French satellite operator Eutelsat takes Hamas-affiliated channel al-Aqsa TV off air
Press TV – October 15, 2023
France’s broadcasting watchdog has ordered the satellite provider Eutelsat to pull the plug on the Palestinian Arabic-language Al-Aqsa television channel and take the station, which is affiliated with the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement, off the air over allegations that it violated rules on incitement.
Eutelsat, Europe’s leading satellite operator, said the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA) had asked the firm to stop broadcasting al-Aqsa TV.
The Hamas-run channel denounced the French move on its Telegram channel on Saturday, stating that it had to stop broadcasting from Eutelsat 8 West B satellite due to French pressure.
“In light of the massacres being committed against our people in the Gaza Strip as they are unwearyingly and steadfastly fighting the Operation al-Aqsa Storm, and in line with continued targeting and killing of journalists in Gaza, the French company responsible for Eutelsat satellite made the decision to block the channel’s broadcast,” the television station wrote in its statement.
“The channel was taken off the air in response to pressure from the French government and submission to the occupying Zionist regime,” the statement added.
The channel also condemned its suspension as “a blatant and shocking violation of all standards of freedom,” stating that the move “contradicts the international laws that guarantee freedom of expression and the right to communicate the voice of oppressed people to the whole world.”
Hezbollah: Eutelsat complicit with Israeli enemy in brutal Gaza war
The Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement censured the decision by satellite provider Eutelsat to take the Hamas-run al-Aqsa TV off the air, stating that the measure dealt a hard blow to Palestinian media.
“In the midst of a ruthless campaign by the Zionist enemy against Palestinian people, the European satellite operator, Eutelsat, opted to cease the broadcast of al-Aqsa television channel. The move was meant to prevent the world public opinion from observing the oppression that Palestinians are exposed to, and ultimately challenging the West’s so-called commitment to media neutrality and freedom of expression,” it said in a statement.
Hezbollah lambasted Eutelsat for “shamelessly collaborating with the Israeli enemy in its ongoing brutal onslaught against defenseless Palestinian civilians.”
The movement views this decision as a “deliberate attempt to conceal the atrocities of Zionist forces, which are increasingly coming to light on the global stage. They also draw a connection to the tragic killing of journalists in Gaza and Lebanon.”
Hezbollah underscored its “unwavering support for al-Aqsa TV as well as all independent media outlets dedicated to exposing the Israeli regime’s crimes and uncovering the truth behind them.”
The WHO ignores its own rules, will refuse to make public the finalized IHR Amendments before the vote
By Meryl Nass | October 10, 2023
The WHO’s press release states what happened in very general terms, so only the already-initiated will understand it. Article 55 of the WHO Constitution requires that amendments to WHO documents be offered to the member states and public 4 months in advance of a vote. The Saudi co-chair said to the public that his Working Group on the IHR amendments may not complete their work by January needed to meet the timeline to be voted on in May 2024. In a choreographed move, he asked Principal Legal Officer Steven Solomon what to do about this. Solomon had already crafted a plan. His plan was to create a specious excuse to ignore the existing rules.
Nobody voted on ignoring them. Nobody said this was okay. It just became a done deal. And here is the WHO press release, saying very little, explaining nothing, just issuing a vague statement that the rules will be ignored and no amendments will be available till (probably) after the vote or consensus process takes place in May:
“We will continue work on a range of issues in the intersessional period before WGIHR6, as well as in early 2024. We are confident that we will be able to deliver on our mandate by the 77th World Health Assembly. The will is there,” said WGIHR Co-Chair Dr Abdullah Assiri of Saudi Arabia.
“We have a very strong shared focus on our mandate to deliver a package of targeted amendments to the IHR and ensure that equity is reflected in the IHR. It would be easy to make the IHR worse. It will be hard to make them better. We will focus on the hard task, making them better,” said WGIHR Co-Chair Dr Ashley Bloomfield of New Zealand.
The Co-Chairs noted that, in reference to Decision WHA75(9), it appeared unlikely that the package of amendments would be ready by January 2024. In this regard, the Working Group agreed to continue its work between January and May 2024. The Director-General will submit to the 77th Health Assembly the package of amendments agreed by the Working Group.
