, what criminal acts they’re entitled to take, how much we need to support them. And so it’s very obviously the documents of an empire. In fact, that’s what I said to my wife, when she said, at one point, before they came out, does it really matter to get this history out? And I said, well, among other things, it’s the first real history of imperial operations since the Nuremberg documents were discovered, covered after the Second World War. And before that, it probably goes back to Punic times, to the Syrian empire, to Sumerian empire, and so probably all the same, but we don’t have the documents for it.
And here they are. And yet, even so, I managed to think of it as an aberration. We had somehow gotten ourselves into acting like an empire. Let me say just very briefly now– I could spend the whole time on this. But I’ll just say, I’ve come recently to see what we are as a covert empire. And covert refers to plausibly denial covert operations.
Covert operations, I should say, are defined as operations that are not just secret, that you’re not just keeping it safe, but that you lie about plausibly. And to make it plausible, you provide in advance evidence, false evidence, misleading evidence as to what’s really going on and who’s running it and why it’s happening and who did it and so forth, a false flag in some cases, whatever.
But you provide several layers of cover for what’s being done to protect the president from the notion that he is murdering, overthrowing governments, installing coup governments in democracies and so forth, as so often in the third world then and now, up until now. Well, you don’t want the US to be associated with that. It’s happening over there.
And if somehow a US hand surfaces, he or she wasn’t working for any agency. And if you find the agency, it wasn’t the CIA. And if it was the CIA, it wasn’t the president. So you have layer after layer of cover stories with documents. I didn’t know this. It didn’t come to my attention. This so-and-so did it and so forth. The Vietnam War was run from beginning to end like that. That’s how we run our empire.We deny that we are an empire. And what is an empire? A country that determines the regime of other countries, decides who the police chief was, who shall live and who shall die, what the basic foreign policies are. We do that throughout Central America and always have, often many other parts of the world as far apart as Indonesia, now the Middle East. In general, we decide: Who do we want? Is this guy OK? We don’t decide every detail but any more than you decide every detail of a military commander’s operations.
But generally, they work. If they don’t do what we want, we replace them with somebody else. We deny that we’re an empire. We’re against empire. When other people do the same sort of thing, they’re empires. They’re acting imperially. First level of denial on the American part. And then second, how do they get in power? Who has to be killed? What paramilitary forces have to be paid and go in, as into Nicaragua, for example, and other places? So the efforts are also plausibly denied OK, I could spend time. And I don’t know if people have it in mind.
... ... ...
And, by the way, “The Day After” is just a tiny, little sliver of what the actual consequences of a nuclear war would look like. Movies that have come closer to that, there’s one called “Threads” in England that they’ve never allowed to be on BBC, to be shown. And again, it really just focuses on the long-term degradation and disintegration of everything, like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” pretty much.
So no nuclear state has ever been willing to tell its own people or to hold others accountable to the risks we are posing over their head. And a movie like that today would be very worthwhile. But I don’t know what prospect there is of it.
Here is how The American Conservative covers this topic:
Steve Sailer links to this unsettling essay by former career Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, who says the “deep state” — the Washington-Wall-Street-Silicon-Valley Establishment — is a far greater threat to liberty than you think. The partisan rancor and gridlock in Washington conceals a more fundamental and pervasive agreement.
Excerpts:These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.
Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.
More:
Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following: “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” This, from the chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has practically abolished the constitutional right to trial for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice — certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee. [3]
The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well trodden highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and many others. Not all the traffic involves persons connected with the purely financial operations of the government: In 2013, General David Petraeus joined KKR (formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a private equity firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in management buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus’ expertise in these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however, is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword. Petraeus also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at theBelfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy.
Lofgren goes on to say that Silicon Valley is a node of the Deep State too, and that despite the protestations of its chieftains against NSA spying, it’s a vital part of the Deep State’s apparatus. More:
The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to “live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.”
Read the whole thing. Steve Sailer says that the Shallow State is a complement to the Deep State. The Shallow State is, I think, another name for what the Neoreactionaries call “The Cathedral,” defined thus:
The Cathedral — The self-organizing consensus of Progressives and Progressive ideology represented by the universities, the media, and the civil service. A term coined by blogger Mencius Moldbug. The Cathedral has no central administrator, but represents a consensus acting as a coherent group that condemns other ideologies as evil. Community writers have enumerated the platform of Progressivism as women’s suffrage, prohibition, abolition, federal income tax, democratic election of senators, labor laws, desegregation, popularization of drugs, destruction of traditional sexual norms, ethnic studies courses in colleges, decolonization, and gay marriage. A defining feature of Progressivism is that “you believe that morality has been essentially solved, and all that’s left is to work out the details.” Reactionaries see Republicans as Progressives, just lagging 10-20 years behind Democrats in their adoption of Progressive norms.
You don’t have to agree with the Neoreactionaries on what they condemn — women’s suffrage? desegregation? labor laws? really?? — to acknowledge that they’re onto something about the sacred consensus that all Right-Thinking People share. I would love to see a study comparing the press coverage from 9/11 leading up to the Iraq War with press coverage of the gay marriage issue from about 2006 till today. Specifically, I’d be curious to know about how thoroughly the media covered the cases against the policies that the Deep State and the Shallow State decided should prevail. I’m not suggesting a conspiracy here, not at all. I’m only thinking back to how it seemed so obvious to me in 2002 that we should go to war with Iraq, so perfectly clear that the only people who opposed it were fools or villains. The same consensus has emerged around same-sex marriage. I know how overwhelmingly the news media have believed this for some time, such that many American journalists simply cannot conceive that anyone against same-sex marriage is anything other than a fool or a villain. Again, this isn’t a conspiracy; it’s in the nature of the thing. Lofgren:
Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it’s 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one’s consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?” No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one’s surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn’t know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.
When all you know is the people who surround you in your professional class bubble and your social circles, you can think the whole world agrees with you, or should. It’s probably not a coincidence that the American media elite live, work, and socialize in New York and Washington, the two cities that were attacked on 9/11, and whose elites — political, military, financial — were so genuinely traumatized by the events.
Anyway, that’s just a small part of it, about how the elite media manufacture consent. Here’s a final quote, one from the Moyers interview with Lofgren:
BILL MOYERS: If, as you write, the ideology of the Deep State is not democrat or republican, not left or right, what is it?
MIKE LOFGREN: It’s an ideology. I just don’t think we’ve named it. It’s a kind of corporatism. Now, the actors in this drama tend to steer clear of social issues. They pretend to be merrily neutral servants of the state, giving the best advice possible on national security or financial matters. But they hold a very deep ideology of the Washington consensus at home, which is deregulation, outsourcing, de-industrialization and financialization. And they believe in American exceptionalism abroad, which is boots on the ground everywhere, it’s our right to meddle everywhere in the world. And the result of that is perpetual war.
This can’t last. We’d better hope it can’t last. And we’d better hope it unwinds peacefully.
I, for one, remain glad that so many of us Americans are armed. When the Deep State collapses — and it will one day — it’s not going to be a happy time.
Questions to the room: Is a Gorbachev for the Deep State conceivable? That is, could you foresee a political leader emerging who could unwind the ideology and apparatus of the Deep State, and not only survive, but succeed? Or is it impossible for the Deep State to allow such a figure to thrive? Or is the Deep State, like the Soviet system Gorbachev failed to reform, too entrenched and too far gone to reform itself? If so, what then?
The second important thinker in this area is Professor Michael J. Glennon who wrote the book “National Security and Double Government.”. The strong point of his views on the subject is that he assumes that there is an internal struggle between those two forms of government, not just passive submission one to another, but in most cases deep state prevails. This move led the USA "beyond a mere imperial presidency to a bifurcated system — a structure of double government — in which even the President now exercises little substantive control over the overall direction of U.S. national security policy."
The "deep state" (call by Professor Michael J. Glennon) The Trumanites, exercise their power due to alliance with Wall Street, almost unlimited funding (with many hidden sources belong US budget), higher efficiency, abuse of secrecy, exaggerated threats, peer pressure to conform, and corruption of the key decision-makers.
Here is how Amazon reviewer Mal Warwick summarized the book in his review written on December 22, 2014
Who makes national security decisions? Not who you think!Why does Barack Obama's performance on national security issues in the White House contrast so strongly with his announced intentions as a candidate in 2008? After all, not only has Obama continued most of the Bush policies he decried when he ran for the presidency, he has doubled down on government surveillance, drone strikes, and other critical programs.
Michael J. Glennon set out to answer this question in his unsettling new book, National Security and Double Government. And he clearly dislikes what he found.
The answer, Glennon discovered, is that the US government is divided between the three official branches of the government, on the one hand — the "Madisonian" institutions incorporated into the Constitution — and the several hundred unelected officials who do the real work of a constellation of military and intelligence agencies, on the other hand. These officials, called "Trumanites" in Glennon's parlance for having grown out of the national security infrastructure established under Harry Truman, make the real decisions in the area of national security. (To wage the Cold War, Truman created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the NSA, and the National Security Council.) "The United States has, in short," Glennon writes, "moved beyond a mere imperial presidency to a bifurcated system — a structure of double government — in which even the President now exercises little substantive control over the overall direction of U.S. national security policy. . . . The perception of threat, crisis, and emergency has been the seminal phenomenon that has created and nurtures America's double government." If Al Qaeda hadn't existed, the Trumanite network would have had to create it — and, Glennon seems to imply, might well have done so.
The Trumanites wield their power with practiced efficiency, using secrecy, exaggerated threats, peer pressure to conform, and the ability to mask the identity of the key decision-maker as their principal tools.
Michael J. Glennon comes to this task with unexcelled credentials. A professor of international law at Tufts and former legal counsel for the Senate Armed Services Committee, he came face to face on a daily basis with the "Trumanites" he writes about. National Security and Double Government is exhaustively researched and documented: notes constitute two-thirds of this deeply disturbing little book.
The more I learn about how politics and government actually work — and I've learned a fair amount in my 73 years — the more pessimistic I become about the prospects for democracy in America. In some ways, this book is the most worrisome I've read over the years, because it implies that there is no reason whatsoever to think that things can ever get better. In other words, to borrow a phrase from the Borg on Star Trek, "resistance is futile." That's a helluva takeaway, isn't it?
On reflection, what comes most vividly to mind is a comment from the late Chalmers Johnson on a conference call in which I participated several years ago. Johnson, formerly a consultant to the CIA and a professor at two campuses of the University of California (Berkeley and later San Diego), was the author of many books, including three that awakened me to many of the issues Michael Glennon examines: Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis. Johnson, who was then nearly 80 and in declining health, was asked by a student what he would recommend for young Americans who want to combat the menace of the military-industrial complex. "Move to Vancouver," he said.
Another good summary of the book can be found is review by Bruce Morgan (Shadow Government )
October 28, 2014 | Tufts Now
Elected officials are no longer in charge of our national security—and that is undermining our democracy, says the Fletcher School's Michael Glennon
"We are clearly on the path to autocracy," says Michael Glennon. "There's no question that if we continue on that path, [the] Congress, the courts and the presidency will ultimately end up . . . as institutional museum pieces." Photo: Kelvin Ma
Michael Glennon knew of the book, and had cited it in his classes many times, but he had never gotten around to reading the thing from cover to cover. Last year he did, jolted page after page with its illuminating message for our time.
The book was The English Constitution, an analysis by 19th-century journalist Walter Bagehot that laid bare the dual nature of British governance. It suggested that one part of government was for popular consumption, and another more hidden part was for real, consumed with getting things done in the world. As he read, Glennon, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School, where he also teaches constitutional law, saw distinct parallels with the current American political scene.
He decided to explore the similarities in a 30-page paper that he sent around to a number of his friends, asking them to validate or refute his argument. As it happens, Glennon's friends were an extraordinarily well-informed bunch, mostly seasoned operatives in the CIA, the U.S. State Department and the military. "Look," he told them. "I'm thinking of writing a book. Tell me if this is wrong." Every single one responded, "What you have here is exactly right."
Expanded from that original brief paper, Glennon's book National Security and Double Government (Oxford University Press) takes our political system to task, arguing that the people running our government are not our visible elected officials but high-level—and unaccountable—bureaucrats nestled atop government agencies.
Glennon's informed critique of the American political system comes from a place of deep regard. Glennon says he can remember driving into Washington, D.C., in the late spring of 1973, at the time of the Senate Watergate hearings, straight from law school at the University of Minnesota, to take his first job as assistant legislative counsel to the U.S. Senate. Throughout his 20s, he worked in government, culminating in his position as legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Sen. Frank Church from 1977 to 1980. Since entering academic life in the early 1980s, Glennon has been a frequent consultant to government agencies of all stripes, as well as a regular commentator on media outlets such as NPR's All Things Considered, the Today show and Nightline.
In his new book, an inescapable sadness underlies the narrative. "I feel a great sense of loss," Glennon admits. "I devoted my life to these [democratic] institutions, and it's not easy to see how to throw the current trends into reverse." Tufts Now spoke with Glennon recently to learn more of his perspective.
Tufts Now: You've been both an insider and an outsider with regard to government affairs. What led you to write this book?
Michael Glennon: I was struck by the strange continuity in national security policy between the Bush administration and the Obama administration. Obama, as a candidate, had been eloquent and forceful in criticizing many aspects of the Bush administration's national security policies, from drone strikes to Guantanamo to surveillance by the National Security Agency—the NSA—to covert operations. Yet as president, it turned out that he made very, very few changes in these policies. So I thought it was useful to explain the reason for that.
Were you surprised by the continuity?
I was surprised by the extent of it. I knew fundamentally from my own experience that changing national policies is like trying to change the course of an aircraft carrier. These policies in many ways were set long ago, and the national security bureaucracy tends to favor the status quo. Still, I thought that a president like Obama would, with the political wind in his sails and with so much public and congressional support for what he was criticizing, be more successful in fulfilling his promises.
You use the phrase "double government," coined by Walter Bagehot in the 1860s. What did he mean by that?
Walter Bagehot was one of the founders of the Economist magazine. He developed the theory of "double government," which in a nutshell is this. He said Britain had developed two sets of institutions. First came "dignified" institutions, the monarchy and the House of Lords, which were for show and which the public believed ran the government. But in fact, he suggested, this was an illusion.
These dignified institutions generate legitimacy, but it was a second set of institutions, which he called Britain's "efficient" institutions, that actually ran the government behind the scenes. These institutions were the House of Commons, the Cabinet and the prime minister. This split allowed Britain to move quietly from a monarchy to what Bagehot called a "concealed republic."
The thesis of my book is that the United States has also drifted into a form of double government, and that we have our own set of "dignified" institutions—Congress, the presidency and the courts. But when it comes to national security policy, these entities have become largely for show. National security policy is now formulated primarily by a second group of officials, namely the several hundred individuals who manage the agencies of the military, intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracy responsible for protecting the nation's security.
What are some components of this arrangement?
The NSA, the FBI, the Pentagon and elements of the State Department, certainly; generally speaking, law enforcement, intelligence and the military entities of the government. It's a diverse group, an amorphous group, with no leader and no formal structure, that has come to dominate the formation of American national security policy to the point that Congress, the presidency and the courts all defer to it.
You call this group the "Trumanite network" in your book. What's the link to Harry Truman?
It was in Truman's administration that the National Security Act of 1947 was enacted. This established the CIA and the National Security Council and centralized the command of the U.S. military. It was during the Truman administration as well that the National Security Agency [NSA] was set up, in 1952, although that was a secret and didn't come to light for many years thereafter.
In contrast to the Trumanites you set the "Madisonians." How would you describe them?
The Madisonian institutions are the three constitutionally established branches of the federal government: Congress, the judiciary and the president. They are perceived by the public as the entities responsible for the formulation of national security policy, but that belief is largely mistaken.
The idea is driven by regular exceptions. You can always point to specific instances in which, say, the president personally ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden or Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution. But these are exceptions. The norm is that as a general matter, these three branches defer to the Trumanite network, and that's truer all the time.
So the trend is toward increased power on the Trumanite side of the ledger.
Correct.
If that's true, why has there not been a greater outcry from the public, the media—all the observers we have?
I think the principal reason is that even sophisticated students of government operate under a very serious misunderstanding. They believe that the political system is self-correcting. They believe the framers set up a system of government setting power against power, and ambition against ambition, and that an equilibrium would be reached, and that any abuse of power would be checked, and arbitrary power would be prevented.
That is correct as far as it goes, but the reality is that's only half the picture. The other half is that Madison and his colleagues believed that for equilibrium to occur, we would have an informed and engaged citizenry. Lacking that, the entire system corrupts, because individuals are elected to office who do not resist encroachments on the power of their branches of government, and the whole equilibrium breaks down.
What role, if any, have the media played?
The media have pretty much been enablers. Although there are a handful of investigative journalists who have done a heroic job of uncovering many of the abuses, they are the exception, for a number of reasons. Number one, the media are a business and have a bottom line. It takes a huge amount of money to fund an investigative journalist who goes about finding sources over a period of years. Very few newspapers or television concerns have those sorts of deep pockets.
Second, access for the press is everything. There is huge incentive to pull punches, and you don't get interviews with top-ranking officials at the NSA or CIA if you're going to offer hard-hitting questions. Look, for example, at the infamous 60 Minutes puff piece on the NSA, a really tragic example of how an otherwise respectable institution can sell its soul and act like an annex of the NSA in order to get some people it wants on the TV screen.
What is the role of terror in this environment?
The whole transfer of power from the Madisonian institutions to the Trumanite network has been fueled by a sense of emergency deriving from crisis, deriving from fear. It's fear of terrorism more than anything else that causes the American people to increasingly be willing to dispense with constitutional safeguards to ensure their safety.
Madison believed that government has two great objects. One object of a constitution is to enable the government to protect the people, specifically from external attacks. The other great object of a constitution is to protect the people from the government. The better able the government is to protect the people from external threats, the greater the threat posed by the government to the people.
You've been involved with the U.S. government for 40 years. How has your view of government changed?
Double government was certainly a factor in the 1970s, but it was challenged for the first time thanks to the activism stemming from the civil rights movement, Vietnam and Watergate. As a result, there were individuals in Congress—Democrats and Republicans like William Fulbright, Frank Church, Jacob Javits, Charles Mathias and many others—who were willing to stand up and insist upon adherence to constitutionally ordained principles. That led to a wave of activism and to the enactment of a number of pieces of reform legislation.
But there is no final victory in Washington. Those reforms have gradually been eaten away and turned aside. I think today we are in many ways right back where we were in the early 1970s. NSA surveillance is an example of that. The Church Committee uncovered something called Operation Shamrock, in which the NSA had assembled a watch list of antiwar and civil rights activists based upon domestic surveillance. Church warned at the time that NSA capabilities were so awesome that if they were ever turned inward on the American people, this nation would cross an abyss from which there is no return. The question is whether we have recently crossed that abyss.
To what degree are we still a functioning democracy? I'm sure you know that President Jimmy Carter told a German reporter last year that he thought we no longer qualified as a democracy because of our domestic surveillance.
We are clearly on the path to autocracy, and you can argue about how far we are down that path. But there's no question that if we continue on that path, America's constitutionally established institutions—Congress, the courts and the presidency—will ultimately end up like Britain's House of Lords and monarchy, namely as institutional museum pieces.
Bruce Morgan can be reached at [email protected]
Here is how Christopher Bellavita in Homeland Security Watch summarize an interesting discussion at Cato think tank which I highly recommend to watch:
That’s the question Michael J. Glennon asks in his book “National Security and Double Government.”
His answer: national security policy is determined largely by “the several hundred managers of the military, intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement agencies who are responsible for protecting the nation and who have come to operate largely immune from constitutional and electoral restraints.” The president, congress and the courts play largely a symbolic role in national security policy, Glennon claims.
You can read a Harvard National Security Journal article that outlines Glennon’s argument at this link: http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf. The paper is not an especially easy read, but I found it to be well researched and – for me – persuasive.
His book adds more analysis to the argument, using (from Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision) the rational actor model, the government politics model, and the organizational behavior model. Glennon extends that framework by discussing culture, networks, and the myth of alternative competing hypotheses. The book is richer, in my opinion. But the core of Glennon’s position is in the paper.
This link takes you to a video of Glennon talking about his book at the Cato Institute: http://www.cato.org/events/national-security-double-government (the talk starts at the 5:20 mark).
From the Cato site:
In National Security and Double Government, Michael Glennon examines the continuity in U.S. national security policy from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. Glennon explains the lack of change by pointing to the enervation of America’s “Madisonian institutions,” namely, the Congress, the presidency, and the courts. In Glennon’s view, these institutions have been supplanted by a “Trumanite network” of bureaucrats who make up the permanent national security state. National security policymaking has been removed from public view and largely insulated from law and politics. Glennon warns that leaving security policy in the hands of the Trumanite network threatens Americans’ liberties and the republican form of government.
Some blurb reviews:
- “If constitutional government is to endure in the United States, Americans must confront the fundamental challenges presented by this chilling analysis of the national security state.”
Bruce Ackerman- “Glennon shows how the underlying national security bureaucracy in Washington – what might be called the deep state – ensures that presidents and their successors act on the world stage like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.” John J. Mearsheimer
- “National Security and Double Government is brilliant, deep, sad, and vastly learned across multiple fields–a work of Weberian power and stature. It deserves to be read and discussed. The book raises philosophical questions in the public sphere in a way not seen at least since Fukuyama’s end of history.” David A. Westbrook
- “In our faux democracy, those we elect to govern serve largely ornamental purposes, while those who actually wield power, especially in the realm of national security, do so chiefly with an eye toward preserving their status and prerogatives. Read this incisive and richly documented book, and you’ll understand why.” Andrew J. Bacevich
- “…Michael Glennon provides a compelling argument that America’s national security policy is growing outside the bounds of existing government institutions. This is at once a constitutional challenge, but is also a case study in how national security can change government institutions, create new ones, and, in effect, stand-up a parallel state….” Vali Nasr
- “Instead of being responsive to citizens or subject to effective checks and balances, U.S. national security policy is in fact conducted by a shadow government of bureaucrats and a supporting network of think tanks, media insiders, and ambitious policy wonks. Presidents may come and go, but the permanent national security establishment inevitably defeats their efforts to chart a new course….”Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer
I’ve spoken to three people I consider to be members of the “shadow national security state.” One person said Glennon’s argument is nothing new. The second told me he’s got it exactly right. The third said it’s even worse.
If Michael Glennon conceded defeat, but still has some hope, here we enter perfect Dante hell picture along the lines "Leave all hopes those who dare to enter"
Professor Peter Dale Scott book and article represent probably the most comprehensive coverage, especially his book. But the article in the Asia-Pacific journal represents fair summary of his views on the subject (The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld (Updated March 13, 2014):
In the last decade it has become more and more obvious that we have in America today what the journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin have called
two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre – and its entirety…visible only to God.1
And in 2013, particularly after the military return to power in Egypt, more and more authors referred to this second level as America’s “deep state.”2 Here for example is the Republican analyst Mike Lofgren:
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.3
At the end of 2013 a New York Times Op-Ed noted this trend, and even offered a definition of the term that will work for the purposes of this essay:
DEEP STATE n. A hard-to-perceive level of government or super-control that exists regardless of elections and that may thwart popular movements or radical change. Some have said that Egypt is being manipulated by its deep state.4
The political activities of the deep state are the chief source and milieu of what I have elsewhere called “deep politics:” “all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”5
Others, like Tom Hayden, call the deep state a “state within the state,” and suggest it may be responsible for the failure of the Obama administration to follow the policy guidelines of the president’s speeches:
We have seen evidence of a "state within the state" before, going back as far as the CIA's operations against Cuba. In Obama's time, the president correctly named the 2009 coup in Honduras a "coup", and then seemed powerless to prevent it.6
This development of a two-level or dual state has been paralleled by two other dualities: the increasing resolution of American society into two classes – the “one percent” and the “ninety-nine percent” – and the bifurcation of the U.S. economy into two aspects: the domestic, still subject to some governmental regulation and taxation, and the international, relatively free from governmental controls.7 All three developments have affected and intensified each other – particularly since the Reagan Revolution of 1980, which saw American inequality of wealth cease to diminish and begin to increase.8 Thus for example we shall see how Wall Street – the incarnation of the “one percent” – played a significant role in increasing the deep state after World War Two, and how three decades later the deep state played a significant role in realigning America for the Reagan Revolution.
In earlier books I have given versions of this America-centered account of America’s shift into empire and a deep state. But another factor to be mentioned is the shift of global history towards an increasingly global society dominated by a few emergent superpowers. This trend was accelerated after the Industrial Revolution by new technologies of transport, from the railroad in the 19th century to the jet plane and space travel in the 20th.9
In the fallout from this rearrangement we must include two world wars, as a result of which Britain ceased to act as the dominant superpower it had been since Napoleon. Not surprisingly, the Soviet Union and the United States subsequently competed in a Cold War to fill the gap. It was not however predetermined that the Cold War would be as thuggish and covertly violent as for decades it continued to be. For that we should look to more contingent causes on both sides of the Iron Curtain – starting with the character of Stalin and his party but also including the partly responsive development of the American deep state.
The Deep State, The Shadow Government and the Wall Street Overworld
The “deep state” was defined by the UK newsletter On Religion as “the embedded anti-democratic power structures within a government, something very few democracies can claim to be free from.”10 The term originated in Turkey in 1996, to refer to U.S.-backed elements, primarily in the intelligence services and military, who had repeatedly used violence to interfere with and realign Turkey’s democratic political process. Sometimes the definition is restricted to elements within the government (or “a state-within-the state”), but more often in Turkey the term is expanded, for historical reasons, to include “members of the Turkish underworld.”11 In this essay I shall use “deep state” in the larger sense, to include both the second level of secret government inside Washington and those outsiders powerful enough, in either the underworld or overworld, to give it direction. In short I shall equate the term “deep state” with what in 1993 I termed a “deep political system:” “ one which habitually resorts to decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as inside those publicly sanctioned by law and society.”12
Like myself, Lofgren suggests an ambiguous symbiosis between two aspects of the American deep state:
1) the Beltway agencies of the shadow government, like the CIA and NSA, which have been instituted by the public state and now overshadow it, and
2) the much older power of Wall Street, referring to the powerful banks and law firms located there.
In his words,
It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice - certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee.13
I shall argue that in the 1950s Wall Street was a dominating complex. It included not just banks and oil firms but also the oil majors whose cartel arrangements were successfully defended against the U.S. Government by the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, home to the Dulles brothers. This larger complex is what I mean by the Wall Street overworld.
The Long History of the Wall Street Overworld
Lofgren’s inclusion of Wall Street is in keeping with Franklin Roosevelt’s observation in 1933 to his friend Col. E.M. House that “The real truth … is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”14
FDR’s insight is well illustrated by the efficiency with which a group of Wall Street bankers (including Nelson Rockefeller’s grandfather Nelson Aldrich and Paul Warburg) were able in a highly secret meeting in 1910 to establish the Federal Reserve System – a system which in effect reserved oversight of the nation’s currency supply and of all America’s banks in the not impartial hands of its largest.15 The political clout of the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve Board (where the federal Treasury is represented but does not dominate) was clearly demonstrated in 2008, when Fed leadership secured instant support from the successive administrations of a Texan Republican president, followed by a Midwest Democratic one, for public money to rescue the reckless management of Wall Street banks: banks Too Big To Fail, and of course far Too Big To Jail, but not Too Big To Bail.16
Wall Street and the Launching of the CIA
Top-level Treasury officials, CIA officers, and Wall Street bankers and lawyers think alike because of the “revolving door” by which they pass easily from private to public service and back. In 1946 General Vandenberg, as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), recruited Allen Dulles, then a Republican lawyer at Sullivan and Cromwell in New York, "to draft proposals for the shape and organization of what was to become the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947." Dulles promptly formed an advisory group of six men, all but one of whom were Wall Street investment bankers or lawyers.17 Dulles and two of the six (William H. Jackson and Frank Wisner) later joined the agency, where Dulles proceeded to orchestrate policies, such as the overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala, that he had previously discussed in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations.18
There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles’s influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director. Although he did not formally join the CIA until November 1950, he was in Berlin before the start of the 1948 Berlin Blockade, “supervising the unleashing of anti-Soviet propaganda across Europe.”19 In the early summer of 1948 he set up the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE), support of what became by the early 1950s “the largest CIA operation in Western Europe.”20
The Deep State and Funds for CIA Covert Operations
Wall Street was also the inspiration for what eventually became the CIA’s first covert operation: the use of “over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].”21 (The fundraising had begun at the wealthy Brook Club in New York; but Allen Dulles, still a Wall Street lawyer, persuaded Washington, which at first had preferred a private funding campaign, to authorize the operation through the National Security Council and the CIA.)22
Dulles’s friend Frank Wisner then left Wall Street to oversee an enlarged covert operations program through the newly created Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC). Dulles, still a lawyer, campaigned successfully to reconstruct Western Europe through what became known as the Marshall Plan.23 Together with George Kennan and James Forrestal, Dulles also “helped devise a secret codicil [to the Marshall Plan] that gave the CIA the capability to conduct political warfare. It let the agency skim millions of dollars from the plan.”24
This created one of the earlier occasions when the CIA, directly or indirectly, recruited local assets involved in drug trafficking. AFL member Irving Brown, the assistant of AFL official Jay Lovestone (a CIA asset), was implicated in drug smuggling activities in Europe, at the same time that he used funds diverted from the Marshall Plan to establish
a "compatible left" labor union in Marseilles with Pierre Ferri-Pisani. On behalf of Brown and the CIA, Ferri-Pisani (a drug smuggler connected with Marseilles crime lord Antoine Guerini), hired goons to shellack striking Communist dock workers.25
An analogous funding source for the CIA developed in the Far East: the so-called
"M-Fund," a secret fund of money of enormous size that has existed in Japan [in 1991] for more than forty years. The Fund was established by the United States in the immediate postwar era for essentially the same reasons that later gave rise to the Marshall Plan of assistance by the U.S. to Western Europe, including the Federal Republic of Germany….. The M-Fund was used not only for the building of a democratic political system in Japan but, in addition, for all of the purposes for which Marshall Plan funds were used in Europe.26
For at least two decades the CIA lavishly subsidized right-wing parties in countries including Japan and Indonesia, possibly still using captured Axis funds.27 (One frequently encounters the claim that the source of the M-fund was gold looted by Japan during World War Two (“Yamashita’s gold”).28
As a general rule the CIA, rather than assimilating these funds into its own budget, appears to have left them off the books in the hands of cooperative allied powers – ranging from other U.S. agencies like the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA. set up in 1948 to administer the Marshall Plan) to oil companies to powerful drug kingpins.29
The CIA never abandoned its dependency on funds from outside its official budget to conduct its clandestine operations. In Southeast Asia, in particular, its proprietary firm Sea Supply Inc., supplied an infrastructure for a drug traffic supporting a CIA-led paramilitary force, PARU.30 The CIA appears also to have acted in coordination with slush funds from various U.S. government contracts, ranging from the Howard Hughes organization to (as we shall see) the foreign arms sales of U.S. defense corporations like Lockheed and Northrop.31
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Jul 29, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
vova_3.2018 5 hours ago remove linkTBT or not TBT 10 hours agoThe Clintons changed the definition of truth.
The CIA changed the definition of Truth - FTFY
Oliver Stone premiered his new documentary about the Kennedy assassination titled
' JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass' ,Not a lone wolf killing: New documentary on JFK assassination reveals 'organized black op,' director Oliver Stone tells RT
https://www.rt.com/usa/529180-jfk-assassination-documentary-oliver-stone/Oliver Stone exposes JFK assassination cover-up
C Rabbit PREMIUM 7 hours agoWell, we would have gone bigger in Vietnam, and sooner, than LBJ did. So there is that. The Cold War might have been shorter.
radio man 15 hours agoThat is not true. Kennedy intended to remove our troops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Action_Memorandum_263
Johnson reversed that memorandum within a few days of Kennedy's assassination. Johnson was just another front man for the MIC.
eatapeach 14 hours ago (Edited)What a load. Visited the 6th floor and the grassy knoll back in the eighties and all doubts were confirmed. Like Trump, JFK was clueless about the real enemy. The true enemy is a central banking cartel that knew a Military Industrial Complex could and would serve as a Fountain of Youth.
Taxpayers are semi-living proof that bloodletting is still in vogue and the Oswald hoax was simply the cost of doing business.
Baron Samedi 15 hours agoPretty clear, just from the cui bono, that it was a coup: LBJ got the White House, the MIC got more Vietnam, and Israel's American arm AIPAC did not have to register as a foreign agent.
bobdog54 15 hours ago(((They))) had/have long since planned a world-spanning post-modern, neo-feudal (ref. Quigley T&H) bankster aristocracy with a pseudo-Marxist face ... and were/are not about to let anyone interfere with that. The most wonderfully compact expression of this is to be found in a speech by Ned Beatty in the 1976 (!) film NETWORK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuBe93FMiJc
(Seeing Old Sam playing chicken simultaneously (!) with two nuclear-armed peers and quite apparently indifferent to the fate of 7-8 billion peasants (anyone with assets of less than 1 B U$D) should be informative enough. But his continued frenetic drive for apparent hegemony also suggests Sam believes he is alone in having an ace up his sleeve (e.g. ZPE/antigrav/DEW++) to achieve it.)
Corn Pops brother, Pop Corn 14 hours agoWhat happened to that kind of sensible democrat?
radio man 14 hours agoHe made a deal with the devil, known as the mob in Chicago, then burned the CIA by backing out of the Cuban invasion.
The rest is history, as they say
consistentliving PREMIUM 10 hours agoThen, Bobby goes after the mob. Brilliant!
Able Ape 4 hours agobecuz Mob, CIA basically the same thing, different day
Don Cherry 3 hours ago (Edited)JFK did NOT give the generals the nuclear war they wanted [Cuban Missile Crisis]; for that, he was a great man...
Ms No PREMIUM 1 hour ago (Edited)And for that he was assassinated
He was assassinated for saying he would break the CIA I to a thousand pieces and demanding Inspections of Israel's Dimona. His father also made comments proving they were wise to the Zio mafia.
Jul 16, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Today the Guardian published another fake 'Russiagate' story:
Kremlin papers appear to show Putin's plot to put Trump in White House
Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a "mentally unstable" Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia's national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.
...
Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.Yaawwwnn ...
We know, without reading it, that the story is fake because its main author is Luke Harding. Harding also authored the story which claimed that Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manaford met Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. That story was proven to be false but the Guardian , to its shame, still has it up on its website .
In 2017 Luke Harding abruptly ended an interview with Aaron Maté after Harding was challenged over false claims he had made in his book about 'Russiagate'. The last five minutes of that video are quite amusing .
The Guardian story claims that the 'leaked' nonsense paper was discussed in high level Kremlin meeting in January 2016. It was then decided, it alleges, to support Trump. But in January 2016 there was no one, not even Donald Trump himself, who thought that he would win the Republican primary or even the presidency. But the Kremlin is supposed to have discussed him at the highest level well before anyone thought he could win?
Various people make interesting remarks about the new Guardian fakery:
Tara McCormack @McCormack_Tara - 12:13 UTC · Jul 15, 2021I am seriously coming to the conclusion that Luke Harding is a Russian operative who has been put in place as part of a long term dastardly plan to make British journalism appear ridiculous.
--- Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg - 12:02 UTC · 15 Jul 2021The next Luke Harding MI6 hoax.
Passing off forged Kremlin minutes saying things like "It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump's] election to the post of US president."
Hilarious
theguardian.com/world/2021/jul"¦--- Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald - 12:07 UTC · 15 Jul 2021The part of the media that feigns anger at misinformation is uncritically promoting a story today by Luke Harding that Russia was blackmailing Trump -- the same Harding who has published many false stories, championed the Steele Dossier and claimed Trump was long a Russian agent.
...
Now suddenly, Harding claims he obtained leaked, highly sensitive Kremlin documents that just so happen to prove all the lies he's been peddling for years, that not even Mueller's huge team found. Because it advances liberals' interests, journalists are uncritically spreading it.
...
I will once use this shabby behavior to against highlight 2 points:1) The contempt and loss of trust people harbor for the corporate media is completely justified and well-earned.
2) These outlets are by far the most prolific and destructive disseminators of disinformation.
Even people who are typically inclined to promote all kinds of anti-Russian nonsense are cautious on this item.
Thomas Rid @RidT - 12:38 UTC · 15 Jul 2021This Guardian story is likely to make big waves. I would remain somewhat cautious for now, however. For a "leak" of this magnitude, we need at least some details on the chain of custody. Also note the Guardian's own hedging ("papers appear to show") theguardian.com/world/2021/jul"¦
--- Pwn All The Things @pwnallthethings - 14:40 UTC · 15 Jul 2021Also, just putting this out there, if the US had this and thought it was real, how likely is it that it would have survived the waterfall of leaks of the past few years? And yet, here we are, with this as exclusive by the UK's Guardian, and conspicuously not, say, WaPo or NYT.
Christopher Steele, the 'former' British intelligence officer who peddle the fake dossier about alleged Russian Trump kompromat on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign, worked and still works for Orbis Intelligence, a British private outlet run by 'former' British spies.
They are still at it ...
Orbis Business Intelligence @OrbisBIOfficial - 10:48 UTC · Jul 15, 2021Great reporting on an important story.
Luke Harding @lukeharding1968 - 10:02 UTC · Jul 15, 2021Exclusive: Leaked Putin papers appear to show #Russia's plot to put a "mentally unstable" Donald Trump into the White House "" my story with @julianborger in Washington and @dansabbagh in London
Kremlin papers appear to show Putin's plot to put Trump in White House"Great reporting.. " "..important story"
Yeah. Sure. Whatever.
Posted by b on July 15, 2021 at 15:20 UTC | Permalink
Bemildred , Jul 15 2021 15:31 utc | 1
Bemildred , Jul 15 2021 15:33 utc | 2
They embarass us all with this sort of stupidity. And being British, of course, they double down on it." REVEALED: Iran plotted to kidnap Iranian-American journalist from Brooklyn, transport her by speedboat to Venezuela and then fly her to the Islamic republic because she criticized regime, FBI say"
You just cannot get much more ludicrous than that.
And lots of projection too, we all know who lies and indulges in all sorts of chicanery to silence critics (like Assange, say).james , Jul 15 2021 15:50 utc | 3damn you gottlieb! look what you started, lol...james , Jul 15 2021 15:52 utc | 4thanks b... these intel agencies running the "free press" sure are getting boring really fast....
@ 1 bemildred.... i knew it was a lie when i heard it on the cbc radio yesterday... if the cbc is running with it - it is an outright made up lie... accept everything on the surface and never question anything!!! be a good citizen, lol...Bigben , Jul 15 2021 16:00 utc | 5The articles from The Guardian and all don't prove anything about Russia's plans. The cite the January 26 meeting of the Security Council as Proof of Putin's plans. If I were in Putin's place, I would also have been happy with Trump's election and its likely socioeconomic impact on the US society.Tuyzentfloot , Jul 15 2021 16:12 utc | 6Harding strikes me as someone who's completely into the business of selling stories. He senses where the money is , looks at his sales numbers and concludes he's doing great because that is how he measures things. No concept of 'truth' other than financial success in the market of ideas. I suspect he makes a lot of money.the pair , Jul 15 2021 16:18 utc | 7damn, i wish i had it in me to be a cult leader...i'd make a beeline to the guardian office and have an army of kool-aid drinking simps at my disposal. when they aren't harrassing and firing women writers for calling out "female identifying" sex offenders in dresses or stirring up imaginary "anti-semitism" they're peddling this delusional nonsense and LARPing as MI6 spooks. truly in their own little world. i'll guess some LSD in the water cooler and a decent powerpoint presentation is all it would take to be the limey jim jones.Ð"жММ , Jul 15 2021 16:35 utc | 8The chunks of the supposed document that the Guardian included with its article really give it away. The text - supposedly from an internal Kremlin communication - reads as no more or less than a chunk of English passed through Google Translate. Idiomatically, it is chock full of awkwardness and simple ridiculous phrasings. There are even grammatical errors! "..во Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼Ñ Ð¿Ñ€ÐµÐ±Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ ÐµÐ³Ð¾..." is simply incorrect. In Russian, the last two words are reversed in order.vk , Jul 15 2021 16:55 utc | 9It recalls the recent Putin's Palace story, with the "комната грÑзи".
It's just shameful how little pride the propagandists take in their work. I understand that they hold their audience in only the lowest of regard (not without cause, to be fair), but it's not like there is any shortage of Russian-speakers in the west they could go to for proofreading, if not copy writing.
Kremlin's response came out:Stonebird , Jul 15 2021 17:18 utc | 10Peskov called the article by The Guardian about the authorities of Russia and Trump a fiction
"Of course, this is such a continuation of absolutely low-quality publications. Either the newspaper is trying to somehow increase its popularity, or the newspaper continues such a frenzied Russophobic line. Of course, all this does not and cannot correspond to the truth. This, in fact, is not true ... This is a continuation of the exercises on total demonization of Russia and Putin, which The Guardian sometimes likes to do, or is it a desperate attempt to attract some new readers by publishing such tales, "Peskov said."REVEALED: Iran plotted to kidnap Iranian-American journalist from Brooklyn, transport her by speedboat to Venezuela and then fly her to the Islamic republic because she criticized regime, FBI say", Bemildred | Jul 15 2021 15:31 utc | 1pnyx , Jul 15 2021 17:18 utc | 11I TOLD you all that the FBI needed new script writers. Either that or they have so little imagination that they have to use up all the scripts from a couple of years back, as they cannot afford new ones.
******
Don't underestimate stupidity
Luke 'Skywalker' Harding defeats the evil empire. Part 13.Citizen621 , Jul 15 2021 17:58 utc | 12Doesn't matter - the MSNBC watchers will never accept this. I still try to punch through the armor of confirmation bias now and then. My last jab was: "I think Russiagate is every bit as much evidence-free bullshit as Quanon!". No effect whatsoever. Willing to agree with half of what I said - just like Fox watchers.jo6pac , Jul 15 2021 18:07 utc | 13Unfortunately, I don't think my fellow citizens here in the heart of Pindostan will pay attention until things get bad enough that they know actual hunger - and then they will serve the elites by fighting each other.
Sorry for the pessimism, the one positive thing I do think I can do is tend my vegetable garden!
Amerikan intel agrees it fake but they will walk it back soon I'm sureQA , Jul 15 2021 18:53 utc | 14Ð"жММ:Thomas , Jul 15 2021 20:22 utc | 15"во Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼Ñ Ð¿Ñ€ÐµÐ±Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ ÐµÐ³Ð¾", maybe awkward but semikosher, many examples can be found Googling it ---like during stay of his vs. during his stay (e.g. kamchatka.mid.ru can be found to say: "ÑвÑÐ·Ð°Ð½Ð½Ñ‹Ñ Ñ Ð´ÐµÐ¹ÑтвиÑми и поÑтупками пригÐ"ашаемого во Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼Ñ Ð¿Ñ€ÐµÐ±Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ð½Ð¸Ñ ÐµÐ³Ð¾ в РФ, в том чиÑÐ"е, в ÑÐ"учае депортации").
Jeez, it just gets worse-as soon as I saw the name Luke harding, I knew it was a pile of trash; really, who in the hell reads this without a sense to vomit.Cadence calls , Jul 15 2021 20:28 utc | 16Well, there there is Orbis: "great reporting."
MI6 and prob cia has this clown on the payroll; I tried to watch the last 5 minutes of the video but could not get past the first minute; the guy is absolutely repulsive and they continue to double down on this garbage.
Headlines on Democratic Underground and Daily KOS:Thomas , Jul 15 2021 20:30 utc | 17
"Explosive evidence that Putin supported a Trump Presidency"Commenters: "I knew it!"
Ð"жММ-8librul , Jul 15 2021 21:41 utc | 18I think you really nailed it; we see it every day, with this latest pail of s___, that these purveyors absolutely have no shame or embarrassment, but believe their audience, the sheeple, are complete idiots or stupid. The question is who is stupid as this level of stupidity cannot be fixed or underestimated.
I remember the scene in the movie "The Big Short" where Steve Carellvk , Jul 15 2021 22:11 utc | 19
was saying, "they knew all along!".Goldman Sachs, et al, had over-leveraged the housing mortgages and "they knew all along"
if and when it all crumbled the government would cover Wall Street's bad bets with taxpayer debt.They knew all along it was bs but they did it anyway.
The MSM is a different arena but has the same arrogant attitude towards average joe citizen.
The MSM knows it is selling bs but they don't care.
What I see is they are counting on the "Reiteration Effect" (look it up, it is a real thing).
"Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad", "Russia bad".There have been a steady stream of "Russia bad" stories and "Russia helped Trump" stories, and over time
the fact that these stories are one by one debunked does not matter. The "Reiteration Effect" is what matters.
"Say something a million times and it becomes true" is not a mere cynical phrase, it actually works - the "Reiteration Effect".Keep putting out these "Russia bad" stories and "Russia helped Trump" stories and over time people will accept the basic message as true.
The MSM has known all along they were selling bs, but they don't care.
@ Posted by: librul | Jul 15 2021 21:41 utc | 18librul , Jul 15 2021 22:23 utc | 20They definitely didn't know 2008 would happen. On the contrary: they thought they had discovered the elixir of immortality for capitalism.
The USA was caught completely off-guard in September 2008. You have to search with a magnifying glass to find the ten people who predicted the crisis would happen in its nature and more or less its timing - but even then, most of them were Marxists, i.e. outside the commanding heights of the USG.
@Posted by: vk | Jul 15 2021 22:11 utc | 19Tuyzentfloot , Jul 15 2021 22:41 utc | 21Goldman Sachs began to short mortgage bonds and like instruments before the crash of 2008.
Regardless, they *knew* their bets were covered by the government.
---
Were you aware that Henry Paulson began to ready a coup in 2008?
I like the idea of the makers of this thing deciding that it's a shoddy job which only Harding will take. Also Harding gets all the attention but let's not forget the honourable mentions in this story: Julian Borger and Dan Sabbagh.librul , Jul 15 2021 22:49 utc | 22@Posted by: librul | Jul 15 2021 22:23 utc | 20 ....continuedMichael888 , Jul 15 2021 23:01 utc | 23I saved this from somewhere (?) years ago. Doesn't matter, you can read Paulson's coup document for yourself.
The WSJ link still works but you hit a pay wall. You can put the following url at http://web.archive.org/
and read the original WSJ publication and Paulson's coup document dated Sept 20, 2008 at the WSJ.http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/09/20/treasurys-financial-bailout-proposal-to-congress/
**** "shall not be subject to judicial review" ****http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/09/20/treasurys-financial-bailout-proposal-to-congress/
"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."
Did you catch that? Paulson went further. Not just the courts are cut out but "any adminstrative agency" as well.
Paulson also was giving to Himself the authority to APPROPRIATE any funds He wished.
"Any funds expended for actions authorized by this Act, including the payment of administrative expenses, shall be deemed appropriated at the time of such expenditure."
HE could pass ANY legislation He wanted to:
"(5) issuing such regulations and other guidance as may be necessary or appropriate to define terms or carry out the authorities of this Act."
The word "term" has a duel meaning. It also refers to TIME, as in length of a term.
Give powers to anyone and hire anyone He wished to:
"(1) appointing such employees as may be required to carry out the authorities in this Act and defining their duties;"
What miscellaneous authorities did G-d Paulson give Himself? Answer: Authority over the police and the military.
"In exercising the authorities granted in this Act, the Secretary shall take into consideration means for""
(1) providing stability or preventing disruption to the financial markets or banking system; and
"providing stability OR". That OR makes for confusion (intentional confusion). Stability is a word used often in the context of economics but it is also used in the context of police action. Get it? He wants to create his own SS. See the very next word: "protecting", as in "We Serve and Protect".
(2) protecting the taxpayer."
The last one is my favorite. Who is a *taxpayer*? Hmmm, is not everyone, even candy purchasing kids liable to pay tax? Corporations are also taxpayers...
G-d Paulson covered all his bases.
Even the one about being G-d Forever:
"Sec. 9. Termination of Authority.
