What Google and Facebook Are Hiding
The American Deep State Strikes Back
By Ron Unz • Unz Review • May 24, 2020
After several months of record-breaking traffic our alternative media webzine suffered a sharp blow when it was suddenly purged by Facebook at the end of April. Not only was our rudimentary Facebook page eliminated, but all subsequent attempts by readers to post our articles to the world’s largest social network produced an error message describing the content as “abusive.” Our entire website had been banned.
Facebook publishes a monthly report cataloging its actions to eliminate “improper content,” and although our publication was probably one of the largest and most popular ever so proscribed, the explanation provided was remarkably cursory, with our name mentioned in only two scattered sentences across the 47 page document.
Our investigation linked this network to VDARE, a website known for posting anti-immigration content, and individuals associated with a similar website The Unz Review.
Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their coordination, our investigation linked this network to VDARE, a website known for posting anti-immigration content, and to individuals associated with a similar website The Unz Review.
As I’ve previously discussed, characterizing our alternative media publication as an “anti-immigration” website “similar” to VDare seemed utterly bizarre considering that only about 0.2% of our 2020 content was republished from that source and many months had elapsed since we had last featured a piece on immigration. So I strongly suspected that the claim merely served as an excuse.
I don’t use Facebook or other social networks myself, and noticed little reduction in our daily traffic following that purge, seeming to demonstrate our lack of reliance upon social media. But a week later, this abruptly changed, and our regular daily readership dropped by a significant 15-20%, hardly a crippling blow but quite distressing, setting us back many months of previous growth.
This puzzled me. Why would the Facebook ban have had such limited initial impact but then suddenly become so much more serious? Eventually I discovered that a second, even more powerful Internet giant had also banned us, which explained the sharp drop. Our entire website and all its many millions of pages of serious content had been silently deranked by Google, thus eliminating nearly all our incoming traffic from search results. A few quick checks confirmed this unfortunate situation, best illustrated by a particularly striking example.
Just over a decade ago, I had published an important article entitled The Myth of Hispanic Crime, and for ten years it had always placed extremely high in Google searches, generally being ranked #2 across the 52,000,000 results for “Hispanic crime” and also #2 among the 139,000,000 results for “Latino crime.” The impact of my analysis on the heated public debate had also been quite considerable, and a few years ago a leading academic specialist even asked me to blurb his book on that subject. But my article had now vanished from all such Google searches.
Although Google holds an overwhelming monopoly for web searches across the Western world, comparable products such as Bing and DuckDuckGo using similar technology do exist, and these still list my article among their results, with Bing ranking it at #2 for “Hispanic crime” and “Latino crime,” while DuckDuckGo places it #4 in each. But no one would ever find it using Google.
All the other pages of our website have been similarly blacklisted, effectively eliminated from all web searches courtesy of Google’s information monopoly. This even included the periodical content library that I had built during the 2000s, containing the near-complete archives of hundreds of America’s most influential publications of the last 150 years. Millions of these important articles were available no where else, and their disappearance representing a tremendous loss to academic scholarship.
Google still does contains all these pages, and if the additional specifier “unz” is added to the search, the results do come up, but for anyone not knowing where to look, our entire website and all its content has completely disappeared. This explained our sudden 15-20% reduction in regular traffic.
Internet law is obviously quite murky, but it seems a great shame if Google has decided to use its software monopoly to severely manipulate search results and deliberately hide important information. The notion of Google “disappearing” an entire website and all its material is surely fraught with peril. Should Google’s executives be allowed to “disappear” whichever politicians or candidates they dislike? Should wealthy individuals or powerful groups be able to pay or lobby Google to have their critics removed from all search results?
During 2018 Google employees themselves took a very strong public stance on exactly this issue, protesting their own company’s willingness to produce a “censored” version of their search engine for use in China, a controversy that reached the national headlines, and soon forced executives to abandon the project. But although Google censorship of content within China still remains an inflammatory topic, Google censorship of American content is now apparently so routine and acceptable that it took me more than a week to discover that our entire website had been thrown down the Orwellian “memory hole.”
I’d always taken considerable pride that my Hispanic Crime article had spent a decade ranked #2 among nearly 200,000,000 Google results for that important topic, and was dismayed that Google “disappeared” it. But in fairness, I’d have to admit that those individuals whose views make themselves disagreeable to ruling political elites have sometimes suffered far worse retaliation. For example, my Saturday morning newspapers carried the latest episode in the unfortunate story of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissenting Saudi journalist whose critical writings in the Washington Post so irritated his government that they had him killed and his body dismembered with a bone-saw. Much as I liked my article, having it deranked by Google hardly seems a comparable fate.
For years our website has published a great deal of extremely controversial material, and many readers are probably much more surprised that Google and Facebook took so long to purge us rather than they finally did so.
Consider, for example, my own American Pravda series, which together with related articles runs 280,000 words and has drawn about 3 million pageviews, while attracting over 25,000 comments totaling another 3.5 million words. Many of these articles candidly address some of the most controversial aspects of the JFK Assassination, the 9/11 Attacks, and the history of World War II, topics so touchy that a couple of years ago the redoubtable Israel Shamir described me as the “Kamikazi from California,” and suggested along with numerous other observers that our website might soon be annihilated as a consequence. But aside from a rather lackluster rebuke from the usually ferocious ADL, absolutely nothing untoward happened.
Yet now we have been almost simultaneously banned by both Google and Facebook, America’s leading gatekeepers to the Internet, concerted action that hardly seems likely to have been coincidental, especially coming after years of apparent equanimity. So what had prompted this sudden purge?
I think the obvious answer was my most recent American Pravda installment, which attracted more early readership and social media interest than anything I had previously written, and which appeared just eight days before Facebook’s ban.
My article noted some important facts that are less widely known that they should be, and are quite embarrassing both to our own government and its overly subservient mainstream journalists.
For decades, the American media had regularly denounced the Chinese government for its notorious 1989 slaughter of the student protesters at Tiananmen and shamed its leadership for continuing to flatly deny that historical reality, with China’s demands for censorship of the massacre being a leading source of conflict with Google. However, I pointed out that more than twenty years ago the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post, who had personally covered the events, published a long article in our most prestigious journalism review admitting that the infamous “Tiananmen Square Massacre” had never actually happened, and was just a concoction of incompetent journalists and dishonest propagandists. Yet for decades the promotion of that debunked hoax by our elite media has continued unabated.
As another example, I noted that back in 1999 our warplanes had bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing or wounding dozens of Chinese diplomats. At the time, our media uniformly reported the attack as a tragic accident, while ridiculing China’s government for alleging otherwise. However, just a few months later, many of the leading newspapers in Britain and the rest of the world revealed that the bombing had indeed been deliberate, quoting numerous NATO intelligence sources to that effect. But since the American media completely boycotted this major international story, very few Americans ever discovered that the Chinese had been telling the truth all along and our own government lying.
Although these historical items were important, they merely set the stage for a far more explosive analysis. The bulk of my 7,400 word article presented the very considerable circumstantial evidence that our current Coronavirus national disaster was entirely self-inflicted, being the unintended blowback from an extremely reckless American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), presumably organized by the Deep State Neocons or other rogue elements in our national security establishment.
This ongoing disease epidemic has already killed 100,000 Americans and wrecked our economy, so we can easily understand why the guilty parties would do all they could to prevent some of the critical information from getting into general circulation, pressuring Google and Facebook to suppress the crucial evidence. A few excerpts from my long analysis, now banned by America’s Internet giants, are worth once again repeating:
As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.
Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?
* * *
For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has presumably encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.
As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese documents. Provocatively entitled “China Didn’t Warn Public of Likely Pandemic for 6 Key Days”, the piece was widely distributed, running in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere. According to this reconstruction, the Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan. 14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the number of infections greatly multiplied.
Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough 4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful timeline of those early events as well. Although there may be some differences of emphasis or minor disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese officials first became aware of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January, with the first known death occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public health measures later that same month. No one has apparently disputed these basic facts.
But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.
It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.
Although criticism of the mainstream media has been the central theme of my American Pravda series, I always spend at least a couple of hours every morning carefully reading our leading newspapers, which I regard as unmatched sources of important information so long as their articles are treated with proper caution and rigor. As an example, I would note that most of the crucial evidence suggesting an American biowarfare attack was hidden in plain sight in such eminently respectable news sources as the NYT, the WSJ, and ABC News.
As our global confrontation with China has grown hotter, my morning New York Times has continued to provide invaluable information for anyone who is willing to read it carefully.
For example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo probably ranks as the most prominent Deep State Neocon in the Trump Administration, and is a leading architect of our confrontation with China. Last week he broke quarantine to take a trip to Israel and hold important talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as reported in a 1,600 word NYT article. Although the majority of their discussion concerned American support for the proposed annexation of the Palestinian West Bank, a serious disagreement came with regard to Israel’s growing economic ties with China, with the piece noting that the Jewish State had “antagonized” Washington by allowing Chinese companies to make major infrastructure investments, some of them in sensitive locations. According to the three Times journalists, Netanyahu firmly stood his ground, determined to “push back” against Pompeo’s repeated warnings and refused to reconsider his government’s China policy.
But just a couple of days later, the Times then reported that Du Wei, the Chinese ambassador to Israel, age 57, had been found dead at his home, having suddenly fallen victim to “unspecified health problems.” The piece emphasized that he had become a leading public critic of America’s current policies toward China, and the juxtaposition of these two consecutive NYT articles raised all sorts of obvious questions in my mind.
According to standard mortality tables, an American male age 57 has less than a 1% chance of dying in a particular year, and given the similarity in overall life expectancy, the same must surely be true of Chinese males. Recently appointed Chinese ambassadors are likely to be in reasonably good health rather than suffering the last stages of terminal cancer, and such causes together with obvious, visible injuries account for more than half of all fatalities at around that age. Thus, the likelihood that the 57-year-old Chinese diplomat died naturally within that two day window was probably far less than 1 in 50,000. Lightning does sometimes strike under the most unlikely of circumstances, but not very often; and I think that the unexplained deaths of ambassadors during international confrontations probably fall into the same category.
It therefore seems exceptionally unlikely that the sudden demise of Ambassador Du was not somehow directly connected with the heated dispute between Pompeo and Netanyahu over Israel’s China ties that had occurred two days earlier. The exact details and circumstances are entirely obscure, and we can merely speculate. But since speculation has not yet been outlawed by government edict, an interesting possibility comes to mind.
In sharp constrast to the elected leaders of America’s vassal-states throughout Europe and Asia, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu hardly regards himself as beholden to the American government. He is a powerful, arrogant individual who remembers the endless standing ovations that he enjoyed when he addressed our own House and Senate, receiving the sort of bipartisan public adulation that would be unimaginable for a Donald Trump, who remains deeply unpopular with half our Congress. So faced with demands by a Trump envoy that he sacrifice his own nation’s interests by cancelling important Chinese economic projects, he apparently disregarded Pompeo’s warnings and told him to get lost.
The classic 1972 film The Godfather ranks #2 in the IMDb Movie Database, and one of its most famous scenes concerns a conflict between a powerful and arrogant Hollywood film mogul and a visiting representative of the Corleone family. When the polite requests of the latter are casually disregarded, the movie tycoon awakens to discover the bloody head of his prized race-horse in his own bed, thereby demonstrating the serious nature of the warning he had received and indicating that it should not be disregarded. Pompeo had recently served as CIA Director, and I suspect he called in a few favors with elements of the Israeli Mossad and had them take lethal steps to convince Netanyahu that our demands that he reassess his ties with China were of a serious nature, not to be treated lightly. I strongly suspect that the controversial Chinese-Israeli economic ventures will soon be abandoned.
I had never heard of the unfortunate Chinese ambassador prior to his sudden demise, and under normal circumstances any such notions of American foul play might be dismissed as absurd. But consider that just a few months earlier, we had publicly assassinated a top Iranian leader after he was lured to Baghdad for peace negotiations, an act vastly more weighty than the plausible deniability of of a middle-aged diplomat being found dead in his own home of unknown causes.
A few days later, my Wall Street Journal carried an article entitled China’s ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomats Are to Fight, beginning on the front page and running 2,200 words, by far the longest piece appearing in that day’s edition. Yet although the late Ambassador Du had been in the forefront of this ongoing Chinese campaign to challenge American influence, both in Israel and during his previous posting to Ukraine, and the sudden demise of this particular “wolf warrior” was surely known to the journalists, his name appeared nowhere in the text, leading me to wonder whether it had been deliberately excised to avoid raising obvious suspicions in the WSJ readership.
For hundreds of years since the Treaty of Westphalia, the lives of diplomats have been almost always treated as sacrosanct, and a typical response to breaking such international conventions might be tit-for-tat retaliation. China’s leadership tends to be remarkably pragmatic, and recognizes that its national strength is rapidly growing even as our own society decays and declines, so perhaps they will forego any such reaction, at least for the time being. But if any American diplomats or other ranking officials begin to suffer strange fatalities, the explanation may be less than mysterious, though Google and Facebook will certainly do their best to keep it so.
Is This Controlled Demolition all over Again?
By Gilad Atzmon | May 22, 2020
For years Eco-Enthusiasts, both activists and scientists, have been telling us that the ‘party’ will come to an end. The planet we are stuck on can’t take it for much longer, it is getting too crowded and unbearably warm. Most people didn’t take any real notice of the situation and for a reason. This planet, we tend to think, isn’t really ‘ours,’ we were thrown onto it and for a limited time. Once we grasp the true meaning of our temporality, we begin to acknowledge our terminality. ‘Being in the world’ as such is often the attempt to make our ‘life-time’ into a meaningful event.
Most of us who haven’t been overly concerned with the ecological activists and their plans to slow us down knew that as long as Big Money runs the world, nothing of a dramatic nature would really happen. In the eyes of Big Money, we tended to think, we, the people, are mere consumers. We understood ourselves as the means that make the rich richer.
Rather unexpectedly, life has undergone a dramatic change. In the present age of Corona, Big Money ‘let’ the world lock itself down. Economies have been sentenced to imminent death. Our significance as consumers somehow evaporated. The emerging alliance we have been detecting between the new leaders of the world economy (knowledge companies) and those who carry the flag of ‘progress’ ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ has evolved into an authoritarian dystopian condition in which robots and algorithms police our speech and elementary freedoms.
How is it that the Left, that had been devoted to opposition to the rich, has so changed its tune? In fact, nothing has happened suddenly. The Left and the Progressive universe have, for some time, been sustained financially by the rich. The Guardian is an illustrative case of the above. Once a left -leaning paper with a progressive orientation, the Guardian is now openly funded by Bill & Melinda Gates. It shamelessly operates as a mouthpiece for George Soros: it even allowed Soros to disseminate his apocalyptic pre-Brexit view at the time he himself gambled on Brits’ anti- Brexit vote. By now it is close to impossible to regard the Guardian as a news outlet – a propaganda outlet for the rich is a more suitable description. But the Guardian is far from alone. Our networks of progressive activists fall into the same trap. Not many of us were surprised to see Momentum, Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign support group within the Labour Party, rallying for the ‘Holocaust Survivor’ and ‘philanthropist’ George Soros. When Corbyn led the Labour Party, I learned to accept that ‘socialists’ putting themselves in the line of fire defending oligarchs, bankers and Wall Street brokers must be the new ‘Left’ reality. We are now inured to the fact that in the name of ‘progress’ Google has demoted itself from a great search engine into a hasbara outlet. We are accustomed to Facebook and Twitter dictating their worldview in the name of community standards. The only question is what community they have in mind. Certainty not a tolerant and pluralist western one.