Below is the WHO lawyer (previously from US State Dept) who thought up the scheme to hide the amendments from the public instead of issuing the packet in January 2024 as required:
And here is the show where James Corbett, James Roguski and I discuss what is happening before our eyes, and tell you who really runs the WHO—its private donors. https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/shows/good-morning-chd/whos-principal-legal-officer-tries-to-reinterpret-rules-pass-ihr-amendments-without-the-public-knowing-what-is-in-them/
FBI director warns of Hamas copycat threat
RT | October 15, 2023
Americans face a heightened threat from “lone wolf” terrorists inspired to replicate aspects of Hamas’ recent assault on Israel on US soil, FBI Director Christopher Wray told an audience of law enforcement officers at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Conference in San Diego on Saturday.
Claiming there was “no question we’re seeing an increase in reported threats,” Wray warned his law enforcement colleagues, “We’ve got to be on the lookout, especially for lone actors who may take inspiration from recent events to commit violence of their own” – a reference to Hamas’ attack on Israel last Saturday.
“History has been witness to antisemitic and other forms of violent extremism for too long,” the FBI director continued, vowing to “continue confronting those threats.”
The responsibility for that confrontation was also on conference attendees, Wray added, urging them to “stay vigilant” and notify the FBI and other authorities if they saw any “signs that someone may be mobilizing towards violence.”
The FBI chief did not give any specific examples of domestic threats, copycat or otherwise, that had emerged since Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel. Instead, he made a generalized reference to “foreign terrorist organizations, or those inspired by them, or domestic violent extremists motivated by their own racial animus” as a vaguely equivalent menace likely to target individuals because of their (presumably Jewish) faith.
Wray’s FBI was caught earlier this year targeting Christian groups in a sprawling probe that presented traditionalist Catholics as potential domestic terrorists with “antisemitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.”
Saturday’s speech was one of the few public references Wray had made since the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, to an extremist threat with possible origins outside the US. The FBI director has insisted for years that the primary menace imperiling Americans is “white supremacy.” The concept has become increasingly nebulous under the presidential administration of Joe Biden, expanding to include not only the so-called “radical Catholics” but also parents who speak out at school board meetings, many of whom were investigated by the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division for speaking out against Covid-19 policies, LGBTQ material inserted into their children’s curricula, and other controversial issues following a directive from the Department of Justice deeming them a threat to school officials.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have highlighted “claims of government overreach” as a motivating factor for these “domestic violent extremists.”
The big picture on Wales’s 20 mph speed limit
Well well well
AWKWARD GIT | SEPTEMBER 25, 2023
Suddenly out of nowhere the population and politicians of Wales are shocked that a 20mph speed limit has been imposed across much of the country.
In fact it has been in the making for many years, since at least 2010, when the UN’s little-known Economic Commission in Europe (UNECE) held a workshop to ‘raise awareness about the important challenges that climate change impacts and adaptation requirements present for international transport networks . . . The workshop highlighted that while transport is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions it is, at the same time, heavily affected by the impacts of climate change. This workshop demonstrated the urgent need to prepare appropriate policy actions.’
In Wales it has been discussed since at least 2020 with a survey of 1,002 people which has been used to justify the policy.
The report begins: ‘The Welsh Government plans to introduce legislation in 2023 which will reduce the speed limit from 30 mph to 20 mph in residential communities across Wales.’
In July 2021 a public consultation was launched. Just over 6,000 responses were received, with 47 per cent in favour of reducing the speed limit and 53 per cent against it. Feedback from a number of organisations in Wales was submitted, with 22 out of the 25 supporting the proposed reduction in speed limit. Notice the big difference in attitude between the response from individuals and the organisations? What were these organisations? What were the responses for and against given by individuals? We don’t know.
The legislation was voted through in the Welsh Assembly/Senedd in July 2022. A Welsh Government press release trumpeted: ‘Wales becomes the first UK nation to make the move – helping to save lives, develop safer communities, improve the quality of life and encourage more people to make more sustainable and active travel choices.’ https://www.gov.wales/uk-first-welsh-senedd-gives-green-light-20mph-legislation
So were the politicians who now oppose the legislation asleep? Absent? Not paying attention? Not interested? Happy with it until the recent furore and uproar kicked off? My guess is the latter.