The authorities under this Act, with the exception of authorities granted in sections 2(b)(5), 5 and 7, shall terminate two years from the date of enactment of this Act."
Paulson wants you to believe this terminates in two years. However, 2(b)(5) does NOT terminate and that one says he can just place the crown back on His own head:
"(5) issuing such regulations and other guidance as may be necessary or appropriate to define terms or carry out the authorities of this Act."
Cheers
A coup! A massive scandal that has been totally missed.
@Posted by: librul | Jul 15 2021 21:41 utc | 18corvo , Jul 15 2021 23:16 utc | 24"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."-- Joseph Goebbels (Luke Harding's Father?)
@ Cadence calls | Jul 15 2021 20:28 utc | 16:Dim sim , Jul 15 2021 23:31 utc | 25We can take some comfort in the fact that Daily Kos readership has fallen precipitously over the last few years. Nobody takes it seriously anymore.
In 2017 Luke Harding abruptly ended an interview with Aaron Maté after Harding was challenged over false claims he had made in his book about 'Russiagate'. The last five minutes of that video are quite amusing.mismatch , Jul 15 2021 23:49 utc | 26I'm not normally a follower of this topic even though one of our sleazers, Downer, was involved but needing something to smile at while in our CV lockdown I watched the link.
What an understatement! It's a hilarious 28m:51s train wreck interview with a complete dick. Thanks b for sharing it.
@Vk, I'm sorry to contradict you but if you pick up a copy of the Financial Times in 2008 before the crash, everyone was predicting it. I checked recently, and sure enough, it was all over the paper.TEP , Jul 16 2021 0:18 utc | 27Luke Harding. Nuff said.Erelis , Jul 16 2021 0:22 utc | 28
TEP.Once again super duper evil genius ex-KGB spy cannot keep state secrets secret.Christian J. Chuba , Jul 16 2021 0:24 utc | 29Painful video to watch. Harding is using the Hitler argument.vk , Jul 16 2021 0:39 utc | 30'My evidence that Trump colluded with Putin (Saddam has WMD) is that Putin is Hitler. If you don't believe me, you are supporting Adolf Hitler'.
Harding is Satan's minion, and Jesus said, 'Satan is a liar and a murderer, when he lies, he speaks his native language'
Lies kill.
@ Posted by: mismatch | Jul 15 2021 23:49 utc | 26By 2007, the financial elite already knew something would happen - but not a structural crisis. In fact, they predicted nothing: the chain of bankruptcies started at the end of 2006; September 2008 was just the date it "leaked" to the "real economy".
Not every crisis is bad for capitalism. Cyclical crisis are natural and beneficial to capitalism. The crisis of 2008 was not a cyclical crisis, but a structural one. They probably thought it was either a cyclical crisis (a la Dotcom crisis of 2000) or, if something more serious, something the free market would easily be able to "self-regulate" out of.
Jul 23, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
JUL 22, 2021Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,
Pennsylvania 's top election official has decertified the voting system of rural Fulton County for future elections, saying that an election assessment by a third party had violated the Keystone State's election code, according to a release on Wednesday.
Acting Secretary of State Veronica Degraffenreid, an appointee of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, informed the Fulton County Board of Elections that she "did not arrive at this decision lightly."
Wake Technology Services Inc. (Wake TSI), a software company based in West Chester, Pennsylvania, had carried out an election assessment that involved its workers visiting Fulton County in December 2020 and in early February.
The company in May released a report that concluded the election was "well-run" and did not indicate any signs of fraud in Fulton County. However, five "issues of note" were uncovered , three of which are related to Dominion Voting Systems , whose electronic voting system was used in the county for the 2020 election.
"While these may seem minor, the impact on an election can be huge," Wake TSI said of the five issues. At the time, Dominion disputed the report's findings.
The Pennsylvania Department of State said in a statement on Wednesday that Wake TSI's access to the Fulton County's voting system "undermined the chain of custody requirements and strict access limitations necessary to prevent both intentional and inadvertent tampering with electronic voting systems."
It added that the "unauthorized access" prevents the vendor -- Dominion -- from "affirming that the system continues to meet state and federal certification standards."
Fulton county officials had allowed Wake TSI to "access certain key components of its certified system, including the county's election database, results files, and Windows systems logs," and to "use a system imaging tool to take complete hard drive images of these computers and other digital equipment," the department noted.
"These actions were taken in a manner that was not transparent," Degraffenreid said in her letter to Fulton County officials on Tuesday. She said the access given to Wake TSI has caused Fulton County's voting system to be "compromised," and that neither the county, state officials, nor Dominion could now "verify that the impacted components of Fulton County's leased voting system are safe to use in future elections."
"I have no other choice but to decertify the use of Fulton County's leased Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5A voting system last used in the November 2020 election," Degraffenreid wrote.
The Fulton County Board of Elections and Wake TSI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Pennsylvania Department of State previously said that a risk-limiting audit of the 2020 election has confirmed the state's election results.
The Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported that Fulton County needed to pay $25,000 to lease new equipment for its municipal elections in May, because Dominion refused to let the county use the voting machines that Wake TSI had accessed. According to the outlet, Dominion told the county that it violated its contract in letting a unaccredited and non-certified company inspect the machines.
Wake TSI's assessment in Fulton County was "set" by Pennsylvania Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican, according to a Dec. 31, 2020 document signed by the company that was obtained and published by the Arizona Mirror and The Washington Post. Wake TSI said in its report that Mastriano and Pennsylvania Sen. Judy Ward, also a Republican, "were aware of our efforts."
The document also said that Wake TSI was "contracted to Defending the Republic," a nonprofit founded by lawyer Sidney Powell, who has alleged that widespread fraud occurred in the 2020 election.
Mastriano earlier this month issued letters to York, Tioga, and Philadelphia counties requesting that they voluntarily submit information and materials by July 31, to enable what he calls a "forensic investigation" of the 2020 and 2021 elections. He told The Epoch Times that he seeks for an investigation that would be "a big deep dive, like we saw in Arizona, but even deeper."
Wake TSI was also involved in the election audit still underway in Arizona's Maricopa County up until its contract expired in May. The audit in Maricopa County was ordered by the Arizona state Senate's Republican majority. Dominion machines in Maricopa County will also be replaced .
Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican, said the machines were not tampered with during the audit and questioned the Board of Supervisors' decision to get new machines.
"If their experts can't prove the machines have not been tampered with, then how does the [Secretary of State's office] or County Elections certify the machines before every audit to make sure the machines haven't been tampered with?" she asked in June.
Jul 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Lysander , Jul 17 2021 11:31 utc | 2
...WaPo columnist George Will then asserts:
Henry Kissinger has said, not unreasonably, that we are in "the foothills" of a cold war with China. And Vladimir Putin, who nurses an unassuageable grudge about the way the Cold War ended, seems uninterested in Russia reconciling itself to a role as a normal nation without gratuitous resorts to mendacity. It is, therefore, well to notice how, day by day, in all of the globe's time zones, civilized nations are, in word and deed, taking small but cumulatively consequential measures that serve deterrence.If arrogance were a deadly disease, George Will would be dead.
George Will has been an ass clown since I first had the displeasure of watching him in the 1970s. Age has not brought an ounce of wisdom. Nevertheless, this total lack of self reflection and ability to project American sins on others is unfortunately not unique to our man George. It seems a habit throughout the entire US political spectrum. The ability to view, for example, the invasion of Iraq as perfectly normal behavior, while viewing any resistance to US/Israeli dominance as beyond the pale is the character of the decaying American superpower. George Will is but one manifestation of it. It was once infuriating. But now it's simply like listening to the ravings of a schizophrenic. More pathetic than anything else.
Dao Gen , Jul 17 2021 11:35 utc | 3
What do you expect from George Swill? He is a pathetic, disoriented refugee from his home in Victorian England, when barbarism never set for a single instant on the British Empire.Donbass Lives Matter , Jul 17 2021 11:45 utc | 4There's a way to get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from the mainstream news media. Just look at their propaganda and ask yourself, "Why do they want me to believe this particular lie?" If you can figure that you, you will have the truth.alaff , Jul 17 2021 11:52 utc | 5Well, you know, the white man's burden...Midville , Jul 17 2021 11:57 utc | 7
The funny thing is that they seriously consider themselves a "superior race", while behaving like wild barbarians.
Such opinions/articles of "Western civilized people" cause only a condescending smile, nothing more. So let's let George Will entertain us.Perimetr , Jul 17 2021 12:16 utc | 11I find it pretty bizzarre how western media obsessively try to portray the Defender incident as a some sort of "victory" for "civilized nations".
What exactly is the victory here? The fact that Russia only resorted to warning fire and didn't blow up the ship?Ayatoilet , Jul 17 2021 12:50 utc | 16Decades of propaganda masquerading as news has led most "educated" Americans into a Matrix of false narratives. Should you dare mention election fraud or question the safety of COVID vaccines in the presences of anyone who considers the NY Times and Wash Post as the "papers of record", they will be happy to inform you that you are "captured" by false news. Dialogue with these true believers has become almost impossible. We are the indispensable, civilized nation, don't you understand basic facts?
My sister, who is truly a good-hearted person, unfortunately keeps CNN and MSNBC on most of the day in her small apartment, and lives for The NY Times, which she pours over, especially the weekend edition. She knows that Putin is evil and Russia is a bad place to live, etc etc. I got rid of my TV ten years ago and started looking elsewhere for my information. I live in a rural area of a Red state, she lives in Manhattan. We have to stick to topics that revolve around museums, gardening, and food.
Et Tu , Jul 17 2021 13:07 utc | 18This is precisely the type of arrogance that has led to US leaving Afghanistan with their pants down - having spent untold Trillions of dollars and having nothing to show for it. And soon, leaving Iraq and Syria too. It reminds me of how the US left Vietnam and Cambodia.
The 'White' establishment in Washington and across the US military industrial complex, has an air of superiority and always seem to feel that they can subjugate via throwing money at people! This in effect turns everyone they deal with into Whores (yes, prostitutes). Its fundamentally humiliating, and sews the seeds of corruption - both economic and moral. Then, they are shocked that there's a back clash!
The Taliban succeeded not with arms - but by projecting a completely different narrative of "Morality (i.e. non-corruption), honor, and even intermingled nationalism with their narrative". They projected a story that suggested that new Afghan daughters would not turn into Britney Spears or porn stars.
And, believe it or not, the Chinese see themselves as having been fundamentally humiliated by the West and couch their efforts as a struggle for their civilization (its not ideological or even economic) - they are fighting for honor and respect.
Western Civilization (and western elite) on the left and right are fundamentally materialistic. They worship money, and simply don't understand it when others don't. When they talk about superiority, they are basically saying the worship of money rules supreme. You sort of become dignified in the west if you have a lot of wealth. They want to turn the whole world into prostitutes. Policy and laws are driven by material considerations.
Now, I am not saying that spirituality or religion is good; and in fact, the Chinese are not driven by religious zeal (they are, on the whole, non-religious). What I am saying is that - no matter how its expressed - be it through religion, through culture, through rhetoric, etc. - all this back clash is really a struggle for respect, 'honor' and thus a push back to Western Arrogance, and the humiliation it has caused. The West simply doesn't understand that there are societies - especially in the east, that value honor over other things.
When Trump calls other people losers, he is basically saying he is richer, they are poorer. In his mind, winning, is all about money. When people write articles about the superiority of a civilization - they are implicitly putting other people down. That's not just arrogant, its rude and disrespectful. Its basically like a teenager judging their parents. How dare a newly formed nation (the US), judge or differentiate or even pretend to be superior to the Chinese, Persians etc.?
Our foreign policy (and rhetoric) in the West has to completely change. We have to be really careful, because, (honestly), it won't be very long before these other (inferior) civilizations actually take over global leadership. Then how will we want to be treated? Don't for a second think these folks can't build great gadgets that go to Mars! Oh, did China just do that? Does Iran have a space program? Did they just make their own vaccines? Once they start trading among themselves without using the USD greenback, we are finished.
We need them, they don't need us.
Petri Krohn , Jul 17 2021 14:05 utc | 26Some notable recent achievements of 'civilised' nations include:
-Illegal invasion and bombing of multiple non-aggressor nations
-Overthrowing of democratically elected Governments
-Support of extremist and oppressive regimes
-Sponsoring of terrorism, including weapon sales to ISIS
-Corruption of once trusted institutions like the UN and OPCWOh, the civility...
Billb , Jul 17 2021 14:15 utc | 28HOW DID RUSSIA BECOME THE ENEMY?
...when all she did was offer slight resistance to Western aggression? The key event was the August 2013 false-flag gas attack and massacre of hostages in Ghouta in Damascus.
What really angered the West was the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean that prevented the NATO attack on Syria. (You will not find a single word of this in Western media.) This is why Crimea needed to be captured by the West. As revenge and deterrence against the Russian agression.
I wrote about these events in 2016:
The standoff was first described by Israel Shamir in October 2013:
"The most dramatic event of September 2013 was the high-noon stand-off near the Levantine shore, with five US destroyers pointing their Tomahawks towards Damascus and facing them - the Russian flotilla of eleven ships led by the carrier-killer Missile Cruiser Moskva and supported by Chinese warships.Apparently, two missiles were launched towards the Syrian coast, and both failed to reach their destination."
A longer description was published by Australianvoice in 2015:
"So why didn't the US and France attack Syria? It seems obvious that the Russians and Chinese simply explained that an attack on Syria by US and French forces would be met by a Russian/Chinese attack on US and French warships. Obama wisely decided not to start WW III in September 2013." Can Russia Block Regime Change In Syria Again?In my own comments from 2013 I tried to understand the mission of the Russian fleet. This is what I believed Putin's orders to the fleet were:
- To sink any NATO ship involved in illegal aggression against Syria.
- You have the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons in self-defense.
I am sure NATO admirals understood the situation the same way. I am not sure of the American leadership in Washington.
Petri Krohn , Jul 17 2021 14:44 utc | 33Insulting language aside, the narrative they are trying to create is that there is an anti-Russia, anti-China trend developing and that those sitting on the fence would be wise to join the bandwagon.
This will be particularly effective on the majority of folks who barely scan headlines and skim articles. Falun Gong/CIA mouthpiece Epoch Times is on board with this, based on recent headlines.
Andres , Jul 17 2021 14:58 utc | 35Democracy grows in darkness
Wikipedia has a list of reliable and unreliable sources . "Reliable" are those sources that are under the direct control of the US regime. Any degree of independence from the regime makes the source "unreliable." WaPo and NYT are at the top of the list of reliable sources.
This is the diametric opposite of how Wikispooks defines reliability. Reliability of sources is directly proportional to their distance *from* power.
At A Closer Look on Syria (ACLOS) we only trust primary sources.
Civilization vs Uncivilizationlysias , Jul 17 2021 15:10 utc | 36Makes me remember the cornerstone work from former Argentine president DF Sarmiento, who dealt with "Civilization or Barbarism" in his book "Facundo". Of course, his position was the "civilized" one.
Those "civilized" succeeded in creating a country submitted to the British rule, selling cheap crops and getting expensive manufactures, with a privileged minority living lavishly and a great majority, in misery.
Also, their "civilized" methods to impose their project was the bloody "Police War"
Same language used now, for the same undisclosed intentions.
In Russian, to be uncivilized (nekulturny) is a bad thing.Mar man , Jul 17 2021 16:14 utc | 44librul , Jul 17 2021 17:04 utc | 55This article is fundamentally about propaganda and "soft power".
Soft power in foreign policy is usually defined when other countries defer to your judgement without threat of punishment or promise of gain.
In other words, if other countries support your country without a "carrot or stick" approach, you have soft power.
For years, the US simply assumed other "civilized" of the western world would dutifully follow along in US footsteps due to unshakeable trust in America's moral authority. The western media played a crucial role by suppressing news regarding any atrocities the western powers committed and amplifying any perceived threats or aggressions from "enemies".
Now, with the age of the internet, western audiences can read news from all over the world and that has been a catastrophe for western powers. We can now see real-time debunking of propaganda.
In the past, the British would have easily passed off the recent destroyer provocation as pure Russian aggression and could expect outrage from all western aligned countries. The EU and US populations could have easily been whipped into a frenzy and DEMANDED reprisals against Russia if not outright war. Something similar to a "Gulf of Tonkin" moment.
But, that did not happen. People all over the world now know NOTHING from the US or British press is to be trusted. People also now know NATO routinely try to stir up trouble and provoke Russia.
So, Americans and even British citizens displayed no widespread outrage because they simply did not believe their own government's and compliant media's side of the story.
US and British "soft power" are long gone. No one trusts them. No one wants to follow them into anymore disastrous wars of aggression.
Western media still do not understand this and cannot figure out why so many refuse western vaccines or support the newest color revolutions.
We simply do not believe it.
fx , Jul 17 2021 19:01 utc | 68This site appears to be the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deceiving-the-public
They cast Germany as a victim or potential victim of foreign aggressors, as a peace-loving nation forced to take up arms to protect its populace or defend European civilization against Communism.I remember a tv history program that had interviews with German soldiers.
I recall one who had seen/participated in going from village to village in the USSR
hanging local communist leaders. He said they had been taught that by doing this
they were "protecting civilization".Max , Jul 17 2021 19:48 utc | 72Arrogance is not a deadly disease or even a hindrance for mainstream presstitutes; it is a job qualification, making them all the more manipulable and manipulative. And so, as with Michael Gordon, Judith Miller, Brett Stephens and David Sanger (essentially all of them pulling double duty for the apartheid state), people will die from their propaganda, but they will advance.
Tuyzentfloot , Jul 17 2021 21:08 utc | 78Name a democracy that isn't a suzerainty.
Name a leader with moral courage and integrity among suzerainties (private plantations). Nations without integrity and filled with Orcs (individuals without conscience), can't be civilized. They're EVIL vassals of Saruman & Sauron, manipulated by Wormtongue.
"The true equation is 'democracy' = government by world financiers."
– J.R.R. TolkienHenry Kissinger, in his interview with Chatham House stated, "the United States is in a CRISIS of confidence... America has committed great moral wrongs." What are U$A's core values?
According to a CFR member :
"How lucky I am that my mother studied with JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis and WH Auden and that she passed on to me a command of language that permits me to "tell the story" of the world economy in plain English. She would have been delighted that I managed to show that the evil Gollum from Tolkien's tales lives above the doorway in the Oval Office, which he certainly does. I saw him there myself. He may have found a new perch over at The Federal Reserve Bank as well."
– Excerpt From, Signals: The Breakdown of the Social Contract and the Rise of Geopolitics by Dr Philippa MalmgrenThe Financial Empire has ran out of LUCK. "In God We Trust"
Why Mordor Failed... Sauron's hegemonic collapse holds potent lessons
"A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims but accomplices."
Erelis , Jul 17 2021 21:27 utc | 79I thought moral superiority was the official position of NATO. The explicit intent is to weaponize human rights and democracy . So it is not merely the mundane 'our group is better' or the somewhat nostalgic western form of moral superiority, it's weaponized moral superiority.
Rob , Jul 17 2021 22:41 utc | 83George Will looking good I tellya. Anybody know who does his embalming?
Doesn't Will's article reek of Nazi propaganda against the Russians as a mongrel Asiatic uncivilized people? Of course to attack the Chinese as uncivilized? China uncivilized? 5,000 years of continuous culture? The Russians and Chinese must join up with civilization. Unfortunately at least in the West race is only about skin color. It certainly wasn't the case with the original Nazis. Will's piece is blatantly racist out of the tradition of Nazism.
circumspect , Jul 18 2021 1:38 utc | 88American exceptionalism's finest spokesman -- George F. Will
Tom_Q_Collins , Jul 18 2021 5:00 utc | 95Oxford and the Ivy League. The training grounds for the Anglo American deep state and the cheerleaders of the empire. Expect nothing more of these deeply under educated sudo intellectuals.
Tom_Q_Collins , Jul 18 2021 5:03 utc | 96Posted by: Ayatoilet | Jul 17 2021 12:50 utc | 16
Plenty of people who work for the MIC and in various policy circles/think tanks have plenty "to show for it" where all these wars are concerned. Many billions of dollars were siphoned upwards and outwards into the bank accounts and expensive homes of the managerial and executive classes (even the hazard pay folks who actually went to the places "we" were bombing) not just at Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen, etc. but plenty of lesser known "socioeconomically disadvantaged" Small Businesses (proper noun in this context) companies who utilized the services of an army of consultants to glom onto the war machine. In most cases of the larger firms, Wall Street handled the IPOs long ago, and these companies have entire (much less profitable) divisions dedicated to state and local governments to "diversify" their business portfolios in case the people finally get sick of war. But that rarely happens in any real sense because the corporate establishment "legacy media" makes sure that there's always an uncivilized country to bomb or threaten....and that means the "defense" department needs loads of services, weapons, and process improvement consultants all the time. War is a racket; always has been, always will be.
Constantine , Jul 18 2021 7:33 utc | 98In what ways is the USA like Darth Vader's Galactic Empire in Star Wars?
Posted by: Mar man | Jul 17 2021 16:14 utc | 44Bemildred , Jul 18 2021 7:48 utc | 99Unfortunately, it seems that truly large segments of the population in the developed western countries and especially in the Anglo-sphere believe the propaganda emanating from the imperial mouthpieces. The US citizenry is a case study in manipulating the public.
Indeed, the DNC liberals are effectively the vanguard of the pro-war movement, espouse racist Rusophobia and conitnue Trump's hostility to China. The so-cslled conservatives follow their own tradition of imperial mobilization behind the Washington regime: Chin,Latin America, the very people who berated the 'Deep State' now paise its subversive activities against the targeted left-wing governments.
As for the moribund left - it would be better described as leftovers - it is often taken for a ride as long as the imperial messaging is promoted by the liberal media. The excuses for imperialism are a constant for many of them (even as they call themselves anti-imperialists) and the beleaguered voicesfor the truth are far and few. The latter often face silencing campaigns not just from the establishment hacks, but from their own supposed ideological comrades, who are, of course, in truth nothing of the sort.
All in all, despite the consistent record of manipulative propaganda and utter criminality the imperial regime never loses the support of the critical masss of the citizenry.
All in all, despite the consistent record of manipulative propaganda and utter criminality the imperial regime never loses the support of the critical masss of the citizenry.Posted by: Constantine | Jul 18 2021 7:33 utc | 98
Maybe 50% of the people here bother to vote, in IMPORTANT elections. Can be a lot less if the election is not important. The only people still engaged politically here at all are the people with good jobs. The American people have given up. And there are a lot of angry people running around, with guns. Claiming the citizenry here support the government is imperial propaganda. Why do you think they like mercenaries and proxies so much? And this is all in great contrast to when I was young 50 years ago.
Jul 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Prof , Jul 19 2021 18:09 utc | 1A number of international papers report today on the Israeli hacking company NSO which sells snooping software to various regimes. The software is then used to hijack the phones of regime enemies, political competition or obnoxious journalists. All of that was already well known but the story has new legs as several hundreds of people who were spied on can now be named.
How that came to pass is of interest :
The phones appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of the Israeli firm, NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry, the investigation found.The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many of the phones were targeted or surveilled. But forensic analysis of the 37 smartphones shows that many display a tight correlation between time stamps associated with a number on the list and the initiation of surveillance, in some cases as brief as a few seconds.
Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based journalism nonprofit, and Amnesty International, a human rights group, had access to the list and shared it with the news organizations, which did further research and analysis. Amnesty's Security Lab did the forensic analyses on the smartphones.
The numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents.
Who might have made such a list and who would give it to Amnesty and Forbidden Stories?
NSO is one of the Israeli companies that is used to monetize the work of the Israel's military intelligence unit 8200. 'Former' members of 8200 move to NSO to produce spy tools which are then sold to foreign governments. The license price is $7 to 8 million per 50 phones to be snooped at. It is a shady but lucrative business for the company and for the state of Israel.
NSO denies the allegations that its software is used for harmful proposes with a lot of bullshittery :
The report by Forbidden Stories is full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability and interests of the sources. It seems like the "unidentified sources" have supplied information that has no factual basis and are far from reality.After checking their claims, we firmly deny the false allegations made in their report. Their sources have supplied them with information which has no factual basis, as evident by the lack of supporting documentation for many of their claims. In fact, these allegations are so outrageous and far from reality, that NSO is considering a defamation lawsuit.
The reports make, for example, the claim that the Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has used the NSO software to spy on the leader of the opposition party Rahul Gandhi.
How could NSO deny that allegation? It can't.
Further down in the NSO's statement the company contradicts itself on the issues:
How do you explain the suspiciously-timed, and simultaneous, Five Eyes denunciation of China for alleged hacking of Microsoft? Is it a way of deflecting too much wrath on Israel? Or, is b wrong and the China story serves as real distraction.
james , Jul 19 2021 18:17 utc | 2
thanks b.. it is an interesting development which seems to pit the usa against israel... i am having a hard time appreciating this... maybe... interesting conundrum snowden paints himself into... @ 1 prof... there are plenty of distractions to go around.. hard to know...karlof1 , Jul 19 2021 18:31 utc | 3Prof @1--Mar man , Jul 19 2021 18:34 utc | 4In our day-and-age, all "Spectacular Stories" serve as distractions, although some are genuine scoops illuminating criminal behavior involving state actors. Ultimately, this scoop provides much more leverage for Putin's ongoing insistence that an International Treaty dealing with all things Cyber including Cyber-crime be convened ASAP.
"Who has an interest in shutting NSO down or to at least make its business more difficult?Down South , Jul 19 2021 18:36 utc | 5
The competition I'd say. And the only real one in that field is the National Security Agency of the United States."There is at least one other possibility.
The leak could be from a highly sophisticated state actor that needs to "blind" US and especially Israeli intelligence services temporarily.
That could very easily be China, Russia or even Iran. Some of their assets could be on the list.
Exposing the service weakens, or possibly destroys, it until another workaround is found.
China might do this to push customers towards some of their cellphones that are supposedly immune to this.
Russia and Iran might need to blind Mossad, NSA and CIA or upcoming operations in Syria, Iraq and possibly Afghanistan.
Who knows?
Weird to have the US burn an Israeli spy operation (I'd be surprised if they didn't build back doors into their own software) in such a public manner.ld , Jul 19 2021 19:07 utc | 8The only reason I can think of for the US to shut NSO down is if they refused to share information they had gathered with the NSA and so they were put out of business.
Snowden didn't have a problem with the NSA et al spying on foreign adversaries. He had a problem when the NSA was spying illegally on US citizens.
JUSA: Blackmailing and Bribing Politicians; it's what they do.div> No marriage can survive financial problems. This is just capitalism eating itself for scarce profits.Posted by: vk , Jul 19 2021 19:11 utc | 9
No marriage can survive financial problems. This is just capitalism eating itself for scarce profits.Brendan , Jul 19 2021 19:13 utc | 10This is an old story going back years.chet380 , Jul 19 2021 19:24 utc | 11
https://citizenlab.ca/2018/09/hide-and-seek-tracking-nso-groups-pegasus-spyware-to-operations-in-45-countries/
The question is: Why is it being investigated so closely now?The 'West' could be using it as a weapon to rein in Israel, which it sees as getting more and more out of control. Netanyahu might be gone but the policies that he represents will not just disappear.
The mass media didn't like Israel's destruction of the building in Gaza where the Associated Press had its offices. How are the media supposed to publish reports from places where they don't have anywhere to work?
Western governments are exasperated that Israel doesn't even pretend to have any respect for international law and human rights. Nobody in power in the West cares about those things either, and they really want to support Israel, but doing that is a lot harder when Israel makes it so obvious that it is a colonial aggressor.
As the Guardian reported yesterday, "The Israeli minister of defence closely regulates NSO, granting individual export licences before its surveillance technology can be sold to a new country."
The attack on NSO looks like a message to the Israeli state.
Can we expect US sanctions against Israel, whose intelligence agency sponsored this, and against the Various Israeli companies involved?m , Jul 19 2021 19:42 utc | 13Stonebird , Jul 19 2021 19:47 utc | 15I think you are very wrong in your assessment that this is about business and getting rid of the competition. Information isn`t about money. It is about power.
The people at MoA might not have noticed it because of ideological bias but Netanyahu and Biden (and before him Obama) were quite hostile towards each other. To a degree they were almost waging a kind of undercover cold war against each other (culminating in United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334).
In this context I don`t believe the "former" Israelis spies at NSO are just Isrealis. They are a specific kind of Israelis. Namely extreme-right Israelis/Likud loyalists. Netanyahu created his own private unit 8200 - outside of the Israeli state. The profit that NSO made were just the "former" spies regular payment.
The USA - with the consent and probably active assistance of the new Israeli government - took Netanyahus private intelligence service down.
The US has found out that the NSO spyware can be used BY the "other regimes" against US leaders. Or at least against US assets.Max , Jul 19 2021 19:47 utc | 16The Israelis would sell their wares to anyone with a buck (or shekel, as the buck is getting rather uncertain as a money).
IE. Saudi buys a section of numbers and then decides to track and eliminate "opposants". BUT if there are CIA personnel implanted with a good cover story, then OOOPS, "another one bites the dust".
What laws exist in your nation to prevent illegal snooping?Stonebird , Jul 19 2021 20:02 utc | 17How about profiling by the digital companies? Nations need to pass laws making it a CRIMINAL offense to conduct snooping or hacking without a warrant. What happened to Apple's claims about its devices' superior security and privacy?
Let's see what sanctions or criminal ACTIONS are taken against NSO, its executives and other companies. Is any of the information captured by NSO shared with Israel &/or Five Eyes? Are their financial accounts frozen? Let's see how they're treated compared to Huawei.
Are Dark web sites linked to the REvil ransomware gang operating? Shutdown all illegal snooping and cyber crimes entities.
A rule or law isn't just and fair if it doesn't applies to everyone, and they can't be applied at the whims of powerful. Laws and rules applied unequally have no credibility and legitimacy.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
– Martin Luther King Jr.Yul , Jul 19 2021 20:08 utc | 18Max | Jul 19 2021 19:47 utc | 16
"A rule or law isn't just and fair if it doesn't applies to everyone, and they can't be applied at the whims of powerful. Laws and rules applied unequally have no credibility and legitimacy."
Max, are you sure you have got your feet on this planet earth? If there is one factor that is common to his era, is that "Justice" is no longer blindfolded, but is looking out for the best interests of "friends".
Can you name a few countries where your ideal is the norm?
*****
PS. Don't bother, as I won't reply, I'm off to bed to dream of a perfect world. Much easier, and I can do it lying down.@bc1ue , Jul 19 2021 20:35 utc | 19Edifying Twitter thread :
https://twitter.com/YousefMunayyer/status/1417169505747341318check this article from 6 yrs ago:
Innocent people under military rule exposed to surveillance by Israel, say 43 ex-members of Unit 8200, including reservistsAnother possible scenario is that the NSO has been poaching people and/or techniques from US intel agencies for use in its for-profit schemes.thewokendead , Jul 19 2021 20:39 utc | 20
That is one thing which is guaranteed to get a negative reaction - regardless of who is doing it and which party is in power.
We do know that NSO has been very active on the exploit buying dark webs since their inception...Also, I would point out that US entity action against NSO didn't just start today: Facebook sued them even before COVID, in 2019
And earlier 2016 NSO mention in Apple exploit
The above article also notes that NSO was acquired by Francisco Partners in 2010...
Thus maybe all this is purely a capability play: The US is falling behind and so wants to bring in house, more capability. One way is to squeeze an existing successful player so that they have to cooperate/sell out...
All I can be sure of, is that none of the present foofaraw has anything to do with the truth.
Mark Thomason , Jul 19 2021 20:55 utc | 22"In fact, these allegations are so outrageous and far from reality, that NSO is considering a defamation lawsuit."
Ya..Right. That's not remotely gonna happen!
The NSO 'Group" would have to provide a substantial amount of their very sensitive 'operational' & 'proprietary' internal documents - which would most certainly be requested in discovery - to any of the possible defendants should NSO be stupid/arrogant enough to actually file a formal suit of "defamation" in a any US court.
Talk about a "defamation" legal case that would get shut down faster than Mueller's show indictment of 13 'Russian' agents and their related businesses that were reportedly part of the now infamous "Guccifer 2.0" "Hack"
When these "Russian" hackers simply countered by producing a surprise Washington based legal team that publically agreed to call Mueller's bluff and have the all of the 'indicted' defendants actually appear in court, they immediately "requested" - via the discovery process - all relevant documents that the Mueller team purportedly had that confirmed that their was any actual or attempted (hacking) criminality.
VIA POLITICO:
The 13 people charged in the high-profile indictment in February are considered unlikely to ever appear in a U.S. court. The three businesses accused of facilitating the alleged Russian troll farm operation -- the Internet Research Agency, Concord Management, and Concord Catering -- were also expected to simply ignore the American criminal proceedings.Last month, however, a pair of Washington-area lawyers suddenly surfaced in the case, notifying the court that they represent Concord Management. POLITICO reported at the time that the move appeared to be a bid to force Mueller's team to turn over relevant evidence to the Russian firm and perhaps even to bait prosecutors into an embarrassing dismissal in order to avoid disclosing sensitive information.
The NSO Group is never going to even considering this "defamation" route, but their threatening legal bluster is pure... Hutzpa!
thewokendead
In a world in which this can be done, the worst of governments will do it, and in the worst ways.Max , Jul 19 2021 21:07 utc | 23The US and other governments have promoted this. Their own intelligence services use it. They actively oppose efforts to block it, as happened with private encryption ideas.
We can't both make it possible and prevent the bad guys from doing it.
We have deliberately made it possible, and opposed serious efforts to protect private life against it. Now we are surprised?
@ Stonebird (#17), you missed the pun in those words. Maybe you're sleeping while reading.Antibody , Jul 19 2021 22:42 utc | 26The Financial Empire and its lackeys want a "rules-based international order" and China-Russia... want a "rule of international laws". Both are meaningless and worthless as they're applied unequally. I am awake and in sync with REALITY. Just playing with these two ideas. We have the law of the jungle. However, Orcs (individuals without conscience – dark souls) are worse than animals in greed, deceits and killing.
"The Black Speech of Mordor need to be heard in every corner of the world!"
Interesting story but I agree that the hype is overblown because nothing much will change even if this NSO outfit has a harder time flogging its spyware to all and sundry.Sam F , Jul 19 2021 22:47 utc | 27The NSA, CIA, MI5/6, Mossad and the 5 Lies spies will continue spying on friend and foe alike and tech companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google will likewise continue their unethical surveillance practices and will keep passing on private citizen's data to government spy agencies. So it goes.
For a dissident Snowden is a lightweight. His beef wasn't, as b points out, with the NSA itself, he just didn't like them spying on Americans within the USA. He had no problem spying on people in other countries as long as the proper 'rules' were followed. That, almost by definition, makes him a limited hangout.
The AI report notes that this software was abandoned in 2018 for cloud implementations to help hide responsibility;Antibody , Jul 19 2021 22:53 utc | 28
Having Amazon AWS dump services naming NSO probably has no effect at all, as NSO will just use other names;
@Max 23Paul , Jul 19 2021 23:06 utc | 29" However, Orcs (individuals without conscience – dark souls) are worse than animals in greed, deceits and killing."
Non-human animals operate on a genetically programmed autopilot and are not responsible for their actions.
Humans are partially engineered by genetics but unlike the "lower" animals they have the power to choose which actions they will take and they are therefore responsible for their choices.
A bear or a mountain lion will attack a human when it is injured or when protecting its young, but one can't blame these animals for exercising their survival instincts.
Human beings are the only mammal, indeed the only animal, that is capable of evil, i.e. deliberately choosing to harm or kill other humans for profit or personal gain.
Sushi , Jul 20 2021 0:24 utc | 30On this subject, I suggest barflies read the excellent post on the previous MoA Week in Review thread by:
Posted by: Debsisdead | Jul 19 2021 1:36 utc | 71
My reply @167 and Uncle T's further comment.
The book on this criminal conduct is called 'Murdoch's Pirates.' The detestable Amazon have it at 'unavailable' however it is available at Australian bookseller Booktopia.
Debsisdead , Jul 20 2021 1:37 utc | 33How do you explain the suspiciously-timed, and simultaneous, Five Eyes denunciation of China for alleged hacking of Microsoft? Is it a way of deflecting too much wrath on Israel? Or, is b wrong and the China story serves as real distraction.Posted by: Prof | Jul 19 2021 18:09 utc | 1
If the US navy were to purchase leaky boats would it not be absurd for it to then blame Russia or China for the influx of water?
If the US government, and US industry, purchase software full of holes is it not equally absurd for them to blame a foreign entity for any resulting leaks?
In answering these questions it is worthwhile to remember that US government entities support the insertion of backdoors in US commercial software. Such backdoors can be identified and exploited by 3rd parties.
If this somewhat limp-wristed takedown of NSO did not have the support of apartheid Israel's intelligence services, the graun would not be pushing the story.div> Since the software is licensed by the number of phones it's installed on, NSO must have a means of determining the device ID/phone number of each phone (You wouldn't trust some shady third-world regime to be honest, would you?It is that simple, the guardian is run by rabid zionists such as Jonathon Freedland deputy editor, who retains editorial control from the second seat rather than #1 simply because the zionist board wanted to stroke the fishwrap's woke credentials by having a female editor.
Foreign news and england news all have many zionist journos.
Now even the sports desk features stories by a bloke called Jacob Steinberg 'n sport is not generally an interest of jews.
Also if NSO a corporation born to advance particular media interests were in fact a tool of apartheid israel's intelligence establishment, it is unlikely that it would have tried to sue the graun back in 2019.None of that precludes Mossad plants working at NSO, in fact the move against it would suggest that zionist intelligence has wrung the organisation dry.
This 'takedown' suggests to me that these services will continue, but not for everyone as before. ME governments will never again gain full access, no matter how friendly they may claim to be. All future contracts with whatever entity follows will only proceed if permitted by FukUSi.Posted by: J2 , Jul 20 2021 1:44 utc | 34
Since the software is licensed by the number of phones it's installed on, NSO must have a means of determining the device ID/phone number of each phone (You wouldn't trust some shady third-world regime to be honest, would you?Christian J. Chuba , Jul 20 2021 1:49 utc | 35Posted by: J2 | Jul 20 2021 1:44 utc | 34
The Israeli connection just read an account on AC by Rod Dreher and so far, writers are downplaying the connection to Israel. If it was a Chinese or Russian company we would be blaming Putin.Boss Tweet , Jul 20 2021 1:56 utc | 36We blame Putin for every criminal in Russia but I don't see anyone blaming Israel for a product they they authorized for export. Wow.
It does take two to tango, so I do understand talking about the clients who bought the product but if they have the export version of the spyware the it's obvious that Israel has the super-duper lethal version but that's okay. No biggie. But Iran having any weapons to defend their own country is a scandal.
US taxpayers subsidize the Israeli military industry. The zionists then developed tools which they use against palestinians and their adversaries. The same technologies are later sold at a profit to various United states security agencies. A wonderful self licking ice cream cone of christian zionism, so much winning... Paying up the wazoo for our own eslavement. Last I checked, the chosen one's were never held accountable for their role prior to 911 operations.Biswapriya Purkayast , Jul 20 2021 2:12 utc | 38Fox News Series on Israeli Spying on US Telecommunications:
https://cryptome.org/fox-il-spy.htmThe Amerikastani Con-serve-ative manages to write a whole article about this without mentioning the name of the "country" that created and exported this software.MrChristian , Jul 20 2021 3:11 utc | 39https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/pegasus-end-of-privacy/
This same Amerikastani Con-serve-ative pretends to champion free speech but doesn't permit the slightest criticism of this same "nation", the racist fascist apartheid zionist settler colony in Occupied Palestine. In fact the very mention of the word "zionist" will get your comment removed.
I'm of the school of thought that Snowden is still an active CIA asset used to assist in discrediting government agencies, such as the NSA, to allow private corporations to take their place in data collection and dissemination. Alphabet, and it's AI/quantum computers should not be ignored in this particular scenarioMax , Jul 20 2021 3:15 utc | 40@ Antibody (#28), good points, thanks.uncle tungsten , Jul 20 2021 3:32 utc | 41Human beings with conscience are INNER directed. Those without strong conscience (Orcs) are OUTER directed and thereby easily captured, corrupted and controlled. Human beings with great conscience (soul/spirit), strong mind and healthy body are PARAGONS.
Orcs were once elves. They got programmed by the dark forces of Saruman & Sauron (Sin). Sauron's EYE is for intimidation. Seeing it sends fear into the hearts of people and sucks away their courage. "When did we let evil become stronger than us?" Communicate reality, truth and expose power freely!
There is still light to defeat the darkness. May your light light others 🕯🕯🕯
karlof1 #3Sarcophilus , Jul 20 2021 5:28 utc | 45Ultimately, this scoop provides much more leverage for Putin's ongoing insistence that an International Treaty dealing with all things Cyber including Cyber-crime be convened ASAP.Israel and the UK will never sign such a protocol. The USA? only if it is worthless.
Mar man #4
The leak could be from a highly sophisticated state actor that needs to "blind" US and especially Israeli intelligence services temporarily.That could very easily be China, Russia or even Iran. Some of their assets could be on the list.
pssst - UK
Linus , Jul 20 2021 6:35 utc | 47"Snowden's opinion on this is kind of strange". Snowden's task, almost a decade ago now, was to facilitate the passage of CISPA. Greenwald was the PR guy. Remember Obama saying we need to have a conversation about privacy versus security? Well, Snowden and Greewald helped him to have the conversation on his terms. And the media giants will be forever grateful. Greenwald even got his own website. So no, nothing strange about what Snowden said. It was in his script. Was, is and always will be an asset.
In a broader context:Stonebird , Jul 20 2021 8:05 utc | 48
"In a corporatist system of government, where there is no separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. The actual government as it actually exists is censoring the speech not just of its own people, but people around the world. If US law had placed as much emphasis on the separation of corporation and state as it had on the separation of church and state, the country would be unrecognizably different from what we see today."
"It's A Private Company So It's Not Censorship"Sanctions? Sanctions, did anybody mention sanctions for those carrying out Cyber attacks? (Particularly ones that target "Freedom of speech" and Journalists.)Joe B , Jul 20 2021 10:11 utc | 51
.............Just waiting.BM , Jul 20 2021 13:00 utc | 55Apple is also zionist controlled, so not surprising that NSO had all internal details to hack their iPhones, via tribal leakers or approved connections. So is Amazon, so their cloud service for NSO continues under other cover.
Those in danger should not use Apple or Amazon-based or other zionist-controlled products or services. A catalog of those might help.
U.S. Takes Down Israeli Spy Software Companydiv> I certainly can't compete on tech savvy as I have none, but doesn't this perhaps line up with the summit decision between Putin and Biden to cooperate in terms of policing cybercrime? Maybe that's too obvious, but I don't see that Snowden is contradicting his own positions in that case. And of course, b, you are correct that the main culprit on these matters is the US. Throwing the spotlight elsewhere however, doesn't mean it can't circle around. Spotlights have a way of doing that.I don't buy it. It doesn't sound plausible to me as presented.
One possibility is that it is a camouflaged operation to take down non-attributably spy software that has fallen into the wrong hands, and thereby contrary to US interests. For example, the new Myanmar government is sure to be using the software to observe the US-sponsored miscreants from the Aung San Su Kyi regime who are bombing schools, hospitals and government offices, and to seek out wanted criminals in hiding. The NSO take-down could be an operation to take those licences out of operation. In that scenario those NSO customers who are not anti-US might get support to continue operations as usual. As another example it could also be used as a warning to the Saudis not to get too close to the Russians and Chinese or ditch the US dollar, and not to accommodate to Iran.
Or maybe NSO just had the wrong political connections in the USA.
Whatever it may seem on the surface, that is what it surely is not.
Posted by: juliania , Jul 20 2021 14:54 utc | 56
I certainly can't compete on tech savvy as I have none, but doesn't this perhaps line up with the summit decision between Putin and Biden to cooperate in terms of policing cybercrime? Maybe that's too obvious, but I don't see that Snowden is contradicting his own positions in that case. And of course, b, you are correct that the main culprit on these matters is the US. Throwing the spotlight elsewhere however, doesn't mean it can't circle around. Spotlights have a way of doing that.Simplicius , Jul 20 2021 15:15 utc | 57Posted by: juliania | Jul 20 2021 14:54 utc | 56
The interesting backdrop to all this is that Israel has a *huge* presence in all things associated with cybersecurity and have for years. The IDF's Talpiot plan no doubt enviously eyed the NSA tapping into everyone's internet/cellphone traffic and wanted a piece of the action. The financial intelligence alone would make it hugely valuable, not to mention blackmail opportunities and the means to exercise political control.Mar man , Jul 20 2021 15:37 utc | 58I wonder if the Intel's Haifa design bureau was behind the infamous "management engine" installed on *every* Intel chip since 2008 (to, of course, "make administration easier")?
The discover of this "feature" precipitated a huge scandal not too many years back if you recall...
This "feature" gave anyone who could access it the ability to snoop or change the code running on the main CPU... anyone want to guess whether the Mossad knows how to get to it?
@Simplicius | Jul 20 2021 15:15 utc | 57vk , Jul 20 2021 15:40 utc | 59
"I wonder if the Intel's Haifa design bureau was behind the infamous "management engine" installed on *every* Intel chip since 2008 (to, of course, "make administration easier")?"I remember 30 years ago there was controversy over the NSA requiring hardware backdoors in all phones. At the time, it was called the "Clipper chip". Reportedly, the program failed and was never adopted. Apparently, as this article exposed, that is false and something like it is installed in all phones and possibly computers manufactured for sale in the western world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
Supposedly, the real story behind Huawei sanctions and kidnapping of their executive, is Huawei phones have no NSA backdoor since the Chinese flatly refuse to cooperate with NSA.
Max , Jul 20 2021 18:26 utc | 63Turns out the Microsoft hacking accusation against China wasn't a distraction against the NSO scandal, but a capitalist reaction against the CPC's growing containment of their own big tech capitalists:
The Crackdown in China Is a Hot Mess, and It's Coming for Us
For people who don't know: this Kara Swisher is clearly an USG asset (or behaves exactly like one). Every column she writes is an unashamed apology to all the USG policies on big tech and on all decisions of American big tech.
@ vk (#59), Your conclusion about Kara Swisher is good one. However, cast the net wider to understand the NETWORK that she represents and find additional media Orcs. Most likely she is an asset of the Global Financial Syndicate, acting as a gatekeeper/porter/lobbyist in the technology arena. Her mentor Walter Mossberg was an asset too? It is easy to identify Orcs!Piotr Berman , Jul 20 2021 19:05 utc | 64Work Experience: WSJ, The Washington Post, New York Times, ... Who did she sell Recode to? Who are financiers of Vox Media?
Education: Georgetown, Columbia University (many assets come from here)While the theory from m at #13 about it being a personal tiff between Biden and Netanyahu has some appeal I tend to believe it is more complex than that.Jackrabbit , Jul 20 2021 23:33 utc | 65Posted by: psychohistorian | Jul 20 2021 5:14 utc | 44
While Dems could accumulate some grudges against Netanyahu, they can be pretty thick skinned on that. On the other hand, if Netanyahu used his budget to dig the dirt against his opponents like Bennet, with NSO as the took, the grudge against NSO could be very strong on the side of the current government of Israel. Internal strife between Likudniks is intense. And the mantle of the ruler of Israel comes with perks, like the ability to plant stories in WP and NYT.
CIA 'takedown' of NSO? or an orchestrated 'crackdown' on press freedoms?BM , Jul 21 2021 7:14 utc | 66UK journalists could be jailed like spies under proposed Official Secrets Act changes
The Government said the reform was needed as the existing acts, with the last update in 1989, are no longer enough to fight the "discernible and very real threat posed by state threats".The Home Office said it does "not consider that there is necessarily a distinction in severity between espionage and the most serious unauthorised disclosures, in the same way that there was in 1989".
[More at the link.]
If it was Russia or Iran that was selling such spyware, would FUKUS react with measures against the press or with sanctions and efforts to protect the press?!!