One may wonder what drives this new alliance that divides nearly every Western society? The left’s betrayal is hardly a surprise, yet, the crucial question is why, and out of the blue, did those who had been so successful in locating their filthy hands in our pockets go along with the current destruction of the economy? Surely, suicidal they aren’t.
It occurs to me that what we may be seeing is a controlled demolition all over again. This time it isn’t a building in NYC. It isn’t the destruction of a single industry or even a single class as we have seen before. This time, our understanding of Being as a productive and meaningful adventure is embattled. As things stand, our entire sense of livelihood is at risk.
It doesn’t take a financial expert to realise that in the last few years the world economy in general and western economies in particular have become a fat bubble ready to burst. When economic bubbles burst the outcome is unexpected even though often the culprit or trigger for the crash can be identified. What is unique in the current controlled demolition is the willingness of our compromised political class, the media and in particular Left/Progressive networks to participate in the destruction.
The alliance is wide and inclusive. The WHO, greatly funded by Bill Gates, sets the measures by which we are locked down, the Left and the Progressives fuel the apocalyptic phantasies to keep us hiding in our global attics, Dershowitz tries to rewrite the constitution, big Pharma’s agenda shapes our future and we also hear that Moderna and its leading Israeli doctor is ready to “fix” our genes. Meanwhile we learn that our governments are gearing up to stick a needle in our arms. Throughout this time, the Dow Jones has continued to rise. Maybe in this final stage of capitalism, we the people aren’t needed even as consumers. We can be left to rot at home, our governments seemingly willing to fund this new form of detention.
I believe that it was me who ten years ago coined the popular adage “We Are all Palestinians” – like the Palestinians, I thought at the time, we aren’t even allowed to name our oppressor…
Russsian Foreign Ministry Press release on YouTube removing accounts of Krym 24 TV Channel, Anna News and News-Front
The Saker | May 20, 2020
We learned on May 20 that the US YouTube video hosting site has removed the accounts of Krym 24 Crimean television channel, as well as two Russian-language news agencies, Anna News and News Front.
Krym 24 is one of Crimea’s most popular sources of information. It is part of Crimea’s largest media holding company, Krym Television and Radio Company, operating through five television channels, three radio stations, a news portal and two websites. The Krym 24 team traditionally covers the most important major news in this Russian region.
Now that the Krym 24 account has been removed from YouTube, about 30,000 subscribers have lost access to videos with tens of millions of viewings. This US-owned platform has taken restrictive measures under the clearly far-fetched pretext of a “hosting rules violation.”
The fact that YouTube failed to provide any convincing evidence to clarify its actions, as well as the fact that the channel’s query remains unanswered, is unacceptable.
As you may be aware, on April 17, US-based Google LLC blocked the Federal News Agency’s account and the associated YouTube account, which resulted in removal of tens of thousands of documentaries and news reports posted by the agency. On an earlier occasion, in January 2019, Facebook moderators deleted, over 500 accounts related to Russia, including Sputnik news agency materials, on a far-fetched pretext.
These are just some examples of US online censorship of Russian news portals.
We consider YouTube’s actions as another act of discrimination against Russian-language media resources from US-controlled online platforms that systematically resort to arbitrary censorship of content in the Russian language.
This policy by US authorities represents a gross violation of US international obligations to ensure free and unfettered access to information, freedom of the media and freedom of expression.
We call on the related international agencies and human rights NGOs to respond to these egregious actions.
COVID Naturally Leads to Corruption
By Tim Kirby | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 19, 2020
Anyone who has paid attention to history knows that political change requires some sort of catalyst to happen. So one could logically expect that the Covid-19 Pandemic would be the perfect excuse for politicians to take action. However, it takes time for the chemical reaction to start working its magic and only now are we starting to see some major actions being taken by Congress for our “benefit”.
Patriot Act 2: the Revenge of Unconstitutionality
Interestingly enough, the Patriot Act is on its way to being reauthorized and naturally expanded while the nation is conveniently on lockdown. Very often the American Right will scream to the YouTube hills that the Constitution is being ripped in half by every move the other side makes. This over exaggeration has a “boy who cried wolf” effect making it seem cliché every time journalists/pundits rage over something being “unconstitutional”. But this time dear friends, Congress is actually defecating on constitutional principles and Right Wing pundits are not over inflating this issue.
The new updated Patriot Act (as it stands today) will allow the government to collect Americans’ web-browsing data without a warrant. The expression “we have sunk to a new low” seems like the appropriate response to such cowardly madness.
So if this Patriot Act update pack goes through, then the 4th Amendment has essentially faded off into the sunset probably never to be seen again. If the government can dive into your personal data without a warrant then what is the point of having warrants at all or privacy? This is more proof that the principles of the Enlightenment are being (or have been) forgotten as only an intellectual minority understands just how fundamental maintaining a system of warrant issuance is as the only means the government should have to “spy” on an individual. It seems obvious to say, but shouldn’t one be put under the government’s scrutiny for taking actions that rouse enough suspicion for a neutral judge to “okay” a warrant? This seems like a great policy, but then again I was born in the Cold War when American principles were still discussed, kind of understood and seemed to matter.
Like any ideology or religion if we all universally forget the ideas of the Constitution then they will no longer become valid. The 4th Amendment is starting to look like Thor – something cool that people used to believe in long ago that has become a cartoon empty version of itself in Hollywood movies.
It also needs to be stated just how weak the logic of expanding the Patriot Act is under pandemic conditions. The original project was put in place to in theory prevent another 9/11 type event from happening. Essentially, mass surveillance was offered as a solution to preventing terrorism on U.S. soil. Since the Coronavirus (as of now) is officially a natural phenomenon, then how could surveillance possibly help? When Patriot Act 1.0 came into being the “ticking time bomb” argument was made that the government needs to be able to act quickly and have no barriers in their fight against terrorism or else we are doomed to another set of planes hitting buildings. This logic is weak but it makes some sense, but how can mass surveillance stop a natural phenomenon? If there was total spying or zero spying on the American people would it really affect the appearance of a new plague?
Unless there is an alternative theory to the origin of Covid-19 in Congress that they are keeping from us, then no amount government overreach can prevent this type of pandemic from happening again. How can knowledge of our browser history prevent Corona 2.0? It can’t, it won’t, but that means nothing, we have a crisis and that is all that is needed for action.
When in doubt, debt your way out
The Coronavirus Plague has damaged economies all over the world. It has been a major punch in the face to American financial stability and the stimulus money sent to Americans is a logical response. Many people have lost their jobs or face abnormal hardships. Everyone pays taxes so in times of trouble we should expect to get our money’s worth from the state. Now drafting a 347,000 word $3 trillion Congressional spending spree is not something we should expect as a solution to the Corona Crisis especially when one-third of it is going to go to state and local governments to compensate for their inefficiency, not the American masses. Obviously this is all designed to bail out those lovely Democrat initiatives that cost lots of taxpayer money yet yield little for society, because if they were so important they would remain “essential” and funded even when the coffers look bare.
It is unclear whether this titanic bill that approaches the annual spending of the United States (which gets the nation further and further into debt as is) will actually go through, but it is the perfect example of the exploitation of a crisis for one’s own gain.
Pelosi and crew are surely going to try to use the current catalyst to save all their programs and keep America on the track that they have routed it on. If the idea really were to help the American people then why not just take the $3 trillion and give every American roughly $9,000. That would help everyone, both MAGA hat wearing factory workers and interpretive dance LGBT activists alike. If the mission really were to provide a solution it could be done in a page or two of text so everyone could understand it, make sense of it and get the help they need. But this is not the objective. This proposal is gargantuan in size so that way everyone can get their piece of the corruption pie in the fine print and keep the pet projects of the Democrats afloat by saving bankrupt but loyal state and local governments.