But there is more to it than simply the Welsh Assembly/Senedd introducing the policy. The question to ask is ‘Why are Wales and many other countries introducing a policy being pushed by the UN’s World Health Organization backed by various NGOs?’
Yes, the very same WHO trying to push through the pandemic treaties and the very same NGOs behind a lot of the turmoil in recent years. Here is the WHO’s low speed campaign launch.
To be able to see the bigger picture and not the Wales-centric small picture here is a link that show the web between the UNECE (United Nations Economic Council in Europe), the EU and the UK.
There are many, many more documents on the same lines. They explain HS2, SMART motorways, ANPR cameras everywhere, 20 mph speed limits and road pricing, which is mentioned frequently. Like many other policies – 15-minute cities, low traffic neighbourhoods, low emission zones, electric vehicles, renewable energy, man-made global climate change, Covid, to name a few – it’s all one big circle of politicians, civil servants, activists and the media all quoting each other.
Everything seems to be an integral part of the sustainable development and Great Reset agendas.
Surprised?
I’m not any more now I can see the Big Picture and where it leads.
It’s like one big Gordian Knot of intertwined policies that are designed to ensnare and enslave us while proclaiming it will enhance our physical and mental wellbeing, make us safer, happier, healthier and so on and on and on.
Alexander the Great solved his Gordian Knot dilemma – he chopped it in half with a sword. Time for us to do something similar to all these intertwined polices getting closer.
AfD NEEDLE ATTACK UPDATE
The Banana Republic of Germany has become a very absurd and extreme place
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | October 13, 2023
Last week, I posted about allegations of a needle attack on Alternative für Deutschland co-chair Tino Chrupalla. On 4 October, at a rally in Ingolstadt ahead of the Bavarian state elections this past Sunday, Chrupalla was posing for selfies with supporters when two fans hugged him. His right arm suddenly felt heavy and within minutes he was near collapse. An ambulance rushed him to hospital and he spent several days under medical observation in intensive care.
There have now been important developments in this case.
In the days after the attack, Ingolstadt prosecutors acknowledged that police were investigating, but insisted they had “no evidence … that Mr. Chrupalla was approached or attacked.” As intended, this gave the right-thinking press space to jeer that the AfD were “exaggerating shamelessly” for political gain ahead of the elections, and for the Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) to deplore “how perfidiously and deceitfully the AfD is trying to capitalise on these incidents … in the state elections.”
Amid Herrmann’s bizarre fulminations, AfD-adjacent newsweekly Junge Freiheit (JF) reported that Chrupalla’s own doctor had diagnosed an “intramuscular injection” with an unknown substance in Chrupalla’s deltoid. Police immediately summoned the doctor for interrogation, after which he mysteriously distanced himself from the diagnosis, pleading that in his assessment he had merely provided “a description of the injury based on Chrupalla’s statements and not an actual determination of an injection.” Public prosecutors again said that allegations of an attack had “no basis in witnesses statements … including the testimony of Mr. Chrupalla and his bodyguards.”
Only this Wednesday did Chrupalla feel well enough to give his first public statements on the attack. Because the police would do nothing, he said he was forced to enlist a Dresden pathologist to investigate his needle injury. The doctor took a skin sample from the injection site on his arm, confirming that an injection had occurred. Chrupalla also said that he still felt unwell and that he’d lost 3.5 kg in the days since the Ingolstadt rally, and he added an additional detail that the press had not yet reported: Immediately after the attack, federal police had noticed a blood-stain on his right shirt sleeve, corresponding to the injection site. All those official claims that police had no evidence of a needle attack were lies, in other words; they had clear indications from the first moment.
Hours after Chrupalla’s statements, Ingolstadt prosecutors suddenly reversed themselves, finally acknowledging the obvious:
… Expert opinion has confirmed that the blood stain on MdB Chrupall’s clothes is his own blood. According to our current assessments, this blood stain probably corresponds to the diagnosed puncture wound. The investigations of the Ingolstadt public prosecutor’s office continue to focus on the open question of when and how Chrupalla’s diagnosed puncture wound … occurred during the campaign rally … in Ingolstadt, and who caused it. In order to clarify these matters, we are identifying and questioning further witnesses, evaluating video recordings and seeking out expert assessments.