On the other hand, if Netanyahu used his budget to dig the dirt against his opponents like Bennet, with NSO as the took, the grudge against NSO could be very strong on the side of the current government of Israel. Internal strife between Likudniks is intense. And the mantle of the ruler of Israel comes with perks, like the ability to plant stories in WP and NYT.m , Jul 21 2021 9:41 utc | 67
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Jul 20 2021 19:05 utc | 64Ah, you've nailed it, Piotr!
@64 Piotr BermanBemildred , Jul 21 2021 10:19 utc | 68
This goes much deeper than just personal animosity.For several years now there had been some kind of cultural war waging in Israel with the populist leader - Netanyahu - on the one side and and most of the Israeli establishment - the Mossad, the generals and the High Court - against him. The generals eventually acted by founding their own party (with the former TV presenter Lapid at it`s head) and deposed Netanyahu.
This cultural war in Israel is not only very similar to the cultural war in the USA. The two countries are so intervened with one another that both conflicts have kind of merged.
Posted by: m | Jul 21 2021 9:41 utc | 67"This cultural war in Israel is not only very similar to the cultural war in the USA. The two countries are so intervened with one another that both conflicts have kind of merged."
Posted by: m | Jul 21 2021 9:41 utc | 67
Yes, not unrelated to the purge Biden seems to be planning here. Bibi made a big mistake getting so cozy with Trump. I would wager Trump is going to be in the crosshairs too. And that is likely to be divisive, in both places.
Jul 21, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
BY TYLER DURDEN WEDNESDAY, JUL 21, 2021 - 11:09 AM
Authored (satirically) by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
So go ahead and say whatever you want around all your networked devices, but don't be surprised if bad things start happening.
I received another "Our Terms Have Changed" email from a Big Tech quasi-monopoly, and for a change I actually read this one. It was a revelation on multiple fronts. I'm reprinting it here for your reading pleasure:
We wanted to let you know that we recently updated our Conditions of Use.
What hasn't changed:
Your use constitutes your agreement to our Conditions of Use.
We own all the content you create on our platform, devices and networks, and are free to monetize it by any means we choose.
We own all the data we collect on you, your devices, purchases, social networks, views, associations, beliefs and illicit viewing, your location data, who you are in proximity to, and whatever data the networked devices in your home, vehicles and workplaces collect.
We have the unrestricted right to ban you and all your content, shadow-ban you and all your content, i.e., generate the illusion that your content is freely, publicly available, and erase your digital presence entirely such that you cease to exist except as a corporeal body.
What has changed:
If we detect you have positive views on anti-trust enforcement, we may report you as a "person of interest / potential domestic extremist" to the National Security Agency and other federal agencies.
Rather than respond to all disputes algorithmically, we have established a Star Chamber of our most biased, fanatical employees to adjudicate customer/user disputes in which the customer/user refuses to accept the algorithmic mediation.
If a customer/user attempts to contact any enforcement agency regarding our algorithmic mediation or Star Chamber adjudication, we reserve the unrestricted rights to:
a. Prepare voodoo dolls representing the user and stick pins into the doll while chanting curses.
b. Hack the targeted user's accounts and blame it on Russian or Ukrainian hackers.
c. Rendition the user to a corrupt kleptocracy in which we retain undue influence, i.e., the United States.
Left unsaid, of course, is the potential for "accidents" to happen to anyone publicly promoting anti-trust enforcement of Big Tech quasi-monopolies. Once totalitarianism has been privatized , there are no rules that can't be ignored or broken by those behind the curtain . So go ahead and say whatever you want around all your networked devices, but don't be surprised if bad things start happening.
Editor's note: this is satire. If I disappear, then you'll know who has no sense of irony or humor.
* * *
If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com .
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Jul 19, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Southfront reports that an Israeli company's spyware was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, government officials and human rights activists around the world, according to an investigation by 17 media organizations, published on July 18th.
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One of the organizations, The Washington Post, said the Pegasus spyware licensed by Israel-based NSO Group also was used to target phones belonging to two women close to Jamal Khashoggi, a Post columnist murdered at a Saudi consulate in Turkey in 2018.
One of them was his fiancee, and she and the other woman were targeted both before and after his death.
The Guardian, another of the media outlets, said the investigation suggested "widespread and continuing abuse" of NSO's hacking software , described as malware that infects smartphones to enable the extraction of messages, photos and emails; record calls; and secretly activate microphones.
The investigation highlights widespread and continuing abuse of NSO's hacking spyware called 'Pegasus' which the company confirms is only intended for use against terrorist groups, drug and human traffickers, and criminals.
Pegasus is a very advanced malware that infects iOS and Android devices to allow operators of the spyware to copy messages, photos, calls and other data, including secretly activate microphones and cameras.
Based on the investigation, the leak contains a list of 50,000 phone numbers that have been identified as those of people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016.
The list includes many close family members of one country's ruler, suggesting he might have instructed the country's intelligence agencies to explore the possibility of tracking and spying on their own relatives.
anti-bolshevik 8 hours ago (Edited)Southern_Boy 10 hours ago (Edited) remove linkTwo articles from Motherboard Vice:
Is Israel EXEMPT from the ' rules-based order ' that Biden / Blinken / Yellen constantly affirm?
Any incoming Sanctions? Any Treasury asset-seziures?
NSO Group Impersonated Facebook to Help Clients Hack Targets May 20, 2020
Motherboard uncovered more evidence that NSO Group ran hacking infrastructure in the United States.
A former NSO employee provided Motherboard with the IP address of a server setup to infect phones with NSO's Pegasus hacking tool. Motherboard granted the source anonymity to protect them from retaliation from the company.
Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure July 19, 2021
The move comes as activist and media organizations publish new findings on the Israeli surveillance vendor.
Amazon has previously remained silent on NSO using its infrastructure . In May 2020 when Motherboard uncovered evidence that NSO had used Amazon infrastructure to deliver malware , Amazon did not respond to a request for comment asking if NSO had violated Amazon's terms of service.
MASTER OF UNIVERSE 11 hours agoThe licensor of software is not the user of the software. An Israeli company developed it and may have used it.
In weapons terms, an Israeli company was the arms developer.
However, there are the licensees and users of the software. The factions and individuals who actually used this weapon of war and political coercion.
In weapons terms, there are others, like the US and other country intelligence communities who will be the ones who pulled the trigger.
The "trigger pullers include the Bolshevik Democrat party and the Biden campaign, which used it to control citizens through intelligence gathering (remember Judge Roberts?) and extract political donations from corporations and rich individuals. Don't forget the Globalist GOP RINOs and Tech monopolists, who have used this weapon to control and subvert anyone that they need to subjugate.
Bye bye Apple, Xiomi and Google Android. You just lost your market of brainwashed sheep for new mobile phones. Even the unwashed Joe Six-Packs of this world now know they are being manipulated with the phones that are so expensive.
WorkingClassMan 10 hours agoI've spent many years studying Experimental Psychology & Personality Theory and can honestly state that malware can't determine appropriate behavioural signals intelligence enough to act responsibly, or judiciously.
Algos are dependent upon Behavioural Science & human analytics. They are crude tools that employ hit & miss techniques that hardly ever work accurately.
Israeli intelligence tries to look state of the art, but they are just as dimwitted as the CIA.
NAV 10 hours ago remove linkThey might be dimwitted and hamfisted but like an elephant with a lobotomy they can still do a lot of damage flailing around. Worst part about it is them not caring about the consequences.
2banana 12 hours ago (Edited)It's amazing how the "dimwits" control the entire apparatus of the most powerful Empire in the world and the entire world media.
gregga777 12 hours ago (Edited)It's not just some politicians and journalists.
It's everyone.
Your phone spys on you in every possible way.
Pegasus is a very advanced malware that infects iOS and Android devices to allow operators of the spyware to copy messages, photos, calls and other data, including secretly activate microphones and cameras.
truth or go home 12 hours agoIt's been widely for at least a decade that carrying a smart phone is really like wiring oneself up for 24/7/365 audio and/or video surveillance. They only have themselves to blame if they've been spied upon by the world's so-called secret intelligence agencies.
[Ed. The next time in a crowded public space, turn on Wi-Fi and count the number of unlocked phones under the "Other Networks" menu.]
philipat 11 hours ago remove linkIf you have no phone, and no facebook, then you are likely immune from prosecution. My neighbor the Fed agent told me 10 years ago that these two sources are 90% of every investigation. That number has only gone up. They track you with it, they find out your contacts with it. They find out your secrets with it. Just try to get either of those things anonymously. You can't.
Ura Bonehead PREMIUM 7 hours agoLand of the Free....
Steeley 4 hours ago'truth or go home', 'having no Facebook' doesn't help you as FB secures the same information via data-sharing arrangements with any number of apps you may download, that came on your phone, or are embedded deep on your phone. Just a fact.
E5 10 hours agoA friend that lives in Pahrump, NV reports that every time he crosses into California a smart phone Covid Health Tracking App activates and he starts getting notifications. Can't turn it off or find where it resides. When he crosses back into Nevada it stops.
zzmop 9 hours ago (Edited)"After checking their claims, we firmly deny the false allegations made in their report,"
Really? So if 99 claims are true and one false? Never did they say there was truth to the accusation that they hacked phones.
If you are going to commit a crime I suppose you want to "issue a statement" that you didn't. I guess we have to ask them 2 more times: then it is a rule that you must tell all. No minion can resist the same question three times.
eatapeach 9 hours agoKeyword -'Israeli', Not Russian, Israeli, Not 'Russian hackers', Israeli hackers
consistentliving PREMIUM 7 hours agoThis is old news. Congresswoman Jane Harman was all for spying/eavesdropping until she got busted selling her power to Israel, LOL.
vova_3.2018 10 hours agoNot USA fake paper pushers but Mexican journalists deserve mention here
Revealed: murdered journalist's number selected by Mexican NSO client
not just journalists either (i know SLATE but hey) https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/mit-media-lab-jeffrey-epstein-joi-ito-moral-rot.html
wizteknet 10 hours agoA smart phone is a spying device .....
Spying & .... Israeli cybersecurity firm "NSO Group" has been selling surveillance software Pegasus, enabling the murder of dissident journalist.
Snowden: Israeli Spyware Used By Governments to Pursue Journalists Targeted for Assassination
https://www.mintpressnews.com/snowden-israeli-spyware-used-by-governments-to-pursue-journalists-targeted-for-assassination/251612/Israel: Snowden accuses Israeli cybersecurity firm of enabling Khashoggi murder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LeOt4HCI-MIsraeli cybersecurity firm "NSO Group" Which Sold Pegasus Spyware, paid Biden's political advisers in SKDKnickerbocker consulting firm.
https://sputniknews.com/world/202107191083412056-biden-advisers-consulting-firm-got-paid-by-israeli-nso-group-which-sold-pegasus-spyware-report/Israel doesn't respect human rights!. Israel has been killing defenseless people in Palestine for more than 50 years. The sad thing is that US support these genocidal sick sycophats.
vova_3.2018 9 hours ago (Edited)Where's a list of infected software?
Steeley 4 hours agoWhere's a list of infected software?
If they take yr phone under control they'd have access to everything & then they can use the info against you or anybody else in the info.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuBuyv6kUKIIsraeli spy-wear "Candiru" works a little bet different than Pegasus but is also used to hack & track journalists and activists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWEJS0f6P6kThe magic number of "6 million" will be the Get out of Jail Card once again.
And, these idiots keep preaching about the great risk China poses...
Kugelhagel 12 hours ago (Edited)Embedded in the OS...
HippieHaulers 11 hours agoIs that article an attempt to get some sympathy for "politicians", "journalists" and "activists"? Try again.
WhiteCulture 7 hours ago (Edited)Exactly. Don't forget Kashogi was CIA. And they're using another asset (Snowden) to roll this out. This story stinks.
TheInformed 7 hours agoI installed Nice Systems onto 600 desk tops in 2003 at 3 separate call centers, a call monitoring and a PC, mainframe CICS, or email, screen scrape capability. When the call audio was recorded we also captured whatever was on the screen. No doubt the government has been doing this on our phones and all personal computers for over a decade.
two hoots 10 hours ago (Edited)Your example shows that people are dumb, it's not evidence of some grand 'government backdoor' conspiracy. Don't conflate the two.
Globalist Overlord 12 hours agoForget the petty herd/individual surveillance, this is a "super power" tool for investment opportunities, negotiation advantage, strategic decisions, military/covert decisions, etc. you can be sure that the most improved (undisclosed) versions are in use in the usual suspect country. Likely spying on the spy's that bought the software from them. These are those steps beyond Nietzsche's amoral supra-man.
tunetopper 12 hours agoWhitney Webb was writing about this in 2018.
Snowden: Israeli Spyware Used By Governments to Pursue Journalists Targeted for Assassination
Occams_Razor_Trader 11 hours agoIf Pegasus is used against Human Traffic-ers, then why didnt they get Jeffrey Epstein earlier?
RasinResin 11 hours agoWhy 'get' people when you can 'use' these people ........................?
CryptoingTheLightFantastic 11 hours agoI use to be in IT and worked in association with Radcom. Now you may ask who is that? They are the Israeli company that is truly behind all monitoring and spying of your phones in America
EVIL incarnate
donebydoug 11 hours ago"Reuters' spokesman Dave Moran said, "Journalists must be allowed to report the news in the public interest without fear of harassment or harm, wherever they are. We are aware of the report and are looking into the matter."
I love the sanctimonious clutching of pearls, wringing of hands, and bleating from the purveyors of CCP propaganda, woketardness, and globalism whenever the velvet hand that feeds them punishes them with a throat punch instead.
Watt Supremacist 12 hours agoJournalists can't be spies, right? That would never happen.
nowhereman 11 hours agoYes but do the people working for Reuters know all that?
Grumbleduke 11 hours agoJust look at the signature on your paycheck.
Enraged 10 hours agothey're in the news business - of course they don't!
You know the adage "when your livelihood depends on not knowing" or something....
Max21c 10 hours ago (Edited)Listening in on calls is a distraction story by the propaganda media.
The real story is the blackmailing of politicians, judges, corporate executives, etc. for many years by the intelligence agencies with tapes of them with underage girls and boys. This was included in the Maxwell/Esptein story.
These people are compromised, which is the reason for the strange decisions they make, as they support the globalist elite.
There is no reason to spy on journalists, as they are part of the intelligence agency operations.
Wayoutwilly 12 hours ago remove linkThere is no reason to spy on journalists, as they are part of the intelligence agency operations.
True the press are either spies or puppets and vassals of Big Brother and the secret police. They're all mostly agents of the Ministry of Truth. But sometimes they get the weather report right.
Brushy 11 hours agoBet they have sh!t on Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett too.
Dis-obey 10 hours ago remove linkWait a minute, you mean the tracking spy device that you carry around and put all of your personal information on is actually tracking and spying on you?!!
Yog Soggoth 10 hours agoThey have data on everyone but not enough eyes to look at everyone all the time. So when you get flagged then they can open all the data on your device to investigate u.
ay_arrowLawn.Dart 10 hours agoKhashoggi was not a journalist. While interesting, this is not the story of the year.
Max21c 10 hours agoAlmost every intellegence agent is a writer of some kind.
The 3rd Dimentia 9 hours agoNOS is just one company out of many. They have the willing complicity of the security services of other countries including the CIA, FBI, NSA, DOJ, in the USA and similar per UK. Secret police use these special contractors to help them engage in crimes and criminal activities and it does not matter whether the secret police use a foreign or domestic secret police agency or contractor as they're all in on it together. It's just a criminal underworld of secret police, secret police bureaus & agencies, and "intelligence" agencies. They're all crooked. They're all crooks and criminals and thieves that rob and persecute innocent civilians just like the Bolsheviks, Nazis, Gestapo, Waffen SS, Viet Kong, Khmer Rouge, Red Guards, ISIS, Stasi, KGB, etc. It's all the same or similar secret police, police state tactics, state security apparatus abuses of power, absolute power & its abuses, and spy agencies and intelligence agencies... and those that go along with it and collaborate. It's all just criminal enterprises and crime agencies.
Dis-obey 10 hours agoone other tentacle- https://archive.4plebs.org/dl/pol/image/1590/02/1590026057592.jpg
Bostwick9 10 hours agoSo you can solve the 10,000 open murder investigations in Chicago with this. That's how its being used right...
NAV 11 hours ago remove link"We are deeply troubled to learn that two AP journalists, along with journalists from many news organizations, are among those who may have been targeted by Pegasus spyware," said Director of AP Media Relations Lauren Easton.
OMG . Not journalists !!!!!!!!!!
Guess NSO is a "buy", then.
Norseman_Aura 10 hours agoTo believe that the Israelis will not use the information that they have is absurd.
Here's one example:
The American Anti-Defamation League under Abe Foxman long made it a practice for decades to tail all Congressmen – liberal or conservative -- as was brought out in allegations in the San Francisco trial of its head operative Roy Bullock on charges of buying blackmail information from members of the San Francisco Police Department as reported by the San Francisco Examiner. Bullock had collected information and provided it to the ADL as a secretly-paid independent contractor for more than 32 years.
Can it be that there's a connection between data of this kind and the unbelievable unification of almost every congressman behind every Israeli position?
Of course, the San Francisco Examiner no longer is in existence. But Israeli trolls continue to gather like wasps upon meat to destroy any information that might reveal their nefarious purposes.
novictim 8 hours agoIn 1993 the FBI interviewed 40-year undercover ADL operative Roy Bullock , who had improperly obtained social security numbers and drivers licenses from San Francisco Police Department officer Tom Gerard. Gerard and Bullock infiltrated and obtained information on California Pro-Palestinian and anti-Apartheid groups as paid agents of both the ADL and South African intelligence services. The ADL paid tens of thousands in damages over the incident and promised not to collect confidential information in the future.
SARC '
Sarrazin 8 hours agoWhat do you want to bet that Orange Hitler and associates along with MAGA Republicans, their attorneys, friendly patriot reporters, etc, have had their phones widely hacked going all the way back to 2016?
Because when you are a "progressive" in power, anyone who wants to unseat you is a terrorist threat and you can do just about anything you want to them because you are saving the world.
LEEPERMAX 9 hours ago (Edited)unseat you is a terrorist threat and you can do just about anything you want to them because you are saving the world.
Funny, it's the same formula US foreign policy applies to all it's victims nations around the world. Fighting terrorists in the name of saving the world.
OldNewB 11 hours ago💥BOOM !!!
In 2020 alone, Facebook and Amazon spent more money on lobbyists than did Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing -- major players in the defense-industrial complex !!!
Let that sink in.
SummerSausage PREMIUM 12 hours ago"Journalists must be allowed to report the news in the public interest without fear of harassment or harm, wherever they are."
This hasn't happened in ages. What the large majority of MSM operatives (so called "journalists" ) convey to the public is propaganda and agenda driven misinformation and disinformation.
Mute Button 11 hours agoObama spying on Trump and Fox reporters - meh.
Same Obama intelligence services spying on WaPo & leftist reporters - FASCIST
Ivy Mike 8 hours agoWe're supposed to be outraged even though Trump & co. know they're being "spied" on.
Its just a game of the uniparty.
MeLurkLongtime 5 hours agoYawn. Smart phones have swiss cheese security. Who knew.
If you have a secret that you really don't want people to know, don't put in on a device that ever touches the internet. Don't talk about important stuff on a phone call. Any mob boss from the 70's could tell you that.
_0000_ 9 hours ago remove linkI would add if you have Alexa, don't converse on any sensitive topics in front of her, either.
Rectify77 PREMIUM 10 hours ago" Pegasus is a very advanced malware that infects iOS and Android devices to allow operators of the spyware to copy messages, photos, calls and other data, including secretly activate microphones and cameras."
This is a non-story. Lots of smoke, lots of brew-ha-ha.
Why is THIS a jaw dropping story now when the NSA/CIA have been doing this to ALL iOS and Android devices years ago? RE: CALEA , signed into law in 1996 by Bill Clinton.
Just more misdirection... meant to distract from something else. What?
NAV 10 hours agoIsn't it odd that Iran, Russia and China are not on the map? Who are the Israelis playing?
Market Pulse 13 hours agoIsn't is amazing that Russia is giving asylum to Edward Snowden who will be arrested and inflicted with only God knows what if captured by the USA?
dog breath 4 hours agoAnd we are surprised, why??? Everyone's phones are spied upon with all the data collected. All part and parcel of the NWO and the "Information Age". How else are they going to get all that information to control everything. And just think, once upon a time, there were no cell phones and the people were fine. They also were happier and much more free. Hint - ditch the phone!
Hello? This stuff has been going on for two decades. Bill Binney, former NSA, been talking about this since after 911. Five eyes is a way over going around internal rules. Every country does this. Russia, China, EU, USA, Australia, etc. are all spying on their own citizens. This world is turning into a corrupt crap pile and I'm waiting for the Lord to come.
Jul 08, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Update (2130ET): Tucker Carlson responded to today's 'unmasking' - namely an Axios report which accuses him of trying to set up an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"I'm an American citizen, I can interview whoever I want - and plan to," said the Fox News host.
Presented without further comment, along with Carlson's sit-down with journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden revelations about domestic spying and other illicit activities conducted by the US government.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1412936005305475077
Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in a bombshell broadcast that an NSA whistleblower had approached him with evidence that the National Security Agency has been spying on his communications , with the intent to leak his emails to the press and 'take this show off the air.'
Today, Carlson told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo that the emails have in fact been leaked to journalists - at least one of whom has contacted him for what we presume is an upcoming article on their contents.
"I was in Washington for a funeral last week and ran into someone I know well, who said ' I have a message for you ,' and then proceeded to repeat back to me details from emails and texts that I sent, and had told no one else about. So it was verified. And the person said 'the NSA has this,' and that was proven by the person reading back the contents of the email, 'and they're going to use it against you.'
To be blunt with you, it was something I would have never said in public if it was wrong, or illegal, or immoral. They don't actually have anything on me, but they do have my emails. So I knew they were spying on me, and again, to be totally blunt with you - as a defensive move, I thought 'I better say this out loud.'"
"Then, yesterday, I learned that - and this is going to come out soon - that the NSA leaked the contents of my email to journalists in an effort to discredit me. I know, because I got a call from one of them who said 'this is what your email was about.'
So, it is not in any way a figment of my imagination. It's confirmed. It's true. They aren't allowed to spy on American citizens - they are. I think more ominously, they're using the information they gather to put leverage and to threaten opposition journalists, people who criticize the Biden administration. It's happening to me right now..."
" This is the stuff of banana republics and third-world countries ," replied Bartiromo.
Jul 05, 2021 | www.wsj.com
Attorney General Merrick Garland is the front-runner so far for 2021's bad timing prize. The Justice Department last month rushed out a lawsuit claiming that Georgia's new election law violates Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act only days before the Supreme Court laid down standards that make the lawsuit a nearly certain loser.
Justice knew the likely timing of the Court's ruling in Brnovich v. DNC, so a fair guess is that Mr. Garland succumbed to White House and progressive pressure to make a political statement to support Democratic efforts in Congress to federalize state election laws in H.R.1.
Bad call. Now federal judges hearing the case will have to contend with Justice Samuel Alito's five principles in Brnovich as they assess the Georgia statute.
It won't be easy to find legal fault under those principles. Mere voting inconvenience can't be considered disqualifying, since all voting imposes some inconvenience. Any specific voting provision, such as the number of drop boxes, must also be considered in the overall context of a state's voting rules. Georgia's rules are generally lenient and don't especially burden the ability of minorities to vote.
Perhaps Justice can find a federal judge somewhere to rule against Georgia, but such a ruling is unlikely to survive on appeal to higher courts. The legal and political result of the lawsuit is therefore likely to vindicate Georgia Republicans during the 2022 election season or leading up to 2024, depending on how the lawsuits proceed. Mr. Garland would be wise to drop the suit in light of Brnovich, lest his term at Justice be marred by the continuation of this patently political lawsuit.
R
Robert Amrine
Given what we have seen of Mr. Garland thus far in his questionable legal performance as AG, it is looking like the Republicans were prescient in blocking his appointment to the Supreme Court.David SchmidtPolitics will always supersede good judgment.DON WILLINGHAMYep, apparently its a burden for some of the libs to put a stamp on an ballot and mail it it (I'm going one step beyond the extraordinary burden of getting off your behind to go to a local polling location).paul grunderLooks like Coca Cola and Major L. baseball made a mistake. do you think they will have second thoughts about leaving GA.? I know I now love Pepsi and don't watch baseball much at all anymore. You can bet someone in each organization is saying, how do we save face over this. p's wifeBrien AkersNone of this matters. Not lawsuits, not SCOTUS rulings, not State election laws, not lower court rulings. None of it matters. Why? Because the Democrats know that they cannot win without cheating as surely as they know the sun is going to rise tomorrow. That means they will simply ignore all the laws and do they same thing in 2024 that they did in 2020. Ask yourself this: Who's going to stop them? Question number two: Who will reverse the election results?DON WILLINGHAMTell us what citizen cannot vote in the next election? (no, felons don't count). Its not hard to vote. Besides, where were all the whiners 4 years ago, 8 years, 20 years ago if GA's laws were so restrictive. This is such nonsense.Greg ElsdenI say keep going, Garland. Your party is known for epic fails (eg Russian Delusion and two impeachments).Steven SThe chances of DoJ voluntarily dismissing its lawsuit against Georgia's more-lax-and-liberal-than-Delaware's voting regulations are somewhere between slim and none.David AlanAnd Slim has left town.
Litigation of this kind takes years to wind its way through the lower courts and to reach SCOTUS. By then, the Supreme Court could be packed with Justices of the same mindset as the dissenters in Brnovich.
Only the "Jim Crow" Filibuster stands in the way of court packing.
Another reminder that we dodged a bullet by not sending Merrick Garland through to SCOTUS.Robert Bridges
Amen to that. He isn't a moderate after all...Jim Walsh
Democrats need the issue so that they can continue to use minorities, who they truly think are too stupid to vote. It is insulting and stupid,James StockGarland is really just a bureaucrat with a law degree. Deep down, he doesn't believe is this ridiculous lawsuit. He made a deal with the devil by working for an incompetent president.
Jul 03, 2021 | www.wsj.com
... ... ...
In their book "Critical Race Theory: An Introduction," Mr. Delgado and Jean Stefancic list several of its core premises, including the view that "racism is ordinary, not aberrational," and that it "serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group," that is, for white people. In recent years, these ideas have entered the mainstream thanks to the advocacy of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was catalyzed by several high-profile cases of police violence against Black people, as well as the New York Times's 1619 Project and bestselling books like Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" and Ibram X. Kendi's "How to Be an Antiracist." Critical race theory also informs instruction at some schools and other institutions.
...Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than from the theorists themselves. That may be inevitable, since their writing was mostly aimed at other scholars. But at least one major work is more accessible: "Faces at the Bottom of the Well," the 1992 book by Derrick Bell, who is often described as the founder or godfather of critical race theory.
Bell died in 2011, but the response to his work foreshadows today's controversies. In "Faces," he blends the genres of fiction and essay to communicate his powerfully pessimistic sense of "the permanence of racism" -- the book's subtitle. Bell's thought has been an important influence on some of today's most influential writers on race, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander.
Derrick Bell was born in Pittsburgh in 1930, and after serving in the Air Force he went to work as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Eisenhower Justice Department. He left the job in 1959 after being told that he had to resign his membership in the NAACP to avoid compromising his objectivity. That experience reflects a major theme in Bell's work: Can traditional legal standards of objectivity and neutrality lead to justice for Black Americans, or does fighting racism require a more politically engaged, results-oriented approach to the law?
In 1971, Bell became the first Black professor to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. As he writes in "Faces," "When I agreed to become Harvard's first black faculty member I did so on the express commitment that I was to be the first, but not the last, black hired. I was to be the pioneer, the trailblazer." But the school was slow to hire more Black faculty, leading Bell to leave in protest in 1990. He ended up spending the last part of his career at NYU Law School.
... ... ...
The political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., whose work focuses on race and inequality, wrote about a conference he attended at Harvard Law School in 1991, where "I heard the late, esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress since 1865. I was startled not least because Bell's own life, as well as the fact that Harvard's black law students' organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his claim." Mr. Reed dismissed the idea as "more a jeremiad than an analysis."
In the conclusion to "Faces," Bell argues that the struggle for racial equality is worthwhile even though it will never succeed. Like the French existentialist Albert Camus, who saw Sisyphus's eternal effort to roll a boulder uphill as a symbol of human endurance in an absurd world, Bell demands "recognition of the futility of action" while insisting "that action must be taken."
To the journalist and historian James Traub, who profiled Bell for the New Republic magazine in 1993, this amounted to a recipe for paralysis: "If you convince whites that their racism is ineradicable, what are they supposed to do? And what are blacks to do with their hard-won victim status?"
... ... ...
These experiences inform "Faces at the Bottom of the Well," which is made up of nine fables, some with a science-fiction twist. In one story, a new continent emerges in the Atlantic Ocean, with an atmosphere that only African-Americans can breathe. In another, the U.S. institutes a system where whites can pay for permission to discriminate against Blacks -- a kind of cap-and-trade scheme for bigotry.
Jun 26, 2021 | www.wsj.com
A self-made multimillionaire who founded a biotech company at 28, Vivek Ramaswamy is every inch the precocious overachiever. He tells me he attended law school while he was in sixth grade. He's joking, in his own earnest manner. His father, an aircraft engineer at General Electric, had decided to get a law degree at night school. Vivek sat in on the classes with him, so he could keep his dad company on the long car rides to campus and back -- a very Indian filial act.
"I was probably the only person my age who'd heard of Antonin Scalia, " Mr. Ramaswamy, 35, says in a Zoom call from his home in West Chester, Ohio. His father, a political liberal, would often rage on the way home from class about "some Scalia opinion." Mr. Ramaswamy reckons that this was when he began to form his own political ideas. A libertarian in high school, he switched to being conservative at Harvard in "an act of rebellion" against the politics he found there. That conservatism drove him to step down in January as CEO at Roivant Sciences -- the drug-development company that made him rich -- and write "Woke, Inc," a book that takes a scathing look at "corporate America's social-justice scam." (It will be published in August.)
Mr. Ramaswamy recently watched the movie "Spotlight," which tells the story of how reporters at the Boston Globe exposed misconduct (specifically, sexual abuse) by Catholic priests in the early 2000s. "My goal in 'Woke, Inc.' is to do the same thing with respect to the Church of Wokeism." He defines "wokeism" as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the "moral vacuum" created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and "the identity we derived from hard work." He argues that notions like "diversity," "equity," "inclusion" and "sustainability" have come to take their place.
"Our collective moral insecurities," Mr. Ramaswamy says, "have left us vulnerable" to the blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a cynical "arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other." Each side is getting out of the "trade" something it "could not have gotten alone."
Wokeness entered its union with capitalism in the years following the 2008 financial panic and recession. Mr. Ramaswamy believes that conditions were perfect for the match. "We were -- and are -- in the midst of the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history," he says. Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president. By the end of the crisis, Americans "were actually pretty jaded with respect to capitalism. Corporations were the bad guys. The old left wanted to take money from corporations and give it to poor people."
The birth of wokeism was a godsend to corporations, Mr. Ramaswamy says. It helped defang the left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of the big banks. They thought, 'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion, appointed token female and minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change." So, in Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials, birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption." Now, in Mr. Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing itself."
Mr. Ramaswamy regards Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as the "patron saint of wokeism" for his relentless propagation of "stakeholder capitalism" -- the view that the unspoken bargain in the grant to corporations of limited liability is that they "must do social good on the side."
Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock , are "its archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of Salesforce , John Donahoe of Nike and Alan Jope of Unilever -- are its "cardinals."
Mr. Ramaswamy says that "unlike the investigative 'Spotlight' team at the Boston Globe, I'm a whistleblower, not a journalist. But the church analogy holds strong." He paraphrases a line in the movie: "It takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a village to abuse one. In the case of my book, the child I'm concerned about is American democracy."
In league with the woke left, corporate America "uses force" as a substitute for open deliberation and debate, Mr. Ramaswamy says. "There's the sustainability accounting standards board of BlackRock, which effectively demands that in order to win an investment from BlackRock, the largest asset-manager in the world, you must abide by the standards of that board."
Was the board put in place by the owners of the trillions of dollars of capital that Mr. Fink manages? Of course not, Mr. Ramaswamy says. "And yet he's actually using his seat of corporate power to sidestep debate about questions like environmentalism or diversity on boards."
The irrepressible Mr. Ramaswamy presses on with another example. Goldman Sachs , he says with obvious relish, "is a very Davos-fitting example." At the 2020 World Economic Forum, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon "issued an edict from the mountaintops of Davos." Mr. Solomon announced his company would refuse to take a company public if its board wasn't sufficiently diverse. "So Goldman gets to define what counts as 'diverse,' " Mr. Ramaswamy says. "No doubt, they're referring to skin-deep, genetically inherited attributes."
He describes this sort of corporate imposition -- "a market force supplanting open political debate to settle the essence of political questions" -- as one of the "defining challenges" America faces today. "If democracy means anything," he adds, "it means living in a one-person-one-vote system, not a one-dollar-one-vote system." Voters' voices "are unadjusted by the number of dollars we wield in the marketplace." Open debate in the public square is "our uniquely American mechanism" of settling political questions. He likens the woke-corporate silencing of debate as akin to the "old-world European model, where a small group of elites gets in a room and decides what's good for everyone else."
The wokeism-capitalism embrace, Mr. Ramaswamy says, was replicated in Silicon Valley. Over the past few years, "Big Tech effectively agreed to censor -- or 'moderate' -- content that the woke movement didn't like. But they didn't do it for free." In return, the left "agreed to look the other way when it comes to leaving Silicon Valley's monopoly power intact." This arrangement is "working out masterfully" for both sides.
The rest of corporate America appears to be following suit. "There's a Big Pharma version, too," Mr. Ramaswamy says. "Big Pharma had an epiphany in dealing with the left." It couldn't beat them, so it joined them. "Rather than win the debate on drug pricing, they decided to just change the subject instead. Who needs to win a debate if you can just avoid having it?" So we see "big-time pharma CEOs musing about topics like racial justice and environmentalism, and writing multibillion-dollar checks to fight climate change, while taking price hikes that they'd previously paused when the public was angry about drug pricing."
Coca-Cola follows the same playbook, he says: "It's easier for them to issue statements about voting laws in Georgia, or to train their employees on how to 'be less white,' than it is to publicly reckon with its role in fueling a nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity -- including in the black communities they profess to care about so much." (In a statement, Coca-Cola apologized for the "be less white" admonition and said that while it was "accessible through our company training platform," it "was not a part of our training curriculum.")
Nike finds it much easier to write checks to Black Lives Matter and condemn America's history of slavery, Mr. Ramaswamy says, even as it relies on "slave labor" today to sell "$250 sneakers to black kids in the inner city who can't afford to buy books for school." All the while, Black Lives Matter "neuters the police in a way that sacrifices even more black lives." (Nike has said in a statement that its code of conduct prohibits any use of forced labor and "we have been engaging with multi-stakeholder working groups to assess collective solutions that will help preserve the integrity of our global supply chains.")
... ... ...
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute.
Rod Drake 53 minutes ago
Seems to me in a nutshell he is saying that these woke corporations are all hypocrites. No surprise there hypocrisy is a defining characteristic of the woke left and you need to assume that characteristic yourself to be able to work within their bounds.Terry Overbey 1 hour agoIn addition, I have been saying for some time discrimination based on political belief desperately needs to be included as a prohibited basis. Where are the Republicans, while the greatest civil rights violation of our time is going on right under their noses?
I love reading stories about people who are willing to take on the woke political class. For most people, even if they strongly disagree, their only option is to bite their tongue and go along. People aren't stupid. If you buck the system, you don't get promoted, you don't get good grades, you don't get into elite schools, you don't get the government job.James Ransom 1 hour agoThank you Mr Ramaswany.
Well. If nothing else, he just sold me a book. I think we should say that "Wokeism" tries to "Act Like" a religion, not that it is one. Because of this fakery, we do not need to give it "freedom" in the sense that we have "Freedom of Religion."marc goodman 1 hour ago
These misguided Americans perhaps need to be exposed to a real religion. Christianity and Buddhism would be good choices; I don't know about Hinduism, but my point is that "Wokeism" is more like a mental disorder. We should feel sorry for its victims, offer them treatment, but not let them run anything.Wokeists argue that theirs is not a religion because it doesn't center on a transcendent being. I see Wokeism as a religion that gathers multiple Secularist sects into a big tent. These sects include Environmentalism, Genderism, Anti-Racism, and more.Grodney Ross 2 hours ago (Edited)One thing all religions share in common is the elevation of questionable premises to unassailable truths which they defend with religious zeal. Some questionable premises elevated to unassailable truths by Wokeism are that humans are making the Earth uninhabitable, gender is an individual choice, and race is the most important human characteristic. There are more.
Humans need to believe in something greater than themselves. We fulfill this need with religion, and historically, the "greater something" has been a transcendent being. Wokeism fulfills this need for its adherents but without a transcendent being. Ultimately, Wokeism will fail as a religion because it can't nourish the soul like the belief in a transcendent being does.
Judgement will be passed in November of 2022. I don't see this as a Democrat vs Republican issue. I think it's a matter of who is paying attention vs. those who are not. We live in a society where, generally, the most strident voices are on the left, along with the most judgmental voices. When the "wokeless" engage in a manner that conflicts with views of the woke, they are attacked, be you from the left or the right, so you keep your mouth shut and go about your day.Barbara Helton 2 hours ago (Edited)I believe that this coming election will give voice to those who are fatigued and fed up with the progressive lefts venom and vitriol. If not, we will survive, but without a meaningful first amendment,14th amendment, or 2nd amendment.
Being woke, when practiced by the wealthy and influential, can be extremely similar to bullying.
Jun 26, 2021 | www.wsj.com
Johnson & Johnson has agreed to pay $230 million to the state of New York to resolve an opioid lawsuit slated to go to trial Tuesday, as negotiations intensify with the company and three drug distributors to clinch a $26 billion settlement of thousands of other lawsuits blaming the pharmaceutical industry for the opioid crisis.
Johnson & Johnson's New York deal removes it from a coming trial on Long Island but not from the rest of the cases it faces nationwide, including a continuing trial in California. The New York settlement includes an additional $33 million in attorney fees and costs and calls for the drugmaker to no longer sell opioids nationwide, something Johnson & Johnson said it already stopped doing.
States have been trying to re-create with the opioid litigation what they accomplished with tobacco companies in the 1990s, when $206 billion in settlements flowed into state coffers. More than 3,000 counties, cities and other local governments have also pursued lawsuits over the opioid crisis, complicating talks that have dragged on since late 2019 and that have been slowed down by the Covid-19 pandemic.
... ... ...
Jun 22, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Having been caught delivering some fact-base 'science' that does not jibe with the establishment's message that all kids should be jabbed immediately, The WHO has rapidly 'adjusted' its science-based recommendations for whether children should get vaccinated... or not...Gone is the big headline - "Children should not be vaccinated for the moment."
The new guidance is as follows: (emphasis ours... in case you are confused by their guidance)
Children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults, so unless they are part of a group at higher risk of severe COVID-19, it is less urgent to vaccinate them than older people, those with chronic health conditions and health workers.
More evidence is needed on the use of the different COVID-19 vaccines in children to be able to make general recommendations on vaccinating children against COVID-19.
WHO's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) has concluded that the Pfizer/BionTech vaccine is suitable for use by people aged 12 years and above. Children aged between 12 and 15 who are at high risk may be offered this vaccine alongside other priority groups for vaccination.
Vaccine trials for children are ongoing and WHO will update its recommendations when the evidence or epidemiological situation warrants a change in policy.
So to clarify... children aren't really at risk of this virus so no hurry on the jab... more evidence is needed on its usefulness in kids... oh but the Pfizer vax is suitable?
So is there evidence or not? Is the vaccine worthwhile for kids? If you have to ask, you aren't following the science.
Here's the new page ( source )
h/t @AlexBerenson
Color us not entirely surprised at this farce... but one thing we are sure of, this will simply be dismissed as a coincidence and WHO had planned on adjusting its guidance the whole time (it was just waiting to get caught in a disagreement with Fauci and friends).
* * *
As The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity's Adam Dick noted yesterday, in America, national, state, and local governments are pulling out all the stops to advance giving experimental coronavirus shots to children down to the age of 12.
Up next, babies and children up to age 11.
The shots are "safe and effective," the propagandists proclaim.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) has a different approach. The WHO says do not vaccinate children, at least not yet.
At its website, the WHO offers this advice regarding giving experimental coronavirus vaccines, some of which are not even vaccines under the normal meaning of the term, to children:
Children should not be vaccinated for the moment. There is not yet enough evidence on the use of vaccines against COVID-19 in children to make recommendations for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults.
However, children should continue to have the recommended childhood vaccines.
Choose accordingly.
Kugelhagel 18 hours agoRide_the_kali_yuga 17 hours agoConspiracy theorist = heretic ... they couldn't use that word anymore, because everyone would understand that this is about silencing the truth.
JimmyJones 17 hours ago remove linkNice analogy.
Alice-the-dog 13 hours agoYep, women with their periods messed up, their babies allergic to their breast milk, young people with heart inflammation, people having partial paralyzed limbs. I know there's more.
We don't even know what 6-12 months has in-store or 1-2 years.
WarrenLiz 15 hours agoI'm always on the look out for new conspiracy theories, because my old ones all turned out to be accurate.
It was a brilliant psyop by the CIA to invent the term to cover up the murder of JFK. But if one takes a cursory look at it, how is a conspiracy ever to be exposed without a theory that there is one? If every time someone proposes a theory regarding this or that possible conspiracy, they are swept into the kook dust bin, how will any conspiracy ever be exposed? Hence they aren't, unless iron clad evidence of their existence is encompassed by the theory.
skizex 13 hours ago remove linkOver 15,472 dead from Jab in 27 EU countries, about half of Europe's 50 countries.
The EudraVigilance database reports that through June 19, 2021 there are 15,472 deaths and 1,509,266 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots:
- COVID-19 MRNA VACCINE MODERNA (CX-024414)
- COVID-19 MRNA VACCINE PFIZER-BIONTECH
- COVID-19 VACCINE ASTRAZENECA (CHADOX1 NCOV-19)
- COVID-19 VACCINE JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S )
From the total of injuries recorded, half of them (753,657) are serious injuries.
ALL UNNECESSARY...
Nona Yobiznes 17 hours ago (Edited)and this on KOMO this morning:
Ride_the_kali_yuga 17 hours ago (Edited) remove link...Too many people are stuck in normalcy bias and are too trusting of the modern elite class. You don't have to look back very far to see the unspeakable atrocities powerful people are willing and able to commit.
The_Dude 16 hours agoMy guess was depopulation due to lower EROIE on petroleum. Deathcross of the fossil energy (oil) available was near to us, maybe we already are behind peak oil. Eolians, solar panels and EV are an energical leftist joke and will never be an alternative to nuclear/ charchoal power plants and thermic motors.
I was thinking about it for quite some time. Why all this Covidian Cult was necessary for? What does it produce? Lockdowns was a main response worldwide.
Was it usefull? absolutely not. No more planes in the sky, economic slowdown, a lot less of enegy used . I guess this sanitary madness was all about cheap energy we can get from oil. The human population exploded due to the industrial revolution, the machines, their capacities and -in fine- oil made it possible. If you do not have enough cheap oil and the EROIE is way to high, then the industrial technology we live in can no longer be.
The Covidian Cult produced what an energy crisis would have made...
Rose Marie PREMIUM 15 hours agoEvil is narcissism run amok...
uncle_duke 18 hours ago remove linkIntelligence without wisdom. Always looking at what, how, when, where, but no interest in asking why. Running thought processes without examining the meaning.
DAVOS-19 14 hours agoAn age of unlimited information, and a population too dumb and lazy to do anything with it. Reality has become Pythonian.
Now Voyager 14 hours agoNot so fast. Remember, they lie, probably also about history.
Ride_the_kali_yuga 13 hours agoWhat happens when you stop natural selection and substitute unnatural selection.
Yeah, the gene pool is over crowded with genetics defects. See diabetics, i mean "genetical" ones since a young age. Insuline was a great discovery, it saves a lot of people at some point. Then without the natural selection they had kids of their own and has a consequence they spread their genetic defect in the gene pool. Sometimes great inventions make unintended results.
Diseases are a way for nature to get rid of the olders and the weak. It is not moral, there is no justice in this, this is just the way nature works. Human tried damn hard to break nature's law, the thing is, there is consequences playing god.
Jun 25, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
There's a growing cottage industry at the nexus of consumer research and government surveillance.
In a report published Friday, the Wall Street Journal explored the world of Premise Data Corp., an innocently-named firm that uses a network of users, many in the developing world, who complete basic tasks for small commissions. Assignments can range from snapping photos of competitors' stores, to counting the number of ATMs in a given area, to reporting on the price of consumer goods on the shelf.
Roughly half of the firm's clients are private businesses seeking "commercial information" (mostly reporting on competitors' operations), both the US government and foreign governments have hired the firm to do more advanced reconnaissance work while gauging public opinion.
According to WSJ , Premise is one of a growing number of companies that are straddling "the divide between consumer services and government surveillance and rely on the proliferation of mobile phones as a way to turn billions of devices into sensors that gather open-source information useful to government security services."
Premise's CEO even hinted that the company had been tapped by foreign governments to help with setting policy about how to deal with "vaccine hesitancy".
"Data gained from our contributors helped inform government policy makers on how to best deal with vaccine hesitancy, susceptibility to foreign interference and misinformation in elections, as well as the location and nature of gang activity in Honduras," Premise Chief Executive Officer Maury Blackman said. The company declined to name its clients, citing confidentiality.
Premise launched in 2013 as a tool meant to gather data for use in international development work by governments and non-governmental organizations. In recent years, it has also forged ties to the American national-security establishment and highlighted its capability to serve as a surveillance tool, according to documents and interviews with former employees. As of 2019, the company's marketing materials said it has 600K contributors operating in 43 countries, including global hot spots such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen.
Federal records show Premise has received at least $5MM in payouts from the government since 2017 on military projects -- including from contracts with the Air Force and the Army and as a subcontractor to other defense entities. The company's key utility was, again, gathering information: It would use civilian users in Afghanistan and elsewhere to map out "key social structures such as mosques, banks and internet cafes; and covertly monitoring cell-tower and Wi-Fi signals in a 100-square kilometer area."
In a presentation prepared last year for the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Aghanistan, Premise shared some details about its global operation which showed that it's mostly active outside the US.
It also showed how its "users" stationed around Kabul helped it collect data that are valuable to the US and Afghan military.
As the WSJ explained, data from Wi-Fi networks, cell towers and mobile devices could be valuable to the military for "situational awareness, target tracking and other intelligence purposes."
There is also tracking potential in having a distributed network of phones acting as sensors, and knowing the signal strength of nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points can be useful when trying to jam communications during military operations.
Users of Premise's data-collection app typically aren't told for whom they are truly working. This is all laid out in its privacy policy, of course. The app currently assigns about five "tasks" per day to its active users in Afghanistan.
When WSJ caught up with Afghani users of the app, they were told that the users were typically paid about 25 cents per task (about 20 Afghani). And that lately, some of the tasks had struck him as "potentially concerning." Premises claims that none of its users have ever been harmed while completing tasks.
In this way, many of the app's users are effectively being used as unwitting spies for the military.
But it's just one more thing to look out for. Next time you're traveling abroad and you see somebody taking a photo of a mosque or a bank, just remember, it might be part of an officially sanctioned intelligence operation.
Jun 22, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
In the later years of an abusive relationship I was in, my abuser had become so confident in how mentally caged he had me that he'd start overtly telling me what he is and what he was doing. He flat-out told me he was a sociopath and a manipulator, trusting that I was so submitted to his will by that point that I'd gaslight myself into reframing those statements in a sympathetic light. Toward the end one time he told me "I am going to rape you," and then he did, and then he talked about it to some friends trusting that I'd run perception management on it for him.