Stay tuned, the late night horror show will continue.
There is certainly going to be more and more disgusting exploitation of this crisis in the next few weeks/months. The Covid-19 iron is still glowing and everyone is going to strike while they can. New corrupt plans are probably being discussed over brandy as you read this because the economy has and will continue to suffer from this unprecedented event that we are all living through.
Sadly, our last line of defense is the strange real estate billionaire who happens to head the executive branch at the moment. Vetoes can be overridden, but Trump needs to send a signal that his answers to the crisis are the ones that are going to happen. He can manipulate the Mainstream Media to get what he wants, and his light being shone onto a topic can be game changing. Sadly, thus far Trump has been focused more on #Obamagate than either of the two issues presented in this piece, meaning that his ego issues could allow the 4th Amendment to die right in front of our faces. In contrast however, at some point he will probably fight the $3 trillion spending bill because Pelosi is involved in it and she is a bad lady so maybe there is some hope.
Ghost of J. Edgar Haunts Flynn Investigation
By Coleen Rowley – Consortium News – May 18, 2020
In this time of unprecedented political polarization, it’s disappointing but not surprising to see the Justice Department’s recent request to dismiss its prosecution of retired General Michael Flynn causing yet another media firestorm to swirl around Attorney General William Barr.
Obama Administration former officials, like the hyperventilating authors of this New York Times’ op-ed, “The Appalling Damage of Dropping the Michael Flynn Case,” go so far as to claim that dropping the case “embeds into official U.S. policy a shockingly extremist view of law enforcement as the enemy of the American people.”
In stark contrast, other former FBI agents, myself included, are appalled at Bureau and other “national security” officials’ numerous suspicious departures from standard FBI/Department of Justice policies that have finally been brought to light, marking this most bizarre investigation aimed at “get(ting) Flynn to lie.”
Flynn was asked to “a friendly chat” with the FBI on Jan. 24, 2017, for which he was told he would not need a lawyer present. The interview was part of the FBI’s Russiagate investigation, a purported scandal that has now all but totally collapsed.
The agents wanted to speak with him about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the then Russian ambassador to the U.S., while Flynn was on the Trump transition team as incoming national security advisor. Having already read the transcripts of those intercepted conversations there was nothing the agents could learn from Flynn.
According to FBI administrative notes released earlier this month, an official identified in the press as Bill Priestap, then assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, asked whether the only aim of the upcoming interview with Flynn was to get him to lie about his conversations with Kislyak. “Our goal is to determine if Mike Flynn is going to tell the truth about his relationship with Russians,” said Priestap in a hand-written note. But Priestap was having second thoughts.
“I agreed yesterday that we shouldn’t show Flynn [REDACTED] if he didn’t admit,” he wrote, the redaction presumably meaning the transcript of Flynn’s calls with Kislyak. “I thought about it last night, and I believe we should rethink this. What is our goal? Truth/admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?… Protect our institution by not playing games.”
Flynn was indeed formally charged with lying to an FBI agent and on Dec. 1, 2017 pled guilty after Russiagate Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly threatened to prosecute his son. Flynn was fired by Donald Trump after Flynn lied to the vice president about the conversations with Kislyak.
Kislyak. (Flickr)
In those conversations, Flynn asked that the Russians not retaliate for the Obama administration sanctions on Moscow imposed for the now debunked Russiagate allegations. Russia eventually decided not to retaliate. Flynn also asked on behalf of Israel that the Russians veto a UN Security Council resolution condemning illegal Israeli West Bank settlements, which Obama was planning to abstain on. Russia refused this request.
Upon release of the FBI documents this month, Flynn sought to undo his guilty plea and last week the Justice Department dropped the case. The judge, however, has not yet agreed and has asked for expert opinion.
Law Rarely Used
Many former FBI agents will probably recall being instructed in FBI training school (as I was) that Title 18 US Code 1001 (lying to an FBI agent) is mainly to caution a suspect not to lie, in order to get him or her to tell the truth to further an investigation.”
We were taught (and later learned by experience) that, for a lot of reasons, violation of this provision of “lying to the FBI” would almost never be prosecuted, especially if it was the sole “crime” committed. One reason for this was, at least in my law enforcement experience, that many, if not most, people who are embarrassed to be suspected of wrongdoing, do lie, or at least partially fudge the truth during initial interviews, as it’s a natural ego-defense.
So “getting” someone to lie, if that’s “the goal” (as admitted in the released FBI administrative notes on the Flynn case), is actually very easy. If the green light is now on to use T 18 USC 1001 law in this manner, the sky’s the limit. The FBI could lock up the world. In one of the released emails, FBI attorney Lisa Page shows how rare prosecution under 1001 is by writing:
“I have a question for you. Could the admonition re 1001 be given at the beginning of the interview? Or does it have to come following a statement which agents believe to be false? Does the policy speak to that? (I feel bad that I don’t know this but I don’t remember ever having to do this! Plus I’ve only charged it once in the context of lying to a probation officer.)”
‘Rewriting’ the 302
Peter Strzok during congressional hearing in July 2018.
Fired FBI Agent Peter Strzok, a zealous Russiagater who took part in the Flynn interview, and (his paramour) Page, appear in the Flynn case to have run roughshod over basic FBI legal policy by heavily editing the 302 form of the interview, as aptly detailed by retired supervisory agent Thomas Baker and other FBI agents. While Strzok asked Flynn the questions, his partner at the interview, Agent Joe Pientka, took the notes, which Strzok and Page, who wasn’t present, edited, according to released text messages between them.
The rules drilled into new agents are about the need to take verbatim notes, to be timely in documenting an interview on the FD-302 form for use in court, and to disallow edits by supervisors or attorneys who weren’t even present at an interview. These policies—all flouted in the Flynn case—were developed and designed to ensure accuracy during the Hoover era, long before tape recording equipment existed.
302s Only
Hoover’s FBI power was such that the Bureau could usually successfully insist, under federal rules of evidence and trial discovery, that only the final, polished FD-302 interview form would ever be handed over and made public at a trial.
The FBI and DOJ would always fight tooth and nail against “open file discovery,” claiming that other rough investigative and “administrative” documents in a file were not “relevant” and could therefore be kept hidden from the defense at trial.
It wasn’t until a few years after Hoover’s death that courts stopped FBI agents from destroying their contemporaneous interview notes and made the “1A envelope” preserved notes discoverable so that defense attorneys could check to see how closely the content of an agent’s FD-302 transcription conformed to his/her contemporaneous notes.
But the art of transcribing from rough notes in one’s own words what a suspect or defendant said does inherently allow even the most conscientious investigators some leeway, enabling the final 302 court document to be not as accurate as an actual recording of the interview.
In a conspiratorial “ends justify the means” situation that Strzok and Page believed themselves to be operating in, or in the case of any hell-bent, prosecution-focused, overzealous rogue agent(s), the old-fashioned FD-302 Hoover way is, and always was, susceptible to outright abuse.
(It may be appropriate to note that similar over-zealousness to benefit trial prosecutors was long practiced in the FBI laboratory until a top FBI agent-scientist and whistleblower blew the lid off related abuse that allowed FBI managers to rewrite and “strengthen” scientific results obtained by the agents who actually performed the forensic laboratory tests and analysis.)
Hoover. (Flickr)
Anyway, that’s why most other state and local law enforcement agencies in the country went (and/or were forced to go) to tape recording of confessions and other important interviews in the 1980’s to 1990’s. However the FBI bureaucracy long resisted the move to recording devices.
Over the decades, as voice and video recording equipment became more and more prevalent and easy to use, defense attorneys and even judges started to hammer FBI agents about why they continued their old-fashioned reliance on individual agents’ note-taking abilities and memories.