What happened here could not be clearer:
Chrupalla suffered a needle attack less than two weeks after a serious “security incident” against his co-chair Alice Weidel on 23 September. Worried that these possibly coordinated efforts against AfD leadership might have consequences for the elections in Hesse and Bavaria, the German press played down the Weidel incident, suggesting that she was just seeking any excuse for a holiday on Mallorca. In the case of Chrupalla, police and prosecutors collaborated towards the same ends, denying the attack until the elections were over and mounting evidence, procured by Chrupalla himself, stripped their stupid efforts of all credibility.
Aside from the Federal Republic of Germany, is there any other developed Western nation where the police, the press and the political establishment react with such obviously calculated indifference to serious assaults on leading opposition party officials? [Yes, USA for example.]
EU Opens Investigation Into X After Making Censorship Demands
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | October 13, 2023
Sparking serious concerns over severe censorship and free speech restrictions, the European Union has initiated a formal investigation into X, due to perceived misinformation related to the recent Hamas attack on Israel.
The potential risk of such probes is that they could lead to a world where a centralized authority determines the validity of opinions and controls information flow.
From the perspective of anti-censorship advocates, this move by the EU is a slippery slope.
The imperative question that arises is who gets to define “misinformation,” and how can it be ensured that bias or interests of the few do not influence these definitions?
This investigation marks the inaugural application of the Digital Services Act (DSA) – a controversial legislative effort purportedly aimed at policing Big Tech.
However, free speech advocates argue that this aggressive stance strays dangerously close to infringing on foundational rights to free expression.
In the wake of recent hostilities between Israel and Hamas, there’s been a substantial uptick in digital content related to the conflict, some containing graphic imagery. While the EU’s initiative is purportedly to quell misinformation, it raises the age-old question: where does one draw the line between censoring misinformation and infringing upon free speech?
Elon Musk, now at the helm of X, received a letter from EU commissioner Thierry Breton, signaling unease that the platform could be a conduit for what the EU deems “illegal content and disinformation.” In response, Musk advocated for transparency, inviting the EU to make public the alleged violations, thereby allowing the public to form their opinions. “Our policy is that everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports. Please list the violations you allude to on X, so that that [sic] the public can see them. Merci beaucoup,” Musk wrote.
Yet, Breton’s rejoinder was less than satisfactory for proponents of free discourse. He retorted, “You are well aware of your users’ — and authorities’— reports on fake content and glorification of violence. Up to you to demonstrate that you walk the talk.” This statement underscores a problematic vagueness and subjectivity in determining what constitutes a gray area that poses a potential threat to free speech.
Lawsuit Pushes Back Against California Medical Board’s “Misinformation” Censorship Power
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | October 12, 2023
A lawsuit has been amended in California against this US state’s medical boards’ “misinformation powers” – based on a law that is soon to be repealed, and which critics – some of them legal plaintiffs – say allowed the government to prevent them from practicing medicine, the way they were trained to do.
It was one of the rules, called Assembly Bill 2098 (AB 2098), introduced to keep medical professionals in check, in case they felt like speaking their minds freely as insights into Covid were developing.
And since the world has now moved on to other crises, the “forgotten pandemic” censorship laws are getting “quietly” repealed.
But not really, the plaintiffs in this case claim – because of the nature of the repeal of the short-lived AB 2098, made null-and-void on September 14 via Senate Bill 815 (SB 815). California Senator Newsom got to sign all three documents.
However, the repeal – which will not be in effect before the start of 2024 – at the same time incorporates Democrat member of California Assembly Evan Low’s provision that doctors who get accused of “misinformation” can still be punished – “held accountable” – regardless of whether the controversial law was actually applicable.
“The Medical Board of California will continue to maintain the authority to hold medical licensees accountable for deviating from the standard of care and misinforming their patients about COVID-19 treatments,” Low said.
How in the world is this political, ideological, pre-election, and legal gymnastics even supposed to work?
The lawsuit against the bill, Hoang et al. v. Bonta et al., has the plaintiffs represented by California attorney Richard Jaffe.
He had this to say: “Because of the repeal of AB 2098, and the board’s position that it can still sanction the speech targeted by the soon-to-be-repealed law, we are pivoting in our lawsuit and arguing to the judge that they can’t do it under their general statute either because the speech does not change just because the legal theory/statute changes.”