The better he got at psychologically twisting me up in knots and the more submitted I became, the more open he'd be about it. He seemed to enjoy doing this, taking a kind of exhibitionistic delight in showing off his accomplishments at crushing me as a person, both to others and to me. Like it was his art, and he wanted it to have an audience to appreciate it.
Close 168.1K Pfizer CEO on mRNA Vaccine Creation, R&D, Drug CostsI was reminded of this while watching a recent Fox News appearance by Glenn Greenwald where he made an observation we've discussed here previously about the way the CIA used to have to infiltrate the media, but now just openly has US intelligence veterans in mainstream media punditry positions managing public perception.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/jU58mrEpPvU
"If you go and Google, and I hope your viewers do, Operation Mockingbird, what you will find is that during the Cold War these agencies used to plot how to clandestinely manipulate the news media to disseminate propaganda to the American population," Greenwald said .
"They used to try to do it secretly. They don't even do it secretly anymore. They don't need Operation Mockingbird. They literally put John Brennan who works for NBC and James Clapper who works for CNN and tons of FBI agents right on the payroll of these news organizations. They now shape the news openly to manipulate and to deceive the American population."
In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled " The CIA and the Media " reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America's most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird . It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media are meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.
Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and the public is too brainwashed and gaslit to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits . The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor , and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC's Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.
They're just rubbing it in our faces now. Like they're showing off.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=879036821954539520&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fso-much-what-cia-used-do-covertly-it-now-does-overtly&sessionId=f90acd7ceb3bc7675f43696376e59f5ebdc79571&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px
And that's just the media. We also see this flaunting behavior exhibited in the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a propaganda operation geared at sabotaging foreign governments not aligned with the US which according to its own founding officials was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. The late author and commentator William Blum makes this clear :
[I]n 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the "nongovernmental"" part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.
"We should not have to do this kind of work covertly," said Carl Gershman in 1986, while he was president of the Endowment. "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60's, and that's why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that's why the endowment was created."
And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."
In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.
We see NED's fingerprints all over pretty much any situation where the western power alliance needs to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted government, from Russia to Hong Kong to Xinjiang to the imperial propaganda operation known as Bellingcat.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1278456656305643521&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fso-much-what-cia-used-do-covertly-it-now-does-overtly&sessionId=f90acd7ceb3bc7675f43696376e59f5ebdc79571&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px
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Hell, intelligence insiders are just openly running for office now. In an article titled " The CIA Democrats in the 2020 elections ", World Socialist Website documented the many veterans of the US intelligence cartel who ran in elections across America in 2018 and 2020:
"In the course of the 2018 elections, a large group of former military-intelligence operatives entered capitalist politics as candidates seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 50 congressional seats" nearly half the seats where the Democrats were targeting Republican incumbents or open seats created by Republican retirements. Some 30 of these candidates won primary contests and became the Democratic candidates in the November 2018 election, and 11 of them won the general election, more than one quarter of the 40 previously Republican-held seats captured by the Democrats as they took control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, the intervention of the CIA Democrats continues on what is arguably an equally significant scale."
So they're just getting more and more brazen the more confident they feel about how propaganda-addled and submissive the population has become. They're laying more and more of their cards on the table. Soon the CIA will just be openly selling narcotics door to door like Girl Scout cookies.
Or maybe not. I said my ex got more and more overt about his abuses in the later years of our relationship because those were the later years. I did eventually expand my own consciousness of my own inner workings enough to clear the fears and unexamined beliefs I had that he was using as hooks to manipulate me. Maybe, as humanity's consciousness continues to expand , the same will happen for the people and their abusive relationship with the CIA.
* * *
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Jun 22, 2021 | www.wsj.com
The voting measure has inflamed Republicans, who accused Democrats of engaging in demagoguery.
"This bill is brazen," said Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), ticking off a list of provisions in the Democratic bill that he called damaging, including one that would shrink the Federal Election Commission to five from six members, which he said would enable the president to turn the agency into a weapon against political rivals. Mr. Cruz accused Democrats of "deliberately inflaming racial tensions" by attacking policies like requiring voter identification that Republicans say are designed to protect the integrity of the vote.
... ... ...
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.), the sponsor of the Senate bill, a version of which cleared the House in March , told CNN on Monday that there are ways to advance voting legislation that would involve changing the filibuster, which requires three-fifths of the Senate, or currently 60 members, to end debates and vote on most legislation.
"Fifty members getting into a room and deciding how we go forward will be kind of another stage of how we proceed," Mr. Merkley said later on a call with activists.
The pressure-cooker environment in which the debate lands was highlighted by nascent campaigns inside and outside the Capitol. Republicans are calling attention to a provision in the Democrats' bill that would allow signatures in lieu of voter identification cards, saying such a policy could be abused and would weaken trust in the validity of elections. A Monmouth University poll released Monday found that 80% of Americans support requiring voters to show photo identification to cast ballots.
Meanwhile, the progressive group Just Democracy is running ads aimed at Ms. Sinema, suggesting that she is weak on voting policy because she hasn't come out in support of ending the filibuster to make voting legislation possible.
Ms. Sinema is up for re-election in 2024. Her state is currently roiled by an audit of votes cast in 2020 in Maricopa County, which Mr. Biden won, and is defending some of its voting rules at the Supreme Court.
MMichael Quick
Ending the filibuster may get Democrats everything that the want for another 18 months. But they will not be able to keep the legislation that they have passed.As soon as control of both chambers and the White House passes to the other party, they very quickly will repeal each and every bit of legislation that had been passed by the Democrats.
At that point, Republicans will be able to pass absolutely everything that they want, probably for 18 months.
By ending the filibuster we will get national laws that change with every change of administration.
Aren't we better off, keeping the filibuster, so that nothing is ever accomplished by either party? Deadlock.
Deadlock pleases politicians and the primary voters in their party, but it frustrates the 80% of Americans who are moderates. They want Congress to act to deal with the country's problems. But deadlock it will be.
Jun 23, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by James Bovard via The Future of Freedom Foundation,
"The Trump""Deep State clash is a showdown between a presidency that is far too powerful versus federal agencies that have become fiefdoms with immunity for almost any and all abuses," I wrote in an FFF article a year ago.
Since then, Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by fewer than 50,000 votes in a handful of swing states that determined the Electoral College result. There were numerous issues that could drive that relatively small number of votes. But machinations by the Deep State probably cost Trump far more votes than it took to seal his loss.
... ... ...
The first three years of Trump's presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he had colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. The FBI launched its investigation on the basis of ludicrous allegations from a dossier financed by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. FBI officials deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign. A FISA warrant is the nuclear bomb of searches, authorizing the FBI "to conduct simultaneous telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the U.S. person target's home, workplace and vehicles," as well as "physical searches of the target's residence, office, vehicles, computer, safe deposit box and U.S. mails," as a FISA court decision noted. The FISA court is extremely deferential, approving 99 percent of all search warrant requests.
Leaks from federal officials spurred media hysteria that put Trump on the defensive even before he took his oath of office in January 2017. A 2018 Inspector General (IG) report revealed that one FBI agent labeled Trump supporters as "retarded" and declared, "I'm with her" (Clinton). Another FBI employee texted that "Trump's supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS." One FBI lawyer texted that he was "devastated" by Trump's election and declared, "Viva la Resistance!" and "I never really liked the Republic anyway." The same person became the "primary FBI attorney assigned to [the Russian election-interference] investigation beginning in early 2017," the IG noted.
FBI chief James Comey leaked official memos to friendly reporters, thereby spurring the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Trump. A 2019 Inspector General report noted that top FBI officials told the IG that they were "shocked," "stunned," and "surprised' that Comey would leak the contents of one of the memos to a reporter. The IG concluded, "The unauthorized disclosure of this information" information that Comey knew only by virtue of his position as FBI Director" violated the terms of his FBI Employment Agreement and the FBI's Prepublication Review Policy." The IG concluded that by using sensitive information "to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees" and the many thousands more former FBI employees" who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information." The IG report warned that "the civil liberties of every individual who may fall within the scope of the FBI's investigative authorities depend on FBI's ability to protect sensitive information from unauthorized disclosure."
But the only penalty that Comey suffered was to collect multimillion-dollar advances for his book deals.
The Steele dossierIn December 2019, another Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made "fundamental errors" to justify surveilling the Trump campaign. The FBI refrained from launching a FISA warrant request until it came into possession of a dossier from Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent. The Steele dossier played "a central and essential role in the decision by FBI [Office of General Counsel] to support the request for FISA surveillance targeting Carter Page, as well as the FBI's ultimate decision to seek the FISA order," the IG report concluded. The FBI "drew almost entirely" from the Steele dossier to prove a "well-developed conspiracy" between Russians and the Trump campaign. The IG found that FBI agents were "unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations against Carter Page" in the Steele dossier but the FBI relied on Steele's allegations regardless.
The FBI withheld from the FISA court key details that obliterated the dossier's credibility, including a warning from a top Justice Department official that "Steele may have been hired by someone associated with presidential candidate Clinton or the DNC [Democratic National Committee]." The CIA disdained the Steele dossier as "an internet rumor," one FBI official told IG investigators.
Many if not most of the damning details involving Russiagate have still not been disclosed. But the occasional disclosures are doing nothing to burnish the credibility of the key players. On January 12, 2017, Comey attested to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that the Steele dossier used to hound the Trump campaign had been "verified." But on the same day, he emailed the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, "We are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting." That email was revealed this past February, thanks to a multi-year fight for disclosure by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.
If the FBI's deceit and political biases had been exposed in real time, there would have been far less national outrage when Trump fired Comey. Instead, that firing was quickly followed by the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Russian charges. In April 2019, Mueller admitted there was no evidence of collusion. Conniving by FBI officials and the veil of secrecy that hid their abuses had roiled national politics for years.
Not one FBI official has spent a single day in jail for the abuses. In January, former FBI assistant general counsel Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced after he admitted falsifying key evidence used to secure the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. A federal prosecutor declared that the "resulting harm is immeasurable" from Clinesmith's action. But a federal judge believed that a wrist slap was sufficient punishment" 400 hours of community service and 12 months of probation.
The Deep State defeated Trump in part because the president appointed agency chiefs who were more devoted to secrecy than to truth. Bureaucratic barricades were reinforced by judges who repeatedly defied common sense to perpetuate iron curtains around federal agencies.
SyriaTrump's failure to extract the United States from the Syrian civil war was one of his biggest foreign policy pratfalls. Each time he sought to exit that quagmire, the Washington establishment and Deep State agencies pushed back.
When Trump tried to end CIA assistance to Syrian terrorist groups in July 2017, a Washington Post article portrayed his reversal in apocalyptic terms. Trump responded with an angry tweet: "The Amazon Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad." That disclosure spurred a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the New York Times for CIA records on payments to Syrian rebel groups. The CIA denied the request and the case ended up in court.
CIA officer Antoinette Shiner warned the court that forcing the CIA to admit that it possessed any records of aiding Syrian rebels would "confirm the existence and the focus of sensitive Agency activity that is by definition kept hidden to protect U.S. government policy objectives." Of course, "kept hidden" doesn't apply to the CIA when it was engaged in "not for attribution" bragging to reporters. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius proudly cited an estimate from a "knowledgeable official" that "CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years."
Federal judges, unlike Syrian civilians slaughtered by U.S.-funded terrorist groups, had the luxury of pretending the program didn't exist. In a decision last July, the federal appeals court of the Second Circuit stressed that affidavits from CIA officials are "accorded a presumption of good faith" and stressed "the appropriate deference owed" to the CIA. The judges omitted quoting former CIA chief Mike Pompeo's description of his agency's modus operandi: "We lied, we cheated, we stole. It's like we had entire training courses."
Since Trump's tweet did not specifically state that the program he was seeking to terminate actually existed, the judges entitled the CIA to pretend it was still top secret. The judges concluded with another kowtow, stressing that they were "mindful of the requisite deference courts traditionally owe to the executive in the area of classification." Judge Robert Katzmann dissented, declaring that the court's decision put its "imprimatur to a fiction of deniability that no reasonable person would regard as plausible."
On February 9, another federal appeals court shot down a FOIA request from BuzzFeed journalist Jason Leopold who had sought the same records on the basis of Trump's tweet. But the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia unanimously blocked Leopold's request: "Did President Trump's tweet officially acknowledge the existence of a program? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. And therein lies a problem." The judges proffered no evidence that Trump had tweeted about a program that didn't exist. The judges reached into an "Alice in Wonderland" bag of legal tricks and plucked out this pretext: "Even if the President's tweet revealed some program, it did not reveal the existence of Agency records about that alleged program." Since Trump failed to specify the exact room number where the records were located at CIA headquarters, the judges entitled the CIA to pretend the records didn't exist.
Only a federal judge could shovel that kind of hokum. Well, also members of Congress and editorial writers, but that's a story for another month.
* * *
In his final months in office, Trump repeatedly promised massive declassification which never came.
Was the president stymied by persons he had unwisely appointed, such as CIA chief Gina Haspel and FBI chief Christopher Wray? Or was that simply another series of empty Twitter eruptions that Trump failed to follow up? Instead, his legacy is another grim reminder of how government secrecy can determine political history.
Have Deep State federal agencies become a Godzilla with the prerogative to undermine elections? Unfortunately, there's no chance that federal judges would permit disclosure of the answer to that question.
Former CIA and NSA boss Michael Hayden proudly proclaimed,
""Espionage is not just compatible with democracy; it's essential for democracy."
And how can we know if the Deep State's espionage is actually pro-democracy or subversive of democracy? Again, don't expect judges to permit any truths to escape on that score.
Secrecy is the ultimate entitlement program for the Deep State. The federal government is creating trillions of pages of new secrets every year. The more documents bureaucrats classify, the more lies politicians and government officials can tell. Federal judge Amy Berman Jackson warned in 2019, "If people don't have the facts, democracy doesn't work."
Actually, it is working very well for the FBI, CIA, and other Deep State agencies.
capsrule 8 minutes agoNo_Pretzel_Logic 16 minutes agoNot much of a clash. Trump had his *** handed to him because he was a moron who handicapped himself by filling his cabinet with horrible people that sabotaged him and his agenda at every turn - including his incompetent son in law and daughter. Not once did he go on offense. He was reduced to pathetic Twitter rantings begging DOJ to "Do something!"
Wise Limit 18 minutes ago (Edited)The USA is a captured nation and has been for quite awhile.
Little is as it seems to be. Good luck...
Wise Limit 11 minutes ago (Edited) remove linkDonald Trump was a jester. A reality TV actor to give the masses the appearance they got what they wanted while they pacified conservatives and spent four years to plan and strategize the next steps in the infiltration, takeover and destruction of the country. Voting is a sham.
... ... ...
No_Pretzel_Logic 12 minutes ago remove linkRemember all those promises from Trump and the GOP if they "just got the majority" in 2016?
1. Dreamers will be gone.
2. Obamacare will be gone.
3. Hillary will be gone.
4. Mexico will pay for the wall.
Politicians are the greatest actors. Politics is done. Time to fight for secession of Southern conservative states.
Wise Limit 5 minutes ago (Edited)It seems that there is merit to what you say but, I cannot square all the overblown attempts to nail him and to impeach him on bogus grounds. Then to try again a second time.
The Dems and Deep Staters (incl media) could have just kept-up the usual partisan fighting, sniping, etc.
Trump was obviously a true threat to many. I'll bet Ric Grenell and John Radcliffe acquired ALOT of valuable info about important people.
Gospel According To Me 6 minutes ago (Edited)This is all that needs to be squared right here. This was after the election, after the "she would be in jail" rhetoric.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEHNF1TsjV8
I got played too. I just didn't figure it out until 2018 when I saw Trump and the GOP lied again, the Democrats took the House and suddenly "Q" appeared to distract the masses from the fact they didn't fulfill any of their promises.
zod 6 minutes agoThe Deep State is a threat to our very existence as a mostly peaceful oligarchy. They will stop at NOTHING to destroy anyone who attempts to stop them. Trump could never defeat them alone and everyone he hired was quickly cotrrupted by those Deep State actors. They became close allies with our own communists and the CCP. These sick individuals probably had a role in the plandemic and were happy to see all the business failures, etc, as a path to keeping power. If Trump wins in 2024 he must get rid of thousands of government SES employees in every agency or they will destroy his presidency again.
Unfortunatley, the best hope to turn things around is complete economic collapse, which is likley. The leftists will continue to buy votes, but when the cities burn it won't be enough. Trump's team better understand it takes money to fight the globalists and a real dirty campaign like the Dems run. No holds barred...tell Americans what a s***hole the leftists have made America into. Wide open borders with millions pouring across and jobs drying up. Rampant crime and soaring inflation.
Allow legal voters only with ID! It will work! Pray for a leader to get us out of this perverse woke mess.
2pac 12 minutes agotrump was the most entertaining, in a long line of the same, 'illusion of choice' we've always had.
Don't worry - Durham investigation should be done any day now.
Jun 23, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,
Late Stage Globalism Is A Tale of Narratives vs NetworksOver the past few weeks in my weekly #AxisOfEasy newsletter I've been covering how Big Tech and the corporate media tried, unsuccessfully, to keep a lid on the Wuhan Lab origin narrative. At one point I half-joked "I'll shut up about this when it's safe to talk about Ivermectin" . This week, I did end up writing a piece about Ivermectin, namely how doctors can't even mention it in their videos or podcast appearances without being penalized by social media platforms.
Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist who has studied bats (from which COVID-19 purportedly originated) was recently on Triggernometry , the UK based podcast that my company, easyDNS , has been sponsoring since mid-2020. It turns out that neither Weinstein nor Triggernometry can say the word "Ivermectin" in their shows. If they do they'll get an automatic takedown by YouTube and a strike on Facebook for violating community standards.
Matt Taibbi recently posed the question " Why has "˜Ivermectin' become a dirty word? " He cites Dr. Pierre Kory in his testimony to a US Senate Committee hearing on medical responses to COVID-19 in December 2020. Kory was referring to an existing medicine that was already FDA approved that he was describing as a "wonder drug" in treating COVID-19, that drug was Ivermectin.
This Senate testimony was televised and viewed by approximately 8 million people. YouTube removed the video of this exchange. They later suspended the account of the United States senator who invited Dr. Kory to speak. (Kory also appeared on Brett Weinstein's show and they took down that as well).
Associated Press for their part "fact checked" the senate testimony, and because, in their words "there is no evidence that Ivermectin is a "˜miracle drug' against COVID", they labeled it as false:
CLAIM: The antiparasitic drug ivermectin "has a miraculous effectiveness that obliterates" the transmission of COVID-19 and will prevent people from getting sick.
AP'S ASSESSMENT: False. There's no evidence ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.
... ... ...
But I'm looking beyond that, outside of network TV. The hottest news outlets are fast becoming independent journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald , self-publishing via their Substack. That's mainly email.
Joe Rogan has a larger audience than Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon combined. So too does Steve Bannon, btw. The few times I've been on his Warroom I was astounded at the reach of his audience. According to company sources he's doing between 2.5 and 3.5 million downloads per day. The last people I would ever expect to be tuning into Bannon are telling me "I saw you on Warroom". (It's mind-blowing).
Zerohedge has more traffic than Huffington Post, Vox, Vice, The Atlantic and pretty well any of the other bluecheck day camps for aspiring establishment shills.
It's because of independent, renegade journalists and people writing outside of major outlets that these stories are starting go mainstream despite the best efforts of Big Tech, enforcing whatever canon the corporate press deems to be truth, or the establishment anointed "fact checkers" who try to step in whenever something looks to gain traction:
The Wuhan lab origin was suspected for over a year (and the Fauci emails prove it). Zerohedge was on it almost immediately and got deplatformed for their troubles. It was finally pushed over the line in a Medium post by Nicholas Wade over a year later.
Ivermectin may be next round and it looks like if it gets anywhere it will be thanks to people like Matt Taibbi and Bret Weinstein.
What is the common thread here? It's the power of decentralized networks and open source protocols vs narrative control that is promulgated from global governments, amplified by the corporate media, and enforced by technocratic platforms.
... ... ...
It may seem like the censorship is absolute and that the narrative and the spin is overwhelming. But take solace that it only appears that way because the facade is breaking.
As more people realize that the centralized technocratic system is failing, those who's privilege and position are premised on it have to double down, triple down. They have to burn the boats.
They're fully committed now and because they have no other choice they have to overstep and overreach. Too much, too soon. Too late.
Jun 24, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
One Nation Under Greed: The Profit Incentives Driving The American Police State BY TYLER DURDEN THURSDAY, JUN 24, 2021 - 12:00 AM
Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
- Frédéric Bastiat, French economist
If there is an absolute maxim by which the American government seems to operate, it is that the taxpayer always gets ripped off.
Closehttps://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.468.0_en.html#goog_1162627933 John McAfee dies by suicide in Spanish prison
Not only are Americans forced to " spend more on state, municipal, and federal taxes than the annual financial burdens of food, clothing, and housing combined ," but we're also being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government.
With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.
Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we're getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.
The overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us: warrantless surveillance of Americans' private phone and email conversations by the FBI, NSA, etc.; SWAT team raids of Americans' homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans' private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.
Meanwhile, the three branches of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) and the agencies under their command -- Defense, Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, etc. -- have switched their allegiance to the Corporate State with its unassailable pursuit of profit at all costs and by any means possible.
By the time you factor in the financial blowback from the COVID-19 pandemic with its politicized mandates, lockdowns, and payouts, it becomes quickly apparent that we are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.
As with most things, if you want to know the real motives behind any government program, follow the money trail.
When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American police state.
Examples of this legalized, profits-over-people, government-sanctioned extortion abound.
On the roads : Not satisfied with merely padding their budgets by issuing speeding tickets, police departments have turned to asset forfeiture and red light camera schemes as a means of growing their profits. Despite revelations of corruption, collusion and fraud, these money-making scams have been being inflicted on unsuspecting drivers by revenue-hungry municipalities. Now legislators are hoping to get in on the profit sharing by imposing a vehicle miles-traveled tax , which would charge drivers for each mile behind the wheel.
In the prisons : States now have quotas to meet for how many Americans go to jail. Increasing numbers of states have contracted to keep their prisons at 90% to 100% capacity . This profit-driven form of mass punishment has, in turn, given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep the money flowing and their privately run prisons full , " regardless of whether crime was rising or falling ." As Mother Jones reports, "private prison companies have supported and helped write laws that drive up prison populations . Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there." Private prisons are also doling out harsher punishments for infractions by inmates in order to keep them locked up longer in order to "boost profits" at taxpayer expense . All the while, prisoners are being forced to provide cheap labor for private corporations . No wonder the United States has the largest prison population in the world .
In the schools: The security industrial complex with its tracking, spying, and identification devices has set its sights on the schools as " a vast, rich market " -- a $20 billion market, no less -- just waiting to be conquered. In fact, the public schools have become a microcosm of the total surveillance state which currently dominates America, adopting a host of surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, to keep constant watch over their student bodies. Likewise, the military industrial complex with its military weapons, metal detectors, and weapons of compliance such as tasers has succeeded in transforming the schools -- at great taxpayer expense and personal profit -- into quasi-prisons. Rounding things out are school truancy laws , which come disguised as well-meaning attempts to resolve attendance issues in the schools but in truth are nothing less than stealth maneuvers aimed at enriching school districts and court systems alike through excessive fines and jail sentences for "unauthorized" absences. Curiously, none of these efforts seem to have succeeded in making the schools any safer.
In the endless wars abroad : Fueled by the profit-driven military industrial complex, the government's endless wars are wreaking havoc on our communities, our budget and our police forces. Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America's expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour . Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053 . Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn't have on a military empire it can't afford. War spending is bankrupting America.
In the form of militarized police : The Department of Homeland Security routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, " paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams ." The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war -- and the citizenry are the enemy combatants. Over 80,000 SWAT team raids are conducted on American homes and businesses each year. Moreover, government-funded military-style training drills continue to take place in cities across the country.
In profit-driven schemes such as asset forfeiture : Under the guise of fighting the war on drugs, government agents (usually the police) have been given broad leeway to seize billions of dollars' worth of private property (money, cars, TVs, etc.) they "suspect" may be connected to criminal activity. Then -- and here's the kicker -- whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen's property, often divvying it up with the local police who did the initial seizure. The police are actually being trained in seminars on how to seize the "goodies" that are on police departments' wish lists. According to the New York Times, seized monies have been used by police to "pay for sports tickets, office parties, a home security system and a $90,000 sports car."
Among government contractors: We have been saddled with a government that is outsourcing much of its work to high-paid contractors at great expense to the taxpayer and with no competition, little transparency and dubious savings. According to the Washington Post , "By some estimates, there are twice as many people doing government work under contract than there are government workers ." These open-ended contracts, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, "now account for anywhere between one quarter and one half of all federal service contracting." Moreover, any attempt to reform the system is " bitterly opposed by federal employee unions , who take it as their mission to prevent good employees from being rewarded and bad employees from being fired."
By the security industrial complex : We're being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. In the so-called name of "precrime," this government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government's choosing. This far-reaching surveillance, carried out with the complicity of the Corporate State, has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government -- the Surveillance State -- that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum. That doesn't even touch on the government's bold forays into biometric surveillance as a means of identifying and tracking the American people from birth to death.
By a government addicted to power: It's a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry's inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state's hands. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., "we the people" may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.
These injustices, petty tyrannies and overt acts of hostility are being carried out in the name of the national good -- against the interests of individuals, society and ultimately our freedoms -- by an elite class of government officials working in partnership with megacorporations that are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.
This perverse mixture of government authoritarianism and corporate profits has increased the reach of the state into our private lives while also adding a profit motive into the mix. And, as always, it's we the people, we the taxpayers, we the gullible voters who keep getting taken for a ride by politicians eager to promise us the world on a plate.
This is a far cry from how a representative government is supposed to operate.
Indeed, it has been a long time since we could claim to be the masters of our own lives. Rather, we are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few
Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us, in the form of militarized police, surveillance cameras, private prisons, license plate readers, drones, and cell phone tracking technology.
All of those nefarious deeds by government officials that you hear about every day: those are your tax dollars at work.
It's your money that allows for government agents to spy on your emails, your phone calls, your text messages, and your movements. It's your money that allows out-of-control police officers to burst into innocent people's homes, or probe and strip search motorists on the side of the road. And it's your money that leads to Americans across the country being prosecuted for innocuous activities such as growing vegetable gardens in their front yards or daring to speak their truth to their elected officials.
Just remember the next time you see a news story that makes your blood boil, whether it's a police officer arresting someone for filming them in public, or a child being kicked out of school for attending a virtual class while playing with a toy gun, remember that it is your tax dollars that are paying for these injustices.
There was a time in our history when our forebears said "enough is enough" and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people.
Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.
Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we've let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we're back where we started.
Once again, we've got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.
Once again, we've got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.
And once again, we've got to decide whether we'll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.
But what if we didn't just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government's outrageous demands for more money?
What if we didn't just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?
What if, instead of quietly sending in our checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , if the government and its emissaries can just take from you what they want, when they want, and then use it however they want, you can't claim to be anything more than a serf in a land they think of as theirs.
This is not freedom, America.
Jun 20, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
...the prerogative to define extremism includes the power to attempt to banish certain ideas from acceptable discourse. The report warns that "narratives of fraud in the recent general election"¦ will almost certainly spur some [Domestic Violent Extremists] to try to engage in violence this year."
If accusations of 2020 electoral shenanigans are formally labeled as extremist threats, that could result in far more repression (aided by Facebook and Twitter) of dissenting voices.
How will this work out any better than the concerted campaign by the media and Big Tech last fall to suppress all information about Hunter Biden's laptop before the election?
The Biden administration is revving up for a war against an enemy which the feds have chosen to never explicitly define . According to a March report by Biden's Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "domestic violent extremists" include individuals who "take overt steps to violently resist or facilitate the overthrow of the U.S. government in support of their belief that the U.S. government is purposely exceeding its Constitutional authority." But that was the same belief that many Biden voters had regarding the Trump administration. Does the definition of extremism depend solely on which party captured the White House?
The report notes that the "Department of Defense is reviewing and updating its definition of prohibited extremist activities among uniformed military personnel." Bishop Garrison, the chief of the Pentagon's new Countering Extremism Working Group, is Exhibit A for the follies of extremist crackdowns on extremism. In a series of 2019 tweets, Garrison, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, denounced all Trump supporters as "racists." Garrison's working group will "specifically define what constitutes extremist behavior" for American soldiers. If Garrison purges Trump supporters from the military, the Pentagon would be unable to conquer the island of Grenada. Biden policymakers also intend to create an "anti-radicalization" program for individuals departing the military service. This initiative will likely produce plenty of leaks and embarrassing disclosures in the coming months and years.
The Biden report is spooked by the existence of militia groups and flirts with the fantasy of outlawing them across the land. The report promises to explore "how to make better use of laws that already exist in all fifty states prohibiting certain private "˜militia' activity, including"¦state statutes prohibiting groups of people from organizing as private military units without the authorization of the state government, and state statutes that criminalize certain paramilitary activity." Most of the private militia groups are guilty of nothing more than bluster and braggadocio. Besides, many of them are already overstocked with government informants who are counting on Uncle Sam for regular paychecks.
As part of its anti-extremism arsenal, DHS is financing programs for "enhancing media literacy and critical thinking skills" and helping internet users avoid "vulnerability to"¦harmful content deliberately disseminated by malicious actors online." Do the feds have inside information about another Hunter Biden laptop turning up, or what? The Biden administration intends to bolster Americans' defenses against extremism by developing "interactive online resources such as skills-enhancing online games." If the games are as stupefying as this report, nobody will play them.
The Biden report stresses that federal law enforcement agencies "play a critical role in responding to reports of criminal and otherwise concerning activity." "Otherwise concerning activity"? This is the same standard that turned prior anti-terrorist efforts into laughingstocks.
Fusion Centers are not mentioned in the Biden report but they are a federal-state-local law enforcement partnership launched after 9/11 to vacuum up reports of suspicious activity. Seventy Fusion Centers rely on the same standard""" If you see something, say something """that a senior administration official invoked in a background call on Monday for the new Biden initiative. The Los Angeles Police Department encouraged citizens to snitch on "individuals who stay at bus or train stops for extended periods while buses and trains come and go," "individuals who carry on long conversations on pay or cellular telephones," and "joggers who stand and stretch for an inordinate amount of time." The Kentucky Office of Homeland Security recommended the reporting of "people avoiding eye contact," "people in places they don't belong," or homes or apartments that have numerous visitors "arriving and leaving at unusual hours," PBS's Frontline reported. Colorado's Fusion Center "produced a fear-mongering public service announcement asking the public to report innocuous behaviors such as photography, note-taking, drawing and collecting money for charity as "˜warning signs' of terrorism," the ACLU complained.
Various other Fusion Centers have attached warning labels to gun-rights activists, anti-immigration zealots, and individuals and groups "rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority." A 2012 Homeland Security report stated that being "reverent of individual liberty" is one of the traits of potential right-wing terrorists. The Constitution Project concluded in a 2012 report that DHS Fusion Centers "pose serious risks to civil liberties, including rights of free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion, racial and religious equality, privacy, and the right to be free from unnecessary government intrusion." Fusion Centers continue to be bankrolled by DHS despite their dismal record.
The Biden report promises that the FBI and DHS will soon be releasing "a new edition of the Federal Government's Mobilization Indicators booklet that will include for the first time potential indicators of domestic terrorism""related mobilization." Will this latest publication be as boneheaded as the similar 2014 report by the National Counterterrorism Center entitled "Countering Violent Extremism: A Guide for Practitioners and Analysts"?
As the Intercept summarized , that report "suggests that police, social workers and educators rate individuals on a scale of one to five in categories such as "˜Expressions of Hopelessness, Futility,' "¦ and "˜Connection to Group Identity (Race, Nationality, Religion, Ethnicity)' "¦ to alert government officials to individuals at risk of turning to radical violence, and to families or communities at risk of incubating extremist ideologies." The report recommended judging families by their level of "Parent-Child Bonding" and rating localities on the basis in part of the "presence of ideologues or recruiters." Former FBI agent Mike German commented, "The idea that the federal government would encourage local police, teachers, medical, and social-service employees to rate the communities, individuals, and families they serve for their potential to become terrorists is abhorrent on its face."
The Biden administration presumes that bloating the definition of extremists is the surest way to achieve domestic tranquility. In this area, as in so many others, Biden's team learned nothing from the follies of the Obama administration. No one in D.C. apparently recalls that President Obama perennially denounced extremism and summoned the United Nations in 2014 to join his "campaign against extremism." Under Obama, the National Security Agency presumed that "someone searching the Web for suspicious stuff" was a suspected extremist who forfeited all constitutional rights to privacy. Obama's Transportation Security Administration relied on ludicrous terrorist profiles that targeted American travelers who were yawning, hand wringing, gazing down, swallowing suspiciously, sweating, or making "excessive complaints about the [TSA] screening process."
Will the Biden crackdown on extremists end as ignominiously as Nixon's crackdown almost 50 years earlier? Nixon White House aide Tom Charles Huston explained that the FBI's COINTELPRO program continually stretched its target list "from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line." At some point, surveillance became more intent on spurring fear than on gathering information. FBI agents were encouraged to conduct interviews with anti-war protesters to "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox," as a 1970 FBI memo noted. Is the Biden castigation campaign an attempt to make its opponents fear that the feds are tracking their every email and website click?
Biden's new terrorism policy has evoked plenty of cheers from his Fourth Estate lapdogs. But a Washington Post article fretted that the administration's report did not endorse enacting "new legal authority to successfully hunt down, prosecute, and imprison homegrown extremists." Does the D.C. media elite want to see every anti-Biden scoffer in the land put behind bars? This is typical of the switcheroo that politicians and the media play with the terms "terrorists" and "extremists." Regardless of paranoia inside the Beltway, MAGA hats are not as dangerous as pipe bombs.
The Biden report concludes that "enhancing faith in American democracy" requires "finding ways to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories." Bu t permitting politicians to blacklist any ideas they disapprove won't "restore faith in democracy." Extremism has always been a flag of political convenience, and the Biden team, the FBI, and their media allies will fan fears to sanctify any and every government crackdown. But what if government is the most dangerous extremist of them all?
* * *
James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights , Attention Deficit Democracy , and Public Policy Hooligan . He is also a USA Today columnist. Follow him on Twitter @JimBovard .
Jun 20, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
The Democrats in Congress want comprehensive regulation of social media which will ultimately allow regime regulators to decide what is and what is not "disinformation." This has become very clear as Congress has held a series of Congressional hearings designed to pressure tech leaders into doing even more to silence critics of the regime and its preferred center-left narratives.
Back in February, for instance, Glen Greenwald reported:
For the third time in less than five months , the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.
House Democrats have made no secret of their ultimate goal with this hearing: to exert control over the content on these online platforms. "Industry self-regulation has failed," they said, and therefore "we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation." In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.
(The February hearing wasn't even the end of it. Big Tech was summoned yet again on March 25 .)
Greenwald is probably right. The end game here is likely to create a permanent "partnership" between big tech in which government regulators will ultimately decide just how much these platforms will deplatform user and delete content that run afoul of the regime's messaging.
It might strike many readers as odd that this should even be necessary. It's already become quite clear that Big Social Media is hardly an enemy of mainstream proregime forces in Washington. Quite the opposite.
Jack Dorsey, for instance, is exactly the sort of partisan regime apparatchik one expects out of today's Silicon Valley. For example, during October of last year , Twitter locked down the account of the New York Post , because the Post reported a story on Hunter Biden that threatened to hurt Biden's chances for election. Over 90 percent of political donation money coming out of Facebook and Twitter goes to Democrats.
Yet, it's important to keep in mind that this isn't going to be enough to convince politicians to pack up and decide to leave social media companies alone. The regime is unlikely to be satisfied with anything other than full state control of social media through permanent regulatory bodies that can ultimately bring the industry to heel. Regardless of the ideological leanings of the industry players involved, they're likely to see the writing on the wall. As with any regime where the regulators and legislators hold immense power -- as is the case in Washington today -- the regime will generally be able to win the "cooperation" of industry leaders who will end up taking a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" position.
Silicon Valley Is Ideologically Allied with the Regime. But That's Not Enough.It's been abundantly clear for at least a decade that ideologically speaking, Silicon Valley is as politically mainstream as it gets. The old early-2000s notion that Silicon Valley harbors secret libertarian, antiestablishment leanings has been disproven dozens of times over.
Moreover, Washington has a long history of co-opting tech "geniuses" to serve the whims of the regime. Even back in 2013 Julian Assange already saw the "ever closer union" between government agents and Silicon Valley. Assange saw how federal agencies were hiring Silicon Valley workers as "consultants" and saw where the "partnership" was headed. He concluded "The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism."
But even if Silicon Valley is packed full of stooges for the NSA -- as appears to be the case -- this still doesn't mean that Silicon Valley firms are willing to happily hand over their property to the federal government. After all, Silicon Valley CEOs, managers, and stockholders are all still at least partly in it for the money. All else being equal, they prefer profit to loss, and they want freedom to make decisions free of regulatory control. They probably don't care about freedom in the abstract, but they care about it for themselves.
The Threat of Regulation Creates Support for the RegimeOn the other hand, once federal policymakers and regulators start making threats, the game changes entirely. All of a sudden, it makes a lot of sense to pursue "friendly" relations with the state as a matter of self-preservation. If Washington has the ability to destroy your business -- and if it has become impossible to "fly under the radar" -- then it makes a lot of sense to make Washington your friend.
Under these circumstances, there's little to be gained from blanket opposition to federal regulation, and a lot to be gained from embracing regulation while merely working to ensure that regulation benefits you and your friends.
Big Business versus Small BusinessSo, it should never surprise us when big business ultimately ends up siding with the regime. It would be folly not to, especially if one has the means to hire lobbyists, attorneys, and PR consultants which can help Big Business negotiate effectively with regulators. Needless to say, the outcomes of these negotiations are likely to end up helping the big players at the expense of smaller ones who aren't even present at the negotiating table.
For small firms that have little hope of influencing federal policy, it still makes sense to simply oppose federal activism altogether and hope for the best. But if your firm manages to get a seat "at the table" it's best to seize the opportunity. To quote an old saying among lobbyists: "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu."
But let us not forget that even when private firms can bring immense amounts of resources to bear for purposes of influencing public policy and negotiating with bureaucrats: the regime itself ultimately holds the advantage. No private firm in the world has the resources to ignore or veto the wishes of the regime's army of regulatory, prosecutors, and tax collectors. No private firm enjoys anything approaching the coercive monopoly power of the state.
But this doesn't mean those firms can't share in this power. And that's very often what happens. Faced with a "join us or be destroyed" ultimatum from federal regulators or lawmakers, most private firms choose the "join us" option. Of course, many smaller firms aren't even offered the choice.
Tillyoudrop 9 minutes ago (Edited)AriusArmenian 3 minutes ago remove linkWwwwrong.
BIG BUSINESS is the Regime, they own this fxxxing place, and they control you by the balls.
freedommusic 10 minutes agoAll the major social media companies in the US were funded and controlled by the CIA from startup.
There is not a future end-game - it has been the CIA's agenda from the beginning.
The CIA along with Watt Street and the MIC owns and controls the US from top to bottom - and they intend for the lumpen white people to fall on their swords. This is all to the interests of the rich and powerful button pushers. I pity the young people like idiots so easily used by the elites.
bunnyswanson 1 minute agoWell when DARPA, the DOD, CIA, et al, created your company what choice do you have?
What did you think this company is YOURS Mr Z?
We created LifeLog with The Peoples money, handed it over to you so there is plausible deniability, and are now weaponizing this data against the very people who have funded it.
Welcome to the MO of monolithic government.
Big Business is the regime. Unfair competition is the name of their game. Monopolizing their industry is their goal. Oversight committees should have stopped them but simple men who define themselves by what they own sell out eagerly.
Jun 20, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
NSA Agrees To Release Records On FBI's Improper Spying On 16,000 Americans BY TYLER DURDEN SATURDAY, JUN 19, 2021 - 03:30 PM
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,
The National Security Agency ( NSA ) has agreed to release records on the FBI 's improper spying on thousands of Americans , the secretive agency disclosed in a recent letter.
Close Flows Into China Will Remain Very Robust, Says ANZ's GohThe agreement may signal a rift between the NSA and the FBI, according to attorney Ty Clevenger.
Clevenger last year filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on behalf of The Transparency Project, a Texas nonprofit, seeking information on the FBI's improper searches of intelligence databases for information on 16,000 Americans.
The searches violated rules governing how to use the U.S. government's foreign intelligence information trove, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, an Obama nominee who currently presides over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, wrote in a 2019 memorandum and order that was declassified last year.
The FBI insisted that the queries for all 16,000 people "were reasonably likely to return foreign-intelligence information or evidence of a crime because [redacted]," Boasberg wrote. But the judge found that position "unsupportable," apart from searches on just seven of the people.
Still, Boasberg allowed the data collection to continue, prompting Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, to lament that court's decision on the data collection program, authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), "is even more inexplicable given that the opinion was issued shortly after the government reported submitting FISA applications riddled with errors and omissions in the Carter Page investigation."
Page was a campaign associate of then-candidate Donald Trump who was illegally surveilled by the FBI .
After the judge's order was made public, Clevenger filed FOIA requests for information on the improper searches with both the FBI and the NSA.
The FBI rejected the request .
In a February letter ( pdf ), an official told Clevenger that the letter he wrote "does not contain enough descriptive information to permit a search of our records."
The NSA initially declined the request as well, but later granted an appeal of the decision , Linda Kiyosaki, an NSA official, said in a letter ( pdf ) this month.
"You had requested all documents, records, and other tangible evidence reflecting the improper surveillance of 16,000 individuals described in a 6 December, 2019, FISC Opinion," Kiyosaki wrote.
Clevenger believes the NSA's new position signals a rift between the two agencies, potentially because the FBI has repeatedly abused rules governing searches of the intelligence databases while the NSA has largely not.
"There's been a battle between them, for example, Mike Rogers tried to shut off FBI access to the NSA database back in 2016," Clevenger told The Epoch Times, referring to how Adm. Mike Rogers, the former NSA director, cut out FBI agents from using the databases in 2016 .
"And so there's been some history of the NSA trying to limit the FBI's access because they know that the FBI is misusing the data intercepts," he added.
The NSA and FBI did not respond to requests for comment.
Jun 20, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Not Your Father's ZH 6 hours ago (Edited)
Georgia's Dominion Voting System Implementation Manager Gabe Sterling Negotiated a $144,000 Salary Increase for Himself Last Year ===> https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/ <===
How Many dead VOTERS Voted In Georgia?! Raffensperger Cleans Voter Rolls AFTER Fraudulent Election
Boris Epshteyn: Subpoenas Are Being Prepared in Pennsylvania for Another Audit (VIDEO)
Jun 14, 2021 | www.mintpressnews.com
Reddit is one of the world's most influential news and social media platforms. The website attracted over 1.2 billion visits in April 2021 alone, making it the United States' eighth most visited site, ahead of other leviathans like Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now majority-owned by a much larger corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also far ahead of more established news sites, garnering three times the numbers of Fox News and five times those of The New York Times .
That is why it was so surprising that so little was made of the company's decision to appoint foreign policy hawk Jessica Ashooh to the position of Director of Policy in 2017, at which time it was also the eight most visited site in the U.S. Ashooh, who had been a Middle East foreign policy wonk at NATO's think tank the Atlantic Council, was appointed at around the same time that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was demanding more control over the popular website, on the grounds that it was being used to spread disinformation. In her role as Director of Policy, she oversees all government relations and public policy for the company, in addition to managing content, product and advertising. Yet a Google search for "Jessica Ashooh Reddit" filtered between late 2016 and early 2017 (after she was appointed) elicits zero relevant results, meaning not one media outlet even mentioned the questionable appointment.
This is all the more hair-raising, given her resume as a high state official -- all of which raises serious questions about the extent of collaboration between Silicon Valley and the national security state.
A hawk's talons on SyriaThe Atlantic Council is the de-facto brains of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and takes funding from the military alliance, as well as from the U.S. government, the U.S. military, Middle Eastern dictatorships, other Western governments, big tech companies, and weapons manufacturers. Its board of directors has been and continues to be a who's who of high U.S. statespeople like Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, as well as senior military commanders such as retired generals Wesley Clark, David Petraeus, H.R. McMaster, James "Mad Dog" Mattis, the late Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and Admiral James Stavridis. At least seven former CIA directors are also on the board. As such, the council chooses to represent both political wings of the national security state.
Ashooh's LinkedIn resume epitomizes the troubling relantionship between think tanks and big tech
Between 2015 and 2017, Ashooh was Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council's Middle East Strategy Task Force, working directly with and under Madeline Albright and Stephen Hadley. This is particularly noteworthy, given both these individuals' roles in the region. As Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Albright oversaw the Iraq sanctions and the Oil for Food Program, denounced as "genocide" by the successive United Nations diplomats charged with carrying them out. In an infamous interview with 60 Minutes , Albright casually brushed off a question about her role in the killing of half a million children, stating "the price is worth it." Meanwhile, Hadley was deputy or senior national security advisor to the government of George W. Bush throughout the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, surely the greatest crimes against humanity thus far in the 21st century.
Ashooh appears to be as hawkish as her bosses. Her particular area of expertise is the war in Syria, regarding which she has been among the most belligerent voices, constantly calling for more American intervention to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. In a 2015 interview with Al Jazeera , she praised the U.K. government's decision to bomb the country, claiming that the British public was "coming around" to the idea of war. A shocked interviewer asked "how will the British airstrikes [on] Syria make the British public any safer?" Ashooh replied that it was "generally a positive decision" because "it goes a long way in improving international consensus on the way forward on Syria," although she lamented that there wouldn't be "much improvement in the situation without ground troops." There will be "no political solution without a military element," she predicted, essentially making the pitch for war.
https://cdn.jwplayer.com/players/bhFBUukP-YuKiCfZc.html
Ashooh has also constantly praised and supported Syria's opposition forces. In 2016, she said that she was very happy that "fighters on the ground from a number of key factions" were uniting against the "Assad regime." She condemned Russia for claiming these opposition forces were members of terrorist groups like Al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam or ISIS, insisting that these were "moderate" rebels.Of course, the idea that there was still any measurable distance between "moderate" rebels and outright militant jihadists by 2016 was hard to maintain . Even The Washington Post by this time was admitting as much, noting that so-called moderates were now so "intermingled" with al-Nusra that it was difficult to tell them apart.
Nevertheless, the New Hampshire native took to the pages of The New York Times to demand that the U.S. arm the opposition. Of course, it was already doing so, the CIA spending $1 billion per year fielding rebel mercenary armies in the conflict -- with one in every 15 dollars the agency spent going to this endeavor. All of this Ashooh surely knew, yet she maintained that the West must continue to "jack up the price" of Russia defending Assad. "As long as [Assad] remains in power and remains the figurehead of the Syrian government this conflict won't end," she said , laying out her regime-change-or-bust position. Just weeks before unexpectedly taking over at Reddit, Ashooh seemed to still be in full foreign-policy-hawk mode, condemning Obama in the pages of The Washington Post for his apparent softness on Syria and demanding that Trump "restore U.S. credibility" by "order[ing] targeted, punitive strikes against the Assad regime."
Ashooh attends British Polo Day at Abu Dhabi's Ghantoot Racing and Polo Club. Photo | Ahlan Dirty war, dirty warrior
Ashooh is actually even more involved in the Syrian conflict than one might realize from her hawkish opinions alone. Between 2011 and 2015, she worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates, in her own words , "[p]rovid[ing] senior decision makers with policy analysis and strategic advice, with a particular focus on Syria."
At that time the UAE was using its enormous financial clout to arm and fund a myriad of jihadist groups attempting to overthow the secular strongman Assad and establish some kind of Islamic state. Far from a conspiracy theory, this comes straight from the horse's mouth, as then-Vice President Joe Biden revealed in a Q&A session in 2014. The future president frankly stated :
The Saudis, the Emiratis, what were they doing? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world. "
Under pressure, he later apologized for his loose lips.