Nevertheless, for nearly 40 years FBI directors and special agents in charge (SACs) would continue arguing about the difficulty of using modern technology to record interrogations and interviews. They always contended (at least in internal arguments, but never publicly admitted on a witness stand) that allowing agents to testify and tell juries what a defendant said could always be relied upon as more successful for the prosecution than allowing a jury to hear a tape or video recording of exactly what a defendant said.
It was well known and even proudly pointed out internally that in “he said-she said” disputes, a jury would always tend to believe the FBI agent over a defendant.
The Flynn 302 fiasco illustrates how FBI managers recognized what an advantage the final “written in your own words” 302 is when it’s declared to be the only relevant document (no “administrative documents,” early drafts, etc. need ever be handed over in discovery) when juries will almost always believe the FBI agent over a defendant. It is rare for administrative documents to become public, as they have in the Flynn case.
Of course if Strzok and his fellow FBI agent had asked Flynn for his consent to be tape recorded, Flynn would have undoubtedly quickly realized this was not a friendly interview by agents attempting to actually gain counter-intelligence about Russia.
Not Material
That brings up a whole n’other problem with the Flynn case that again harkens back to Hoover and his pre-Church Committee abuses.
Barr and (former FBI agent, now U.S. Attorney) Jeffrey Jensen concluded, after reviewing the complete file, that Flynn’s “lying to the FBI” was not “material” to a bonafide matter under FBI jurisdiction, but merely predicated upon the entirely specious “Russiagate” counter-intelligence investigation of Flynn that Strzok and Page deliberately kept open on a technicality, even after the FBI ordered it closed because there was no reasonable basis to believe Flynn had ever colluded with the Russian government.
The Flynn case furnishes a sterling example of the post 9-11 “war on terror” having demolished the “wall” that separates intelligence gathering from criminal investigation.
While fraught with problems and contradictory DOJ guidance, the “wall” had existed for a valid reason after Church Committee discovery of abuses under Hoover et. al. who so easily used “national security” and “counter-intelligence” as a pretext to surveil, investigate and use COINTELPRO “disrupt and dismantle” activities to go after America’s national leaders, allowing a way around 4th Amendment protections.
Robert Mueller giving testimony on July 24, 2019. (C-Span screenshot)
I and other former FBI agents believe the egregious plotting to railroad Flynn and “get him to lie,” requires dismissal of these charges. A number of additional significant problems with the Flynn investigation and prosecution are enumerated by attorney and award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald in his excellent 1 ¾ hour-long detailed expose at The Intercept and by Scott Ritter, who focuses on “why innocent people plead guilty given plea bargaining” abuses in our justice “system.” Neither Greenwald, Ritter nor I happen to be fans of Flynn or Trump. But wrong is wrong.
It’s hardly extremist to realize that FBI and other law enforcement officials have, over the years, made terrible mistakes, and in some cases, engaged in outright wrongful conduct, sometimes in rogue operations and other times more systemically.
I will venture to say that FBI “entrapment” type actions in manufacturing crimes, as was practiced on Flynn, got its early start as a more normalized standard procedure after 9-11 with Robert Mueller’s FBI gravitating to using con-artist type informants to infiltrate Muslim communities in order to identify, coerce and entrap the more emotionally vulnerable members into committing acts that the FBI could take credit for as “preventing” terrorism.
The FBI found it increasingly difficult to prevent real terrorism spurred by successive administrations committing war crimes that killed so many foreign civilians.
Some FBI and other law enforcement wrongdoing has come to light, like the systemic torture operations perpetrated by certain Chicago police officials; the FBI’s decades-long tolerance for employing murderous mobsters as their “top echelon” informants; the Bureau’s spying on and attempted blackmail of Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders, as well as law enforcement’s racial profiling and wrongful shootings.
In all too rare instances, innocent people are exonerated. Rather than being happy that this bit of justice is finally happening in the Flynn case, however, Russiagate proponents and Democratic partisans seem especially incensed since the always-flimsy charges of Flynn’s “lying to the FBI” was about all Special Prosecutor Mueller’s probe could show for their nearly two-year long, $32 million dollar massive effort.
We should pay heed to Scott Ritter’s admonition:
“The Obama national security team abused its power by unmasking Flynn’s identity, then leaked Flynn’s identity to the press, using this press reporting to justify the continuance of a baseless counterintelligence investigation in order to set a perjury trap intended to place Flynn in legal jeopardy. This is not how American justice is supposed to be dispensed, and the fact that Flynn had to undergo this ordeal should send a shiver down every American’s spine, because if left unchecked, there but for the grace of God go us all.”
Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI special agent and division legal counsel whose May 2002 memo to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller exposed some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, was named one of TIME magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. Her 2003 letter to Robert Mueller in opposition to launching the Iraq War is archived in full text on the NYT and her 2013 op-ed entitled “Questions for the FBI Nominee“ was published on the day of James Comey’s confirmation hearing. Assigned to the Omaha, Jackson, MI, New York City field offices, and to the U.S. embassy in Paris, and consulate in Montreal, Rowley taught constitutional law to FBI agents in Minneapolis.
Pilpul for Beginners
By Gilad Atzmon | May 18, 2020
Americans may be surprised to learn from Alan Dershowitz that their constitution is far more intrusive and oppressive than what they and their forefathers have believed for generations. The law ‘scholar’ declared yesterday that “you have no (constitutional) right to not be vaccinated.”
Watch Video: You Have NO RIGHT to NOT be Vaccinated” – Alan Dershowitz:
One possible explanation for Dershowitz’s peculiar constitutional ‘interpretation’ is that some parts of the American constitution were actually written in Yiddish, Hebrew and Aramaic. As such, their meaning is only accessible to a small privileged segment within the American population, one that amounts to 2% or less.
But there is a far better explanation that shines light into the ‘reasoning’ offered by Dershowitz.
In a spectacularly brave Huffpost article titled What Is Pilpul , And Why On Earth Should I Care About It? author David Shasha writes, “ Pilpul is the Talmudic term used to describe a rhetorical process that the (Jewish) sages used to formulate their legal decisions… It is a catch-all term that in English is translated as ‘Casuistry’.”
The English word ‘casuistry’ is defined as: “the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to moral questions; sophistry.”
Dershowitz, is a pilpul master. He often employs peculiar reasoning in relation to moral questions especially when it comes to his own morality and conduct.
Shasha writes of the history of pilpul tradition that “the Ashkenazi rabbis were less concerned with promulgating the Law transmitted in the Talmud than they were with molding it to suit their own needs. Pilpul was a means to justify practices already fixed in the behaviors of the community by re-reading the Talmud to justify those practices.”
Pilpul, as described, is not about understanding of the law and its meaning but about the deliberate miss- interpretation of the law so it fits with one’s core interests.
Shasha points out that “even though many contemporary Jews are not observant, pilpul continues to be deployed. Pilpul occurs any time the speaker is committed to ‘prove’ his point regardless of the evidence in front of him. The casuistic aspect of this hair-splitting leads to a labyrinthine form of argument where the speaker blows enough rhetorical smoke to make his interlocutor submit. Reason is not an issue when pilpul takes over: what counts is the establishment of a fixed, immutable point that can never truly be disputed.”
Pilpul is basically a legalistic exercise that is removed from truthfulness, ethical thinking or even logic. What we see from Dershowitz is a dramatic pilpul-ization of the American legal culture and ethos.
“In this context,” Shasha continues, “the Law is not primary; it is the status of the jurist. Justice is extra-legal, thus denying social equality under the rubric of a horizontal system. Law is in the hands of the privileged rather than the mass.”
In a pretty accurate description of Dershowitz’ modus operandi Shasha writes, “Pilpul is the rhetorical means to mark as ‘true’ that which cannot ever be disputed by rational means.”