The world clearly has moved to other crises – but it seems, not the California Democrats. And so the plaintiffs in the lawsuit’s amended format are also asking to add more to their ranks. One of the original ones is Children’s Health Defense (CHD).
However absurd the “standard of care” argument that supersedes a law may seem to a layperson, Jaffe is obviously taking it seriously.
The court will hear the arguments related to this new development on November 13.
Five questions for the government’s behavioural scientists
Simple questions, requiring simple answers
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | October 10, 2023
As proposed in a previous HART article, state-funded behavioural scientists – via their application of often-covert ‘nudge’ techniques – fulfil a crucial role in imposing the will of a global elite upon ordinary people. Whether it is confining us to our homes, encouraging the ingestion of insects, imposing digital IDs or restricting our opportunities to travel, the nudgers promote the compliance of the masses by a variety of means, including their stealthy harnessing of fear, shaming and peer pressure.
And behavioural scientists are now a prominent occupational grouping within the government infrastructure. The ‘Government Communications Service’ employs more than 7,000 ‘professional communicators’ across the UK, and incorporates a ‘Behavioural Science Team’ (based in the Cabinet Office) with a central goal of embedding behavioural science expertise across the Government Communication profession’. During the covid event, the Cabinet Office granted the Behavioural Insight Team (the original ‘Nudge Unit’) a £4-million contract to furnish the government with ‘frictionless access to behavioural insights to match central priorities’. Recent Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Energy Security & Net Zero asking how many behavioural scientists they currently employed were both refused on the grounds that it would take too long to compute the information. Ironically, it seems that taxpayers are generously funding their own manipulation.
A prominent UK behavioural scientist recently acknowledged the impact this intense nudging campaign has had on the British people. In a 2023 interview for the Telegraph, Professor David Halpern (the Founding Director of the Behavioural Insight Team, aka the UK’s Nudge Unit) observed that people are now ‘drilled’ and rightly calibrated to accept further restrictions; ‘once you’ve practised something’ (lockdowns, mask wearing) ‘you can switch it back on … you’ve got the beginnings of a habit loop … we’ve practised the drill’.
HART believes that the general public has a right to be informed about the nature, scale, and intensity of state-sponsored nudging, not least so that they can be furnished with the opportunity to express their opinions about the appropriateness and acceptability of this form of top-down persuasion. Yet, to date, there has been a stark reluctance for any of the behavioural scientists within the government infrastructure to admit responsibility for promoting the fear-inflating messaging witnessed throughout the covid event. Given this lack of transparency in regard to the details of the ongoing behavioural science operation, HART would like to ask the state-employed nudgers the following questions:
1. Do you perceive yourselves as advisors or enablers? Is your primary goal to provide expert guidance to ministers and civil servants, or to maximise the compliance of the masses with Government edicts?
2. Did you conduct your own independent evidence reviews before promoting the implementation of top-down restrictions such as lockdowns and community masking, or do you presume that all recommendations emanating from national and global public health bodies are for the ‘greater good’?
3. Do you recognise the ethical concerns arising from the Government’s deployment of nudges upon their own citizens? How much time do you devote to discussing the morality of using often-covert, distress-inducing methods of persuasion upon ordinary people?
4. If, as you claim, you have never endorsed the use of fear-inflation as a means of promoting compliance, why did you all remain silent throughout the covid event while our Government was ‘scaring the pants’ off us all?
5. Do you recognise, and allow for, the fact that your own ideological biases will be colouring your judgements & actions?
By answering these questions, and thereby filling in some of the information gaps surrounding the Government’s ubiquitous use of nudging, lay people will be better placed to make an informed choice as to whether they want their taxes spent on this often-clandestine activity.
We look forward to receiving responses from the behavioural scientists concerned.
Hungary should consider leaving EU if Brussels makes drastic treaty change move, argues Hungarian columnist
Hungary has a new red line as Germany and France move in to seize control of the entire bloc, writes Hungarian political analyst.
By John Cody | Remix News | October 10, 2023
Following news that Germany and France are moving forward with reforms that would drastically curtail the sovereignty of EU nation-states, Hungarian columnist Tamás Fricz argued in the Magyar Nemzet newspaper that if such changes really do come to pass, Hungary needs to consider the possibility of leaving the European Union.