MintPress News asked the Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs to comment on precisely what Ashooh's role was, but they failed to respond.
Ashooh is pictured during her time as a "consultant" in Iraqi Kurdistan. Photo | Academyalumni
Ashooh herself appears to have been a relatively major player in the Syrian Civil War. In her previously mentioned Washington Post article , she notes that her boss was a former Emirati Air Force General and that she was flown to Istanbul in 2013 to attend an emergency meeting with leaders of the Syrian opposition, as well as ambassadors from unnamed Arab and Western states, in order to plan a response to a reported chemical weapons attack and to help the U.S. "coordinate with the Syrian opposition."
At the same time as she was advising the nation on Middle Eastern affairs, the UAE was widely accused of flying ISIS and al-Qaeda leaders into Yemen to help them intensify the Saudi-led onslaught on the impoverished nation and of smuggling U.S.-made weaponry -- including small arms, TOW missiles and Oshkosh fighting vehicles -- to the jihadist groups. While Ashooh's writing is careful to maintain a distinction between the "moderate" rebels she supports and the fundamentalist radicals she does not, it certainly is noteworthy that the entities she worked for consistently seem to end up in league with the most regressive forces in the region. MintPress also reached out to Reddit for comment on why they appointed Ashooh, given her past history, and on the wider phenomenon of government penetration of social media. The company initially promised to issue a response to the inquiry but has not followed through with it.
An Unholy Alliance: Did the US-Backed UAE Fly ISIS Leaders into Yemen's Killing Fields? The US-allied United Arab Emirates (UAE stands accused of flying ISIS leaders from Syria into Yemen to use in the Saudi-led Coalition war. MintPress News | Alexander Rubinstein | Mar 6, 2019 Opposing some dictatorships, supporting othersRegime change is on the table for more than just one Middle Eastern nation. In a 2017 paper for the Center for the National Interest -- a think tank established by former Republican President Richard Nixon and the "Godfather of Neoconservatism," Irving Kristol -- Ashooh explores the different options for forcing regime change in Iran, but concludes that overthrowing the "odious regime" is an impossible task right now, and criticizes the idea as a quixotic dream.
Nevertheless, she is far from an Iran dove. An Atlantic Council report she co-wrote insists that "Iranian interference in the Arab world must be deterred," and that "America's friends and partners must be reassured that the U.S. opposes Iranian hegemony and will work with them to prevent it."
Ashooh's commitment to fighting against Middle Eastern dictatorships might seem more principled if she did not appear so enamored of the least democratic one of them all. In 2016, she accompanied Albright and Hadley to Saudi Arabia and praised the monarchy's dynamic leadership on the economy and its nurturing of a new generation. "It was really really exciting to see that level of energy and the level of government support for these young people who were interested in shaping their own futures it was just wonderful," she said . In an article about her experience for business news website Market Watch , she waxed lyrical about how forward-thinking the Saudi government is and how the country has become "a hub for the dynamic and positive change that is swelling up throughout the region." Presumably, this excludes Yemen, a nation they were bombing relentlessly . In a 2020 interview , Ashooh revealed that her dream job would be U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. One of her earliest comments on her public Reddit page (made before she began working there) is deflecting the Kingdom from criticism of its dreadful treatment of women.
Ashooh's Reddit account, which doesn't identify her real identity, uses the moniker, arabscarab
As part of the Atlantic Council, Ashooh was tasked with envisaging a new Middle East for the 21st century. Given her output , it seems that she advocates for a transition towards a more privatized, free-market economic setup, not completely unlike the shock therapy tried in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. "We have to "encourage states to make the reforms that move economies from state-based to ones that support entrepreneurship, because the age of state-based economies is over," she said at a talk at New York University in 2015, adding:
You've got to move to support entrepreneurship in the region and let people take advantage of the natural industrial tendencies of people in the Middle East. My God, if you've ever been to a Turkish bazaar or a market in Cairo you know that these countries are perfectly capable of having functioning market economies. But the state has gotten in the way.
Ashooh's LinkedIn profile also notes that in 2010, she worked as an advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Planning "on a variety of strategic and economic development issues," but does not go into any more detail about what those issues were. A further biography merely states that her consultancy agency "provid[ed] strategic and management consulting services to the Ministry of Planning of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Northern Iraq." Unsurprisingly, the organization has links to the U.S. military; the agency's lead partner being a former Army captain.
Think TankieAshooh comes from a relatively prominent New Hampshire family of Lebanese descent, the most notable of which is probably her uncle Richard . Richard Ashooh was Donald Trump's Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration and a former executive at weapons manufacturer BAE Systems. Unlike her uncle, Jessica appears to lean more Democratic, having donated money to a number of local politicians, as well as to anti-Trump Republican groups aimed at convincing them to vote blue, such as Right Side PAC and the now infamous Lincoln Project. However, she also appears to have great respect for many Republicans, having written her doctoral thesis at Oxford University on the Middle East policy of the George W. Bush administration. She also stated that the person she would have most liked to have met was 41st President George Bush Senior, describing him as possessing "incredible amounts of strategy, finesse and restraint." Thus, her political views appear to be exactly in the center of the neoliberal " blob " in Washington.
Ashooh also worked for the right-wing think tank the CATO Institute and is a Term Member of the more Democratic-aligned Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR's term member program is intended to, in its own words, "cultivate the next generation of foreign policy leaders."
Surveillance ValleyHow and why, then, did a hawkish young mandarin hothoused at elite universities and in the halls of state power end up an executive at an anarchic messageboard site with an anti-establishment reputation? Virtually everyone else in senior roles at Reddit has relevant backgrounds in marketing or tech, having worked with comparable companies such as Yelp, Expedia and Snapchat.
Tom Secker -- a journalist, podcaster and researcher who runs SpyCulture.com , an online archive about government involvement in the entertainment industry -- was deeply skeptical. "That someone whose entire career has been in international relations and foreign affairs is now the senior policy wonk at Reddit is simply bizarre. Given her ties to the CFR, Atlantic Council and the like, it's downright suspicious," Secker told MintPress .
Underneath the surface, however, the Atlantic Council has been rapidly expanding its influence and control over big social media companies. In 2018, it announced that it would be partnering with Facebook to promote trustworthy sources and derank, demote and even delete low quality or fake news, thus effectively curating what the platform's 2.85 billion worldwide users see in their news feeds. But the effect of recent algorithmic changes has been to throttle alternative media traffic in favor of establishment sources such as CNN , Fox News and The New York Times . Even such more mainstream liberal sites as Mother Jones have seen their numbers crater. Facebook later admitted that they were directly targeting Mother Jones because of its left-leaning content, raising the question that if such a middle-of-the-road liberal outlet was being penalized, wasn't the collapse in traffic to more radical publications surely deliberate? Given the Atlantic Council's funding and the identities of those on its board , their control over social media is tantamount to state censorship on a global level.
Earlier this year, Facebook also hired NATO press officer Ben Nimmo to be its intelligence chief, in another move that dismayed free-speech advocates. In the past, Nimmo has identified a Welsh pensioner and an internationally known Ukranian pianist as Russian bots, raising more questions about the suitability of the Atlantic Council to be an arbiter of truth online.
The Facebook-Atlantic Council link mirrors that of Microsoft with NewsGuard , a new piece of software purportedly trying to fight fake news by placing either green shields or red warning logos, corresponding to an outlet's credibility, beside all links in its browser, Microsoft Edge -- this credibility being decided entirely by NewsGuard itself. Newsguard pushed Microsoft to install the software on all its products as standard. Again, however, NewsGuard's system rated establishment websites like Fox News and CNN as trustworthy but independent media as suspect. And again, a glance at its advisory board makes it clear that this is a state operation. Those in key positions included George W. Bush's Secretary of Homeland Security and former NSA and CIA Director General Michael Hayden; ex-White House Communications Director Don Baer; and former Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Worse still, NewsGuard is also linked to a PR agency employed in whitewashing the Saudi government's human-rights record and its role in the carnage in Yemen.
Twitter, too, has some extremely troubling links with state power. In 2019 Gordon MacMillan, a senior Twitter executive responsible for the Middle East region, was outed as an active duty officer in the British Army's 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to online operations and psychological warfare. Far from causing a scandal, only one major U.S. outlet even mentioned the story, and the journalist in question resigned from the profession weeks later, claiming the existence of a network of top-down state censors who quash stories that threaten the power and prestige of the national security state. To this day, MacMillan remains in his post at Twitter, strongly suggesting the social media company knew of his role before he was hired.
Over the past few years, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook have announced the deletion of hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to sources in Russia, Iran, China and other enemy states, often on the recommendation of Western governments or state-sponsored intelligence organizations. However, they never seem willing or able to find any manipulation of their platforms by Western governments. Thus, the upshot of this has been to slowly dissuade critics of Western foreign policy from using their services.
"The mainstream media-politik establishment has managed to get a hold over Twitter, Facebook and Instagram -- shadow-banning and downrating posts considered 'Russian propaganda' or whatever other excuse they use to marginalize perspectives and content outside of the mainstream," Secker told MintPress . "Audiences for this sort of content are increasingly pissed off and alienated by the major social media sites."
Facebook, Social Media Giants Admit to Silencing Palestinian Voices Online Social media companies including Facebook have admitted to MintPress that pro-Palestinian posts were removed, blaming mistakes in the algorithm. MintPress News | Jessica Buxbaum | May 14Increasingly, unwelcome political voices are either brushed off by centrist pundits as repeating Russian talking points or smeared as being amplified by Kremlin-based bot farms. The popularity of movements on the left like Black Lives Matter or the Bernie Sanders' campaign were written off as partially linked to Russia, while others suggested that the January 6 insurrection in Washington was essentially a Russian operation.
The irony is that many of the wildest accusations against Putin that have fed this climate of suspicion began life in Atlantic Council documents. For example, the organization has published a series of studies that suggest that virtually every European political party challenging the neoliberal status quo in some way -- from Labour and UKIP in the U.K. to Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece and PODEMOS and Vox in Spain -- are secretly controlled by Russia, functioning as the "Kremlin's Trojan Horses," in its words.
The Atlantic Council is also deeply intertwined with a U.K. government-funded organization called the Integrity Initiative, something that purports to be a group defending democracy from disinformation. However, in practice, it appears to be doing the opposite: planting disinformation about politicians' supposed links to Russia in order to undermine them. The Integrity Initiative is a government-backed cluster of journalists who operate in unison to conduct propaganda blitzes on unsuspecting publics. In 2018, it launched a successful operation to prevent Colonel Pedro Baños being appointed Spain's head of national security. Considering Baños too soft on Russia for the Atlantic Council and other hawks' liking, the initiative sprung into action, creating a storm of protest that led to another individual being chosen.
New Documents Reveal Covert UK Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In US Politics With the help of John Rendon and the State Department's Global Engagement Center, the Integrity Initiative brings its disinformation campaign to the US. MintPress News | Mark Ames | Jan 9, 2019Reddit actually played a key role in a 2019 propaganda blitz against anti-war Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. A few days before the U.K.'s general election, Corbyn promoted documents leaked on the platform that showed that Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson was negotiating with American companies, putting much of the country's National Health Service up for sale. With just days to go before polls opened, it could have proved a game changer. Reddit quickly came to Johnson's rescue, however, asserting that the documents were part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The story in the pliant British press switched from "Boris Johnson is selling off the NHS" to "Corbyn promotes Russian disinfo," thus greasing the skids for an easy victory for the hardline anti-Russia Conservative Party, an outcome the hawks at the Atlantic Council were no doubt relieved by, given Corbyn's open skepticism about war, empire and nuclear weapons. The veracity of the documents was not challenged.
For a whileFounded in 2005, Reddit has grown to become one of the world's largest and most influential websites. However, it began life as an anarchistic messageboard whose culture was profoundly libertarian and anti-establishment. For years, the company's administrators took a near free speech absolutist position. Aaron Swartz, Reddit's co-founder, was an open source hacktivist and even attempted to download and publish the entirety of academic publisher Jstor's library. When authorities got wind of what he was doing, they threatened him with 40 years in prison, an action that caused him to take his own life in 2013.
Reddit's own position on free information and free speech was often so extreme it caused huge controversy. The site became the internet's largest source of child pornography. It was only after CNN began reporting on it to a nationwide audience that things began to change. Other, grossly offensive communities like /r/BeatingWomen and /r/CoonTown were also protected.
Nevertheless, the culture established by anarchistic tech bros remained for some years, with the site resembling darker corners of the internet like 4Chan and 8Chan as much as more family-friendly mainstream social media like Facebook.
Ashooh's arrival in 2017 coincided with a new era in the site's history. Gone were the days of protecting communities that would bring in bad publicity. Her team quickly brought in a new content policy and began to delete communities that violated it. Last year, she oversaw the banning of over 2,000 communities in a single day, including /r/The_Donald, the main Donald Trump subreddit, and /r/ChapoTrapHouse, the most active left-wing community. These decisions have helped the money flow in; since 2017 revenue has more than tripled .
However, what has been lost across the internet is the liberatory potential of these technologies. In the 1990s and 2000s, many predicted that the internet would usher in a new era of egalitarianism and genuine democracy, helping even to reduce barriers and tensions between nations. For a while, the new medium allowed political actors to challenge the status quo and gain huge followings quickly. Alternative media was easily outperforming legacy media, and challenging the status quo when it came to news. Seeing that, the reaction since 2016 has been swift, as the elite have moved to retighten their grip over the means of communication. Ashooh's jump from national security state official to Reddit Director of Policy is just one more point of reference on that chart.
Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent , as well as a number of academic articles . He has also contributed to FAIR.org , The Guardian , Salon , The Grayzone , Jacobin Magazine , and Common Dreams .
tsarfat.wordpress.com
During the 2018 conference "Imagining the Next Flu Pandemic - and Preventing it!" Baric uses the graphics to extrapolate investment assistance on how to "make money in the next pandemic" by showing which stocks and industries soared during the Ebola crisis.China's 2018 leaked video of Wuhan Institute of Virology concludes that the COVID-19 originated from China's Wuhan lab and during the 2018 conference, Dr. Ralph Baric of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a collaborator and gain-of-function advocate, gave attendees advice on how to "make a profit" in the next pandemic.
Wuhan lab's researchers immediately started brainstorming ways of making money from a pandemic. Baric shows a slide titled "Global Catastrophe: Opportunities Exist" during his 2018 conference "Imagining the Next Flu Pandemic – and Preventing it!" He uses the graphics to extrapolate investment assistance on how to "make money in the next pandemic" by showing which stocks and industries soared during the Ebola crisis.
https://f7b6463e7d076c3ada175508770dc6b6.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Before pointing out that "there are real mutual funds for outbreak preparedness Baric adds that the abovementioned sectors and firms would "probably do very well." He also added "Some items are successful. "It was the same thing in 1918, with masks, and it's the same thing today." According to Baric, pandemics are periods of fortune, amid times of societal instability, there is a potential for people to achieve political, financial, and personal gain, and this will almost certainly happen.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/2YwVeQgSMN0?feature=oembed
Baric said if one wants to make money from the pandemic then purchase stock in firms that create Lab coats and protective clothes, or firms that develop antiviral medications for that epidemic.
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Jun 08, 2021 | www.wsj.com
Hundreds of suspected members of criminal networks have been arrested by authorities around the world after being duped into using an encrypted communications platform secretly run by the FBI to hatch their plans for alleged crimes including drug smuggling and money laundering.
In the global sting operation dubbed "Operation Trojan Shield," an international coalition of law-enforcement agencies led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation covertly monitored the encrypted communications service Anom, which purported to offer a feature cherished in the criminal underworld: total secrecy.
The sting was revealed this week in a series of news conferences by authorities in the U.S., Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Alleged members of international criminal organizations adopted the platform as a means to communicate securely, unaware that authorities were covertly monitoring 27 million messages from more than 12,000 users across more than 100 countries, officials said.
The takedown involved more than 9,000 law-enforcement offices around the world that had searched 700 locations in the previous 48 hours alone, U.S. and European officials said early Tuesday. Police forces had in recent days carried out more than 800 arrests in 16 countries and seized more than 8 tons of cocaine, 22 tons of cannabis and 2 tons of synthetic drugs, as well as 250 firearms, 55 luxury vehicles and over $48 million in various currencies. More than 150 threats to human life were also disrupted, officials said.
In the U.S., the FBI charged 17 foreign nationals operating in places including Australia, the Netherlands and Spain with distributing encrypted Anom communications devices, saying they violated federal racketeering laws typically used to target organized-crime groups, officials said. Eight of those individuals are in custody and nine remain at large, they said.
The global effort put any other companies offering such services on notice that law-enforcement agencies world-wide consider developing and selling technology aimed at defeating their ability to monitor and intercept communications to be unlawful""the latest salvo in a debate unfolding globally about how to balance security and privacy on technology platforms.
Authorities, who see encrypted platforms like Anom as providing a haven for illicit activity beyond the reach of government monitoring, signaled that intelligence agencies and law enforcement would aggressively seek to infiltrate platforms designed in such a way that they can be used by terrorists and criminal gangs to evade detection.
"The immense and unprecedented success of Operation Trojan Shield should be a warning to international criminal organizations""your criminal communications may not be secure; and you can count on law enforcement world-wide working together to combat dangerous crime that crosses international borders," said Suzanne Turner, the special agent in charge of the FBI's San Diego field office.
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Trojan Shield grew from when the FBI developed a confidential human source involved in the development of Anom and used that access to make, market and distribute the devices around the world, according to an affidavit unsealed in U.S. federal court this week. The source, who had been involved in selling other secure devices to criminal networks before trying to develop Anom, agreed to cooperate with the bureau in order to reduce his or her own criminal exposure and lessen a potential sentence, court documents say.
With the source's cooperation, the FBI and its law-enforcement partners secretly built into Anom the ability to covertly intercept and decrypt messages. The FBI relied on the source's relationships with criminal gangs in Australia to help distribute the first batch of devices, with word of the service spreading organically after that, documents say.
Europol said Anom was used by more than 300 criminal groups in more than 100 countries, including Italian organized crime, outlaw motorcycle gangs and international drug-trafficking organizations. In court filings, the bureau detailed extensive conversations about narcotics trafficking, cryptocurrency transactions, cash smuggling, corruption and other illicit activity flowing through Anom's systems.
Jun 09, 2021 | www.unz.com
GMC , says: June 9, 2021 at 7:19 am GMT • 18.5 hours ago
@beavertalesMy good friend in Canada says that it seems to be a "BioSecurity Fascist State" forming also. And it's not against Cuba , it's against the populace of Canada. Worse than anything in the US. < >
Jun 06, 2021 | www.wsj.com
The problem with conspiracy theories (CIA invented term to whitewash CIA participation in killing of JFK) that some of them in ten to twenty years no longer viewed as conspiracies. They enter mainstream.An online poll this week from Ipsos reported 15% of Americans agree that the government, media and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshiping pedophiles. Not 15% of Republicans or conservatives, but of Americans. That's a lot.
... ... ...
America is a lonely place. When you hold to a conspiracy theory, you join a community. You're suddenly part of something. You have new friends you can talk to on the internet ...
... One of the enduring and revealing songs of America asks "Which side are you on / Which side are you on? / You go to Harlan County / There is no neutral there / You'll either be a union man / Or a thug for J.H. Blair."
... ... ...
Conspiracy believers don't believe what the mainstream media tell them. Why would they? Newsrooms are undergoing their own revolution, with woke progressives vs. journalistic traditionalists, advocacy versus old-school news values. It is ideological. "We are here to shape and encourage a new reality." "No, we are here to find and report the news." It is generational: The young have the upper hand and the Slack channel. The woke are winning.
...
When you think your country has grown completely bizarre...Think of what normal human beings have been asked to absorb the past year. The whole country was shut down and everyone was told to stay in the house. They closed the churches, and the churches agreed. There was no school and everyone made believe""really, we all made believe!""screens were a replacement. A bunch of 13-year-old girls in the junior high decided they were boys and started getting shots, and no adults helped them by saying, "Whoa, slow down, this is a major life decision and you're a kid." The school board no longer argues about transgender bathrooms, they're on to transgender boys wanting to play on the girls team. Big corporations now tell you what you should think about local questions, and if this offends you, they don't care. There were riots and protests last summer and local government seemed overwhelmed.
Jun 06, 2021 | mobile.slashdot.org
Walmart Will Give 740,000 Employees a Free Smartphone (cbsnews.com) 37 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday June 06, 2021 @06:39PM from the company-lines dept. "Walmart will give 740,000 employees free Samsung smartphones by the end of the year ," reports CBS News, "so they can use a new app to manage schedules, the company announced Thursday." The phone, the Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro, can also be used for personal use, and the company will provide free cases and protection plans. The phone's retail price is currently $499... Up until now, associates at Walmart stores used handheld devices they shared to communicate, but an initial test with employee smartphones was received well and will now be expanded upon, Walmart said...
The company promised that it would not have access to any employee's personal data and can "use the smartphone as their own personal device if they want, with all the features and privacy they're used to." The test will be expanded by the end of the year, Walmart said.
Earlier this year, Walmart announced pay increases for nearly a third of its U.S. workforce of 1.6 million. In February, digital and store workers saw their starting hourly rates increase from $13 to $19 depending on their location and market.
Hmmm ( Score: 3 , Insightful)by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06, 2021 @06:48PM ( #61460698 ) Probably will be used to clock them in and out when they enter and exit the premises, and track their movements to ensure they are working and not lollygagging. Maybe even track bio info to adjust health insurance prices.If you think this is just a free gift done out of generosity, you're quite naive. Reply to This Share
No thank you ( Score: 3 )by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Sunday June 06, 2021 @07:11PM ( #61460772 ) It would be wise for Walmart employees to put that phone in a locker on premises before leaving. Having your corporate overlord knowing everything you do outside of work is creepy... peeping Tom creepy. Wal-mart states they won't collect your data but we'll be reading a news story within two years finding out they did just that. "We're sorry for data that was collected. It was a configuration oversight on our part. We promise to do better moving forward." yadda, yadda, yadda. Reply to This Share Not surprised... ( Score: 5 , Interesting)by Pollux ( 102520 ) < speter@@@tedata...net...eg > on Sunday June 06, 2021 @07:36PM ( #61460814 ) Journal
I was talking last week with someone who works customer service at a nearby Walmart. She told me that people are either leaving or moving up the chain, and it's hard to keep new employees retained. She had one who was in for three days, then just went AWOL and was never heard from again.
I asked her what starting salary was. (The Walmart's in out-state MN.) She said $11.50.
I guess Walmart can't help but behave this way. What they should be doing is raising salaries. Instead, they choose to offer a "perk" of a "free" phone w/ a "free" phone plan. I say "free", because no doubt the phone will be a data goldmine for corporate. How? Let me count the ways.
1) Track employee movements within the store;
2) Determine quantity and length of employee breaks;
3) Track employee movements outside the store;
4) Track employee searches;
5) Track employee social media posts;
6) Monitor employee spending behaviors;
7) Mine employee messages;
And so on, and so forth...And any one of these data mining operations can be used to punish employee misbehavior, hustle Walmart services (Moneygram springs to mind), not to mention sell to interested 3rd parties. (With Walmart commanding the largest fleet of employees in the United States, imagine how many other companies would be willing to pay for generalized data on employee behavior. Better yet, image how much someone would be willing to pay to advertise directly to 1.6 million people.)
Jun 08, 2021 | www.wsj.com
Google's critics have said for years that it should be treated like a public utility. On Tuesday, Ohio's attorney general filed a lawsuit asking a judge to rule that the search company is one.
The case adds to the legal woes confronting the Alphabet Inc. GOOG 0.68% subsidiary, which also faces antitrust lawsuits from the Justice Department and a separate consortium of states led by Colorado and Texas. The company is contending with cases in countries around the world where its dominance as a search provider has sparked a push by regulators to corral its power.
Amid the array of court challenges, Ohio said that it is the first state in the country to bring a lawsuit seeking a court declaration that Google is a common carrier subject under state law to government regulation. The lawsuit, which doesn't seek monetary damages, says that Google has a duty to provide the same rights for advertisements and product placement for competitors as it provides for its own services.
"When you own the railroad or the electric company or the cellphone tower, you have to treat everyone the same and give everybody access," said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican.
A Google spokesman said that the remedies sought in the Ohio lawsuit would worsen the company's search results and impair businesses' ability to connect directly with customers. "Ohioans simply don't want the government to run Google like a gas or electric company," a spokesman said. "This lawsuit has no basis in fact or law and we'll defend ourselves against it in court."
Jun 08, 2021 | it.slashdot.org
The FBI and Australian Federal Police ran an encrypted chat platform and intercepted secret messages between criminal gang members from all over the world for more than three years. From a report: Named Operation Ironside (AFP) / Trojan Shield (FBI, Interpol) on Monday, law enforcement agencies from Australia, Europe, and the US conducted house searches and arrested thousands of suspects across a wide spectrum of criminal groups, from biker gangs in Australia to drug cartels across Asia and South America, and weapons and human traffickers in Europe.
In a press conference on Monday, Australian police said the sting operation got underway in 2018 after the FBI successfully seized encrypted chat platform Phantom Secure. Knowing that the criminal underworld would move to a new platform, US and Australian officials decided to run their own service on top of Anom (also stylized as AN0M), an encrypted chat platform that the FBI had secretly gained access to through an insider. Just like Phantom Secure, the new service consisted of secure smartphones that were configured to run only the An0m app and nothing else.
by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @04:56PM ( #61467056 )
Re:STFU! ( Score: 3 )Maybe the criminals already figured it out?
According to a commenter at SANS "Part of the decision to stop monitoring and making arrests was a blog posting (since deleted) detailing the behavior of the ANoM app, this March, which didn't correctly attribute the backdoor to the FBI."
https://www.sans.org/newslette... [sans.org]
So maybe the criminals were indeed starting to figure it out, albeit slowly.
Re:STFU! ( Score: 5 , Insightful)by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @03:03PM ( #61466708 ) Homepage JournalWell, now the criminals can't trust any encryption. That means that it can slow them down quite a bit for a while.
Meanwhile most of the ransom for the pipeline ransomware is also recovered, which likely means that it's possible to track Bitcoin.
Governments may be slow, but they can be relentless in pursuing their targets if they really want.
Re:STFU! ( Score: 4 , Insightful)by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @03:40PM ( #61466816 )Anyone can track Bitcoin transactions from wallet to wallet. The paydirt is that the LEOs know which wallets to watch and can follow the trail.
Tainted Bitcoins are a big thing, and even tumbled coins just mean more tainted coins that currency exchanges will not accept. You might be able to find an individual to trade, and maybe an escrow service so you can do a multisig transaction so the other party doesn't rob you blind when trading to something like XMR to the ill-gotten gains.
However, all it takes is one bit of info to tie the wallet to a person, and the blockchain will do the conviction for the prosecutor from there. Reply to This Parent Share
They've just proven they don't need backdoors to e ( Score: 1 )by layabout ( 1576461 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @03:07PM ( #61466718 ) This is the kind of law enforcement technique that should be used when faced with end-to-end encryption. It proves that there is no need for backdoor and how even "unbreakable" encryption systems can be compromisedClosed source proprietary encryption system ... ( Score: 4 , Insightful)by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @04:42PM ( #61467002 ) JournalIt was a closed-source black-box proprietary encryption system.
As we've pointed out time and again: You can't trust it if you can't check it. Your security is totally at the mercy of the system's authors and operators.
But crooks are apparently no smarter than Pointy Haired Bosses. (Thank goodness.)
Triteleia Laxa , says: June 7, 2021 at 12:17 pm GMT • 12.2 hours agoJun 08, 2021 | www.unz.com
RFK's False-Flag Assassination, and the Forgotten Palestinian Patsy LAURENT GUYÉNOT JUNE 5, 2021 3,600 WORDS 150 COMMENTS REPLY Tweet Reddit 1 Share Share 4 Email Print More 5 SHARES RSS Share to GabOn June 6, 1968, Robert Kennedy had just won the California Democratic presidential primary, when he was shot dead, five years after his brother. David Talbot has shown in his book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years , published in 2007 by Simon & Schuster, that Robert had never believed in the conclusion of the Warren Commission Report, and that, had he succeeded in becoming the next American president, he would have done his utmost to set up a new investigation. Whether he would have been able to get to the bottom of it is another matter. But it is a reasonable assumption that the forces that had killed John were the same that killed Robert on his way to reclaim the White House. After all, as Laurence Leamer writes in Sons of Camelot : "Bobby had been the president's alter ego and protector. . . . He had loved his brother so intensely and served him so well that within the administration it was hard to tell where one man ended and the other began." [1] After 1963, Robert was still his brother's continuation. He was the heir and the avenger.
That is why I have argued before -- and I repeat in my new book -- that the ultimate key to the JFK whodunit is in RFK's assassination, which has a very clear, unmistakable Israeli signature. RFK's assassination is a masterwork of false flag operation, designed by a supremely intelligent, Machiavellian, and organized cabal, the same that orchestrated one year earlier, with Johnson's complicity, the attempted false flag attack on the USS Liberty (watch the new groundbreaking four-part documentary film Sacrificing Liberty ).
What is truly extraordinary, and demonstrates an unmatched expertise in the industry of lies, is that the conspirators succeeded to get rid of Robert Kennedy while at the same time blaming the assassination on their enemies -- the Palestinians -- and thereby giving themselves both an alibi and a victim's role: through RFK, Israel was the target, they claim.
Sirhan Sirhan, the "virulent anti-Semite"
Just hours after Robert's assassination, the press informed the American people, not only of the identity of the assassin, but also of his motive, and even of his detailed biography. [2] Twenty-four-year-old Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was born in Jordan, and had moved to the United States when his family was expelled from West Jerusalem in 1948. After the shooting, a newspaper clipping was found in Sirhan's pocket, quoting Robert's following statement: "The United States should without delay sell Israel the 50 Phantom jets she has so long been promised." Handwritten notes by Sirhan found in a notebook at his home confirmed that his act had been premeditated and motivated by his hatred of Israel.
That became the mainstream storyline from day one. Jerry Cohen of the Los Angeles Times wrote a front page article, saying that Sirhan is "described by acquaintances as a 'virulent' anti-Israeli" (Cohen changed that into "virulent anti-Semite" in an article for the Salt Lake Tribune ), and that: "Investigation and disclosures from persons who knew him best revealed [him] as a young man with a supreme hatred for the state of Israel." Cohen infers that "Senator Kennedy . . . became a personification of that hatred because of his recent pro-Israeli statements." Cohen further revealed that, about three weeks before the shooting, Sirhan wrote "a memo to himself" that said, "Kennedy must be assassinated before June 5, 1968," that is, Cohen notes, "the first anniversary of the six-day war in which Israel humiliated three Arab neighbors, Egypt, Syria and Jordan." [3]
After September 11, 2001, the tragedy of Robert's assassination was rewritten and installed into the Neocon mythology of the "Clash of Civilizations" and the "War on Terror." A book entitled The Forgotten Terrorist, by Mel Ayton (2007), purports to present "a wealth of evidence about [Sirhan's] fanatical Palestinian nationalism," and to demonstrate that "[Sirhan's] politically motivated act was a forerunner of present-day terrorism."
In 2008, on the occasion of the 40 th anniversary of Bobby's murder, Sasha Issenberg of the Boston Globe recalled that the death of Robert Kennedy was "a first taste of Mideast terror." He quotes Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz saying: "It was in some ways the beginning of Islamic terrorism in America. It was the first shot. A lot of us didn't recognize it at the time." [4] That Sirhan was from a Christian family was lost on Dershowitz.
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin took care to mention it in The Forward , only to add that Islamic fanaticism ran in his veins anyway: "But what he shared with his Muslim cousins -- the perpetrators of September 11 -- was a visceral, irrational hatred of Israel. It drove him to murder a man whom some still believe might have been the greatest hope of an earlier generation. . . . Sirhan hated Kennedy because he had supported Israel."
And so, the Forward insists: "One cannot help but note the parallel between [Robert] Kennedy's assassination and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In both tragic cases, Arab fanaticism reared its ugly head on American soil, irrevocably changing the course of events in this country." [5] And the lesson: "In remembering Bobby Kennedy, let us remember not just what he lived for, but also what he died for -- namely, the precious nature of the American-Israeli relationship." [6] In other words: let's propagate the narrative, for it is good for Israel.
On the fiftieth anniversary, the narrative was well rehearsed : Robert got killed because he was "pro-Israel". [7] Therefore his murder was a crime against Israel.
For anyone familiar with the history of the Kennedy clan, there is something odd in the notion that the assassination of Robert Kennedy was a crime against Israel. Robert had not been, in his brother's government, a pro-Israel Attorney General. He had infuriated Zionist leaders by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright and the Committee on Foreign Relations, aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a "foreign agent", which would had considerably hindered its efficiency. [8]
In 1968, Robert Kennedy had not suddenly turned pro-Israel. He was simply trying to attract Jewish votes, as everyone else. Robert's statement in an Oregon synagogue, mentioned in the May 27 Pasadena Independent Star-News article found in Sirhan's pocket, didn't exceed the minimal requirements. Its author David Lawrence had, in another article entitled "Paradoxical Bob," underlined how little credit should be given to such electoral promises: "Presidential candidates are out to get votes and some of them do not realize their own inconsistencies." [9] In fact, as Arthur Krock has noted, the supposed motive for RFK's murder is itself paradoxical: "If this motive was his position that the United States was committed to preserve Israel as a nation, his statement was made with more moderation than that of other important political persons who said the same thing." [10]
All things considered, there is no ground for believing that Robert Kennedy would have been, as president of the U.S.A., particularly Israel-friendly.
Did Sirhan kill Robert Kennedy?
If we trust official statements and mainstream news, the assassination of Robert Kennedy is an open-and-shut case. The identity of the killer suffers no discussion, since he was arrested on the spot, with the smoking gun in his hand.
In reality, ballistic and forensic evidence shows that none of Sirhan's bullets hit Kennedy. According to the autopsy report of Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Thomas Noguchi, Robert Kennedy was hit by three bullets, while a fourth went through his coat. All these bullets were shot from behind Kennedy: two of them under his right armpit, following an upward angle, and the third, the fatal bullet, behind his right ear, at point blank range. Dr. Noguchi reaffirms his conclusion in his memoirs, Coroner (1983) . Yet the sworn testimonies of twelve witnesses established that Robert had never turned his back on Sirhan and that Sirhan was five to six feet away from his target when he fired. Moreover, Sirhan was physically overpowered by Karl Uecker after his second shot, and, although he continued pressing the trigger mechanically, his revolver was not directed towards Kennedy anymore.
By tallying all the bullet impacts in the pantry, and those that wounded five people around Kennedy, it has been estimated that at least twelve bullets were fired, while Sirhan's gun carried only eight. On April 23, 2011, attorneys William Pepper and Laurie Dusek gathered all this evidence and more in a 58-page file submitted to the Court of California, with a request that Sirhan's case be reopened. They pointed out major irregularities in the 1968 trial, notably that the serial number of Sirhan's pistol did not match the serial number of the pistol by which were test fired the bullets compared with those extracted from Robert's brain. [11] Pepper also provided a computer analysis of audio recordings during the shooting, made by engineer Philip Van Praag in 2008, which confirms that two guns are heard. [12] Paul Schrade, a Kennedy confidant who was behind Robert during the shooting and received one of Sirhan's bullets, has long believed there was a second shooter. He testified at Sirhan's 2016 parole hearing, and told him: "the evidence clearly shows that you were not the gunman who shot Robert Kennedy." [13] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his sister Kathleen have joined Schrade and support the call for a reinvestigation of the assassination. [14]
The presence of a second shooter was mentioned by several witnesses and reported on the same day by a few news outlets. There are strong suspicions that Robert's real assassin was Thane Eugene Cesar, a security guard hired by the Hotel Ambassador, property of Zionist businessman Myer Schine. Cesar was stuck behind Kennedy at the moment of the shooting, and some people saw him draw his pistol. One of them, Don Schulman, positively saw him fire. [15] Incredibly, Cesar's weapon was never examined, and he was never interrogated, even though he did not conceal his hatred for the Kennedys. [16]
Even if we assumed that Sirhan did kill Robert Kennedy, a second aspect of the case raises question: Sirhan seemed to be in a state of trance during the shooting, and of disorientation just after. More importantly, Sirhan has always claimed that he has never had any recollection of his act. Fifty years after the facts, he continues to declare: "I was told by my attorney that I shot and killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy and that to deny this would be completely futile, [but] I had and continue to have no memory of the shooting of Senator Kennedy." He also claims to have no memory of "many things and incidents which took place in the weeks leading up to the shooting." [17] Some repetitive lines written of a notebook found in Sirhan's bedroom, which Sirhan recognizes as his own handwriting but does not remember writing, are reminiscent of automatic writing: there is a whole page of fifteen repetitions of "RFK must die, Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated, assassinated, assassinated, assassinated," suddenly turning to "I have never heard please pay to the order of of of of of." [18]
Psychiatric expertise, including lie-detector tests, has confirmed that Sirhan's amnesia is not faked. Therefore, experts in hypnosis and mental manipulation believe that Sirhan has been submitted to hypnotic programming. "It was obvious that he had been programmed to kill Robert Kennedy and programmed to forget that he had been programmed," stated Dr. Robert Blair. [19] In 2008, Harvard University professor Daniel Brown, a noted expert in hypnosis and trauma memory loss, interviewed Sirhan for a total of 60 hours, and concluded that Sirhan, whom he classified among "high hypnotizables," acted involuntarily under the effect of hypnotic suggestion: "His firing of the gun was neither under his voluntary control, nor done with conscious knowledge, but is likely a product of automatic hypnotic behavior and coercive control." During his sessions with Dr. Brown, Sirhan could remember having been accompanied by an attractive woman, before suddenly finding himself at a shooting range with a weapon he did not know. According to Brown's report, "Mr. Sirhan did not go with the intent to shoot Senator Kennedy, but did respond to a specific hypnotic cue given to him by that woman to enter 'range mode,' during which Mr. Sirhan automatically and involuntarily responded with a 'flashback' that he was shooting at a firing range at circle targets." Later, attorney William Pepper found an entry in the police file that showed that, just days before the assassination, Sirhan had visited a firing range, accompanied by an unknown instructor. [20]
Mossad, Mental control, and false-flag terrorism
We know that in the 1960s, American military agencies were experimenting on mental control. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, son of Hungarian Jews, directed the infamous CIA MKUltra project, which, among other things, were to answer questions such as: "Can a person under hypnosis be forced to commit murder?" according to a declassified document dated May 1951. [21] As Larry Romanoff has pointed out , MKUltra was an overwhelmingly Jewish enterprise, with people like Dr. John Gittinger, Harris Isbell, James Keehner, Lauretta Bender, Albert Kligman, Eugene Saenger, Chester Southam, Robert V. Lashbrook, Harold Abramson, Charles Geschickter, and Ray Treichler. [22]
In his book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (2018), Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman has revealed that, in May 1968, the month preceding Robert Kennedy's assassination, the Israeli Military Intelligence (AMAN) was planning to assassinate Yasser Arafat by hypnotically programming a Palestinian. The idea was proposed by a Navy psychologist named Binyamin Shalit, who claimed that, "if he was given a Palestinian prisoner -- one of the thousands in Israeli jails -- with the right characteristics, he could brainwash and hypnotize him into becoming a programmed killer. He would then be sent across the Jordan, join the Fatah there, and, when the opportunity arose, do away with Arafat." The proposal was approved. Shalit selected a 28-year-old Palestinian from Bethlehem, whom he deemed easily suggestionnable. The operation failed, but it proves that, in 1968 precisely, Israel was practicing a method of assassination identical to the one used against Robert Kennedy. [23]
Moreover, manipulating Palestinians to make them commit crimes, or committing crimes and blaming Palestinians for them, bears the signature of Israel. According to former Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky, in 1991 elements of the Mossad were plotting an attempt on the life of President George H. W. Bush. Bush had resisted an unprecedented pro-Israel lobbying campaign that called for $10 billion to help Jews immigrate from the former Soviet Union to Israel, complaining in a televised press conference on September 12 that "one thousand Jewish lobbyists are on Capitol Hill against little old me." [24] Worse, there was his policy of pressuring Israel to the negotiating table at the Madrid Conference by freezing their loan guarantees. Israel had had enough of him. The plan was to leak words to the Spanish police that terrorists were on their way, kill Bush and, in the midst of the confusion, release three Palestinians captured earlier and kill them on the spot. [25]
It is well known that Israel has a long history and a grand expertise in false flag terrorism. A report of the U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), quoted by the Washington Times on September 10, 2001, described the Israeli Intelligence agency as: "Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act." [26] That statement was made public on the day before 9/11.
The pattern dates from before the creation of the Jewish State, with the bombing of the King David Hotel, headquarter of the British authorities in Jerusalem, in the morning of July 22, 1946. Six terrorists of the Irgun dressed as Arabs brought 225 kg of explosives hidden in milk churns into the building. When a British officer became suspicious and gunshot ensued, the Irgun members fled after igniting the explosives. The explosion killed 91 people, mostly British, but also 15 Jews.
The strategy was repeated in Egypt during the summer of 1954, with Operation Susannah. The goal was to compromise the British's withdrawal from the Suez Canal, demanded by Colonel Abdul Gamal Nasser with support from President Eisenhower. Egyptian Jews trained in Israel bombed several British targets, then put the blame on the Muslim Brotherhood. The accidental detonation of an explosive device allowed the exposure of the conspiracy, which led to the "Lavon Affair", from the name of the Defense Minister who was held responsible.
There are more of the same stories in Gordon Thomas's Gideon's Spies: the Secret History of the Mossad (2009). [27] By definition, false-flagged Arab terrorism is only exposed when it fails, and we cannot know how many such operations have been set up by the Mossad. But from the revelations of Ronen Bergman in Rise and Kill First, Sirhan sure looks like a typical made-in-Mossad Palestinian patsy.
There are still, of course, unanswered questions, such as: How did Sirhan find himself in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel at midnight on June 6, 1968, with a pistol in his pocket? Sirhan himself declared it was by accident, or by mistake, but then he doesn't remember much of that evening. Another question is: Why did Kennedy, after finishing his speech, exit the ballroom through the kitchen pantry, instead of walking through the crowd of his supporters, as he usually did? To this question, there is an answer: according to a campaign volunteer present at the scene and interviewed by Michael Piper, it was Frank Mankiewicz who insisted that Robert go this way. [28] Now, isn't it awkward that Mankiewicz had started his career in public relations "as civil rights director for the western branch of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith," as he mentions in his autobiography. [29] (The ADL, remember, was founded in 1913 by the B'nai B'rith to defend the convicted child rapist and murderer Leo Frank .) [30] In 1991, Mankiewicz handled publicity for Oliver Stone's film JFK .
Content of my new book, The Unspoken Kennedy Truth :
Watch the video based on my earlier Kennedy research:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/a_kh5tb7PtA?feature=oembed
Laurent Guyénot, Ph.D., is the author of The Unspoken Kennedy Truth (2021), "Our God is Your God Too, But He Has Chosen Us": Essays on Jewish Power (2020), and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land (2018).
Vinnie O , says: June 5, 2021 at 5:09 pm GMT • 2.3 days ago
Laurent Guyénot , says: June 5, 2021 at 6:39 pm GMT • 2.2 days agoBobby Kennedy was killed by a single shot to the back of his head. The shot was fired at a range close enough to singe the hair on the back of his neck.
Sirhan was of course standing IN FRONT of Bobby, firing BLANKS. The reason for firing those blanks was to cover up the sound of the OTHER gun.
The ONLY person who could have fired such a shot was one of the FBI "bodyguards".
Bobby was murdered because he had a good chance to be elected Prez o' US. And if Bobby EVER became Prez, he would have re-opened the investigation of the murder of his brother, JFK. So RFK was killed by the same people who killed JFK.
Although NO ONE talks about the "plane crash" that killed JFK, Jr., that was also an assassination for the purpose of ensuring that NO ONE EVER made an honest investigation of the murder of JFK, Sr.
@Vinnie OKaty , says: June 5, 2021 at 9:18 pm GMT • 2.1 days agoAgreed. I did talk about JFK Jr. here:
https://www.unz.com/article/the-broken-presidential-destiny-of-jfk-jr/
And I have a chapter on him in my new Unspoken Kennedy Truth bookKaty , says: June 5, 2021 at 9:28 pm GMT • 2.1 days agoSirhan's safety is often in my mind since the death of Epstein and the attempt on Sirhan.
Looks like Barr was trying to clean up CIA tracks.Notsofast , says: June 5, 2021 at 10:45 pm GMT • 2.1 days agoMy understanding is that Maheu was the conduit between the CIA and the Mafia
in at least the JFK assassination. Mafia includes both Italian and Jewish/Israeli groupings. But the order and primary coverup was from the CIA (or acting former CIA). You don't usually hear about military generals, but they had to be in on it too. LBJ was clearly not a mastermind though must have been involved to a degree. Same with Hoover.I was a college student in LA at the time of the RFK assassination,
not that it makes me an expert, but it made me aware then and concerned and
investigating ever since.I have read all of Laurent Guyenot's works and most of it was powerfully eye opening,
especially about the history and "purpose" of the Old Testament Bible. I am grateful to him for this work.He seems to me on less solid ground when it comes to who can control things in the US.
Mulga Mumblebrain , says: June 6, 2021 at 5:46 am GMT • 1.8 days agom.k.ultra/cia/mossad cannot be separated. creating unwitting assassins is a major part of why the program was created. sirhan sirhan's handler "the girl in the polka dot dress" was seen by 25 witnesses but dismissed as a figment of the imagination of an overwrought campaign worker who claimed she heard her say "we shot him, we shot him". the camel faced woman of the joe/camel administration refused to allow sirhan sirhans parole even though bobby kennedy jr. requested it. guess that handlers have to have to watch out for each other.
Mulga Mumblebrain , says: June 6, 2021 at 5:51 am GMT • 1.8 days agoUS and Western political invertebrates don't pander for Jewish votes-they grovel for Jewish MONEY, the Universal Lubricant of electoral success.
@Godfree RobertsKaty , says: June 6, 2021 at 2:11 pm GMT • 1.4 days agoAnd he attacked the Israel A-bomb program and wanted to end the Federal Reserve, that financial yeshiva. They were lining up to top him, then his brother.
@The AlarmistAnon [213] Disclaimer , says: June 6, 2021 at 2:50 pm GMT • 1.4 days agoI agree that it's a mystery he is still alive. Other than it would need someone in the DOJ with the determination to see that he was carefully assassinated. You know there was a recent attempt on his life, don't you? Right around the time Epstein died. As long as Barr was head of DOJ I was extremely concerned about Sirhan.
Of course, originally they expected him to be executed and the California had the audacity to eliminate the death penalty.
lloyd , says: Website June 6, 2021 at 8:40 pm GMT • 1.2 days agoFBI document warns conspiracy theories are a new domestic terrorism threat
https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-documents-conspiracy-theories-terrorism-160000507.htmlS , says: June 7, 2021 at 2:31 am GMT • 21.9 hours agoTo understand Robert Kennedy's support for Israel, we have to enter the mental world of post World War Two. Robert wanted Israel' s nuclear programme ended because the Cold War required a bi polar between nuclear powers, US and USSR. A nuclear Israel would make Israel a super power as has indeed happened. Otherwise Robert, a war vet, loved Israel as an epitome of frontier America. Also Israel's social programme as contrasted with America's predatory capitalism greatly appealed. Robert's visit to Israel and deprecation of the Arabs fitted that era. The Arabs and Islam were not popular as backward peoples except for some Arabian Nights nostalgia. I have read a book that Iranian agents were also involved in his assassination. This was the era of the Shah who was covertly allied to Israel
@FranzMorton's toes , says: June 7, 2021 at 4:15 am GMT • 20.2 hours agoI once read of a security expert who had been around during the 60's who believed RFK's assassination was almost inevitable as RFK routinely disregarded security protocols regarding his exposure to large crowds.