Shasha, obviously had Dershowitz in mind when he wrote his Huffpost article. But Dershowitz is not the only one. In Shasha’s article Noam Chomsky is equally guilty of pilpulism. “The contentiousness of the Middle East conflict is intimately informed by pilpul. Whether it is Alan Dershowitz or Noam Chomsky, both of them Ashkenazim who had traditional Jewish educations, the terms of the debate are consistently framed by pilpul. What is most unfortunate about pilpul — and this is something that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the controversies involving Israel and Palestine — is that, since the rational has been removed from the process, all that is left is yelling, irrational emotionalism, and, ultimately, the threat of violence.”
I agree with Shasha. The Middle East conflict has been reduced into a pilpul battle ground between Zionists and their Anti Zionist Zionist twins. The question for Americans is whether Pilpul, a Jewish Ashkenazi litigious practice that is removed from truthfulness, ethics and reason should interfere with American’s constitutional rights, way of living, politics, culture, spirit and vaccination policies.
Phrenology is back, wrapped up with facial recognition in a 21st century pre-crime package
By Helen Buyniski | RT | May 15, 2020
The focus of US policing is shifting from enforcement to prevention as mass incarceration falls out of favor. ‘Pre-crime’ detection is the hot new thing, accomplished through analysis of behavior and…facial features?
Researchers at the University of Harrisburg announced earlier this week that they had developed AI software capable of predicting – with 80 percent accuracy! – whether a person is a criminal just by looking at their face.
“Our next step is finding strategic partners to advance this mission,” the press release stated, hinting that a New York Police Department veteran was working alongside two professors and a PhD candidate on the project.
That statement had been pulled by Thursday after controversy erupted over what critics slammed as an attempt to rehabilitate phrenology, eugenics, and other racist pseudosciences for the modern surveillance state. But amid the repulsion was an undeniable fascination – fellow facial recognition researcher Michael Petrov of EyeLock observed that he’d “never seen a study more audaciously wrong and still thought provoking than this.”
Purporting to determine a person’s criminal tendencies by examining their facial features implies evildoers are essentially “born that way” and incapable of rehabilitation, which flies in the face of modern criminological theory (and little details like “free will”). While the approach was all the rage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was used to justify eugenics and other forms of scientific racism, it was relegated to the dustbin of history post-World War II.
Until now, apparently. Phrenology and physiognomy – the “sciences” of determining personality by examining the size and shape of the head and face, respectively – are apparently enjoying a comeback. A January study published in the Journal of Big Data made similar criminological claims about its AI “deep learning models,” boasting one program demonstrated a shocking 97 percent accuracy in using “shape of the face, eyebrows, top of the eye, pupils, nostrils and lips” in order to ferret out criminals.
The researchers behind that paper actually named “Lombroso’s research” as their inspiration, referring to Cesare Lombroso, the “father of modern criminology” who believed criminality was inherited and diagnosable by examining physical – specifically facial – characteristics. Nor were they the first to turn AI algorithms loose on identifying “criminal” characteristics – their paper cites a previous effort from 2016, which apparently triggered a media firestorm of its own.
It might be too soon for the public to embrace discredited racist pseudoscience repackaged as futuristic policing tools, but given US law enforcement’s eager adoption of “pre-crime,” it’s not unimaginable that this tech might find its way into their hands.
US authorities have never been more determined to save would-be offenders from themselves, rolling out two pre-crime surveillance programs in the past year alone. The Disruption and Early Engagement Program (DEEP) purports to intervene with “court ordered mental health treatment” and electronic monitoring against individuals anticipated to be “mobilizing toward violence” based on their private communications and social media activity, while the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA)’s flagship “Safe Home” project, uses “artificial intelligence and machine learning” to analyze data scraped from personal electronic devices (smartphones, Alexas, FitBits) and provided by healthcare professionals (!) to identify the potential for “neuropsychiatric violence.” To maximize their effectiveness, Attorney General William Barr has called for Congress to do away with encryption.
The risks of pre-crime policing are enormous. Algorithmically-selected “pre-criminals” are very likely to be set up to commit crimes in order to “prove” the programs work, as has happened with the US’ sprawling “anti-terrorism” initiatives. A 2014 investigation found the FBI had entrapped nearly every “terrorism suspect” it had prosecuted since 9/11, and that pattern has continued into the present.
Meanwhile, facial recognition algorithms are up to 100 times more likely to misidentify black and Asian men than white, and the misidentification rate for Native Americans is even higher, according to a NIST study.
The Harrisburg University researchers attempt to push such concerns aside, insisting their software has “no racial bias” – everyone is phrenologically analyzed on an equally pseudoscientific basis. Surely we can trust an NYPD officer to avoid racism. It’s not like 98 percent of those arrested for violating social distancing in Brooklyn in the last two months were black, or anything – it was 97.5 percent.
Given the frenzy of police-state wish-fulfillment – from babysitter-drones to endless lockdowns – that has accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic, these researchers probably thought they could slip in a sleek modernized version of century-old pseudoscience. Totally understandable!
Still too soon? Wait a few years…
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
With Friends Like These…
By Blake Alcott | Palestine Chronicle | May 16, 2020
It’s nice that a group of 127 British politicians has discovered the as-yet unused tool for pressuring Israel: sanctions, the ‘S’ in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). They wrote a letter to Boris Johnson asking him to impose such sanctions if Israel annexes roughly half of the West Bank – which it just might do this summer.
Actually, many Palestinians believe annexation even of the entire West Bank would be a good thing insofar as it would make Israeli apartheid plain and visible to everybody. That would force world opinion to apply its anti-apartheid standards to historic Palestine and insist on equal rights for everybody between the river and the sea.
Even without this insight, however, the letter is milk toast. It latches onto only the most egregious of Israeli actions – de jure annexation of territory already de facto annexed. It leaves unchallenged countless Israeli actions such as mass murder in Gaza, home and village demolitions, discrimination against the Palestinians in Israel, and its defining itself in July 2018 as a racist state by means of the Nation State Basic Law. The list goes on and on.
The letter is a legalistic gripe that doesn’t mention history or basic ethics. Yes, it is true that “acquisition of territory through war is prohibited” and annexing such territory violates international law, but what about the annexation of Greater Jerusalem in 1967 or, for that matter, of the bulk of historic Palestine in 1948? What about absolute rule over the West Bank and the siege of Gaza without annexation?
The politicians’ main gripe, though, is that annexation would be “a mortal blow to… any viable two-state solution.” Beloved by all of the signees, that is the Zionist solution which leaves the Israeli apartheid state intact within the 1948-occupied territories. It also leaves the 7 million Palestinian refugees out in the cold.
Any two-state solution would be crassly unjust, but this group of British politicians thinks it would be great, and that its possibility be kept alive, because that is the only way to save Israel in the long run (albeit on only about 80% of Palestinian land). And these signees are allegedly the Palestinians’ friends.
Palestine’s So-called Friends
Their letter is actually a symptom of a deeper intellectual bankruptcy and of the impotence of the forces in political Britain claiming solidarity with Palestine. They all support the Zionist two-state solution.
The Parliamentary group ‘Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East’ (LFPME), for instance, “supports a two state solution that creates a viable and contiguous Palestinian state” – and that preserves the viable and contiguous Jewish state. It to be sure urges boycott of West Bank-settlement goods, but trips over itself in a rush to assure the public that this “is categorically not an anti-Israeli policy, but an anti-settlement policy” and that this should not be taken for support of BDS, “which is widely considered to be obstructive to the two state solution.”
91 MPs are members of LFPME, and 24 of them signed the letter. Not among them, curiously, is the Chair of LFPME, Lisa Nandy, who has herself taken incoherent positions on Palestine, describing herself at once as a Zionist but broadly supporting the Palestinians’ right of return. She clearly leans toward Israel, saying she was “honored” by the support of the rabidly pro-Israel Jewish Labour Movement and that under Jeremy Corbyn, the most pro-Palestinian British politician ever, Labour “gave the green light to anti-Semites”.