All I can say is that if we can really get this through the EU institutions, we really need to seriously consider our role and the conditions for staying in the EU,” wrote Fricz in response to the new reform measures being proposed.
“Once again, the two EU powers have found each other: France and Germany are determined to reform — or, in other words, to curtail — the rights of the member states this year, including the abolition of the veto in the European Council, the only EU body where the member states say still counts,” he wrote.
He described how the move was first discussed by German Minister of State Anna Lührmann and French EU Minister of State Laurence Boone during an interview with Euractiv a few weeks ago. However, since then, the EU has accelerated its plans, with 12 experts commissioned by Germany and France to produce a 60-page draft reform paper detailing how the EU would be “reformed,” most notably by abolishing the veto.
Fricz asks why Hungary should go along with these reforms, and writes if Hungary does not fight back against the abolition of the veto, “we will be permanently at the mercy of the mainstream, liberal, globalist elite in Brussels.”
“That is when a qualified majority, 15 countries and at least 65 percent of the population, is enough for the globalists to impose their will on the member states,” he wrote.
He then details the various areas where Hungary would face serious challenges, writing that Hungary would be “forced to take in tens of thousands of migrants under a mandatory quota” or “pay through the nose” to refuse them.
He also notes that the EU would force Hungary to abolish its child protection laws, thus “opening ourselves up — as already done in Western Europe — to LGBTQI+ propaganda in our schools, in our kindergartens, on our streets, in advertising, in cultural works, on television channels, everywhere and anywhere.”
He then listed various initiatives that Hungary would be powerless to stop, such as the global passport scheme from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the abolishment of cash.
“The European Central Bank wants to abolish the use of cash, one of the main guarantees of individual freedom, and the Union is giving huge amounts to Ukraine to continue fighting the war,” writes Fricz.
“I could go on citing the examples, but if our French and German ‘friends’ are able to abolish the veto, if they can do this feat, then there is nothing more to talk about,” he concluded.
Decades before Snowden, this American patriot waged war against illegal surveillance in the US
In the 1970s, US Army Captain Christopher Pyle blew the lid on government agencies’ domestic spying
Former undercover agent Christopher Pyle testifies in the Senate that the Army has spied on politicians and thousands of ordinary Americans, February 24, 1971. © Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
By Robert Bridge | RT | October 11, 2023
In 1970, a US Army captain went rogue after he discovered that the military was conducting surveillance on dissidents across the country, thus sparking the first effort in modern times to tame US intelligence.
In 1968, almost half a century before the world heard the name of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who blew the whistle on a US-run global surveillance system, Christopher Pyle, an Army captain who taught law at the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Holabird, Maryland, was about to do something no less memorable.
After Pyle had concluded one of his popular lectures on civil disorder, which focused on how the military could better quell riots in those highly volatile times, a military officer directly involved in such operations approached him with the request for a meeting. Several days later, Pyle was escorted into a large warehouse facility that once had been used to assemble railroad engines. In his 2006 book, No Place to Hide, Robert O’Harrow described what happened next.
“Pyle walked into the cage, where an officer showed him books containing mug shots. He looked in the first volume and saw a familiar face. It was Ralph David Abernathy, Martin Luther King’s assistant. Officers called the books the ‘black list.’”
“Outside the cage, Pyle saw more than a dozen teletype machines. The head of the CONUS [acronym for Continental United States] intelligence section told him they were spitting out reports from some fifteen hundred Army operatives about demonstrations with twenty people or more. Pyle was starting to understand how naive he’d been. He began formulating a plan. He would be getting out of the Army soon. He could tell the world about what was going on. When he joined the Army he took an oath to defend the country against all enemies, here and abroad. In his mind now, that included the Army’s intelligence operation. They turned in their security badges and left the building.”
And thus was born one of the most consequential whistleblowers of the post-World War II era.
In January 1970, Pyle, now a full-fledged private citizen, penned an article for the Washington Monthly entitled, ‘CONUS Intelligence: The Army Watches Civilian Politics.’ The explosive opening paragraph said it all: “[t]he U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States. Nearly 1,000 plainclothes investigators … keep track of political protests of all kinds – from Klan rallies in North Carolina to anti-war speeches at Harvard.”