@RoatanBillAlden , says: June 7, 2021 at 4:57 am GMT • 19.5 hours agoThat others were involved is a given and the 'system' has protected them for decades, just as it protected the assassins who killed JFK.
Since a president Robert would have been determined to get to who killed his brother, it is practically a foregone conclusion they were both killed by the exact same crew.
Colin Wright , says: Website June 7, 2021 at 5:12 am GMT • 19.2 hours agoSirhan Sirhan wasn't a Muslim he was Christian Greek Orthodox variety. In 1948 When he was 4 years old armed Israeli troops cane to his family's 10 room house and gave them one hour to pack up what they could carry and get out. His father was fired from his city of Jerusalem water department job as soon as Zionists bribed blackmailed and threatened United Nations delegates to declare Israel a nation.
The family went to live in a Greek Orthodox pilgrim hostel. 7 kids mostly boys youngest 4 how'd you like that. One of the boys was killed in a Zionist terrorist bombing at a crowded rush hour intersection about a year before. The Church refugee program brought the Sirhan to Pasadena Ca. They bought a house and settled in.
Having been kicked out of his home at age 4 by armed troops Sirhan was righteously resentful of the Zionists. He grew more anti Zionist at Pasadena community college because of pro Israel Jewish professors.
Kennedy ran in the California primary. He promised arms and support to Israel. So Sirhan shot him.
Robert Kennedy was as anti White as his brothers. He lobbied for the 1965 and 1968 unlimited non White immigration and affirmative action bills. He marched at the head of MLK's funeral, practically shoving the widow out of the way for photo opportunities. He also massively supported the Hispanic cause and was one of the first anti White Democrats to lobby for Hispanics to get affirmative action benefits. Although that didn't happen until 1970. By the time JFK was elected, Robert was a hard core anti White.
He's dead. Sirhan Sirhan confessed to shooting Kennedy because of Kennedy's support for Israel and the Israelis who stole his family's home.
If you're pro Israel and love the American politicians who give more to Israel than to the American taxpayers, you would have lived Kennedy at the time.
If you're anti White and pro black and brown you should mourn Kennedy as an anti White, pro black and brown pro black on White crime and pro affirmative action discrimination against White Americans dead martyr.
If you are pro White and against affirmative action discrimination against White Americans you are a misinformed ignoramus if you mourn Robert Kennedy.
If you are pro Palestinian and anti the Israeli property grabbers you are a misinformed ignoramus if you mourn the pro Israel Kennedy.
All 3 Kennedy brothers were anti White. March 1961 less than 2 months after he became President JFK issued executive order 10925 I believe it was mandating that all federal agencies SHALL take affirmative action to hire blacks over Whites.
Ted lobbied for the 64 civil rights for all but Whites act, the 65 unlimited non White immigration act. The 68 affirmative action act and every anti White law and judicial appointment in his long career.
And Robert disdained Whites and slobbered over MLK Jesse Jackson Cesear Chavez and every black and brown activist in existence. And he was a vociferous supporter of Israel and the anti White Jewish organizations in America.
Someone shot him. Sirhan Sirhan claimed he shot Robert Kennedy. Robert was as much an enemy of Whites and Palestinians as Johnson was.
Had Robert Kennedy become President he would have been as anti White as Nixon or worse.
Sirhan Sirhan had an excellent motive; revenge. The Jews didn't. Robert Kennedy was a puppet of jews both in domestic ( anti White) and foreign affairs.
Robert Kennedy was pro school de segregation and bussing , pro affirmative action, pro Hispanic pro black soft on black crime and anti White.
Any White man who mourns the Kennedys is anti White negro lover and Zionist.
Franklin Ryckaert , says: June 7, 2021 at 5:21 am GMT • 19.1 hours agoThe following topics come to mind.
Israel does indeed have a history of unmasked false-flag operations: the Lavon Affair, the attack on the Liberty, their proven awareness beforehand that the 9/11 attacks were going to happen, where, and how.
So unless we're to assume they're invariably incompetent, it follows that there must also have been false-flag operations that were never uncovered. Like, say, the assassination of Robert Kennedy. But this is hardly proof that this was in fact what happened. It merely demonstrates that it's not inconceivable.
Then there's Sirhan Sirhan himself. What was he like? Had he had similar episodes in the past: committing violent acts and having no memory of them? Was he deranged in some way that suggested such behavior was possible? We know, for example, that the young Adolf Hitler was transported when he saw Wagner's Rienzi -- the story of a man who rises to become the savior of his people. Obviously, this prefigured Hitler's later career. Was there anything in Sirhan's life that prefigured an assassination attempt?
Was there other evidence that Sirhan was worked up about Kennedy and Israel? Surely there should have been more than reading a clipping that Kennedy was for an arms sale. What was he saying to people? What had he been reading? Was Sirhan even aware of who was running for President?
If Israel was in fact behind the killing, how were they sure they would benefit? Was it, in June, clear that if Kennedy lived, he would get the nomination and beat the Republican nominee, and that if he did, that he would be dramatically worse for Israel than the apparent alternatives at that point?
@The AlarmistColin Wright , says: Website June 7, 2021 at 5:35 am GMT • 18.9 hours agoSirhan doesn't remember anything (because of his hypnosis), therefore he is not dangerous.
The Jews made a mistake by choosing a Christian Palestinian as their "typical fanatical Muslim terrorist", but they hoped the gullible American public would not notice, which of course was the case.
Lee , says: June 7, 2021 at 10:48 am GMT • 13.6 hours agoThis bit from Wikipedia is worth mentioning.
' On February 10, 2016, at his 15th parole hearing, he [Sirhan] was denied parole again. One of Sirhan's shooting victims from that night, Paul Schrade, aged 91 at the time of the hearing, testified in his support, stating his belief that a second shooter killed Kennedy and that Sirhan was intended to be a distraction from the real gunman by an unknown conspiracy '
@Vinnie O ense.Ron Unz , says: June 7, 2021 at 11:43 am GMT • 12.7 hours agoKennedy had been shot three times. One bullet was fired at a range of perhaps 1 inch (3 cm) and entered behind his right ear, dispersing fragments throughout his brain.[41] The other two entered at the rear of his right armpit; one exited from his chest and the other lodged in the back of his neck.[4
Wiki
Five other people were wounded by the "blanks" that SS fired after RFK had been shot.
Five other people were wounded: William Weisel of ABC News, Paul Schrade of the United Automobile Workers union, Democratic Party activist Elizabeth Evans, Ira Goldstein of the Continental News Service, and Kennedy campaign volunteer Irwin Stroll.[24]
@Triteleia Laxa g seems to point in a certain obvious direction, but Bergman's recent book also includes a major new revelation. At exactly the same moment that Sirhan was being wrestled to the floor of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles, another young Palestinian was undergoing intensive rounds of hypnotic conditioning at the hands of Mossad in Israel, being programmed to assassinate PLO leader Yasir Arafat; and although that effort ultimately failed, such a coincidence seems to stretch the bounds of plausibility.
@Ron Unz e when compared back to the real world.Joe Levantine , says: June 7, 2021 at 12:22 pm GMT • 12.1 hours agoHad a sinister grouping discovered how to create hypnotised assassins a half a century ago, there is no interest of theirs that they would not be able to achieve by now.
Yet the group you accuse has not even been able to deal with the Palestinians. In the meantime, countless peace settlements, successful ethnic cleansings, large scale massacres, and more, have taken place around the world, ignored and/or forgiven.
My impression is that you paint the Israelis/"deep state neocons"/Jews as Saturday morning cartoon villains. They are all powerful, utterly ruthless, constantly scheming, and yet somehow never achieve more than the most ordinary of their aims. This is too funny.
@Franklin RyckaertMLK , says: June 7, 2021 at 12:26 pm GMT • 12.0 hours agoAnd that made them bold enough to pin 9/11 on a bunch of Islamic terrorists. The system is superb; when discussing 9/11 in 2011 with one of my American cousins, he looked at me like I had come from Mars when I asked him about the the third building (7) falling down without being hit. His answer was " what building you are talking about". That got me curious and I researched to find out if my cousin's reaction was a rarity and to my big surprise it turned out that up to that date only 25% of the American public were aware of the fall of three buildings all in all. Free US media indeed!
@Godfree Roberts After all, whatever else you might say of him, long-reigning Erdogan, is the poster boy for leader hubris yet he's still there.Old and Grumpy , says: June 7, 2021 at 1:14 pm GMT • 11.2 hours agoThough if you make too many powerful enemies eventually someone is going to take a shot. Think of it as the coalition of the willing.
We all crave and grow comfortable with the coutours of what did and didn't happen as if was ordained. Thus Kerry made fun of W. Bush for sitting in that elementary school classroom on live TV as if, regardless of what he (W) and those protecting him knew, he was safe as a kitten.
I've mentioned the Vincennes/Lockerbie as elucidating in terms of the functionality of the resolve. With the US and Iran, the two indisputable moving parties, conspiring to make Libya the dirty dog.
@Colin Wrightchristoso , says: June 7, 2021 at 1:14 pm GMT • 11.2 hours agoRichard Nixon, via Henry Kissinger, was very good for the Israelis. Would mystery votes in Illinois and Texas happen for Bobby like they did for John? We will never know. Joe Kennedy was a ruthless, power driven man, which is why the Kennedy mystique has always been both amusing and a mystery. Perhaps Joe could have pulled another presidential election off for another son.
EuroNat , says: June 7, 2021 at 1:32 pm GMT • 10.9 hours agoAccording to campaign workers at the scene, RFK wanted to exit the ballroom through the crowd, but his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz insisted that he leave through the pantry, having arranged a midnight press briefing in a nearby room. Kennedy was told that he needed to hold the briefing so that he could appear on the morning news the following day. Oddly, Mankiewicz later denied having played this role, contradicting the accounts of Kennedy's staff. As Guyenot points out, Mankiewicz was formerly a publicist for the Zionist ADL. Collins Piper, by the way, goes off on a tangent suggesting that Iran somehow had a hand in the RFK assassination.
Another loose end is of course the girl with the polka dot dress. Who was she? where did she go? Here is one authors novel assessment: http://www.surfs-up.net/Downloads/RFK.pdf If this writer is correct, the ADL also played a role in the silencing of the polka dot dress girl.
@Triteleia Laxa ts. "Confused" was an oft repeated adjective to describe the victims state of mind.Vice made a documentary years ago that can easily be found on the internet, "worlds scariest drug" was titled if memory serves me. Here's also some safety advice for travelers to Colombia, proof of how common this is:
https://www.worldnomads.com/travel-safety/south-america/colombia/drugs-in-colombia
Now could someone be ordered to kill someone else while high on scopolamine? I have read of no reports. But one thing is clear, a hypnotized like state – in which victims blindly follow directions from strangers – can be induced chemically.
Jun 06, 2021 | mobile.slashdot.org
Walmart Will Give 740,000 Employees a Free Smartphone (cbsnews.com) 37 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday June 06, 2021 @06:39PM from the company-lines dept. "Walmart will give 740,000 employees free Samsung smartphones by the end of the year ," reports CBS News, "so they can use a new app to manage schedules, the company announced Thursday." The phone, the Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro, can also be used for personal use, and the company will provide free cases and protection plans. The phone's retail price is currently $499... Up until now, associates at Walmart stores used handheld devices they shared to communicate, but an initial test with employee smartphones was received well and will now be expanded upon, Walmart said...The company promised that it would not have access to any employee's personal data and can "use the smartphone as their own personal device if they want, with all the features and privacy they're used to." The test will be expanded by the end of the year, Walmart said.
Earlier this year, Walmart announced pay increases for nearly a third of its U.S. workforce of 1.6 million. In February, digital and store workers saw their starting hourly rates increase from $13 to $19 depending on their location and market.
Hmmm ( Score: 3 , Insightful)by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06, 2021 @06:48PM ( #61460698 ) Probably will be used to clock them in and out when they enter and exit the premises, and track their movements to ensure they are working and not lollygagging. Maybe even track bio info to adjust health insurance prices.If you think this is just a free gift done out of generosity, you're quite naive. Reply to This Share
No thank you ( Score: 3 )by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Sunday June 06, 2021 @07:11PM ( #61460772 ) It would be wise for Walmart employees to put that phone in a locker on premises before leaving. Having your corporate overlord knowing everything you do outside of work is creepy... peeping Tom creepy. Wal-mart states they won't collect your data but we'll be reading a news story within two years finding out they did just that. "We're sorry for data that was collected. It was a configuration oversight on our part. We promise to do better moving forward." yadda, yadda, yadda. Reply to This Share Not surprised... ( Score: 5 , Interesting)by Pollux ( 102520 ) < speter@@@tedata...net...eg > on Sunday June 06, 2021 @07:36PM ( #61460814 ) Journal
I was talking last week with someone who works customer service at a nearby Walmart. She told me that people are either leaving or moving up the chain, and it's hard to keep new employees retained. She had one who was in for three days, then just went AWOL and was never heard from again.
I asked her what starting salary was. (The Walmart's in out-state MN.) She said $11.50.
I guess Walmart can't help but behave this way. What they should be doing is raising salaries. Instead, they choose to offer a "perk" of a "free" phone w/ a "free" phone plan. I say "free", because no doubt the phone will be a data goldmine for corporate. How? Let me count the ways.
1) Track employee movements within the store;
2) Determine quantity and length of employee breaks;
3) Track employee movements outside the store;
4) Track employee searches;
5) Track employee social media posts;
6) Monitor employee spending behaviors;
7) Mine employee messages;
And so on, and so forth...And any one of these data mining operations can be used to punish employee misbehavior, hustle Walmart services (Moneygram springs to mind), not to mention sell to interested 3rd parties. (With Walmart commanding the largest fleet of employees in the United States, imagine how many other companies would be willing to pay for generalized data on employee behavior. Better yet, image how much someone would be willing to pay to advertise directly to 1.6 million people.)
Jun 06, 2021 | www.wsj.com
The problem with conspiracy theories (CIA invented term to whitewash CIA participation in killing of JFK) that some of them in ten to twenty years no longer viewed as conspiracies. They enter mainstream.An online poll this week from Ipsos reported 15% of Americans agree that the government, media and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshiping pedophiles. Not 15% of Republicans or conservatives, but of Americans. That's a lot.
... ... ...
America is a lonely place. When you hold to a conspiracy theory, you join a community. You're suddenly part of something. You have new friends you can talk to on the internet ...
... One of the enduring and revealing songs of America asks "Which side are you on / Which side are you on? / You go to Harlan County / There is no neutral there / You'll either be a union man / Or a thug for J.H. Blair."
... ... ...
Conspiracy believers don't believe what the mainstream media tell them. Why would they? Newsrooms are undergoing their own revolution, with woke progressives vs. journalistic traditionalists, advocacy versus old-school news values. It is ideological. "We are here to shape and encourage a new reality." "No, we are here to find and report the news." It is generational: The young have the upper hand and the Slack channel. The woke are winning.
...
When you think your country has grown completely bizarre...Think of what normal human beings have been asked to absorb the past year. The whole country was shut down and everyone was told to stay in the house. They closed the churches, and the churches agreed. There was no school and everyone made believe""really, we all made believe!""screens were a replacement. A bunch of 13-year-old girls in the junior high decided they were boys and started getting shots, and no adults helped them by saying, "Whoa, slow down, this is a major life decision and you're a kid." The school board no longer argues about transgender bathrooms, they're on to transgender boys wanting to play on the girls team. Big corporations now tell you what you should think about local questions, and if this offends you, they don't care. There were riots and protests last summer and local government seemed overwhelmed.
Jun 06, 2021 | www.unz.com
It further appears that Bill Gates, then head of Microsoft, made a personal investment in CommTouch at the behest of Isabel Maxwell. In an October 2000 article published in the Guardian , Isabel "jokes about persuading Bill Gates to make a personal investment" in CommTouch sometime during this period.
The Guardian article then oddly notes, regarding Isabel Maxwell and Bill Gates:
"In a faux southern belle accent, [Isabel] purrs: 'He's got to spend $375m a year to keep his tax-free status, why not allow me to help him.' She explodes with laughter."
Given that individuals as wealthy as Gates cannot have "tax-free status" and that this article was published soon after the creation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Isabel's statements suggest that it was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the foundation's endowment assets, that made this sizable investment in CommTouch.
Furthermore, it is worth highlighting the odd way in which Isabel describes her dealings with Gates ("purring," speaking in a fake Southern accent), describing her interactions with him in a way not found in any of her numerous other interviews on a wide variety of topics. This odd behavior may be related to Isabel's previous interactions with Gates and/or the mysterious relationship between Gates and Epstein during this time.
Isabel Maxwell as CommTouch PresidentAfter 2000, CommTouch's business and clout expanded rapidly, with Isabel Maxwell subsequently crediting investments from Microsoft, led by Gates, and Paul Allen for the company's good fortune and the success of its effort to enter the US market. Maxwell, as quoted in the 2002 book Fastalliances , states that Microsoft viewed CommTouch as a key "distribution network," adding that "Microsoft's investment in us put us on the map. It gave us instant credibility, validated our technology and service in the marketplace." By this time, Microsoft's ties to CommTouch had deepened with new partnerships, including CommTouch's hosting of Microsoft Exchange .
Though Isabel Maxwell was able to secure lucrative investments and alliances for CommTouch and saw its products integrated into key software and hardware components produced and sold by Microsoft and other tech giants, she was unable to improve the company's dire financial situation, with CommTouch netting a loss of $4.4 million in 1998 and similar losses well into the 2000s, with net losses totalling $24 million in 2000 (just one year after the sizable investments from Microsoft, Paul Allen and Gates). The losses continued even after Isabel formally left the company and became president emeritus in 2001. By 2006, the company was over $170 million in debt. Isabel Maxwell left her position at CommTouch in 2001 but for years retained a sizable amount of CommTouch stock valued at the time at around $9.5 million . Today, Isabel Maxwell is, among other things, a " technology pioneer " of the World Economic Forum.
Epstein, Edge, and Nathan MyhrvoldAnother indication of a relationship between Epstein and Gates prior to 2001 is Epstein's cozy ties with Nathan Myhrvold, who joined Microsoft in the 1980s and became the company's first chief technology officer in 1996. At the time, Myhrvold was one of Gates's closest advisers, if not the closest, and cowrote Gates's 1996 book, The Road Ahead , which sought to explain how emerging technologies would impact life in the years and decades to come.
In December of the same year that he became Microsoft's CTO, Myhrvold traveled on Epstein's plane from Kentucky to New Jersey, and then again in January 1997 from New Jersey to Florida. Other passengers accompanying Myhrvold on these flights included Alan Dershowitz and "GM," presumably Ghislaine Maxwell. It is worth keeping in mind that this is the same period when Gates had a documented relationship with Ghislaine's sister Isabel.
In addition, in the 1990s, Myhrvold traveled with Epstein in Russia alongside Esther Dyson , a digital technology consultant who has been called "the most influential woman in all the computer world." She currently has close ties to Google as well as the DNA testing company 23andme and is a member of and agenda contributor to the World Economic Forum. Dyson later stated that the meeting with Epstein had been planned by Myhrvold. The meeting appears to have taken place in 1998, based on information posted on Dyson's social media accounts. One photo features Dyson and Epstein, with a time stamp indicating April 28, 1998, posing with Pavel Oleynikov, who appears to have been an employee of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center. In that photo, they are standing in front of the house of the late Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear scientist and dissident, who is alleged to have had ties to US intelligence. Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, were supporters of Zionist causes .
The photos were taken in Sarov, where the Russian Federal Nuclear Center is based. That same day, another photo was taken that shows Epstein inside a classroom full of teens, apparently also in Sarov, given the time stamp.
Another Dyson image , one without a visible time stamp but with a caption stating the photo was taken "at Microsoft Russia in Moscow" in April 1998, shows Nathan Myhrvold. Dyson's caption further states, "This was the beginning of a three-week trip during which Nathan and a variety of hangers-on (including a bodyguard) explored the state of post-Soviet science." Epstein appears to be one of the "hangers-on," given the photographs, dates, and the described purpose of the trip.
Myhrvold and Epstein apparently had more in common than an interest in Russian scientific advances. When Myhrvold left Microsoft to cofound Intellectual Ventures, Vanity Fair reported that he had received Epstein at the firm's office with "young girls" in tow who appeared to be "Russian models." A source close to Myhrvold and cited by Vanity Fair claimed that Myhrvold spoke openly about borrowing Epstein's jet and staying at his homes in Florida and New York. Vanity Fair also noted that Myhrvold has been accused of having sex with minors provided by Epstein by none other than Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who stands accused of the same crime and who had previously flown with Myhrvold on Epstein's private plane.
In addition, a former colleague of Myhrvold's at Microsoft later developed her own ties to Epstein. Linda Stone , who joined Microsoft in 1993 and worked directly under Myhrvold, eventually became a Microsoft vice president. She introduced Epstein to Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab after Epstein's first arrest. "He has a tainted past, but Linda assures me that he's awesome," Ito later said in an email to three MIT staffers. In Epstein's famous little black book, there are several phone numbers for Stone, and her emergency contact is listed as Kelly Bovino, a former model and alleged Epstein coconspirator. After Epstein's 2019 arrest, it emerged that Epstein had "directed" Bill Gates to donate $2 million to the MIT lab in 2014. Epstein also allegedly secured a $5 million donation from Leon Black for the lab. Ito was forced to resign his post as the lab's director shortly after Epstein's 2019 arrest.
Nathan Myhrvold , Linda Stone , Joi Ito, Esther Dyson , and Bill Gates were all members of the Edge Foundation community (edge.org website), alongside several other Silicon Valley icons. Edge, which is described as an exclusive organization of intellectuals " redefining who and what we are ," was created by John Brockman, a self-described "cultural impresario" and noted literary agent. Brockman is best known for his deep ties to the art world in the late 1960s, though lesser known are his various "management consulting" gigs for the Pentagon and White House during that same period. Edge, which the Guardian once called "the world's smartest website," is an exclusive online symposium affiliated with what Brockman calls "the Third Culture." Epstein appears to have become involved with Brockman as early as 1995, when he helped to finance and rescue a struggling book project that was managed by Brockman.
Edge, however, is more than just a website. For decades, it was also instrumental in bringing together tech executives, scientists who were often Brockman's clients, and Wall Street financiers through its Millionaires' Dinner, first held in 1985. In 1999, this event rebranded as the Billionaires' Dinner, and Epstein became intimately involved in these affairs and the Edge Foundation itself. Epstein was photographed attending several of the dinners as was Sarah Kellen, Ghislaine Maxwell's chief "assistant" and coconspirator in the Epstein/Maxwell-run sex trafficking and blackmail scheme.
Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft and Jeffrey Epstein at the 2000 Edge Billionaires' Dinner Source: https://www.edge.org/igd/1200From 2001 to 2017, Epstein funded $638,000 out of a total of $857,000 raised by Edge. During this period, there were several years when Epstein was Edge's only donor. Epstein stopped giving in 2015, which was incidentally the same year that Edge decided to discontinue its annual Billionaires' Dinner tradition. In addition, the only award Edge has ever given out, the $100,000 Edge of Computation prize, was awarded in 2005 to Quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch -- it was funded entirely by Epstein. A year before he began donating heavily to Edge, Epstein had created the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation to "fund and support cutting edge science around the world."
Since the Epstein scandal, regular attendees of the Billionaires' Dinner, sometimes called the Edge annual dinner, have referred to the event as an "influence operation." If one follows the money, it appears it was an influence operation largely benefitting one man, Jeffrey Epstein, and his network. The evidence points toward Myhrvold and Gates as being very much a part of that network, even before Epstein's involvement in Edge increased significantly.
A Tale of Two BillsIt is worth exploring the ties between the "philanthropic" endeavors of Bill Gates and Bill Clinton in the early 2000s, particularly given Epstein's and Ghislaine Maxwell's ties to the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative during that period. According to former Israeli intelligence operative Ari Ben-Menashe, Bill Clinton had been the main focus of Epstein's sexual blackmail operation in the 1990s, a claim supported by Epstein victim testimony and Epstein's intimate involvement with individuals who were close to the former president at the time.
Bill Gates at the White House Conference on the New Economy in 2000, Source: LA TimesDespite tensions arising from the Clinton administration's pursuit of Microsoft's monopoly in the late 1990s, the Gates and Clinton relationship had thawed by April 2000, when Gates attended the White House " Conference on the New Economy ." Attendees besides Gates included close Epstein associate Lynn Forester (now Lady de Rothschild) and then secretary of the treasury Larry Summers, who has also come under fire for his Epstein ties. Another attendee was White House chief of staff Thomas "Mack" McLarty, whose special assistant Mark Middleton met with Epstein at least three times at the Clinton White House. Middleton was fired after press reports surfaced detailing his ties to illegal donations linked to foreign governments that had been made to Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign. Another participant in the conference was Janet Yellen, Biden's current Secretary of the Treasury.
Gates spoke at a conference panel entitled "Closing the Global Divide: Health, Education and Technology." He discussed how the mapping of the human genome would result in a new era of technological breakthroughs and discussed the need to offer internet access to everyone to close the digital divide and allow the "new" internet-based economy to take shape. At the time, Gates was backing a company , along with American Telecom billionaire Craig McCaw, that hoped to establish a global internet service provider monopoly through a network of low-orbit satellites. That company, Teledesic, shut down between 2002 and 2003 and is credited as being the inspiration for Elon Musk's Starlink.
Bill Clinton and Bill Gates entered the world of philanthropy around the same time, with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launching in 2000 and the Clinton Foundation, in 2001. Not only that but Wired described the two foundations as being "at the forefront of a new era in philanthropy, in which decisions -- often referred to as investments -- are made with the strategic precision demanded of business and government, then painstakingly tracked to gauge their success."
Other media outlets, however, such as the Huffington Post , challenged that these foundations engaged in "philanthropy" and asserted that calling them such was causing "the rapid deconstruction of the accepted term." The Huffington Post further noted that the Clinton Global Initiative (part of the Clinton Foundation), the Gates Foundation, and a few similar organizations "all point in the direction of blurring the boundaries between philanthropy, business and non-profits." It noted that this model for "philanthropy" has been promoted by the World Economic Forum and the Milken Institute. It is also worth noting that several of Epstein's own "philanthropic" vehicles were also created just as this new era in philanthropy was beginning.
The Milken Institute was founded by Michael Milken , the notorious Wall Street "junk bond king," who was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud in 1989. He served little prison time and was ultimately pardoned by Donald Trump. Milken committed his crimes while working alongside Leon Black and Ron Perelman at Drexel Burnham Lambert before its scandalous collapse. Black was deeply tied to Epstein, even having Epstein manage his personal "philanthropic" foundation for several years, even after Epstein's first arrest. Perelman was a major Clinton donor whose 1995 fundraiser for the then president was attended by Epstein and whose companies offered jobs to Webster Hubbell and Monica Lewinsky after their respective scandals in the Clinton administration. Like Gates, Milken has transformed his reputation for ruthlessness in the corporate world into one of a "prominent philanthropist." Much of his "philanthropy" benefits the Israeli military and illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.
Years after creating their foundations, Gates and Clinton discussed how they have "long bonded over their shared mission" of normalizing this new model of philanthropy. Gates spoke to Wired in 2013 about "their forays into developing regions" and "cites the close partnerships between their organizations." In that interview, Gates revealed that he had met Clinton before he had become president, stating, "I knew him before he was president, I knew him when he was president, and I know him now that he's not president."
Also in that interview, Clinton stated that after he left the White House he sought to focus on two specific things. The first is the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), which he stated exists "thanks largely to funding from the Gates Foundation," and the second is the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), "where I try to build a global network of people to do their own thing."
The Clinton Health Access Initiative first received an $11 million donation from the Gates Foundation in 2009. Over the last twelve years, the Gates Foundation has donated more than $497 million to CHAI. CHAI was initially founded in 2002 with the mission of tackling HIV/AIDS globally through "strong government relationships" and addressing "market inefficiencies." The Gates Foundation's significant donations, however, began not long after CHAI's expansion into malaria diagnostics and treatments. Notably, in 2011, Tachi Yamada, the former president of the Gates Foundation's Global Health program, joined CHAI's board alongside Chelsea Clinton.
Bill Gates and Bill Clinton at the annual Clinton Global Initiative in 2010Regarding the CGI, Epstein's defense lawyers argued in court in 2007 that Epstein had been "part of the original group that conceived of the Clinton Global Initiative," which was first launched in 2005. Epstein's lawyers described the CGI as a project "bringing together a community of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges." The Gates Foundation gave the CGI a total of $2.5 million between 2012 and 2013 in addition to its massive donations to the CHAI and an additional $35 million to the Clinton Foundation itself. In addition to the Gates Foundation donations, Gates's Microsoft has been intimately involved in other "philanthropic" projects backed by Clinton.
In addition to these ties, Hillary Clinton established a partnership between the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation in 2014 as part of the Clintons' No Ceilings initiative. That partnership sought to "gather and analyze data about the status of women and girls' participation around the world" and involved the two foundations working "with leading technology partners to collect these data and compile them." Months before the partnership was announced, Gates and Epstein met for dinner and discussed the Gates Foundation and philanthropy, according to the New York Times . During Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful run for president in 2016, both Bill and Melinda Gates were on her short list as potential options for vice president.
In addition, Epstein attempted to become involved in the Gates Foundation directly, as seen by his efforts to convince the Gates Foundation to partner with JP Morgan on a multibillion-dollar "global health charitable fund" that would have resulted in hefty fees paid out to Epstein, who was very involved with JP Morgan at the time. Though that fund never materialized, Epstein and Gates did discuss Epstein becoming involved in Gates's philanthropic efforts. Some of these contacts were not reported by the mainstream press until after the Bill and Melinda Gates divorce announcement. Yet, as mentioned, it was known that Epstein had "directed" Gates to donate to at least one organization -- $2 million in 2014 to the MIT Media Lab.
Recent revelations about Gates and Epstein meetings that took place between 2013 and 2014 have further underscored the importance Epstein apparently held in the world of billionaire "philanthropy," with Gates reportedly claiming that Epstein was his "ticket" to winning a Nobel Prize. Norwegian media, however, reported in October 2020 that Gates and Epstein had met the Nobel Committee chair, which failed to make a splash in international media at the time. It is worth asking if Epstein managed to arrange such meetings with other individuals who also coveted Nobel Prizes and if any such individuals later received those prizes. If Epstein had such connections, it is unlikely that he would use them only once in the case of Bill Gates, given the vastness of his network, particularly in the tech and science worlds.
The year 2013 is also when Bill and Melinda Gates together met with Epstein at his New York residence, after which Melinda allegedly began asking her soon-to-be ex-husband to distance himself from Epstein. While the stated reason for this, in the wake of the Gateses' divorce announcement, was that Melinda was put off by Epstein's past and his persona, it could potentially be related to other concerns about Melinda's reputation and that of the foundation that shares her name.
Indeed, 2013 was also the year that the Gates mansion systems engineer, Rick Allen Jones, began to be investigated by Seattle police for his child porn and child rape collection, which contained over six thousand images and videos. Despite the gravity of his crime, when Jones was arrested at the Gates mansion a year later, he was not jailed after his arrest but was merely ordered "to stay away from children," according to local media reports. From Melinda's perspective, this scandal, combined with Bill Gates's growing association with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein may have posed a threat to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's reputation, well before Epstein's 2019 arrest.
2013 was also the year that the Maxwells become involved in the Clinton Foundation. That year, Ghislaine Maxwell's TerraMar Project, which officially supported UN Sustainable Development Goals as they relate the world's oceans, made a $1.25 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of an effort to form a Sustainable Oceans Alliance. TerraMar shut down shortly after Epstein's 2019 arrest.
Isabel Maxwell and Al Seckel at the World Economic Forum's 2011 Annual MeetingNotably, Ghislaine's TerraMar Project was in many ways the successor to Isabel Maxwell's failed Blue World Alliance, which was also ostensibly focused on the world's oceans. Blue World Alliance was set up by Isabel and her now deceased husband Al Seckel, who had hosted a "scientific conference" on Epstein's island. The Blue World Alliance also went under the name Globalsolver Foundation, and Xavier Malina, Christine Maxwell's son, was listed as Globalsolver's liaison to the Clinton Foundation. He was previously an intern at the Clinton Global Initiative.
Malina later work ed in the Obama administration at the Office of White House Personnel. He now works for Google. It is also worth noting that during this same period, Isabel Maxwell's son, Alexander Djerassi , was chief of staff at the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in the Hillary Clinton–run State Department.
Gates Science and Epstein ScienceWhile the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation intermingled, and the latter had ties to Epstein and Maxwell, it also appears that Epstein had significant influence over two of the most prominent science advisers to Bill Gates over the last fifteen years -- Melanie Walker and Boris Nikolic.
A screenshot from a 2019 presentation Melanie Walker gave for Rockefeller Foundation, where she is a fellow. Source: YouTubeMelanie Walker , now a celebrated neurosurgeon, met Jeffrey Epstein in 1992 soon after she graduated from college, when he offered her a Victoria's Secret modelling job. Such offers were often made by Epstein and his accomplices when recruiting women into his operation and it is unclear if Walker ever actually worked as a model for the Leslie Wexner-owned company. She then stayed at a New York apartment building associated with Epstein's trafficking operations during visits to New York, but it is unclear how long she stayed there or at other Epstein-owned properties. After she graduated from medical school in 1998, she became Epstein's science adviser for at least a year. By 1999, she had grown so close to Prince Andrew that she attended a Windsor Castle birthday celebration hosted by the Queen along with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. During this period, Melanie appears on Epstein's flight logs under her birth name , Melanie Starnes , though it looks like "Starves" on the flight logs.
The close relationship between Prince Andrew and Melanie Walker came under scrutiny after Epstein's former housekeeper at the Zorro Ranch property, Deidre Stratton, stated in an interview that Prince Andrew had been "given" a "beautiful young neurosurgeon" while he stayed at Epstein's New Mexico property. Given that only one neurosurgeon was both close to Prince Andrew and a part of Epstein's entourage at the time, it seems highly likely that this woman "gifted" to Andrew was Melanie Walker. According to Stratton, Andrew "kept company" with this woman for three days. The arrangement was set up by Epstein, who was not at the property at the time. The exact timing of the stay is uncertain, but it likely took place between 1999 and 2001.
Stratton said the following about the stay:
"At the time, Jeffrey had this, she supposedly was a neurosurgeon, quite young, beautiful, young and brilliant, and she stayed in the home with him At one point we had all these different teas and you could pick the teas that you wanted and she asked me to find one that would make Andrew more horny.
I'm guessing she understood her job was to entertain him because I guess, the fear, I don't know; the fear would be that Andrew would say, "No I didn't really find her that attractive." . . . He would tell Jeffrey that and then she would be on the ropes.
I'm guessing that, another theory is, that Jeffrey probably had her on retainer and she knew what her job would be, should be, to make these people happy. . . . Sex was all they thought about. I mean, I know for sure that Jeffrey would ideally like three massages a day."
Sometime later, Walker moved to Seattle and began living with then Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky, who now serves as a board partner at the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz. Andreesen Horowitz notably backs Carbyne911, the Israel intelligence-linked precrime start-up funded by Epstein and his close associate, former prime minister of Israel Ehud Barak, as well as another Israeli intelligence-linked tech company led by Barak, called Toka . Toka recently won contracts with the governments of Moldova, Nigeria, and Ghana through the World Bank, where Melanie Walker is currently a director and a former special adviser to its president. It is unclear when, how and under what circumstances Walker met Sinofsky.
After moving to Seattle to be with Sinofsky and after a brief stint as a "practitioner in the developing world" in China with the World Health Organization, Walker was hired as a senior program officer by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006. Given that the main feature of Walker's resume at the time was having been a science adviser to another wealthy "philanthropist," Jeffrey Epstein, her hire by the Gates Foundation for this critical role further underscores how Bill Gates, at the very least, not only knew who Epstein was but knew enough about his scientific interests and investments to want to hire Walker. Walker went on to become deputy director for Global Development as well as a deputy director of Special Initiatives at the foundation. According to the Rockefeller Foundation , where she is a fellow, Walker later advised Gates on issues pertaining to neurotechnology and brain science for Gates's secretive company bgC3 , which Gates originally registered as a think tank under the name Carillon Holdings. According to federal filings, bgC3's focus areas were "scientific and technological services," "industrial analysis and research," and "design and development of computer hardware and software."
During her time at the Gates Foundation, Walker introduced Boris Nikolic, Gates's science adviser, to Epstein. Today, Melanie Walker is the cochair of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Neurotechnology and Brain Science, having previously been named a WEF Young Global Leader. She also advises the World Health Organization, which is closely linked to Bill Gates's "philanthropy."
At the WEF, Walker wrote an article in 2016 entitled " Healthcare in 2030: Goodbye Hospital, Hello Home-spital ," in which she discusses how wearable devices, brain-machine interfaces, and injectable/swallowable robotic "medicines" will be the norm by 2030. Years before COVID-19 and the Great Reset–inspired efforts to change health care in just this way, Walker wrote that while the dystopian scenario she was painting "sounds crazy . . . most of these technologies are either almost ready for prime time, or in development." Of course, a lot of those technologies took shape thanks to the patronage of her former bosses, Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates.
In the case of Boris Nikolic, after being introduced to Epstein through Walker, he attended a 2011 meeting with Gates and Epstein where he was photographed alongside James Staley, then a senior JP Morgan executive, and Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and a close Epstein associate. Nikolic was chief adviser for science and technology to Bill Gates at the time, advising both the Gates Foundation and bgC3. According to the mainstream narrative, this is supposed to be the first time that Gates and Epstein had ever met. In addition, this may have been when Epstein pitched the joint Gates Foundation–JP Morgan "global health charitable fund."
The 2011 meeting at Jeffrey Epstein's Manhattan mansion attended by James E. Staley, Larry Summers, Jeffery Epstein, Bill Gates and Boris NikolicIn 2014, Nikolic " waxed enthusiastic " about Epstein's supposed penchant for financial advice ahead of a public offering for a gene-editing company that Nikolic had a $42 million stake in . Notably, both Nikolic and Epstein were clients of the same group of bankers at JP Morgan, with Bloomberg later reporting that Epstein regularly helped those bankers attract wealthy new clients.
In 2016, Nikolic cofounded Biomatics capital, which invests in health-related companies at "the convergence of genomics and digital data" that are "enabling the development of superior therapeutics, diagnostics and delivery models." Nikolic founded Biomatics with Julie Sunderland, formerly the director of the Gates Foundation's Strategic Investment Fund.
At least three of the companies backed by Biomatics -- Qihan Biotech , eGenesis , and Editas -- were cofounded by George Church, a Harvard geneticist with deep ties to Epstein and also closely associated with the Edge Foundation. Biomatics investment in Qihan Biotech is no longer listed on the Biomatics website. Church's Qihan Biotech seeks to produce human tissues and organs inside pigs for transplantation into humans, while eGenesis seeks to genetically modify pig organs for use in humans. Editas produces CRISPR gene-editing "medicines" and is also backed by the Gates Foundation as well as Google Ventures.
Church has been accused of promoting eugenics as well as unethical human experimentation . Epstein's significant interest in eugenics was made public after his death, and Bill Gates, as well as his father William H. Gates II, have also been linked to eugenics movements and ideas.
After Epstein's death in 2019, it was revealed that Nikolic had been named the "successor executor" of Epstein's estate, further suggesting close ties to Epstein despite Nikolic's claims to the contrary. After details of Epstein's will were made public, Nikolic did not sign a form indicating his willingness to be executor and did not ultimately serve in that role.
The Epstein Cover-Up ContinuesDespite the relatively abrupt shift in the mainstream media regarding what is acceptable to discuss regarding the Jeffrey Epstein–Bill Gates relationship, many of these same media outlets refuse to acknowledge much of the information contained in this investigative report. This is particularly true in the case of the Evening Standard article and Bill Gates's odd relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell's sister Isabel and CommTouch, the company Isabel previously led.
The likely reason for the continued cover-up of the true extent of Epstein's ties to Gates has much more to do with Gates's company Microsoft than with Bill Gates himself. While it is now permissible to report on ties that discredit Gates's personal reputation, the information that could tie his relationship with Epstein and the Maxwells to Microsoft has been omitted.
If, as the Evening Standard reported, Epstein did make millions out of his business ties with Gates prior to 2001 and if Gates's ties to Isabel Maxwell and the Israeli espionage–linked company CommTouch were to become public knowledge, the result could easily be a scandal on a par with the PROMIS software affair. Such a disclosure could be very damaging for Microsoft and its partner the World Economic Forum , as Microsoft has become a key player in the WEF's Fourth Industrial Revolution initiatives that range from digital identity and vaccine passports to efforts to replace human workers with artificial intelligence.
There are clearly powerful actors with a vested interest in keeping the Epstein-Gates narrative squarely focused on 2011 and later -- not necessarily to protect Gates but more likely to protect the company itself and other top Microsoft executives who appear to have been compromised by Epstein and others in the same intelligence-linked network.
This is hardly an isolated incident, as similar efforts have been made to cover up (or memory hole) the ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to other prominent Silicon Valley empires, such as those led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk . One key reason for this is that the Epstein network's blackmail operation involved not only sexual blackmail but electronic forms of blackmail , something used to great effect by Robert Maxwell on behalf of Israeli intelligence as part of the PROMIS operation. Given its nature, electronic forms of blackmail through illegal surveillance or backdoored software can be used to compromise those in power with something to hide, but who were uninclined to engage in the exploitation of minors, such as those abused by Epstein.
That Isabel and Christine Maxwell were able to forge close business ties with Microsoft after having been part of the front company that played a central role in PROMIS-related espionage and after explicitly managing their subsequent companies with the admitted intention to "rebuild" their spy father's work and legacy, strongly points to the probability of at least some Microsoft products having been compromised in some fashion, likely through alliances with Maxwell-run tech companies. The lack of mainstream media concern over the documented ties of the Epstein network to other top Microsoft executives of the past, such as Nathan Myhrvold, Linda Stone, and Steven Sinofsky, makes it clear that, while it may be open season on the relationship between Bill Gates and Epstein, such is not the case for Microsoft and Epstein.
The ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to Silicon Valley, not just to Microsoft, are part of a broader attempt to cover up the strong intelligence component in the origin of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies. Much effort has been invested in creating a public perception that these companies are strictly private entities despite their deep, long-standing ties to the intelligence agencies and militaries of the United States and Israel . The true breadth of the Epstein scandal will never be covered by mainstream media because so many news outlets are owned by these same Silicon Valley oligarchs or depend on Silicon Valley for online reader engagement.
Perhaps the biggest reason why the military/intelligence origins and links to the current Silicon Valley oligarchy will never be honestly examined, however, is that those very entities are now working with breakneck speed to usher in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which would make artificial intelligence, automation, mass electronic surveillance, and transhumanism central to human society. One of the architects of this "revolution," Klaus Schwab, said earlier this year that rebuilding and maintaining trust with the public was critical to that project. However, were the true nature of Silicon Valley, including its significant ties to serial child rapist and sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein and his network, to emerge, the public's trust would be significantly eroded, thus threatening what the global oligarchy views as a project critical to its survival .
kapoore , says: June 6, 2021 at 2:48 am GMT • 1.3 hours ago
I'm always impressed with the vigorous detail and documentation in your articles. What a menace these philanthropic organizations are to the ordinary and lowly. These billionaire creeps never stop plotting and figuring out even more ways to stomp on people and push their creepy agendas, which remain forever hidden.
May 30, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Zapekk , May 30 2021 23:11 utc | 24
Sources for Danmarks Radio: The USA has spied on Norwegian politicians from Denmark
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&u=https://nrkbeta.no/2021/05/30/kilder-til-danmarks-radio-usa-har-spionert-pa-norske-politikere-fra-danmark/ A top-secret investigation called "Operation Dunhammer" was the start of the Danish intelligence scandal, say sources to Danmarks Radio.
Through a collaboration with Danish intelligence, the United States has conducted targeted espionage against senior politicians and officials in Norway, Sweden, Germany and France. That was one of the conclusions in an explosive report made by four employees of the Danish intelligence service (FE), according to Danmarks Radio (DR).
NRK mentions the Danish public broadcaster's findings as part of an international collaboration with Danmarks Radio, SVT, NDR, WDR, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Le Monde.
Over several months, DR has met nine people with access to classified information from the intelligence service. All information in the case has been confirmed to DR by at least two, often several, independent sources.
Last year, NRK reported that the Danish-American spy cooperation was aimed at targets in Norway, but it was then unknown who the surveillance was aimed at. The new information indicates that the extent of espionage against Norway was far greater than previously known.
NRK and DR do not know which Norwegian politicians and officials have been subjected to targeted espionage, but as one of DR's sources says:
- It would not have been interesting for an intelligence service to spy on municipal politicians.
May 22, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
There are reasons to be skeptical. After decades of stonewalling on the issue, suddenly American military chiefs appear to be giving credence to claims of UFOs invading Earth.
Several viral video clips purporting to show extraordinary flying technology have been "confirmed" by the Pentagon as authentic. The Pentagon move is unprecedented.
The videos of the Unidentified Flying Objects were taken by U.S. air force flight crews or by naval surveillance and subsequently "leaked" to the public. The question is: were the "leaks" authorized by Pentagon spooks to stoke the public imagination of visitors from space? The Pentagon doesn't actually say what it believes the UFOs are, only that the videos are "authentic".
A Senate intelligence committee is to receive a report from the Department of Defense's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force next month. That has also raised public interest in the possibility of alien life breaching our skies equipped with physics-defying technology far superior to existing supersonic jets and surveillance systems.
Several other questions come to mind that beg skepticism. Why does the phenomenon of UFOs or UAP only seem to be associated with the American military? This goes back decades to the speculation during the 1950s about aliens crashing at Roswell in New Mexico. Why is it that only the American military seems privy to such strange encounters? Why not the Russian or Chinese military which would have comparable detection technology to the Americans but they don't seem to have made any public disclosures on alien encounters? Such a discrepancy is implausible unless we believe that life-forms from lightyears away have a fixation solely on the United States. That's intergalactic American "exceptionalism" for you!
Also, the alleged sightings of UFOs invariably are associated with U.S. military training grounds or high-security areas.
Moreover, the released videos that have spurred renewed public interest in UFOs are always suspiciously of poor quality, grainy and low resolution. Several researchers, such as Mick West, have cogently debunked the videos as optical illusions. That's not to say that the U.S. air force or naval personnel were fabricating the images. They may genuinely believe that they were witnessing something extraordinary. But as rational optics experts have pointed out there are mundane explanations for seeming unusual aerial observations, such as drones or balloons drifting at high speed in differential wind conditions, or by the crew mistaking a far-off aircraft dipping over the horizon for an object they believe to be much closer.
The military people who take the videos in good – albeit misplaced – faith about what they are witnessing are not the same as the military or intelligence people who see an opportunity with the videos to exploit the public in a psychological operation.
Fomenting public anxieties, or even just curiosity, about aliens and super-technology is an expedient way to exert control over the population. At a time when governing authorities are being questioned by a distrustful public and when military-intelligence establishments are viewed as having lost a sense of purpose, what better way to realign public respect by getting them to fret over alien marauders from whom they need protection?
There is here a close analogy to the way foreign nations are portrayed as adversaries and enemies in order to marshal public support or least deference to the governing establishment and its military. We see this ploy played over and over again with regard to the U.S. and Western demonization of Russia and China as somehow conveying a malign intent towards Western societies. In other words, it's a case of Cold War and UFOs from the same ideological launchpad, so to speak, in order to distract public attention from internal problems.
However, more worrying still is that there is a dangerous reinforcing crossover of the two propaganda realms. The fueling of UFO speculation is feeding directly into speculation that U.S. airspace is being invaded by high-tech weapons developed by Russia or China.
U.S. lawmakers are demanding answers from the Pentagon about whether the aerial "encounters" are advanced weaponry from foreign enemies who are surveilling the American homeland at will. Some U.S. air force aviators have recently expressed to the media a feeling of helplessness in the face of seeming superior technology.