Three of the signees against annexation are even members of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) – Lilian Greenwood, Peter Hain, and Margaret Hodge. On that group’s website, the headline reads ‘Working towards a Two-State Solution’. It “promotes a negotiated two state solution for two peoples; with Israel safe, secure and recognized within its borders living alongside a democratic, independent Palestinian state [and] seeks to strengthen relations between Britain and Israel.”
At first glance, it is astounding that of LFI’s 55 MP members, 24 of them are also members of LFPME! They include such well-known figures as Liam Byrne, Angela Eagle, Emily Thornberry, Liz Kendall, Wes Streeting, David Lammy, Jess Phillips, Chris Bryant, and Rosie Winterton. But astonishment vanishes when one realizes that the goal of the two groups is the same: Israel safe and secure in the Near East, legitimate for all time, ‘alongside’ a rump statelet they are cheeky enough to call ‘Palestine’.
LFI Chair Steve McCabe MP rides hard against a new category of racism: “anti-Zionist antisemitism”. In the Jewish Chronicle of 7 April 2020, he pledged to “vigorously oppose the divisive effort to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state led by the BDS movement.” Perhaps, were LFPME to endorse BDS in so many words – which to my knowledge it does not – MPs would see that they must choose between LFI and LFPME.
Corbyn as Labour leader from 2015-2020 not only unfailingly supported the two-state solution and Israel’s ‘right to exist’, but failed to deal with the Party’s phony, alleged ‘antisemitism crisis’. He did not make clear that criticism of Israel is not antisemitic because any settler-colonial state in Palestine – whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or British – would face the same fundamental criticism, namely that it by definition dispossesses the Palestinians.
Tragically, Corbyn also allowed anti-racist upholders of human rights such as Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and Chris Williamson to be expelled from the Labour Party merely for making various factual comments, mostly about Zionism. Lacking any clear and principled ideology, Labour under Corbyn diminished and tainted the voices of many staunch pro-Palestinians.
What’s more, all the candidates to replace Corbyn – Keir Starmer, Nandy, Rebecca Long-Bailey, etc. – bent the knee to those who do have a coherent ideology and control the narrative in Britain: the Zionists. During the leadership campaign all of them endorsed the so-called “Ten pledges to end the antisemitism crisis” written by the Israel-lobby group Board of Deputies of British Jews. Two of the pledges are 1) to see to it that “Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker… will never be readmitted to membership” and 2) to “adopt the international definition of antisemitism without qualification”.
That definition of antisemitism is, of course, the notoriously illogical one put out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). It conflates politics and racism and includes amongst the “manifestations” of antisemitism the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”, “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”, and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
The Labour Party obeys the pro-Israel forces, but rest assured, things are no better within the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties, nor at The Guardian or any other British newspaper. Truly, ‘with friends like these,…’ No, that’s not quite right. The Palestinians have no friends in British politics.
Why Such Weakness?
The question is Why? A big reason is that within Palestinian and Palestine-solidarity circles there is, in Britain, no coherent intellectual analysis of what is just or unjust, and no vision of a solution.
Nobody in political circles even talks about the three comprehensive demands of BDS (return, equality within Israel, and liberation for the West Bank and Gaza Strip). Talk is only of BDS tactics and its danger to Israel.
Instead, as with the anti-annexation letter, small skirmishes are fought within the Zionist two-state paradigm, symbolically making oppression a little more tolerable and in effect distracting from the fundamental issues that would make sense to the British public, if enunciated.
One ‘solidarity’ wing is Zionist: Israel has every right to continue as it is, as a discriminatory state on the 1967 borders. The perfect representative of this wing is the U.K.’s only Palestinian MP, Liberal Democrat Layla Moran, who wrote in the Guardian in 2019 of her fear of being called ‘antisemitic’ and who stressed that she “believes in Israel’s right to exist.” Also: “I believe in a two-state solution [which] is at best in stasis, at worst it is teetering on the brink of a precipice. It needs a lifeline.”
The other wing is BDS, which starts not with a position against Israel but rather for all the rights of all the Palestinians. Its three demands strictly imply Two Democratic States, and neither of them are Jewish or any other ethnocracy. (The two would undoubtedly merge, resulting in One Democratic State, but that is a separate topic.)
As Omar Barghouti, one of the main originators and propounders of BDS, said a few years ago, “A Jewish state in Palestine, in any shape or form, cannot but contradict the basic rights of the land’s indigenous Palestinian population… No Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sell-out Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”
So the cat’s already out of the bag. What is now needed is for both Palestinians and their supporters to publicly and fearlessly embrace Barghouti’s clarity – to unabashedly say Yes, a racist, apartheid state should obviously be replaced by a normal, human rights-based, ethnicity-blind democracy. To boot, in my experience most people on the street understand this without any difficulty.
It would both constitute a clear intellectual narrative and enormously help campaigning in countries like the U.K. It is now impossible to explain to the public – or for that matter to MPs when one lobbies them – what solution would embody the fulfillment of Palestinians’ rights, or ‘what the Palestinians want’. By contrast, international supporters of the Black freedom struggle in South Africa were able to draw upon a clear vision while arguing the case in the West; Palestine activists lack any such inspiring vision, one which openly, in easy-to-understand terms, states the political goal.
But the BDS Call describing the rights to be fulfilled is kept at a flickering flame. Hardly anyone ventures outside the pro-Zionist framework of the parliamentary Friends of Palestine and, for that matter, the co-opted leaders of the Palestinian Authority. The best that well-meaning British politicians have to hold onto are sporadic, justified but non-essential incidents like the annexation of Area C in the West Bank.
Palestine’s supporters are waiting for open acknowledgment of the consequences of the BDS demands. Only that will enable a refutation of charges of antisemitism – because it would offer a clear, motivating, positive vision which doesn’t even have to mention the Jewishness of the present occupying state, Israel.
– Blake Alcott is an ecological economist and the director of One Democratic State in Palestine (England) Limited. The author welcomes any information on ODS or bi-nationalism activity sent to blakeley@bluewin.ch.
As Another Perjury Trap is Exposed the FBI’s Case Against Trump Collapses
By Scott Ritter – Consortium News – May 14, 2020
It is one of the hottest conversations making the rounds on the internet — Shawn Henry, the retired FBI cyber-sleuth-turned private cyber security consultant, speaking with Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, recorded in transcripts of executive session testimony conducted on December 5, 2017, and only recently released to the public.
Schiff: Do you know the date in which the Russians exfiltrated the data from the DNC?
Henry: I do. I have to just think about it. I don’t know. I mean, it’s in our report that I think the Committee has.
Schiff: And, to the best of your recollection, when would that have been?
Henry: Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the DNC, we have indicators that data was exfiltrated. We do not have concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have indicators that it was exfiltrated.
Schiff: And the indicators that it was exfiltrated, when does it indicate that would have taken place?
Henry: Again, it’s in the report. I believe — I believe it was April of 2016. I’m confused on the date. I think it was April, but it’s in the report.
Schiff: It provides in the report on 2016, April 22nd, data staged for exfiltration by the Fancy Bear actor. [Note: Fancy Bear is an attribution label used by Henry’s parent firm, CrowdStrike, to identify specific hacking methods and tools which are collectively referred to as an “advanced persistent threat”, or APT. Fancy Bear is also known by other cyber security organizations as APT-28, and is assessed by the U.S. government as being affiliated with Russian Military Intelligence, or GRU.]
Henry: Yes, sir. So that, again, staged for, which means there’s not — the analogy I used with Mr. Stewart [Congressman Chris Stewart, R-Utah] earlier was we don’t have a video of it happening, but there are indicators that it happened. There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.