Immediately, some US media swung into action as journalists began hounding the Department of Defense and the US Army to determine the veracity of the claims. Given Pyle’s extreme proximity to the subject matter at hand, however, it soon became clear that Uncle Sam got caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar.
Pyle’s revelations were enough to prompt Congress, as well as a slew of litigation lawyers, to sit up and take notice. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Senator Samuel James Ervin, a self-described “country lawyer” from North Carolina, worked together with Pyle to investigate and expose the clandestine domestic spying program.
Pyle and Ervin eventually spent countless hours delivering testimony before various congressional meetings over a span of several years. The first fruit of their labors came with passage of the Privacy Act of 1974. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford on December 31, 1974, the legislation states: “No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains…” In other words, although the law didn’t actually stop the US Army or intelligence agencies from infiltrating civil action groups and public demonstrations, it did hamper the feds from disclosing the identities of the activists without their foreknowledge.
To this end, Pyle served as a consultant for three Congressional committees: the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights on the Judiciary Committee (1971-1974), the Committee on Government Operations (1974), and the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975).
According to Pyle, as a result of those successful investigations, “the entire US Army Intelligence Command was abolished and all of its files were burned.” For his actions, Pyle ended up on then-President Richard Nixon’s notorious “Enemies List.”
Given the severity of their overall findings, however, the congressional investigations triggered by the US Army captain did not stop there.
1975, the ‘Year of Intelligence’
On January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4, the US Senate created the so-called Church Committee, chaired by Democrat Senator Frank Church, to further examine abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The House carried out its own set of investigations with the Pike Commission and the Rockefeller Commission, thereby prompting the media to label 1975 as the ‘Year of Intelligence,’ and not in a way that was flattering to the intelligence community.
Pyle lent his expertise to the ambitious Church Committee, headed by Iowa Senator Frank Church, which discovered a number of questionable, unethical and outright illegal activities by the CIA between 1959 and 1973. Detailed in a series of reports dubbed the ‘Family Jewels’, these activities included conducting physical surveillance on journalists, amassing files on nearly 10,000 Americans connected to the antiwar movement, funding behavior modification research on unwitting subjects, and plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Cuban President Fidel Castro and DR Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.
The most impactful discovery made by the Church Committee, however, was that of Project SHAMROCK. Started in 1940 during World War II and running into the 1970s, the NSA was given secret authority to access all incoming, outgoing, and transiting telegrams via the Western Union and its associates RCA and ITT. At the peak of Project SHAMROCK, 150,000 messages were captured and analyzed by NSA personnel in a month. The pertinent information contained in these messages was then forwarded to other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI, Secret Service and the Department of Defense. This formed the basis of the so-called ‘Watch List’ of the 1970s that included thousands of American citizens, including high-ranking politicians, celebrities, academics and antiwar activists.
The findings led Senator Frank Church to conclude that Project SHAMROCK was “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.”
Based on the recommendations of the Church Committee, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Under FISA, the government is required to obtain warrants to conduct electronic surveillance against individuals from a special court. Such a warrant requires “probable cause to believe” that the surveillance target is a foreign government or organization, or an agent thereof, “engaging in clandestine intelligence activities or international terrorism,” as per a Department of Justice (DOJ) clarification.
Yet, as we shall see, even this minor legislative hurdle would prove too cumbersome for the Bush administration in its war on terror.
Privacy in the age of terrorism
The tireless work of the Church Commission was put to a test in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as US lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle were prepared to sacrifice citizens’ privacy in the name of national security. Thus, less than one week after three hijacked aircraft toppled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, killing some 3,000 people in the process, one of the most comprehensive plans for conducting surveillance on American civilians and individuals worldwide – the USA PATRIOT ACT (an acronym for ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’) – was already being disseminated to members of Congress.
Arguably the most controversial part of the Patriot Act is contained in Section 215 of the 342-page document, which calls for sweeping government powers against private and public enterprises, individuals, and personal privacy. Most crucially, Section 215 did away with the requirement that the target of the records search be a non-US citizen and “an agent of a foreign power.” American citizens were now legitimate targets as well.
In the Senate, the Patriot Act passed in a 99 – 1 vote. The only senator to vote against it was Wisconsin Democrat Russell Feingold. “There is no doubt,” he declared on the Senate floor before the historic vote, “that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists…But that would not be a country in which we would want to live.”