At a time of heightened animosity towards Russia and China and febrile talk among Pentagon chiefs about the possibility of all-out war, it is not difficult to imagine, indeed it is disturbingly easy to imagine, how optical illusions about alien phenomena could trigger false alarms attributed to Russian or Chinese military incursions.
The stoking of UFO controversy appears to be a classic psyops perpetrated by U.S. military intelligence for the objective of population control. Its aim is to corral the citizenry under the authority of the state and for them to accept the protector function of "our" military. The big trouble is that the psyops with aliens are, in turn, risking the exacerbation of fears and tensions with Russia and China.
With all the Pentagon-assisted chatter, it is more likely that an F-18 squadron could mistake an errant weather balloon on the horizon for an alien spacecraft. And amid our new Cold War tensions, it is but a small conceptual step to further imagine that the UFO is not from outer space but rather is a Russian or Chinese hypersonic cruise missile heading towards the U.S. mainland.
May 09, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
play_arrowCheapBastard 39 minutes ago (Edited) remove link(Coward) Attorney General Bill Barr threatened to quit last year over Trump's attempts to fire FBI Director Chris Wray
Should never have appointed these swamp creatures to begin with.
May 24, 2021 | www.realclearinvestigations.com
By Aaron Maté , RealClearInvestigations
May 19, 2021The man cast as a linchpin of debunked Trump-Russia collusion theories is breaking his silence to vigorously dispute the U.S. government's effort to brand him a Russian spy and put him behind bars.
In an exclusive interview with RealClearInvestigations, Konstantin Kilimnik stated, "I have no relationship whatsoever to any intelligence services, be they Russian or Ukrainian or American, or anyone else."
Konstantin Kilimnik: Decries the U.S. government's "senseless and false accusations." AP PhotoKilimnik, a longtime employee of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, spoke out in response to an explosive Treasury Department statement declaring that he had "provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy" during the 2016 election. That press release, which announced an array of sanctions on Russian nationals last month, also alleged that Kilimnik is a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf."
Treasury 's claim came shortly after two other accusatory U.S. government statements about the dual Ukrainian-Russian national. In March, a U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment accused Kilimnik of being a "Russian influence agent" who meddled in the 2020 campaign to assist Trump's reelection. A month earlier, an FBI alert offered $250,000 for information leading to his arrest over a 2018 witness tampering charge in Manafort's shuttered Ukraine lobbying case, which was unrelated to Russia, collusion, or any elections.
Treasury provided no evidence for its claims, which go beyond the findings of the two most extensive Russiagate investigations: the 448-page report issued in 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the 966-page report issued in August 2020 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Treasury has declined all media requests for elaboration on how it reached conclusions that those probes did not. Two unidentified officials told NBC News that U.S. intelligence "has developed new information" about Kilimnik "that leads them to believe " (emphasis added) that he passed on the polling data to Russia. But these sources "did not identify the source or type of intelligence that had been developed," nor "when or how" it was received.
"Nobody has seen any evidence to support these claims about Kilimnik," a congressional source familiar with the House and Senate's multiple Russia-related investigations told RCI.
Adam Schiff: Treated the Treasury claim about Kilimnik as the Trump-Russia smoking gun. "That's what most people would call collusion," he said. (Al Drago/Pool via AP)Despite the absence of evidence, the Treasury press release's one-sentence claim about Kilimnik has been widely greeted as the Trump-Russia smoking gun. Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC that Treasury's assertion about Kilimnik proved that Russian intelligence was "involved in trying to help Trump win in that [2016] election. That's what most people would call collusion."
Speaking to RCI in fluent English from his home in Moscow, Kilimnik, 51, described these U.S. government assertions as "senseless and false accusations."
His comments are backed up by documents, some previously unreported, as well as by Rick Gates, a longtime Manafort associate and key Mueller probe cooperating witness. (Gates pleaded guilty to making a false statement and to failing to register as a foreign agent in connection to his lobbying work in Ukraine.) The evidence raises doubts about new efforts to revive the Trump-Kremlin collusion narrative by casting Kilimnik as a central Russian figure.
"They needed a Russian to investigate 'Russia collusion,' and I happened to be that Russian," Kilimnik said.
Highlights from the interview and RCI's related reporting:
Reviving the Polling Data Conspiracy Theory
- Kilimnik denies passing 2016 polling data to Russian intelligence, or any Russian for that matter. Instead, Kilimnik says he shared publicly available, general information about the 2016 American presidential race to Ukrainian clients of Manafort's in a bid to recover old debts and drum up new business. Gates told RCI that the Mueller team "cherry-picked" his testimony about Kilimnik to spread a misleading, collusion-favorable narrative. The U.S. government has never publicly produced the polling data at issue, nor any evidence that it was shared with Russia.
- Despite his centrality to the Trump-Russia saga, Kilimnik says no U.S. government official has ever tried get in touch with him. "I never had a single contact with [the] FBI or any government official," Kilimnik says.
- Kilimnik shared documents that contradict the Special Counsel's effort to prove that he has Russian intelligence "ties." Photos and video of his Russian passport and a U.S. visa in his name, shared with RCI , undermine the Mueller report's claim that Kilimnik visited the United States on a Russian "diplomatic passport" in 1997. To judge from the images, he travelled on a civilian passport and obtained a regular U.S. visa. The Mueller team has never produced the "diplomatic passport."
- Kilimnik denies traveling to Spain to meet Manafort in 2017. If true, this would undercut the Mueller team's claim that Manafort lied in denying such a meeting. That denial was used to help secure a 2019 court ruling that Manafort breached a cooperation agreement. The Special Counsel never furnished evidence for the alleged Madrid encounter.
- While the Treasury Department and Senate Intelligence Committee claim that Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer, no U.S. security or intelligence agency has adopted this characterization.
- Kilimnik has never been charged with anything related to espionage, Russia, collusion, or the 2016 election. Instead, the Mueller team indicted Kilimnik on witness-tampering charges in a case pertaining to Manafort's lobbying work in Ukraine.
- Meanwhile, t he FBI's $250,000 bounty for Kilimnik is larger than most rewards it offers for the capture of violent fugitives, including those accused of child murder .
Kilminik has provided an inviting target for proponents of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories. He was born in 1970 in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union, and later worked for Paul Manafort as a translator and aide there. This background makes him one of the few people in the broad Trump 2016 campaign orbit to possess a Russian passport.
To this Mueller and others have added a series of ambiguous and disputed allegations to say that the FBI "assesses" him to "have ties to Russian intelligence." This characterization, first made in a 2017 court filing, quickly transmogrified into a presumed fact of the collusion narrative.
Rather than prosecute Manafort for any crime related to Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, the Mueller team instead pursued him on financial and lobbying charges involving his pre-Trump stint as a political consultant in Ukraine. In 2018, it accused Kilimnik of seeking to pressure two "potential witnesses" by sending them text messages about Manafort's Ukraine lobbying work.
As the Russia probe came to a close without a single indictment related to a Trump-Kremlin conspiracy, the Mueller team used Kilimnik to suggest collusion without formally alleging it.
In January 2019, the Mueller team accused Manafort of breaching their cooperation agreement by lying about his interactions with his Russian employee. Topping the list were alleged false statements about sharing election polling data with Kilimnik in 2016.
Andrew Weissmann: Despite this lead Mueller prosecutor's suggestion otherwise, the Mueller report "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling data and Russia's interference in the election," as the report itself stated. NYU Law"This goes to the larger view of what we think is going on, and what we think is the motive here," lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC. "This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel's office is investigating."
Weissmann's musings became collusion fodder. Media pundits and influential Democrats, namely Congressional intelligence leaders Schiff and Mark Warner, speculated that Kilimnik shared Trump campaign polling data with Russian intelligence officers as they allegedly worked to turn the election in Trump's favor. "This appears as the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual collusion," Warner told CNN . "Clearly, Manafort was trying to collude with Russian agents."
But soon after, the Mueller team quietly undercut Weissmann's "larger view" and the conspiratorial innuendo that it had fueled. One month after igniting the frenzy about the polling data, Weissmann submitted a heavily redacted court filing that walked back some of his claims. The following month, the Special Counsel's final report acknowledged that its musings and speculations about Kilimnik could not be corroborated. The Mueller team not only "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling data and Russia's interference in the election," as the report stated, but also "could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it."
Rick Gates: Ex-Manafort aide says the Mueller team "cherry-picked" his testimony about Kilimnik to spread a misleading, collusion-favorable narrative. AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana"I have no idea who made up the lies about 'detailed' or 'sensitive' polling data, or why they did it," Kilimnik says. "They were mostly quotes of the polls from the media, such as LA Times and others. They would be 'Clinton "" 43, Trump "" 42.' Never anything more detailed. I never got even a page printed out with either polling data or any other info."
This public data was shared, Kilimnik says, with Ukrainian clients of Manafort's as part of both regular political chatter and an effort to encourage future business. "I shared this info with a lot of our clients in Ukraine, who were closely following the race and who were excited about Paul working for [Trump]," Kilimnik says.
If any government official did receive his polling data, Kilimnik adds, they were not Russian but rather from Ukraine or even the United States. "I would share it with our political contacts in Ukraine, basically to keep their interest to Paul and our Ukrainian business alive. Also I shared it with the U.S. and other embassies, basically offering the opinion that the election is not over."
Kilimnik's account is corroborated by Gates, the ex-Manafort associate and Trump campaign official whose testimony was used by the Mueller team "" deceptively, he says "" to suggest a connection between the polling data and possible Trump-Russia collusion. The Special Counsel's office "relied heavily on Mr. Gates for evidence" about the polling data, the New York Times noted in February 2019.
According to Gates, that reliance entailed significant creative license by Mueller's prosecutors, particularly Weissmann. Gates says he told the Special Counsel's Office that the polling data was not sensitive information, but rather publicly available figures taken from media outlets.
"I explained to them, over the course of many interviews, what the polling data was about, and why it was being shared," Gates told RCI. "All that was exchanged was old, topline data from public polls and from some internal polls, but all dated, nothing in real time. So for example, Trump 48, Clinton 46. It was not massive binders full of demographics or deep research. No documents were ever shared or disclosed. And this is part of what Mueller left out of the report. They cherry-picked and built a narrative that really was not true, because they had pre-determined the conclusion."
Happier times: Manafort and colleagues, with Kilimnik far left and the boss seated in white shirt, red tie. AP PhotoAsked why Manafort shared any polling data with clients in Ukraine, Kilimnik and Gates stressed the same reason: money. "The were some outstanding debts, which we were working to get repaid, which never happened," Kilimnik says. "And there was also Paul's reputation. He was very well known to a lot of people in Kiev, and he hoped [he] could generate some new business" by showcasing his work for Trump's campaign.
"This was a way that Paul was using to let people in Ukraine know that he was doing very well in the United States running the election of Donald Trump, and that he was trying to collect the remaining fees that he was owed," for prior work in Ukraine, Gates says. "He was trying to position himself. This is not unlike any other political operative, Republican or Democrat, in politics. They all do it."
The Mueller report itself quietly bolsters Gates' and Kilimnik's converging recollections. "Gates' account about polling data is consistent [redacted]," it states, ""¦ with multiple emails that Kilimnik sent to U.S. associates and press contacts" in the summer of 2016. "Those emails referenced 'internal polling,' described the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort's role in it, and assessed Trump' s prospects for victory." The corresponding footnote cites eight emails from Kilimnik to these "U.S. associates and press contacts." This indicates that the Mueller team obtained direct evidence of the polling data that was shared; how it was discussed; and with whom it was shared.
Rather than highlight the Kilimnik emails that it obtained, and Gates' account that the polling data was shared for financial reasons, the Mueller report mentioned this information only in passing and ultimately concluded that it "could not reliably determine Manafort's purpose in sharing" the information.
Weissmann did not respond to a request for comment.
The Kilimnik Passport Kilimnik's passport from the time in question "" to judge from photos and a video he shared with RCI "" was issued in the standard red ... Konstantin Kilimnik via RealClearInvestigations ... not in the green of the diplomatic corps. Mueller cited a Kilimnik "diplomatic passport" as evidence of "ties to Russian intelligence." Government of Russia/WikimediaAlthough the Mueller report walked back Weissman's innuendo regarding polling data, its assertion that Kilimnik has "ties to Russian intelligence" remains a foundation of the Russia collusion narrative.
Putting aside the fact that the government has never produced any evidence that Kilimnik communicated with Russian intelligence or the Kremlin, RCI has obtained documents that undercut the government's basis for assuming those unspecified "ties."
In Mueller's own telling, Kilimnik's only direct link to the Russian government was his enrollment in a Soviet military academy from 1987 to 1992, where he trained as a linguist. "It's a language school, similar to what you guys have in Fort Monterey," Kilimnik said, referring to the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, in Monterey, California. "It's a university that trains military translators, mostly for the army, not for the intelligence services. Basically it was a military training, for five years, focusing on English and Swedish. In normal circumstances, I would actually go and serve in the army, but because Soviet Union was falling apart, I was able to get a job as the instructor of Swedish at the university. I never served in the real army. If teaching Swedish counts as spying "" that will be very surprising."
To substantiate Kilimnik's alleged Russian intelligence "ties," the Mueller team wrote that Kilimnik "obtained a visa to travel to the United States with a Russian diplomatic passport in 1997." (Intelligence operatives often travel to foreign countries under diplomatic cover.)
Kilimnik's U.S. visa shows an "R" for "regular." (The typo in his last name was corrected on a later visa.) Konstantin Kilimnik via RealClearInvestigationsBut Kilimnik's passport from that period "" to judge from the images he shared with RCI via a messaging app "" was issued in the standard red color, not in the green color of the diplomatic corps. The document also contains a regular U.S. visa issued on October 28, 1997 "" the same date the Mueller report claims he traveled to the U.S. "with a Russian diplomatic passport." The U.S. visa to Kilimnik is issued under the category of "R" "" which stands for Regular "" and "B1/B2," the designation for a temporary visa for business and tourism.
The Mueller team's claim that he possessed and travelled on a diplomatic passport is "a blatant lie," Kilimnik told RCI. "I never had a diplomatic passport in my life. It's one of many very sloppy things in the Muller report, which don't make sense."
The Mueller report cites Kilimnik's "travel to the United States with a Russian diplomatic passport." Mueller report, Page 133Told of the Mueller report's apparent error concerning Kilimnik's passport, a Justice Department spokesperson declined comment. Former Special Counsel Mueller and former lead prosecutor Weissmann did not respond to emailed queries.
Ironically, at the time when Mueller team claims that he visited the U.S. on behalf of the Russian government, Kilimnik was in fact working for the U.S. government at the U.S. Congress-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) in Moscow. As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported , Kilimnik's 10-year IRI tenure is among several substantial Western government connections that have been ignored in amid efforts to accuse him of ties to the Russian government. "I gave IRI my CV which clearly said which school I graduated from, and gave my detailed background," Kilimnik recalls. "I never concealed anything."
Kilimnik: No Madrid Meeting With ManafortWhen it comes to his travel history, Kilimnik says that the Special Counsel's Office made another significant error: falsely claiming that he and Manafort held a meeting in Spain .
"I have never been to Madrid in my life," Kilimnik says. WikimediaWhen Manafort denied that he and Kilimnik met in Madrid in 2017, the Mueller team accused him of lying and cited this as one of several alleged breaches of their cooperation agreement. The Mueller report claims that the two met in the Spanish capital on Feb. 26, 2017, "where Kilimnik had flown from Moscow."
It also states that Manafort initially denied the Madrid meeting in his first two interviews with the Special Counsel's office, but then relented "after being confronted with documentary evidence that Kilimnik was in Madrid at the same time as him."
But Kilimnik tells RCI that no such meeting occurred, and that he believes that Manafort was coerced into changing his story.
"I have never been to Madrid in my life," Kilimnik says. The "documentary evidence" referenced in the Mueller report was, he speculates, a flight booking that was ultimately cancelled. "I was thinking about going to Madrid, and I discussed it with Paul," he says. "But it made no sense. And ultimately, it was too expensive. So I didn't go."
Had he actually visited Madrid, Kilimnik says, the Mueller team would have "easily found proof "" tickets, boarding passes, border crossings "" all that stuff. It's not rocket science to get it. The European Union is a pretty disciplined place. There would be at least be a record of me crossing the border somewhere in the EU."
Kilimnik told RCI that the last time he saw Manafort was one month before the alleged Madrid trip, around the time of Trump's inauguration in Janaury 2017. "I did not attend any of the inauguration events myself," he recalls. "But I spent some time to meet with Paul, and to catch up. That was our last meeting in-person, in Alexandria [Virginia]."
Asked why Manafort would have admitted to a Madrid meeting that did not in fact take place, Kilimnik said that his former boss faced heavy pressure while locked up by the Mueller team, which included a long stint in solitary confinement. "I don't know why he said that. I have difficulties to imagine Paul's psychological state when he was jailed. A guy who [had] a very high-level life. Jail is a tough place. I still get the shudders to think what he had to go through."
The allegation that Manafort lied to the Mueller team proved consequential. In February 2019, U.S. District Judge Jackson sided with the Special Counsel and voided Manafort's plea deal. No longer bound to give him a reduced sentence for cooperating, Jackson nearly doubled Manafort's prison term on top of his earlier conviction and excoriated him for telling "lies." President Trump pardoned in Manafort in December 2020.
Told that Kilimnik denies ever visiting Madrid, and asked whether the Special Counsel's office collected concrete evidence to the contrary, both former Special Counsel Mueller and lead prosecutor Weissmann did not respond. A Justice Department spokesperson declined comment.
FBI Alert Contradicts Senate-Treasury Spy ClaimOver one year after Mueller closed up shop, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) unilaterally upgraded Kilimnik's alleged Russian intelligence status. The panel's August 2020 report declared that Kilimnik, far from merely having "ties" to the GRU as Mueller had claimed, is in fact a full-fledged "Russian intelligence officer."
The Senate made the leap despite offering no new public evidence to support its explosive "assessment", and even acknowledging that its "power to investigate" "" as well as "its staffing, resources, and technical capabilities" -- ultimately "falls short of the FBI's."
Richard Burr and Mark Warner, Republican chair and Democratic co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The FBI and Justice Department do not endorse their panel's judgment that Kilimnik is a "Russian intelligence officer." AP Photo/J. Scott ApplewhiteThe Senate also labelled Kilimnik a Russian spy despite simultaneously presenting new evidence that he was, in the Committee's own words, a "valuable resource" for officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, with whom he was "in regular contact."
In September 2020, RCI asked the FBI and Justice Department whether it shares the SSCI's judgment that Kilimnik is a "Russian intelligence officer." A DOJ spokesperson replied that "the Mueller report speaks for itself," and advised that the public "defer" to how Kilimnik was characterized in the Mueller report and the Special Counsel Office's indictments. This strongly suggested, RCI reported, that the FBI has not adopted the SSCI's view that Kilimnik is a Russian spy.
The FBI's February "alert" offering $250,000 for information leading to Kilimnik's arrest bolsters this reporting. It once again states that Kilimnik is "assessed by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence" "" shunning the SSCI's spy language and reverting to Mueller's original, ambiguous characterization.
The wording of the FBI alert underscores that while the Senate Intelligence Committee and Treasury Department have declared that Kilimnik is a Russian spy, the nation's top law enforcement agency has never adopted that assessment. When Manafort's legal team asked the Special Counsel's Office for any communication between Manafort and "Russian intelligence officials," they were told that "there are no materials responsive to [those] requests." In unsealed notes from early 2017, Peter Strzok "" the top FBI counterintelligence agent who opened the Trump-Russia investigation "" wrote : "We are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials."
Asked whether the FBI has altered its characterization of Kilimnik in light of Treasury's claim that he is a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent", an FBI spokesperson declined comment.
The FBI's alert was also remarkable for the size of the Kilimnik bounty, which is more than double the amount of most members of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. While the bureau is offering $100,000 each for information regarding six alleged murderers, and $200,000 for another, the FBI is offering $250,000 for help nabbing Kilimnik on a lone witness tampering charge in Manafort's Ukraine lobbying case.
The Mueller team accused Kilimnik of sending text messages to two individuals with whom Manafort had worked during his Ukraine lobbying days. Kilimnik's aim, the Special Counsel's Office alleged, was to pressure the pair to attest that their prior work was focused on lobbying officials in Europe, not in the United States. These individuals "" identified in court documents as "Person D1" and "Person D2" "" were not active witnesses for the Mueller probe, but instead, according to the Special Counsel's Office, "potential witnesses."
The 13 Kilimnik messages to these "potential witnesses" cited by Mueller include the following:
[Person D2], hi! How are you? Hope you are doing fine. ;)) My friend P [Manafort] is trying to reach [Person D1] to brief him on what's going on. If you have a chance to mention this to [Person D1] - would be great. Basically P wants to give him a quick summary that he says to everybody (which is true) that our friends never lobbied in the U.S., and the purpose of the program was EU. Hi. This is [Kilimnik]. My friend P is looking for ways to connect to you to pass you several messages. Can we arrange that.Kilimnik says that he was not trying to tamper with anyone. "I do not understand how two messages to our old partners who helped us get out the message about Ukraine's integration aspirations in EU, and asking them to get in touch with Paul, can be interpreted as 'intimidation' or 'obstruction of justice,'" he says.
Whether or not Kilimnik sought to tamper with "potential witnesses" in Manafort's Ukraine lobbying case, the alleged 2018 infraction has nothing to do with 2016 Trump-Russia collusion.
The FBI alert from February raises questions about the bombshell Treasury Department claims released two months later. If the U.S. government stands by Treasury's claims about Kilimnik, why is he wanted only on a minor, non-Russia related witness-tampering charge, and not for taking part in alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election? If Kilimnik indeed passed on "sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy" to Russian intelligence while working as a spy, why has he not been indicted alongside the Russian social media company charged by Mueller in February 2018, or the Russian intelligence officers charged by Mueller in July 2018?
To Kilimnik, the answer is found on that same Russian passport that Mueller mischaracterized. "It is clear to me that the indictment of 2018 was pulled out of the thin air, simply to have a Russian face in the mix," he says. "I understand that they needed a Russian to investigate 'Russia collusion,' and I happened to be that Russian," he says.
"The funny thing is that I'm not hiding. And I would have explained the same thing to the FBI or anyone who never reached out to me. They don't because they don't want the truth."
From Russian Spy to "Influence Agent"In Kilimnik's eyes, his utility as a Russian national for the Trump-Russia collusion narrative also explains his prominent inclusion in the recent U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment , released in March one month after the FBI alert for his arrest.
In yet another new iteration of how Kilimnik is described by the U.S. government, the ICA does not call him a Russian intelligence officer, but instead a "Russian influence agent."
The ICA does not define the term "Russian influence agent," or explain how it reached that new assessment about Kilimnik. Nor does it put forth any evidence for the alleged Russian influence activities ascribed to him .
The report alleges that Kilimnik was part of a "network of Ukraine-linked individuals "¦ connected to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)" who "took steps throughout the [2020] election cycle to damage U.S. ties to Ukraine, denigrate President Biden and his candidacy, and benefit former President Trump's prospects for reelection."
Andriy Derkach: "I have never met him in my life," Kilimnik says of this Ukrainian lawmaker with reputed Kremlin ties. Petro Zhuravel/WikimediaAs part of this alleged meddling network, the ICA asserts that Kilimnik tried to influence U.S. officials; helped produce a documentary that aired on U.S. television in January 2020; and worked with Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker alleged to have Kremlin ties. "Derkach, Kilimnik, and their associates sought to use prominent U.S. persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to U.S. officials and audiences," the ICA states.
Kilimnik says the U.S. intelligence officials who wrote those words are using their anonymity and power to launder their false narratives about him.
"I have no idea what they're talking about," he says. "I would really love to see at least one confirmation of the things they allege. Pulling me into this report with zero evidence really shows that [U.S. intelligence] people high up do not give a damn about the truth, facts, or anything."
As for Derkach, "I have never met him in my life," Kilimnik says. "I don't know why, or on what basis, they're making claims that he has any relationship to me."
"I had zero meetings with anybody related to the Trump campaign. In fact, I have tried to do my best "" understanding how I've gotten into this mess "" to stay as far as possible from any U.S. politics." If he had held such meetings, Kilimnik adds, "this should be easy to prove."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to requests for comment.
No Effort to Contact Russiagate's Top RussianEven though Kilimnik's name fills dozens of pages of the Mueller and Senate Intelligence reports after years of federal scrutiny and he is the target of a $250,000 FBI reward, this seemingly critical Russiagate figure has never been contacted by a single U.S. government official, to judge from the public record as well as Kilimnik's account.
The lack of contact is similar to the way FBI, Mueller, and Senate investigators treated other supposedly central Russiagate figures. When Joseph Mifsud, whose conversations with George Papadopoulos triggered the FBI's Trump-Russia probe, visited the U.S. in early 2017, the FBI subjected him to a light round of questioning and then let him leave the country. The Mueller team later claimed in its final report that Mifsud had lied to FBI agents, yet inexplicably did not indict him. Despite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's central role in publishing the stolen Democratic Party emails supposedly hacked and supplied by Russia, the Mueller team never contacted him and the Senate Intelligence Committee shunned an offer to interview him .
Kilimnik believes that this avoidance is deliberate. "The FBI and others could have had the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv or Moscow, or have any of my numerous contacts in the U.S., reach out and start a conversation, if they wanted info," he says. "But they do not really need it. All they is need is a scarecrow. And as one of the few people within reach of the Trump campaign who has a Russian passport, they picked me."
"They never reached out to me," he adds. "I never had a single contact with FBI or any government official, basically since charges were brought [on] Paul. Nobody ever tried to talk to me because they know the truth. They understood damn well that I will tell them what I'm telling you."
Kilimnik says that he has had only minimal contact with Manafort since the former Trump campaign chairman was released to home confinement in March 2020 and subsequently pardoned by Trump in late December. "We had one short contact after he got out of jail, basically catching up about family and kids and everything," Kilimnik recalls. "I want to give him time to just basically get his life back to normal. We have not spoken on the telephone."
After years in Ukraine working with Manafort, Kilimnik now lives full-time in Moscow with his wife and two children. "I have been pretty open all my life, and have not been hiding from anyone," Kilimnik says. "I would have been happy to answer any questions from the FBI, or whoever. But I refuse to be a toy in bizarre political games and have my life ruined more than it has been because of the senseless and false accusations."
Despite being labeled a Russian spy who meddled in the 2016 election, Kilimnik has no plans to return to the U.S. and try to clear his name. "I am not going to the U.S. on my own dime, with no visa in COVID times only to be crucified by the media, having zero chance of justice," he says. "This is a sad continuation of a deeply wrong story. I thought it would be over with Trump gone and the need to create lies about his 'ties to Russia.' But obviously, I was wrong."
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- roc993 19 May, 2021 Did the Democrats and the media ever apologize for spending 2 years claiming the election was stolen by Trump? The drumbeat was continuous - ratcheting up day by day - "Walls closing in" - right up to the point Mueller threw cold water on the entire thing. Then they slinked away without another word. And no censorship of those entities and individuals by FaceBook and Twitter? Fascinating. Reply 40 11 2 reply
- N notenough 19 May, 2021 What are the odds that the FBI/Treasury Dept, CIA, etc are lying to the public about this whole mess THEY created....100%. These are all political organizations, tasked with protecting the status quo, the status quo being the protection of Empire. Reply 30 7 1 reply
- A AJMG 19 May, 2021 "In his speech before a joint session of Congress last week, President Biden complained about "Russia's interference in our elections," even though his intelligence czar had released a report the previous month formally dismissing the idea Moscow had interfered in the 2020 election or the 2016 election." Reply 23 7 1 reply
- D daniel155 19 May, 2021 No one, even those on the other side, believes there was Russian collusion though they will never admit it. Hillary still says the Russia stole the election from her. I guess she uses that to cope with the fact that she blew a very winnable election. Reply 28 7
- A AJMG 19 May, 2021 Trump opposed Russia's Nord Stream 2 pipeline, & today we learn that Biden has accepted it. If Putin favored Trump, it was a bad miscalculation since Trump was way more tough on Russia than any Democrat. Reply 36 6 1 reply
- DH Derrick Hand 19 May, 2021 Hate to tell you guys but the Russia collusion discussion is over, no matter who is right. The Media has succeeded in mudding the water and destroying any trust in finding the truth with respect to anything political, including any election and that includes the coming one in 2022. This is like an argument at a table for four in a raucous high school cafeteria. You should be more concerned where this total loss of trust is going to lead us and that is not a good place. Reply 16 6 3 reply
- W Wisewerds 19 May, 2021 A wholly partisan, politically biased prosecutor lied and cherry-picked information to support a pre-determined conclusion in an effort to savage an opponent and jail his supporters? I would put on my shocked face, but its currently at the cleaners. Instead, I will just suggest that this is now standard operating procedure for our left-fascist oppressors. Reply 21 4 1 reply
- C Crutch 19 May, 2021 I can't wait for 2022 House win by Republicans. The first thing they should do is haul Adam Schiff in under oath to discuss his every utterance, then expel him from the House. Reply 40 9 5 reply
- A archon27 19 May, 2021 It not sedition if the democrats try to oust a legally elected president on a falsified premise... because THEIR "evidence" was believable... This is literally the mantra of the left. Reply 27 6 3 reply
- Mark H 19 May, 2021 If the wider media do not pick this up then the matter of Trump campaign's collusion with Russia can never be cleared up, and will continue to serve the intention of the establishment. VAPOR 19 May, 2021 The media portrayed both Obama and Biden as uninvolved. But now we know they both actively followed the investigation. According to former acting attorney general Sally Yates, she was surprised that Obama knew about the investigation and knew more than she did at the time. Obama called upon former FBI director James Comey to stay after a meeting to discuss the investigation. Comey had mentioned using the Logan Act to charge Flynn, even though the unconstitutional law has never been used successfully in a prosecution since the country was founded. Biden has repeatedly denied knowledge of the investigation. Just a day before the latest disclosure, George Stephanopoulos asked Biden in an interview what he knew of the Flynn investigation. Biden was adamant that he knew nothing about "those moves" and he called it a diversion. But that is not true if he took the relatively uncommon action for a vice president of demanding the unmasking of Flynn information.
Justis 20 May, 2021 Thank you for your continued work. This is all hidden from Americans in this age of media coverage. But more importantly it is devastating information about the dishonesty of our government. What have we come to? What recourse is available?futbolfan 19 May, 2021 I respect all the dogged investigators who root out the truth of the crimes and corruption of our "justice department", and FBI. I hope they keep up the good work. Personally I have no more faith in anything which was soaked in the hate and insanity of the Obama thug regime...
- VAPOR 19 May, 2021 Carter Page Sues FBI, Comey, McCabe for Millions Nov 28, 2020" Former Trump campaign aide Carter Page filed a $75 million lawsuit against the FBI and several former high-ranking bureau officials ... Reply 6 1 1 reply
- V VAPOR 19 May, 2021 Just a reminder that Obama and his minions committed the greatest political crime in US history when they weaponized government agencies to influence and discredit a presidential election and frame Trump. Reply 7 3 1 reply
- V VAPOR 19 May, 2021 Obama needs to answer questions about his involvement with the Fake Russian Dossier and the weaponization of government agencies to get Trump. He basically planted evidence and then said prosecute Trump by the book.
- Jerubbesheth xx 19 May, 2021 Give it up already. The Russia Trump Collusion was already disapproved by Mueller. Americans are tired of the disinformation and propaganda. Bolshevik Schiff is a pathological liar. If anyone colluded with Russia it was certainly Liberal Commie Democrat Clinton. The reason Bolshevik Schiff doesn't investigate Clinton? Schiff and Clinton are part of the swamp. Clinton bought and paid for colluded with an ex-British Spy on a false dossier on Trump. Clinton was already in Putin's pocket. Clinton approved the sale of Uranium one to the Russians, and then Clinton receives $145 Million from Russian Oligarchs for her Corrupt Clinton Foundation. Mueller was FBI director at the time. So now who is colluding with the Russians. I guess Clinton's colluding with the Russians is the good kind for the liberal commie Democrats, while the Liberal commie Democrats deflect the bad colluding onto to Trump. Colluding is colluding anyway you cut it. Hillary's colluding wasn't disapproved. Reply 10 3 3 reply
- C chuckstephens06 19 May, 2021 While the Special prosecutor office was capable of any transgression or corruption, one needs to realize that it wouldn't have been possible without the assistance of corrupt lefty operative Judge, Amy Berman Jackson... Jackson's non legal, political approach to decision making, has been the example that all corrupt lefty judges follow... Plus her questionable relationship with Weissman outside of the Courtroom... Reply 6 2
- K kochcomics 20 May, 2021 Lets see what we have here: 1)Kilimnik says he has no ties to the Russian government. OK. Do you really believe that no one in the Putin's government has directly or indirectly debriefed him. Really? Do you think he would have a choice in the matter? Do you know anything about Putin at all? Does he believe in democracy,. You clearly know little about Trump. We've had Trump here for 40 years - from the NY Post page six to Howard Stern. Its a joke. Hey, he was proposing running with Oprah as his VP in 2002. Then he tricked into the birther stuff. Lets check out the apologies from the Donald and the push back from Republicans (apart from McCain) 2) There were enough sympathetic Russians around (Putin included) to raise concerns. As the Donald himself made clear, he would have no problem with outside foreign help. The investigation took place. It was damning, but not pretty clear that no . The collusion was possible but speculative, but as Jared himself said, the campaign was too chaotic for any collusion to really get off the ground (though you are still stuck with Manafort as a conflicted party). But in Donald world, everything is a bout big pronouncements... See more Reply 2 2
- F futbolfan 19 May, 2021 For years, we on the right knew who had done what, and who should be arrested, Comey, Rosenstein, Strzok, Mueller, etc. But I am not a lawyer, and I am not sure what crimes, exactly, these evil and sick creeps would be charged with, if they ever were arrested. For me, the key question now is, if they WERE charged with whatever the appropriate offence would be, what is the statute of limitations on those types of crimes? There is NO statue on treason, as far as I know. But what about conspiracy? Obstruction of justice? Betrayal of oath of office? Sedition? The reason these questions are still alive is, obviously there are people still patiently digging into the twisting trails of the conspirators, and eventually they may reel in some live prospects for prosecution. Maybe even including "the big guy with black skin" Obama himself. Nothing would make me happier than to see that African nightmare in handcuffs. Reply 4 4 2 reply
- DC dana crow 20 May, 2021 Can't blame them for running with lies, innuendo and conspiracy theories when all Trump and Republicans could ever muster in response was nuh-uh or let-mueller-finish-his-work. "Ties to [insert boogeyman]" is always a tell. It literally means NOT the boogeyman. And since the "ties" are conveniently redacted, he probably ordered borscht from someone whose second cousin gave a talk at a charity event hosted by a retired russian intel gofer. The election interference/russia collusion business was always a cynical ploy to isolate Trump from his friends and bog down his administration. And it was wildly successful.
will.ganness 20 May, 2021 Who is calling the January 6th Protests the biggest threat the the country since the Civil war? The Democratic Party, the MSM, The FBI.... Who produced and directed Russiagate? The same three!! If progressives think they should get on board with Insurrectiongate, they should have more sense! VAPOR 19 May, 2021 The Fake Russian Dossier do it by the book Crossfire Hurricane insurance policy to overturn a presidential election and frame Trump. Where is Professor Misfud and why won't Steele talk to Durham? Call in Mary Jacoby and ask her what she discussed with Obama at the white house.
- spinbag48 1 day ago Adam Schiff is a fool who told us he had the goods on Trump, but it turns out he is a liar. I do have a question... The FBI spent 2 years and $35 million dollars investigating Trump only to find out they didn't have a case. But when the pipeline got hacked Biden said the FBI told him that the Kremlin wasn't involved within a day of two. How is it they got that good so quick? Same with the election within a couple of days they knew that the election was fair and square. Even though I saw many people of TV say they saw corruption right in front of them. But the shooting of Andrew Brown took a month when they had numerous videos that they couldn't release until the investigation was complete. I have lost all faith in the FBI, and the press. They don't even pretend they are fair or truthful. Reply 1 1
- CA Clear 4 All 19 May, 2021 The USIC and media has destroyed their own name. Nothing that the Russia collusion purveyors say now has value on any topic. Russia didn't do that.
Justis 20 May, 2021 Why did Horowitz not discover this in his investigation? Was that investigation another coverup, finding just enough to look authentic? Is he too, untrustworthy?
May 20, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
vk , May 19 2021 22:31 utc | 35
Very aggressive stuff from the EU:
A draft report published online by the assembly's Committee on Foreign Affairs caused consternation in Russian media on Monday, after statements came to light that argued the bloc "should establish with the US a transatlantic alliance to defend democracy globally" and "deter Russia" from supposed aggression in Eastern Europe.As part of its "vision" for future ties with Moscow, the paper concludes that the EU should put forward a number of incentives designed to persuade Russians that a turn to the West would be beneficial, including visa liberalization and "free trade investment."
[...]
At the same time, the committee puts forward a number of extreme steps that it says the bloc should take. It insists that Brussels "must be prepared not to recognize the parliament of Russia and to ask for Russia's suspension from international organizations with parliamentary assemblies if the 2021 parliamentary elections in Russia are recognized as fraudulent."
The success or failure of this operation will depend entirely on the Russian people. Will it fall for the Western European honey trap once again?
After Putin is gone, bets are off. Also, the EU continues to suffer from refugee waves from Syria and Libya, and its economy continues to deteriorate (recession confirmed for Q1 2021). The whole system is so exhausted that they don't talk about even of the absorption of Moldova anymore (the Moldovan president had to bring that up to the Kremlin; good they remembered them).
--//--
US waives sanctions against Nord Stream company and CEO as Blinken & Lavrov meet in Iceland
This looks like Biden had some surge of sanity, but it's not: I read an article on Izvestia some days ago and it seems Russia won the war for the Arctic and has expelled the USA from that sea. That, combined with the fact that Russia has been ramping up investment on the sector, results in the fact that, soon enough, Russia will also have the infrastructure to deliver cheaper LNG by ship to Europe, too.
That means the USA has given up on the NordStream II in order to hurt the Russian LNG investments. Yes, people, that's the insanity of the situation: the USG is completely lost. It still has its ace in the hole, though: the Green Party is set to win the next German general elections, and they're rabid Atlanticists. Like, this would cost Germany dearly and they wouldn't last two years in government, but at least Russian gas to Europe through a non-Ukrainian route would be stopped.
Speaking of the Ukraine, this whole situation makes us reflect: it is patent at this point in time that the EU is a subsidiary of NATO - it expands eastwards after those countries become NATO members. They're the "socioeconomic" version of NATO. This has created a huge problem for the EU, though, because the Ukraine is a massive financial black hole to the American economy (through the IMF) and the USA is pressuring the EU to make it a member quick, so that this black hole goes to European (i.e. German) hands. The thing is Germany obviously doesn't want that, because it needs the Euro to keep at where it is or stronger (you can only enter the EU by entering the EZ nowadays). The Ukraine is salivating to become an EZ member - that's the whole point of the Maidan coup in the first place - so Ukraine entering the EU without entering the EZ is out of the table. The EU must've told the USA that no, the Ukraine must first become a NATO member, then they'll make it an EZ-EU member. The Ukraine is the proverbial hot potato.
All of that coupled with the hard economic fact that, without the Russian gas transit exclusivity, you can't leverage Ukraine's debt, because, after Maidan, all of the public goods and infrastructure were privatized to American capitalists. That means we have the absurd situation where Germany has to give up cheaper gas for itself (which would be essential for its economic recovery) in order to make the Ukraine happy so that it enters the EU, so that it becomes a financial black hole... to the German economy! Germany has to pay the Ukraine for the privilege of having to pay it even more, for eternity.
The price of nation-building has become more and more expensive to the capitalist world. Turns out those Third World shitholes have learned something after all those decades.
--//--
Well, well, well... how the tables have turned:
Taiwan is also suffering from a significant brain drain to the Mainland. They're trying to solve the problem by demonizing those people by calling them "traitors".
Interesting times.
--//--
Colonial Pipeline CEO confirms paying $4.4 million ransom to hackers, says he did it for America
This is USSR-of-the-1980s level of propaganda.
Either way, give that man a statue in D.C.!
P.S.: this is the quotation of what the CEO really said, so you don't accusing me of just reading the headline:
"[it was very hard, difficult to me etc. etc.] But it was the right thing to do for the country," Blount, who leads the company since 2017, added.--//--
No shit, Sherlock:
May 11, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
More Hacks, More Baseless Accusations Against Russia
In January police in various countries took down the Emotet bot-network that was at that time the basic platform for some 25% of all cybercrimes.
Based on hearsay Wikipedia and other had falsely attributed Emotet to Russian actors. The real people behind it were actually Ukrainians :
The operating center of Emotet was found in the Ukraine. Today the Ukrainian national police took control of it during a raid (video). The police found dozens of computers, some hundred hard drives, about 50 kilogram of gold bars (current price ~$60,000/kg) and large amounts of money in multiple currencies.
biggerEmotet had nothing to do with Russia.
Now the U.S. is accusing Russia of somehow having part in another cybercrime :
President Joe Biden said Monday that a Russia-based group was behind the ransomware attack that forced the shutdown of the largest oil pipeline in the eastern United States.The FBI identified the group behind the hack of Colonial Pipeline as DarkSide, a shadowy operation that surfaced last year and attempts to lock up corporate computer systems and force companies to pay to unfreeze them.
"So far there is no evidence ... from our intelligence people that Russia is involved, although there is evidence that actors, ransomware is in Russia," Biden told reporters.
"They have some responsibility to deal with this," he said.
Three days after being forced to halt operations, Colonial said Monday it was moving toward a partial reopening of its 5,500 miles (8,850 kilometers) of pipeline" the largest fuel network between Texas and New York.
Biden however is badly informed. There is no evidence that DarkSide has anything to do with Russia. It is, like Emotet, a commercial 'ransomware-as-a-service' criminal entity that wants to make money and does not care about geopolitics.
Yes, a version of the DarkNet software does exclude itself from running on system with specific language settings :
The DarkSide malware is even built to conduct language checks on targets and to shut down if it detects Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Armenian, Georgian, Kazakh, Turkmen, Romanian, and other languages ...That is a quite long list of east European languages and Russian is only one of it. Why the authors of DarkNet do not want their software to run on machines with those language settings is unknown. But why would a Russian actor protect machines with Ukrainian or Romanian language settings? Both countries are hostile towards Russia. To claim that this somehow points to Russian actors is therefore baseless.
Russia strongly rejected Biden's accusation:
The Kremlin has once again pointed out the importance of cooperation between Moscow and Washington in tackling cyberthreats amid a cyber-attack on Colonial Pipeline, a US company. "Russia has nothing to do with these hacker attacks, nor with the previous hacker attacks," Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Preskov assured reporters on Tuesday."We categorically reject any accusation against us, and we can only regret that the US is refusing to cooperate with us in any way to counter cyber-threats. We believe that such cooperation - both international and bilateral - could indeed contribute to the common struggle against this scourge [known as] cyber-crime," Peskov said.
The U.S. seems notoriously bad at attributing computer hacks. It claims that the recent SolarWinds attack which intruded several government branches was also done by Russia. But that attack required deep insider knowledge and access to SolarWinds' computers and processes :
The recently discovered deep intrusion into U.S. companies and government networks used a manipulated version of the SolarWinds Orion network management software. The Washington borg immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump attributed it to China. But none of those claims were backed up by facts or known evidence.
The hack was extremely complex, well managed and resourced, and likely required insider knowledge. To this IT professional it 'felt' neither Russian nor Chinese. It is far more likely, as Whitney Webb finds, that Israel was behind it .
Indeed - the programmers of an Israeli company, recently bought up by SolarWinds, had all the necessary access for such a hack. However the U.S. sanctioned Russia over the SolarWinds hack without providing any evidence of its involvement.
If the U.S. continues to blame Russia without any evidence for each and every hack there may come a time when Russia stops caring and really starts to hack into or destroy important U.S. systems. The U.S. should fear that day.
Posted by b on May 11, 2021 at 17:31 UTC | Permalink
David G Horsman , May 11 2021 17:48 utc | 1
Thanks b. I don't think Russia is going to escalate destructive attacks any time soon. There's no upside.psychohistorian , May 11 2021 17:56 utc | 2
They might even be reluctant to reveal their capabilities in the Ukraine.
For the moment, mockery is the best remedy while they up their game.@ b who ended withanon48 , May 11 2021 18:20 utc | 3
"
If the U.S. continues to blame Russia without any evidence for each and every hack there may come a time when Russia stops caring and really starts to hack into or destroy important U.S. systems.
"How can you write such assertions that vary from the approach that both Russia and China are taking?....strong defense but no offense.
Now if empire tried to hack into a Russian or Chinese system/network then appropriate takedowns of malicious systems/networks would seem logical....and I expect they know how...but will not do it on the basis of another avenue of empire lies and deceit.
You should have titled the post "Killing Two Birds With One Stone".Ike , May 11 2021 18:27 utc | 4
This pipeline is huge, running from Texas through the Southeast and all the way up to New England. It's condition is beyond awful with multiple leaks along the route some of which lose more than a million gallons per month and much more than can be determined since some of the gasoline / jet fuel went into the aquifers. These faults have been well known for decades and although some of the areas are heavily populated no remediation was done. The local outcry recently caught the attention of the press when kids reported a gasoline smell along the pipeline route to the police. The locals demanded the pipeline be closed for repairs and sought answers from state officials and Federal authorities as to why this situation was allowed. To blame the Russians for the closure of the pipeline which results in a surge in prices and limited availability of gas for the summer is an absolute stroke of genius.
https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/ncdeq-colonial-pipeline-spill-huntersville/275-70e16fb6-c945-4634-b933-3975d0573f2eGreat article. Russia must be getting so pissed off with the idiots in Washington.The uninformed and easily manipulated Western people surely get the governments they deserve.DG , May 11 2021 18:43 utc | 5
Paul Craig Roberts highlights this with another bit of truth telling from Tucker Carlson
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/05/11/the-proof-is-in-tony-fauci-is-responsible-for-the-creation-of-the-covid-19-virus/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_proof_is_in_tony_fauci_is_responsible_for_the_creation_of_the_covid_19_virus&utm_term=2021-05-11@allJosh , May 11 2021 18:44 utc | 6I need to ask this: What do you think about the vaccination of children?
...
It is odd that certain elements of the us intelligence community, along with negative factions within the us political establishment, continue to absolutely refuse to enter into verifiable and mutually binding international agreements on cyber security with exactly the nation states that they accuse (without evidence) of malicious activity in the same sphere, while at the same time operating in this field in an openly declared hostile manner under the secrecy deemed necessary for 'national security'.
May 26, 2021 | yro.slashdot.org
(nytimes.com) 371 Posted by msmash on Monday May 24, 2021 @04:00PM from the how-about-that dept. Florida on Monday became the first state to regulate how companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter moderate speech online , by imposing fines on social media companies that permanently bar political candidates in the state. From a report:
The law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is a direct response to Facebook's and Twitter's bans of former President Donald J. Trump in January. In addition to the fines for barring candidates, it makes it illegal to prevent some news outlets from posting to their platforms in response to the contents of their stories. Mr. DeSantis said signing the bill meant that Floridians would be "guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites."
"If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable," he said in a statement. The bill is part of a broader push among conservative state legislatures to crack down on the ability of tech companies to manage posts on their platforms. The political efforts took off after Mr. Trump was barred after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Lawmakers around the country have echoed Mr. Trump's accusations that the companies are biased against conservative personalities and publications, even though those accounts often thrive online. More than a hundred bills targeting the companies' moderation practices have been filed nationwide this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many of the bills have died, but a proposal is still being debated in Texas.
May 24, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Grieved , May 24 2021 1:39 utc | 103
Laurent Guyénot makes a compelling case that both Kennedys were assassinated by Mossad:
Robert would have become president, and then reopen the investigation into his brother's murder.