Even with this widening of surveillance powers, then-US President George W. Bush, as part of the global ‘War on Terror’ that he declared following the events of 9/11, ordered the NSA to tap the communications of an untold number of people in the US, including citizens, without the warrants demanded by the FISA court – despite the fact that between 1979 and 2005, only four out of over 15,000 warrant requests were rejected by the FISA court.
Christopher Pyle, who was still committed to his cause over 30 years after he chose to become a whistleblower, labeled Bush “a criminal” for violating the FISA law and suggested that he should be impeached.
“The Constitution says he must take care that all laws be faithfully executed, not just the ones he likes,” Pyle said during an interview with Democracy Now in 2005. “The statute says … that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the exclusive law governing these international intercepts, and he violated it anyway. And the law also says that any person who violates that law is guilty of a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. By the plain meaning of the law, the President is a criminal.”
More recently, Christopher Pyle, 83, who now works as Professor Emeritus of Politics at Mount Holyoke College, spoke out on behalf of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor turned whistleblower who revealed a massive global intelligence program run by the so-called Five Eyes, a once-secretive intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
“He’s just an ordinary American,” Pyle explained in 2013. “He’s trying to start a debate in this nation over something that is critically important. He should be respected for that and taken at face value and we should move on to the big issues, including the corruption of our system that is done by massive secrecy and by massive amounts of money and politics.”
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.
Featured Video
AIDS Inc. by Gary Null (2007)
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Clash of Civilization, Iran Part II
By Jamal Kanj – Intifada-Palestine.com – January 14, 2011
Israel’s survival kit is: perpetuate conflict, insecurity to rationalize collective hate and finally playing victim.
Devoid of conflict, Israel implodes internally; without hate, Zionism loses its justification; and playing eternal victim to continue blackmailing the West. Absence of this holy trinity, Israel ceases to exist.
From its inception, the house of Zion has mastered exploiting adversarial powers to advance Israel’s cause. For instance, their influence over the Democratic Party in the US began with President Truman’s bid for 2nd term election in 1948.
Responding to strong opposition from Secretary of State General George Marshall and Department experts urging against recognition of Israel, President Truman replied: “I’m sorry gentlemen but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands [Jewish voters] who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of [voting] Arabs among my constituents”
Zionists influence over liberal American politics was matched with the doctrinal school of Conservative theoreticians aligning the Republican Party’s platform with Israel’s objectives. The Neoconservative Zionists, coined Zioncons, invented the “Clash of Civilization” concept to fight Israel’s wars. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Pro-Palestine protesters arrested outside UK’s ruling Labour Conference in Liverpool
- Mauritius denies landing permit to flight from Israel, forcing cancellation: Tour operator
- Israeli finance minister calls for genocidal war on West Bank, annexation of south Lebanon
- 12 Things Your Psychiatrist Was Trained Not to Tell You
- From Unipolar Universalism to Multipolar Civilizational Distinctiveness
- RSF military group defects, joins Sudanese army: State media
- Ireland goalkeeper refuses to play ‘Israel’ as squad weighs boycott
- China pushes back against US on Cuba, Iran
- Ukrainian Soldiers, Potential Mercenaries: Have Gun, Will Travel!
- Burnham’s UN debut… A masterclass in British disinformation
- If Americans Knew
- Israel forces Gazans to live in constant peril – Daily Update
- Deconstructing Netanyahu’s pants-on-fire UN rant – Daily Update
- Trump betrayed voters with his campaign lies and prioritized a foreign country once he took office
- Netanyahu calls Israel’s war in Gaza ‘opposite of genocide’ in UN speech to near-empty hall
- Settler Kidnappings: Torture, Sexual Abuse and Terrorisation of Palestinian Abductees as Israel Deepens Annexation of West Bank
- Gaza winter nears as 162,000 tents become unusable, raising fears of humanitarian crisis
- Netanyahu says, “It’s the opposite of genocide”; UN says Gaza economy is world’s ‘most severe crisis on record’ – Daily Update
- Israel’s US-Backed Assault on Gaza Has Created the ‘World’s Most Severe Economic Crisis on Record’: UN
- ‘Protecting U.S. Citizens’… From Israel
- ‘This is where I live now, the back of a truck’: a day in the life of a grandmother in Gaza
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