A generation later, JFK's son, John F. Kennedy, Jr, who was also undoubtedly heading toward the presidency or at least high politics, died when his small plane suddenly nose-dived into the ocean. The chain of potential justice has been successively cut off.
The Mossad fingerprints are all over Robert's death and also Oswald's. And the Israeli connection is conspicuously absent from the decades of conspiracy investigations that seem to have been deliberately led to the CIA - Michael Collins Piper being the notable exception who linked to Israel.
Dimona was the principal reason, says Guyénot, and shows that Lyndon Johnson put paid to all opposition to Dimona coming from the US.
~~
I am not a student of this affair, but I've never seen much made of the fact that JFK was already embarked upon issuing US currency directly - the USA Note rather than the Federal Reserve Note that we call dollars today. This was canceled under Johnson, of course.
Presidents don't get to issue greenbacks. We had already seen how that worked out for Lincoln.
Not a student of this, as I say. But I tend to see the world's power pyramid with debt-issuers at the top, and all the other factions on lower steps. So, Dimona, yes, the main incentive for Israel, and all the lesser motivations that caused rejoicing in many other groups - but the money control at the top, in my view, is the force that gives the nod to these various factions and approves the hit.
librul , May 24 2021 5:00 utc | 115
Paul , May 24 2021 6:01 utc | 118No one has asked but the most fascinating suspect in Dealey Plaza that fateful day was Lamar Hunt.
Yes, that Lamar Hunt. The Lamar Hunt Trophy is in honor of that very guy.
He was the son of H.L. Hunt the billionaire oilman who had his main offices in Dealey Plaza. Lamar Hunt was in his thirties at the time (31) and flew to Mexico minutes after the shooting (this is a matter of record).
Lamar was escorting two men around Dealey Plaza that day. One was arrested coming out of a building, arrested because he was reported/fingered as suspicious, someone that didn't belong there.
The guy said he was looking for a phone booth to call his mother. This was James Braden a known mafia hit man (who, by the way, was in the vicinity of the hotel where RFK was assassinated). Braden was detained and then released. The other person, that had arrived with Braden, checked out of his hotel minutes after the assassination and was gone.
_K_C_ , May 24 2021 6:21 utc | 122Posted by: Grieved | May 24 2021 1:39 utc | 103
Skiming through the JFK chapter of Guyenot's book, 'From Yahweh to Zion' it is obviously a number of compelling 'reasons' JFK and his brother were despised by the Zionists.
First was their father Joe Kennedy. Out with the Swiss Army Knife of words, again.
Dimona also figured large. This was also covered by Seymour Hirsh in, 'The Sampson Option., Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.' Note, Hersh writes in the introduction, he refused to travel to the Bandit State because of the wall to wall censorship imposed on ALL journalists.
Importantly, JFK visited a Palestinian refugee camp in 1956 and 'expressed sympathy' for the Palestinians. The Zionists worst fears were his proposals to have them registered a Foreign Agents.
KFK also advocated UN resolution 194, The Right of Return.
uncle tungsten , May 24 2021 8:10 utc | 127Posted by: Paul | May 24 2021 6:01 utc | 118 - and others on the JFK thing
I think it was the detente he intended to enter into with the USSR in addition to a few other things.
For one, he wasn't murdered in Dallas, TX for no reason. That was the city where big oil co-joined with the newly powerful "intelligence" community of the Dulles and Bush families. The depletion allowance was a big deal and JFK was one of, if not the, first to suggest he might end it.
Then there was the Cuba situation.
Finally there was the infamous quote about rendering the CIA into a thousand shards and it blowing into the wind or something of that nature.
He managed to piss off and threaten all the main powers that be, including those with very high level mafia connections.
If anyone gets the chance to visit it, the museum in Dallas in the former book repository on the fifth (?) floor of that building is quite worth a visit. I thought I'd be bored as hell when my wife and her younger sister dragged me and the family there one Saturday afternoon, but it ended up being fascinating. That said, if I were a left-leaning or anti-corporate/oil president to this day I'd stay TF away from Dallas or Houston, TX save for an airfield-only visit. Well, until Iran can create the capability to murder our politicians/diplomats from the air with no repercussions (still, anyone heard from Ayatollah Mike in the last 6 months? Asking for a friend).
vato , May 24 2021 11:41 utc | 140Grieved #103
Re the Kennedy story ~ beware the US Navy.
Thank you, what a timely tale.
Posted by: Grieved | May 24 2021 1:39 utc | 103
Starter's reading list (a must list IMO for every American) for you in order to understand the Kennedy assassination (no, Israel had nothing to do with it):
James W. Douglass - JFK and the UnspeakableDavid Talbot - Devil's Chessboard
James DiEugenio - Destiny Betrayed/ The JFK Assassination
Mark Lane - Rush to Judgement
Peter Dale Scott - Deep Politics and the Death of JFK
For more literature go to Our Hidden History which is a treasure trove of all things US Deep State politics from Heroin Trade in the Golden Triangle to Vietnam to JFK, to Watergate, Iran-Contra etc...
May 24, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
New Hampshire Election Auditors Find Ballot "Fold" Issue, Only 28% Of GOP Votes Counted In One Machine BY TYLER DURDEN MONDAY, MAY 24, 2021 - 12:50 PM
Authored by Samuel Allegri via The Epoch Times,
Auditors for a 2020 election investigation being carried out in Windham, New Hampshire, are saying that some of their latest findings are "large enough to account for discrepancies" in the election results.
Auditors said they found "experimental confirmation that if the contest is undervoted, a fold through a vote target can create a vote."
"Something we strongly suspect at this juncture, based on various evidence, is that in some cases, fold lines are being interpreted by the scanners as valid votes," Mark Lindeman, part of the audit team, told WMUR .
Harri Hursti, another auditor, said on Twitter that testing proved folded ballots were misinterpreted by machines.
"Test decks proved that foldings across a vote targets is misinterpreted as additional phantom votes or subtracts votes due to false overvotes," he wrote in a post.
Auditors finished the hand recount on May 21. The audit began on May 11.
AccuVote didn't respond to a request for comment about the audit authorization by the Epoch Times. The AccuVote machines' intellectual property are owned by Dominion Voting Systems.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1396156388020310016&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fnew-hampshire-election-auditors-find-ballot-fold-issue-only-28-gop-votes-counted-one&sessionId=35cbdcbb1ef0ad6cf66d3e777859be2ff6685321&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px
Windham's four state representative seats were all won by Republicans on Election Night. The presidential election was not an item for this audit.
Democrat candidate Kristi St. Laurent, who lost by a narrow margin of 24 votes, requested an audit ( pdf ) claiming that the machines were improperly programmed, and that double voting was involved.
As a result, New Hampshire's Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, signed a bill last month that gave authorization for forensic analysis and a comprehensive recount of the 2020 election votes in Windham related to optical scanning AccuVote machines.
An automatic recount was done, resulting in St. Laurent losing 99 more votes after a hand recount. Meanwhile, four Republicans gained about 300 votes each.
The other three Democrats gained between 18 and 28 votes.
The audit team said that more issues could be involved besides folded ballots being misinterpreted.
"The fold effect is large enough to account for discrepancies, but might not be all that's going on," the team said on Twitter on May 22.
"75 folded ballots voted straight Republican. Only 48 votes recorded for them. Folds generated overvotes. This is machine used on Election Day [for] most absentee ballots."
Another machine was found to have "an even more dramatic problem" by the auditors, who said that only 28 percent of the votes for Republican candidates were counted.
"The work is not completed yet. While the folding seems to be a strong contributor it clearly is not the only factor," Hursti said on Sunday.
"For example: We have observed vastly different error rates on two machines processing the same ballots. Work continues."
www.zerohedge.com
May 21, 2021
One of the things that makes Wi-Fi work is its ability to break big chunks of data into smaller chunks and combine smaller chunks into bigger chunks, depending on the needs of the network at any given moment. These mundane network plumbing features, it turns out, have been harboring vulnerabilities that can be exploited to send users to malicious websites or exploit or tamper with network-connected devices, newly published research shows.
In all, researcher Mathy Vanhoef found a dozen vulnerabilities, either in the Wi-Fi specification or in the way the specification has been implemented in huge numbers of devices. Vanhoef has dubbed the vulnerabilities FragAttacks , short for fragmentation and aggregation attacks, because they all involve frame fragmentation or frame aggregation. Broadly speaking, they allow people within radio range to inject frames of their choice into networks protected by WPA-based encryption.
Bad news FURTHER READING Serious flaw in WPA2 protocol lets attackers intercept passwords and much more Assessing the impact of the vulnerabilities isn't straightforward. FragAttacks allow data to be injected into Wi-Fi traffic, but they don't make it possible to exfiltrate anything out. That means FragAttacks can't be used to read passwords or other sensitive information the way a previous Wi-Fi attack of Vanhoef, called Krack , did. But it turns out that the vulnerabilities -- some that have been part of Wi-Fi since its release in 1997 -- can be exploited to inflict other kinds of damage, particularly if paired with other types of hacks."It's never good to have someone able to drop packets into your network or target your devices on the network," Mike Kershaw, a Wi-Fi security expert and developer of the open source Kismet wireless sniffer and IDS, wrote in an email. "In some regards, these are no worse than using an unencrypted access point at a coffee shop -- someone can do the same to you there, trivially -- but because they can happen on networks you'd otherwise think are secure and might have configured as a trusted network, it's certainly bad news."
He added: "Overall, I think they give someone who was already targeting an attack against an individual or company a foothold they wouldn't have had before, which is definitely impactful, but probably don't pose as huge a risk as drive-by attacks to the average person."
While the flaws were disclosed last week in an industry-wide effort nine months in the making, it remains unclear in many cases which devices were vulnerable to which vulnerabilities and which vulnerabilities, if any, have received security updates. It's almost a certainty that many Wi-Fi-enabled devices will never be fixed.
Rogue DNS injectionOne of the most severe vulnerabilities in the FragAttacks suite resides in the Wi-Fi specification itself. Tracked as CVE-2020-24588, the flaw can be exploited in a way that forces Wi-Fi devices to use a rogue DNS server, which in turn can deliver users to malicious websites rather than the ones they intended. From there, hackers can read and modify any unencrypted traffic. Rogue DNS servers also allow hackers to perform DNS rebinding attacks , in which malicious websites manipulate a browser to attack other devices connected to the same network.
The rogue DNS server is introduced when an attacker injects an ICMPv6 Router Advertisement into Wi-Fi traffic. Routers typically issue these announcements so other devices on the network can locate them. The injected advertisement instructs all devices to use a DNS specified by the attacker for lookups of both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses.
AdvertisementAn exploit demoed in a video Vanhoef published shows the attacker luring the target to a website that stashes the router advertisement in an image.
Here's a visual overview:
In an email, Vanhoef explained, saying, "The IPv6 router advertisement is put in the payload (i.e. data portion) of the TCP packet. This data is by default passed on to the application that created the TCP connection. In the demo, that would be the browser, which is expecting an image. This means that by default, the client won't process the IPv6 router advertisement but instead process the TCP payload as application data."
Vanhoef said that it's possible to perform the attack without user interaction when the target's access point is vulnerable to CVE-2021-26139 , one of the 12 vulnerabilities that make up the FragAttacks package. The security flaw stems from a kernel flaw in NetBSD 7.1 that causes Wi-Fi access points to forward Extensible Authentication Protocol (AP) over LAN frames to other devices even when the sender has not yet authenticated to the AP.
It's safe to skip ahead, but for those curious about the specific software bug and the reason the video demo uses a malicious image, Vanhoef explained:
Punching a hole in the firewallTo make the victim process the TCP payload (i.e. data portion) as a separate packet, the aggregation design flaw in Wi-Fi is abused. That is, the attacker intercepts the malicious TCP packet at the Wi-Fi layer and sets the "is aggregated" flag in the Wi-Fi header. As a result, the receiver will split the Wi-Fi frame into two network packets. The first network packet contains part of the original TCP header and is discarded. The second packet corresponds with the TCP payload, which we made sure will now correspond to the ICMPv6 packet, and as a result, the ICMPv6 router advertisement is now processed by the victim as a separate packet. So proximity to the victim is required to set the "is aggregated" Wi-Fi flag so that the malicious TCP packet will be split into two by the receiver.
The design flaw is that an adversary can change/set the "is aggregated" flag without the receiver noticing this. This flag should have been authenticated so that a receiver can detect if it has been modified.
It's possible to perform the attack without user interaction when the access point is vulnerable to CVE-2020-26139. Out of four tested home routers, two of them had this vulnerability. It seems that most Linux-based routers are affected by this vulnerability. The research paper discusses in more detail how this works -- essentially, instead of including the ICMPV6 router advertisement in a malicious TCP packet, it can then be included in an unencrypted handshake message (which the AP will then forward to the client after which the adversary can again set the "is aggregated" flag etc).
Four of the 12 vulnerabilities that make up the FragAttacks are implementation flaws, meaning they stem from bugs that software developers introduced when writing code based on the Wi-Fi specification. An attacker can exploit them against access points to bypass a key security benefit they provide.
Besides allowing multiple devices to share a single Internet connection, routers prevent incoming traffic from reaching connected devices unless the devices have requested it. This firewall works by using network address translation, or NAT, which maps private IP addresses that the AP assigns each device on the local network to a single IP address that the AP uses to send data over the Internet.
AdvertisementThe result is that routers forward data to connected devices only when they have previously requested it from a website, email server, or other machine on the Internet. When one of those machines tries to send unsolicited data to a device behind the router, the router automatically discards it. This arrangement isn't perfect , but it does provide a vital defense that protects billions of devices.
Vanhoef figured out how to exploit the four vulnerabilities in a way that allows an attacker to, as he put it, "punch a hole through a router's firewall." With the ability to connect directly to devices behind a firewall, an Internet attacker can then send them malicious code or commands.
In one demo in the video, Vanhoef exploits the vulnerabilities to control an Internet-of-things device, specifically to remotely turn on and off a smart power socket. Normally, NAT would prevent a device outside the network from interacting with the socket unless the socket had first initiated a connection. The implementation exploits remove this barrier.
FURTHER READING Microsoft practically begs Windows users to fix wormable BlueKeep flaw In a separate demo, Vanhoef shows how the vulnerabilities allow a device on the Internet to initiate a connection with a computer running Windows 7, an operating system that stopped receiving security updates years ago. The researcher used that ability to gain complete control over the PC by sending it malicious code that exploited a critical vulnerability called BlueKeep ."That means that when an access point is vulnerable, it becomes easy to attack clients!" Vanhoef wrote. "So we're abusing the Wi-Fi implementation flaws in an access point as a first step in order to subsequently attack (outdated) clients ."
Getting your fixDespite Vanhoef spending nine months coordinating patches with more than a dozen hardware and software makers, it's not easy to figure out which devices or software are vulnerable to which vulnerabilities, and of those vulnerable products, which ones have received fixes.
This page provides the status for products from several companies. A more comprehensive list of known advisories is here . Other advisories are available individually from their respective vendors. The vulnerabilities to look for are:
Design flaws:
CVE-2020-24588 : aggregation attack (accepting non-SPP A-MSDU frames) CVE-2020-24587 : mixed key attack (reassembling fragments encrypted under different keys) CVE-2020-24586 : fragment cache attack (not clearing fragments from memory when (re)connecting to a network)Implementation vulnerabilities allowing the injection of plaintext frames:
CVE-2020-26145 : Accepting plaintext broadcast fragments as full frames (in an encrypted network) CVE-2020-26144 : Accepting plaintext A-MSDU frames that start with an RFC1042 header with EtherType EAPOL (in an encrypted network) CVE-2020-26140 : Accepting plaintext data frames in a protected network CVE-2020-26143 : Accepting fragmented plaintext data frames in a protected networkOther implementation flaws:
CVE-2020-26139 : Forwarding EAPOL frames even though the sender is not yet authenticated (should only affect APs) CVE-2020-26146 : Reassembling encrypted fragments with non-consecutive packet numbers CVE-2020-26147 : Reassembling mixed encrypted/plaintext fragments CVE-2020-26142 : Processing fragmented frames as full frames CVE-2020-26141 : Not verifying the TKIP MIC of fragmented framesThe most effective way to mitigate the threat posed by FragAttacks is to install all available updates that fix the vulnerabilities. Users will have to do this on each vulnerable computer, router, or other Internet-of-things device. It's likely that a huge number of affected devices will never receive a patch.
The next-best mitigation is to ensure that websites are always using HTTPS connections. That's because the encryption HTTPS provides greatly reduces the damage that can be done when a malicious DNS server directs a victim to a fake website.
Sites that use HTTP Strict Transport Security will always use this protection, but Vanhoef said that only about 20 percent of the web does this. Browser extensions like HTTPS everywhere were already a good idea, and the mitigation they provide against FragAttacks makes them even more worthwhile.
As noted earlier, FragAttacks aren't likely to be exploited against the vast majority of Wi-Fi users, since the exploits require a high degree of skill as well as proximity -- meaning within 100 feet to a half-mile, depending on the equipment used -- to the target. The vulnerabilities pose a higher threat to networks used by high-value targets such as retail chains, embassies, or corporate networks where security is key, and then most likely only in concert with other exploits.
When updates become available, by all means install them, but unless you're in this latter group, remember that drive-by downloads and other more mundane types of attacks will probably pose a bigger threat. Promoted Comments
Artem S. Tashkinov > , As long as you're using DoT/DoH and HTTPS, you're safe.
When I'm networking I always assume the network I'm connected to is completely compromised, so all my devices use these things and are properly firewalled in which case these attacks are pretty much worthless.
While only new versions of Android support DoT out of the box on the system level, Google has recently added the support for DoH to Chrome, so in case your device is running an older version of Android you might want to enable DoH in Chrome to feel safe.
And as for Firefox it's had the support for DoH for years. I've gone as far as to set network.trr.mode to 2 in about:config to be extra safe. 3 is even better: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Trusted_Recursive_Resolver 178 posts | register
May 24, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
uncle tungsten , May 24 2021 3:19 utc | 111
Strange news of the fatherland... knowing what is going on in Germany right now is helpful to understanding the strange goings on in the USAi and its dreams of eternal empire. It ain't clear sailing yet for NS2!
Here is the story from Wolfgang Streeck in New Let Review.
An excerpt to tease your attention:
If your country is part of an international empire, the domestic politics of the country that rules yours are your domestic politics too. Whoever speaks of the Europe of the EU must therefore also speak of Germany. Currently it is widely believed that after the German federal elections of 24 September this year, Europe will enter a post-Merkel era. The truth is not so simple.In October 2018, following two devastating defeats in state elections in Hesse and Bavaria, Angela Merkel resigned as president of her party, the CDU, and announced that she would not seek re-election as Chancellor in 2021. She would, however, serve out her fourth term, to which she had been officially appointed only seven months earlier.
Putting together a coalition government had taken no less than six months following the September 2017 federal election, in which the CDU and its Bavarian sidekick, the CSU, had scored the worst result in their history, at 32.9 percent (2013: 41.5 percent). (Merkel's record as party leader is nothing short of dismal, having lost votes each time she ran. How she could nevertheless remain Chancellor for 16 years will have to be explained elsewhere.) In the subsequent contest for the CDU presidency, the party's general secretary, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, appointed by Merkel only in February 2018, narrowly prevailed over two competitors.
After little more than a year, however, when Merkel publicly dressed her down for a lack of leadership, Kramp-Karrenbauer resigned and declared that she would not run for Chancellor in 2021 either. A few months later, when von der Leyen went to Brussels, Kramp-Karrenbauer got Merkel to appoint her minister of defense. The next contest for the party presidency, the second in Merkel's fourth term, had to take place under Corona restrictions; it took a long time and was won in January 2021 by Armin Laschet, Prime Minister of the largest federal state, North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). To prevent the comeback of an old foe of hers, Friedrich Merz, Merkel allegedly supported Laschet behind the scenes.
While Laschet – a less-than-charismatic Christian-Democratic middle-of-the-roader and lifelong Merkel loyalist – considered the party presidency to be a ticket to the CDU/CSU candidacy for Chancellor, it took three months for this to be settled. As CDU/CSU politics go, the joint candidate is picked by the two party presidents when they feel the time has come, under four eyes; no formal procedure provided.
Thus Laschet needed the agreement of Markus Söder, Prime Minister of Bavaria, who didn't keep it a secret that he believed himself the far better choice. In the background, again, there was Merkel, in the unprecedented position of a sitting Chancellor watching the presidents of her two parties pick her would-be successor in something like a semi-public cock-fight. After some dramatic toing-and-froing, Laschet prevailed, once more supported by Merkel, apparently in exchange for his state's backing for the federal government imposing a 'hard' Covid-19 lockdown on the entire country...
...There will also be differences on the Eastern flank of the EU, where Baerbock, following the United States, will support Ukrainian accession to NATO and the EU, and finance EU extension in the West Balkans. That she will also cancel North Stream 2 will be a point of contention in a Baerbock/Scholz government.
Laschet will be more inclined towards France and seek some accommodation with Russia, on trade as well as security; he will also hesitate to be too strongly identified with the US on Eastern Europe and Ukraine. But then, he will be reminded by his Foreign Minister, Baerbock, as well as his own party that Germany's national security depends on the American nuclear umbrella, which the French cannot and in any case will not replace. (my emphasis)
May 20, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics.com,
The Biden administration is vigorously pursuing key figures from the phony Trump/Russia collusion scandal that roiled the nation for four years. But instead of trying to punish the liars who perpetrated that fraud, it is targeting the truth-tellers who challenged and exposed the conspiracy to negate the 2016 election.
Working from the same playbook used to smear dozens of Trump associates, the administration and its allies are planting stories based on blind quotes in friendly media outlets to seek revenge.
On April 16, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that the Justice Department is investigating Kash Patel – who had worked with Rep. Devin Nunes and later the Trump administration to reveal the Russiagate hoax – for the "possible improper disclosure of classified information." Ignatius said he received the tip from "two knowledgeable sources" who "wouldn't provide additional details."
Violating the bedrock principles of American justice and journalism, this article is an exercise in thuggery as the government uses a powerful media outlet to intimidate and besmirch a citizen without evidence. With nothing to respond to, how can Patel defend himself? If Patel is lucky, the federal government has only placed a sharp sword over his head that may not fall. If not, he might be dragged into a lengthy court battle that could drain his finances and also cost him his freedom.
We don't know if Patel broke the law, but note that the administration has shown no interest in pursuing former FBI leaders such as James Comey and Andrew McCabe , who improperly disclosed information regarding Russiagate.
Trump's former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani is also in the "cross hairs of a federal criminal investigation," according to an April 29 article in New York Times that relied on "people with knowledge of the matter."
At issue, those anonymous sources say, is whether Giuliani was serving two masters when he counseled Trump to remove Marie L. Yovanovitch as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2019. "Did Mr. Giuliani go after Ms. Yovanovitch solely on behalf of Mr. Trump, who was his client at the time?" the Times reports. "Or was he also doing so on behalf of the Ukrainian officials, who wanted her removed for their own reasons?"
I'll leave it to the lawyers to determine the wisdom of bringing a case based on the parsing of tangled motives. What is clear is that the FBI is taking a thumb-screws page from the playbook of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who deployed the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to pursue the white whale of collusion. As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations , just three people had pleaded guilty to FARA violations in the half-century before Mueller deployed it to pressure and punish Trump allies.
And note, the FBI's zeal to crack down on unregistered foreign agents does not extend to the president's son Hunter Biden, who, Paul Sperry reported for RCI, "failed to register as a foreign agent while promoting the interests of foreign business partners in Washington, including brokering meetings with his father and other government officials." It appears that we have two tiers of justice: one for Biden administration enemies, another for its family and friends.
The targeting of Giuliani looks especially suspect and politically motivated after three main news outlets that have driven much of the false Russiagate coverage – the New York Times, Washington Post and NBC News – were forced to correct a recent story , once again based on anonymous sources, claiming the FBI had warned Giuliani in 2019 "that he was a target of a Russian disinformation campaign during his efforts to dig up unflattering information about then-candidate Joe Biden in 2019." Giuliani was never given such a briefing.
Considering the numerous instances in which the press published bogus information from "informed sources" during Russiagate, one has to ask why they continue to serve as vehicles for falsehoods. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a dozen times and you're not fooling me – we're acting in concert. As RCI editor Tom Kuntz has argued, journalistic integrity demands, at the very least, that these organizations tell their audience who exactly had misled them. Confidentiality agreements should not protect liars.
A third example of the Biden administration's effort to punish Russiagate figures is its renewed effort to put former Manafort associate Konstantin V. Kilimnik behind bars. In an extensive new article for RCI, Aaron Maté reports that the Treasury Department provided no evidence to support its recent claim that Kilimnik is a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf." It also refuses to explain how it was able to discover the truth of Kilimnik's identity, which the two most extensive Russiagate investigations – the 448-page Muller report and the 966-page Senate Intelligence report – failed to uncover.
This absence of evidence has not stopped the peddlers of the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory from claiming vindication. Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff casts Treasury's unsubstantiated claim as smoking-gun evidence of collusion. The New York Times reports that the claim demonstrates that "there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year before the [2016] election."
Who needs proof when the government says it's so?
The FBI is also putting the screws to Kilimnik, offering $250,000 for information leading to his arrest on witness-tampering charges involving text messages he sent in 2018 to two people who have only been identified as "potential witnesses" involving Manafort's lobbying work for Ukraine, not Russiagate.
In an exclusive interview, Kilimnik told Maté, "I don't understand how two messages to our old partners who helped us get out the message about Ukraine's integration aspirations in [the] EU, and asking them to get in touch with Paul, can be interpreted as 'intimidation' or 'obstruction of justice.'"
Maté also reports that the $250,000 bounty on Kilimnik is more than double the amount the FBI is offering for information leading to the arrest of murder suspects.
The Biden administration's campaigns against Patel, Giuliani and Kilimnik suggest how the winners of the 2020 election are attempting to rewrite the history of Russiagate. Having been debunked and rebuked by their own investigators, the conspiracists are taking a second bite at the poisoned apple. Using anonymous sources to make unsubstantiated charges in the nation's most influential news outlets, they are seeking to punish people for the crime of exposing their malfeasance.
May 20, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics.com,
The Biden administration is vigorously pursuing key figures from the phony Trump/Russia collusion scandal that roiled the nation for four years. But instead of trying to punish the liars who perpetrated that fraud, it is targeting the truth-tellers who challenged and exposed the conspiracy to negate the 2016 election.
Working from the same playbook used to smear dozens of Trump associates, the administration and its allies are planting stories based on blind quotes in friendly media outlets to seek revenge.
On April 16, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that the Justice Department is investigating Kash Patel – who had worked with Rep. Devin Nunes and later the Trump administration to reveal the Russiagate hoax – for the "possible improper disclosure of classified information." Ignatius said he received the tip from "two knowledgeable sources" who "wouldn't provide additional details."
Violating the bedrock principles of American justice and journalism, this article is an exercise in thuggery as the government uses a powerful media outlet to intimidate and besmirch a citizen without evidence. With nothing to respond to, how can Patel defend himself? If Patel is lucky, the federal government has only placed a sharp sword over his head that may not fall. If not, he might be dragged into a lengthy court battle that could drain his finances and also cost him his freedom.
We don't know if Patel broke the law, but note that the administration has shown no interest in pursuing former FBI leaders such as James Comey and Andrew McCabe , who improperly disclosed information regarding Russiagate.
Trump's former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani is also in the "cross hairs of a federal criminal investigation," according to an April 29 article in New York Times that relied on "people with knowledge of the matter."
At issue, those anonymous sources say, is whether Giuliani was serving two masters when he counseled Trump to remove Marie L. Yovanovitch as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2019. "Did Mr. Giuliani go after Ms. Yovanovitch solely on behalf of Mr. Trump, who was his client at the time?" the Times reports. "Or was he also doing so on behalf of the Ukrainian officials, who wanted her removed for their own reasons?"
I'll leave it to the lawyers to determine the wisdom of bringing a case based on the parsing of tangled motives. What is clear is that the FBI is taking a thumb-screws page from the playbook of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who deployed the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to pursue the white whale of collusion. As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations , just three people had pleaded guilty to FARA violations in the half-century before Mueller deployed it to pressure and punish Trump allies.
And note, the FBI's zeal to crack down on unregistered foreign agents does not extend to the president's son Hunter Biden, who, Paul Sperry reported for RCI, "failed to register as a foreign agent while promoting the interests of foreign business partners in Washington, including brokering meetings with his father and other government officials." It appears that we have two tiers of justice: one for Biden administration enemies, another for its family and friends.
The targeting of Giuliani looks especially suspect and politically motivated after three main news outlets that have driven much of the false Russiagate coverage – the New York Times, Washington Post and NBC News – were forced to correct a recent story , once again based on anonymous sources, claiming the FBI had warned Giuliani in 2019 "that he was a target of a Russian disinformation campaign during his efforts to dig up unflattering information about then-candidate Joe Biden in 2019." Giuliani was never given such a briefing.
Considering the numerous instances in which the press published bogus information from "informed sources" during Russiagate, one has to ask why they continue to serve as vehicles for falsehoods. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a dozen times and you're not fooling me – we're acting in concert. As RCI editor Tom Kuntz has argued, journalistic integrity demands, at the very least, that these organizations tell their audience who exactly had misled them. Confidentiality agreements should not protect liars.
A third example of the Biden administration's effort to punish Russiagate figures is its renewed effort to put former Manafort associate Konstantin V. Kilimnik behind bars. In an extensive new article for RCI, Aaron Maté reports that the Treasury Department provided no evidence to support its recent claim that Kilimnik is a "known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf." It also refuses to explain how it was able to discover the truth of Kilimnik's identity, which the two most extensive Russiagate investigations – the 448-page Muller report and the 966-page Senate Intelligence report – failed to uncover.
This absence of evidence has not stopped the peddlers of the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory from claiming vindication. Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff casts Treasury's unsubstantiated claim as smoking-gun evidence of collusion. The New York Times reports that the claim demonstrates that "there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year before the [2016] election."
Who needs proof when the government says it's so?
The FBI is also putting the screws to Kilimnik, offering $250,000 for information leading to his arrest on witness-tampering charges involving text messages he sent in 2018 to two people who have only been identified as "potential witnesses" involving Manafort's lobbying work for Ukraine, not Russiagate.
In an exclusive interview, Kilimnik told Maté, "I don't understand how two messages to our old partners who helped us get out the message about Ukraine's integration aspirations in [the] EU, and asking them to get in touch with Paul, can be interpreted as 'intimidation' or 'obstruction of justice.'"
Maté also reports that the $250,000 bounty on Kilimnik is more than double the amount the FBI is offering for information leading to the arrest of murder suspects.
The Biden administration's campaigns against Patel, Giuliani and Kilimnik suggest how the winners of the 2020 election are attempting to rewrite the history of Russiagate. Having been debunked and rebuked by their own investigators, the conspiracists are taking a second bite at the poisoned apple. Using anonymous sources to make unsubstantiated charges in the nation's most influential news outlets, they are seeking to punish people for the crime of exposing their malfeasance.
May 18, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Max , May 17 2021 19:15 utc | 37
Trump represented a FACTION of the establishment. Which one? He did their bidding and in the process alienated other factions. The other factions worked together to get him replaced. There are factions within neocons, neoliberals and establishment. It is a nuanced and complex structure, not monolithic. It is misleading to state, "he publicly broke away from the American oligarchy's class interests".
Trump's biggest MISTAKE was that he didn't build a good sounding board of advisors. He surrounded himself with his family members and believed his orders will be implemented like a corporate president. Jared Kushner is a Bilderberg. So Trump was connected to the global syndicate and part of the swamp.
The unipolar order ended in 2014/15 and the multipolar order is establishing. The U$A or NATO can't launch a foreign war like they did in Libya. Russia and China have warned the Financial Empire and defined the redlines. This is the reason behind Trump not launching a new major foreign war. Will Biden launch a new war? However, Trump did launch hybrid wars in Venezuela, Bolivia, Belarus,... Trump didn't break from FOREIGN adventures.
During Trump's term:
– How many bombs were dropped?
– How much new DEBT was created?
– How much did the money supply increase by?
– What happened to the trade deficit?
May 17, 2021 | www.youtube.com
Krystal Ball details how Bill Gates' solution to poor nation vaccine distribution protects Pharma profits.
Im a nurse and im not allowed to give medical advice or I'll lose my license only a doctor can give advice so bill gates needs to be put in prison send this to him
Stephanie Parker , 1 week agoThe medical industry doesn't want to cure, they want lifetime customers
t Kay , 4 days agoAnita Hamlin , 2 weeks agoBill Gates see every virus as a business opportunity. No wonder he looked so cool, Just like Faucci
How Bill has power deciding on medical issues with absolutely no medical background is an example of what is wrong in the world.
DOS UNO , 5 days agoHappy Man , 4 days ago" Killuminati "
Chris P. Bacon , 1 week agoWhen Gates got his medical degrees I mean Medical degree, and became the Spokesperson of the pharmaceutical companies?
This whole thing is not about a pandemic. It's about money and power.
May 17, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Gates And Epstein Traded Advice On Bill's 'Toxic' Marriage, Jeff's Pedo Image Rehab During Secretive "Men's Club" Gatherings BY TYLER DURDEN MONDAY, MAY 17, 2021 - 03:11 PM
A former Jeffrey Epstein insider claims that Bill Gates was a regular at the notorious pedophile's $77 million Manhattan townhouse, where Epstein held "men's club" - type gatherings for his closest pals (documented by his home's alleged network of spy cameras, we're sure).
For Gates, "Going to Jeffrey's was a respite from his marriage. It was a way of getting away from Melinda " according to one of two insiders , who came forward to the Daily Beast to break what we're guessing is the first rule of elite pedo-lair club.
According to the report, Gates and Epstein traded advice over their respective problems, while Gates " met a rotating cast of bold-faced names and discussed worldly issues in between rounds of jokes and gossip -- a "men's club" atmosphere that irritated Melinda."
Gates used the gatherings at Epstein's $77 million New York townhouse as an escape from what he told Epstein was a "toxic" marriage, a topic both men found humorous , a person who attended the meetings told The Daily Beast.
The billionaire met Epstein dozens of times starting in 2011 and continuing through to 2014 mostly at the financier's Manhattan home -- a substantially higher number than has been previously reported. Their conversations took place years before Bill and Melinda Gates announced this month that they were splitting up .
Gates, in turn, encouraged Epstein to rehabilitate his image in the media following his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting a minor for prostitution , and discussed Epstein becoming involved with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. -Daily Beast
According to one of the insiders, Epstein and Gates "were very close."
A spokesperson for Gates (fleet of attorneys) told the Beast "Your characterization of his meetings with Epstein and others about philanthropy is inaccurate, including who participated. Similarly, any claim that Gates spoke of his marriage or Melinda in a disparaging manner is false ."
"Bill never received or solicited personal advice of any kind from Epstein -- on marriage or anything else. Bill never complained about Melinda or his marriage to Epstein," the rep continued.
According to the Beast , " Melinda Gates was furious over Bill's relationship with Epstein, and was put off by the creepy financier upon meeting him in September 2013, after the couple accepted an award at a New York City hotel. Melinda's anger, people familiar with the matter said, eventually led to the demise of Bill and Epstein's friendship."
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal just reported that Melinda began consulting divorce attorneys in October, 2019 - right around the time it was revealed that Bill and Epstein were pals . What's more, Microsoft board members wanted Bill gone in late 2019 after an internal investigation revealed that Gates had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a female Microsoft employee. play_arrow
ItsAllBollocks 1 hour ago (Edited)
truth or go home 42 minutes agoFunny how the media never reports the obvious. Bill's divorce has nothing to do with marital breakdown and everything to do with protecting his assets. Looks like old Bill just might get thrown under the bus like they did with his pal Epstein. They're going to need a scapegoat when the excreta starts to splatter and who's better than Bill? I just hope he takes Schwab, Fauci and all the rest of them with him...
As for Epstein, try typing 'Epstein's victims' into google images and A/ find a victim who isn't loving every minute of it, B/ find a victim under the age of 16, C/ explain why anyone would go to all the trouble and risk coercing someone to do what damn near all women will do willingly and D/ as you know the media lies, why you believe every word of it...
AlGorerythm 6 hours ago (Edited) remove linkDo you actually believe there will be a trial for "crimes against humanity" under the current system?
That's dumber than believing covid vaxx is "safe".
Michael Musashi 4 hours agoEpstein was hired by a former OSS guy to teach high school teens STEM classes... although he was technically not a teacher at all.
That OSS guy was the father of Dr. Trump's Attorney General who is also a washington swamp creature - Bill Barr
RiverRoad 3 hours agoThis is all that matters. This stupid relationship with Epstein is a distraction. Gates and Fauchi knew what was going on in Wuhan, and this is what matters. Dump all this gossipy women's crap!
Sprumford 7 hours ago (Edited)As soon as Covid was declared a Pandemic, Gates announced that he was resigning ALL of his positions at Microsoft to dedicate his time to Covid. What a timely COVER Covid provided him for his simultaneous FORCED EXIT from Microsoft.
HungryPorkChop 6 hours agoEpstein ran one big blackmail operation IMO.
TonTon 6 hours agoThat Epstein pedo island seemed to be nothing but a way to entrap and blackmail wealthy individuals. That's the main reason they need to release the manifesto is a lot of these people "obviously" still hold high positions and are probably compromised.
TheySayIAmOkay 7 hours agoHe went from Chief Global Philanthropist to Blue Screen of Death in less time than it takes to fake a Jeffrey Epstein suicide.
GreatCaesar'sGhost 7 hours agoSo, Melinda was bothered by Bill going to bang 15 year olds from Ukraine over at Epstein's place? But not bothered enough to ever say anything...
scoop2020 7 hours ago remove linkWho knows what threats she faced? Not everyone has it in them to be a hero. At least she's getting out now.
Give Me Some Truth 7 hours ago (Edited)Imagine how those conversations went? Hey Jeff, my marriage sucks. No worries Bill...
Give Me Some Truth 7 hours agoMaybe someone should ask prosecutors with the Department of Justice why they haven't questioned a single "John" in the decades-long sex trafficking operation run by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Give Me Some Truth 6 hours ago (Edited) remove linkIf the FBI really "investigated" the Epstein sex trafficking operation ... it would also have to investigate - and expose - the FBI, which clearly knew all about it for probably decades.
McGantic 7 hours ago (Edited)"Leave Epstein alone. He's intelligence." This (alleged) comment was made to a U.S. prosecutor working for the U.S. Department of Justice. Has this charge really been investigated? Who passed along this order and why?
Also, much has been written about the photo of Virginia Giuffre with Prince Andrew, taken at Ghislaine Maxwell's London townhouse. Some have speculated the photo is a fake. Well, Virginia Giuffre gave the original photo to ... FBI agents in 2011.
Would she have given them the photo if it was really a fake? What did the FBI agents do with the photo? Don't you think they confirmed it was a legit photo? And what was this girl from the wrong side of the tracks in Palm Bech Florida doing meeting a Prince in London? Why did Epstein and Maxwell fly her to London in the first place? So they could let a teenage stranger do some sightseeing?
Larry Dallas 7 hours agoMan, did Gates piss someone off or what?
StackShinyStuff 5 hours agoBest sentence is the last one:
"Come to think of it, maybe someone should ask Larry Summers if he was ever in Epstein's "men's club" at the pedo lair."
Paleocrat 6 hours agoThese people are sick.
VWAndy 6 hours agoNotice all the media badmouthing of Gates who was just a nerdy hero a few weeks ago. This isn't accidental. He's being set up to take a fall. COVID?
Why is there so much corruption?
May 16, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
chunga 8 hours ago
SurfingUSA 7 hours ago remove linkThey have a lot of work to do. There is a suspicion among cynics like myself that GOP bossmen conspired with DNC to rig 2020 for the opposition.
Moribund Mitch was congratulating Catatonic Joe while the election was still contested and GA runoff polls were still open. Mike Pence folded up like a ten dollar suitcase.
chunga 7 hours ago"Suspicion" ????
Those facts are locked down. See the following GOP champions of Domino Ion Voting with documented roles in getting the equipment and obstructing investigations:
- Kemp & Raffensberger and Sterling in GA
- Ducey in AZ
- Maricopa County Board of Supervisors
- Mitch & Lindsay getting re-elected despite dismal polling
- Kevin McCarthy, "nothing to see here"
- lots more this is just off the top of my head
Note Domino Ion election management is to an extent a front for the CCP.
YuriTheClown 7 hours agoThe recount thing in AZ is a stunt as far as I'm concerned. Nobody ever bothered to question suitcase girl. It is inexplicable.
19331510 3 hours agoDon't do the China thing. That is the Republican version of Russia! Russia! Russia!
While I am sure China spreads the cheese around we all know it's the Giewash Mob banking cartel that is firmly in control. The Cartel can shut off Chinese Cheese in a heart beat when desired. They just like using other people's money.
Miniminer1 8 hours agoMain street does not want perpetual wars, why do you think Trump was elected for a second time?
No_Pretzel_Logic 7 hours agoCNN and the msm will keep putting her on TV like she's important and telling their few viewers she might be president and will go after evil trump and thereby keeping the brainwashing alive . Keep fighting for justice president trump!!!
YuriTheClown 7 hours agoCIA News Network is 100% Deep State operated.
I can flip to that channel anytime of day and within 120 seconds I am pointing at the TV and saying, "Liars!"
It is almost completely Pravda-programming and remains a real threat to this country. Same with MSDNC.
aegis551 8 hours agoYou watch TV????
Paul Bunyan 8 hours agoCheneys is a neocons and a globalist. Hopefully the good people of Wyoming can see that and kick this POS to the curb.
SPACE-CADET 8 hours agoDarth Cheney is not pleased the GOP has discredited his daughter. I am sure he and the Bushes will be doing everything they can to keep Trump from running in '24.
Paul Bunyan 8 hours ago (Edited)Little Bush killed 10,000 americans and over 1 million Iraq.
He retired to Texas with a cushy pension.
YuriTheClown 7 hours agoNever mind the pension. The Bushes are American royalty and British royals before it. His mother Barbara is a Pierce, as in the former POTUS and NYC banking dynasty. Everyone knows CIA asset George Sr. Then there is patriarch Prescott who was a Senator, a banker with the Harrimans ( THE bank that funneled Nazi money through Wall Street) and a Scull and bonesman (as was GHWB and GWB). Then there is Uncle Bert Walker, where both names Herbert and Walker come from. This man traces both names back to British royalty, where both the Herberts and Walkers ruled on the British courts for hundreds of years. So for pensions, these families have power and wealth that can not be imagined.
arby63 7 hours agoNah. As per Eustace Mullins ( a national treasure his recordings )
- Bushes served Harrimans
- Harrimans served Rothschilds
Bushes are high functionaries
They all hated Trump because he wasn't in the club. This scum Cheney is a name I've had to endure for 40 years.
Thats why they hated Trump. He wasn't one of them.
May 16, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com
Liz Cheney Lied About Her Role In Spreading The Discredited CIA "Russian Bounty" Story BY TYLER DURDEN SUNDAY, MAY 16, 2021 - 11:30 AM
Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com ,
In an interview with Fox News ' Bret Baier this week, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) denied that she spread the discredited CIA "Russian bounty" story. That CIA tale, claiming Russia was paying Taliban fighters to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, was cooked up by the CIA and then published by The New York Times on June 27 of last year, right as former President Trump announced his plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The Times story, citing anonymous intelligence officials, was then continually invoked by pro-war Republicans and Democrats -- led by Cheney -- to justify their blocking of that troop withdrawal. The story was discredited when the U.S. intelligence community admitted last month that it had only "low to moderate confidence" that any of this even happened.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) speaks to members of the media after she was removed of her leadership role as Conference Chair, following a Republican House caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol on on May 12, 2021 in Washington, DC (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)When Baier asked Cheney about her role in spreading this debunked CIA story, Cheney blatantly lied to him, claiming "if you go back and look at what I said -- every single thing I said : I said if those stories are true , we need to know why the President and Vice President were not briefed on them." After Baier pressed her on the fact that she vested this story with credibility, Cheney insisted a second time that she never endorsed the claim but merely spoke conditionally, always using the "if these reports are true" formulation. Watch Cheney deny her role in spreading that story.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fd6u_p0K9aE
Liz Cheney, as she so often does, blatantly lied. That she merely spoke of the Russian bounty story in the conditional -- " every single thing I said: I said if those stories are true" -- is completely and demonstrably false. Indeed, other than Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) , there are few if any members of Congress who did more to spread this Russian bounty story as proven truth, all in order to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. In so doing, she borrowed from a pro-war playbook pioneered by her dad, to whom she owes her career: the former Vice President would leak CIA claims to The New York Times to justify war, then go on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, as he did on September 8, 2002 , and cite those New York Times reports as though they were independent confirmation of his views coming from that paper rather than from him:
MR. RUSSERT: What, specifically, has [Saddam] obtained that you believe would enhance his nuclear development program? ..
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Now, in the case of a nuclear weapon, that means either plutonium or highly enriched uranium. And what we've seen recently that has raised our level of concern to the current state of unrest, if you will, if I can put it in those terms, is that he now is trying, through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs.
MR. RUSSERT: Aluminum tubes.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Specifically aluminum tubes. There's a story in The New York Times this morning this is -- I don't -- and I want to attribute The Times . I don't want to talk about, obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it's now public that, in fact, [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge. And the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly enriched uranium, which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.
So having CIA stories leak to the press that fuel the pro-war case, then having pro-war politicians cite those to justify their pro-war position, is a Cheney Family speciality.
On July 1, the House Armed Services Committee, of which Rep. Cheney is a member, debated amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that authorized $740.5 billion in military spending. One of Cheney's top priorities was to align with the Committee's pro-war Democrats, funded by weapons manufacturers, to block Trump's plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020 and to withdraw roughly 1/3 of the 34,000 U.S. troops in Germany.
To justify her opposition, Cheney -- contrary to what she repeatedly insisted to Baier -- cited the CIA's Russian bounty story without skepticism . In a joint statement with Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, that Cheney published on her website on June 27 -- the same day that The New York Times published its first story about the CIA tale -- Cheney pronounced herself "concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces." There was nothing conditional about the statement: they were preparing to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and cited this story as proof that "Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan."
After today's briefing with senior White House officials, we remain concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces. It has been clear for some time that Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan. We believe it is important to vigorously pursue any information related to Russia or any other country targeting our forces. Congress has no more important obligation than providing for the security of our nation and ensuring our forces have the resources they need.
An even more definitive use of this Russia bounty story came when Cheney held a press conference to explain her opposition to Trump's plans to withdraw troops. In this statement, she proclaimed that she "remains concerned about Russian activities in Afghanistan." She then explicitly threatened Russia over the CIA's "bounty" story, warning them that "any targeting of U.S. forces by Russians, by anyone else, will face a very swift and deadly response." She then gloated about the U.S. bombing of Russia-linked troops in Syria in 2018 using what she called "overwhelming and lethal force," and warned that this would happen again if they target U.S. forces in Afghanistan:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/_NUXZog_Vf0
Does this sound even remotely like what Cheney claimed to Baier? She denied having played a key role in spreading the Russia bounty story because, as she put it, " every single thing I said, I said: if those stories are true." She also told him that she never referred to that CIA claim except by saying: "if these reports are true." That is false.
The issue is not merely that Cheney lied: that would hardly be news. It is that the entire media narrative about Cheney's removal from her House leadership role is a fraud. Her attacks on Trump and her party leadership were not confined to criticisms of the role played by the former president in contesting the validity of the 2020 election outcome or inciting the January 6 Capitol riot -- because Liz Cheney is such a stalwart defender of the need for truth and adherence to the rule of law in politics.
Cheney played the key role in forming an alliance with pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee to repeatedly defeat the bipartisan anti-war minority [led by Ro Khanna (D-CA), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)] to prevent any meaningful changes promised by Trump during the 2016 campaign to put an end to the U.S. posture of Endless War. As I reported about the House Armed Services Committee hearing last July, the CIA tale was repeatedly cited by Cheney and her allies to justify ongoing U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan.
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