Henry’s testimony has been used by many detractors of the “Russia-did-it” narrative promulgated by many congressional Democrats (including Schiff), the U.S. Intelligence Community (including the FBI), and former Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller as clear cut evidence that CrowdStrike had no direct evidence that any data or emails had been stolen from the DNC, and as such the entire narrative used to sustain the allegations that Russia was behind the thefts was, in fact, baseless.
Such a sweeping conclusion, however, is not sustained by either Shawn Henry’s testimony, or the available evidence. While there remain serious questions about the efficacy of the official narrative laying the alleged cyber attacks on the DNC at the feet of Russian intelligence, Henry’s testimony in and of itself does not make that case. Indeed, information subsequently released by the FBI suggests that, Henry’s assertions notwithstanding, data transfers did, in fact, occur on April 22.
“On or about April 22,” an indictment charging Russian military intelligence officers with the hacking of the DNC server alleges, “the Conspirators compressed gigabytes of data from DNC computers, including opposition research. The conspirators later moved the compressed DNC data using X-Tunnel to a GRU-leased computer located in Illinois.” Based on an analysis of the Illinois computer and another in Arizona, Mueller likewise asserts, in his report, that “[T]he GRU also stole documents from the DNC network shortly after gaining access. On April 22, 2016, the GRU copied files from the DNC network to GRU-controlled computers.”
[In a footnote to his report, Mueller uses the qualifier “appear” to say that GRU “officers appear to have stolen thousands of emails and attachments, which were later released by WikiLeaks in July 2016.” He was never able to establish how the emails got to GRU headquarters.]
What Henry’s testimony does do, however, is dismantle the official predicate used by the FBI to initiate its counterintelligence investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, into alleged collusion between persons affiliated with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election in favor of Trump.
The date of the alleged “staging” of data for “exfiltration” — April 22, 2016 — is highlighted by Schiff, during his questioning of Henry.
Schiff: In your report, when you stated the data was staged for exfiltration on April 22ndof last year, that would have been the first time that you found evidence that the data was staged for exfiltration?
Henry: I believe that is correct.
Schiff: Did you have a chance to read the information that was filed in conjunction with the George Papadopolous plea? [Note: George Papadopolous was a one-time foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign who pled guilty to lying to FBI agents.]
Henry: I did not.
Schiff: In that information, it states that Mr. Papadopolous was informed at the end of April that the Russians were in possession of stolen DNC or Clinton emails. If that information is correct, that would only be days after that data was staged for exfiltration?
Henry: Yes.
Crossfire Hurricane
Recently declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications submitted by the Department of Justice to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a unique judicial body that approves requests for secret warrants used by law enforcement to conduct covert electronic and physical surveillance of U.S. citizens, reveal that the predicate for the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into alleged Russian collusion by the Trump campaign was triggered by a May 10, 2016, meeting between Papadopolous and an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer (who at the time was the Australian Ambassador to the United Kingdom) in a London bar.
According to Downer, Papadopolous revealed that, based upon an April 26 conversation with a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud, “he [Papadopolous] thought that the Russians may release information, might release information, that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign at some stage before the election.”
Downer and a fellow Australian diplomat who was also at the meeting and witnessed Papadopolous’ statement, drafted a cable back to the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Canberra recording the gist of the conversation. “There was no suggestion from Papadopoulos nor in the record of the meeting that we sent back to Canberra, there was no suggestion that there was collusion between Donald Trump or Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russians,” Downer said. “All we did is report what Papadopoulos said.”
After the release by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, of thousands of emails allegedly sourced from the DNC, Downer, concerned that there might be a link between Papadopolous and the DNC emails, provided a copy of his cable to the U.S. Embassy in London, which forwarded it onto the FBI. This cable was used by the FBI to initiate its Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign; a derivative investigation into Papadopolous was given the codename “Crossfire Typhoon.”
As far as predicates for sensitive counterintelligence investigations of presidential campaigns go, the Papadopolous conversation with Misfud is transparently weak. A cursory examination of the emails released by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, shows that no in-time reference pre-dates May 25, 2016, more than a month after the alleged “data staging” event that Schiff highlighted as the link between the DNC hack and Papadopolous.
In short, regardless of the content of Papadopolous’s conversation with Mifsud, as relayed by Downer, there was no linkage between any emails alleged to be in the possession of Russia at the time of the April 26, 2016, Papadopolous-Misfud meeting and the actual data released by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, that the FBI used to justify the opening of both the Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Typhoon investigations. As Mueller notes in his report, the information released by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, coincides with a separate, alleged cyber attack on the DNC Microsoft Exchange Service between May 25 and June 1, 2016 — an attack that Mifsud could not have known about when he met with Papadopolous in April.
Moreover, the FBI knew before it interviewed Papadopolous on Jan. 27, 2017, that Papadopolous was not involved in any scheme to acquire purloined Russian emails on behalf of the Trump campaign. In September and October of 2016, the FBI made use of two confidential human sources (CHS) to engage Papadopoulos in conversations designed to elicit corroboration into its now-debunked theory.
In a Sept. 15, 2016, meeting between Papadopolous and an FBI-controlled CHS, Papadopolous was asked outright whether or not the Trump campaign could benefit from third-party intervention from the likes of WikiLeaks or Russia. Papadopolous made it clear in his response that no one in the campaign was advocating for this kind of intervention because it was “illegal,” “compromised national security,” and “set a bad precedent.”
“At the end of the day,” Papadopolous said, “it’s an illegal, it’s illegal activity. Espionage is treason. This is a form of treason.” And when asked by a second FBI-controlled CHS on Oct. 29, 2016, about who he thought was behind the hacking of the DNC, Papadopolous responded that it could be “the Chinese,” “the Iranians,” “Bernie supporters,” or “Anonymous” — but not the Russians. “Dude, Russia doesn’t have any interest in it anyways,” Papadopolous said. “They — dude, no one knows how a president is going to govern anyways. I mean… Congress is very hostile to Russia anyways.” It was a prescient, and telling, exchange — one the FBI chose to ignore.
No Connection
In the court filing detailing the facts sustaining Papadopolous’s guilty plea, Mueller declared that “defendant PAPADOPOULOS impeded the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the Campaign and the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”
However, any careful examination of the data used by the FBI to link Papadopolous to the WikiLeaks release of DNC emails on July 22, 2016, clearly shows that there was absolutely no connection. As such, Papadopolous’s conversation with Mifsud had zero material bearing on the FBI’s investigation, a fact known to the FBI prior to its interview of Papadopolous on Jan. 27, 2017.
Indeed, the demonstrative lack of connection between Papadopolous and the hacking of the DNC should have been grounds for shutting down the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. There is only one explanation for the FBI’s actions in continuing to pursue Papadopolous — the interview was a perjury trap, plain and simple, designed to generate a conviction that would politically damage a sitting president and create the impression that the investigation into Russian collusion was more credible than it actually was.
The Papadopolous saga has been overshadowed by the ongoing controversy swirling around the Department of Justice decision to drop its charges against former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn who, like Papadopolous, pled guilty to lying to an FBI agent. The same kind of prosecutorial misconduct, perpetrated by many of the same individuals, that prompted dropping Flynn’s charges infects every aspect of the Papadopolous matter — even more so.
While Papadopolous cannot undo his sentence, or get back the time he served in prison, he can be exonerated by a much-deserved presidential pardon. Anything less would represent a victory by those who have corrupted American justice for political purposes, and a defeat for every American citizen who believes in the foundational principle of impartial justice.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.
Israel Perfecting Surveillance Tech
Leave it to the Mossad and Shin Bet to profit militarily and financially from virus
By Philip Giraldi | American Free Press | May 11, 2020
Israel’s external spy organization Mossad and its internal espionage equivalent Shin Bet have reputations that are much larger than their actual successes, but the one area where they have excelled is electronic intelligence gathering. Recent electronic spying around the White House and other federal buildings in Washington carried out by the Israeli Embassy demonstrates that Israel does not differentiate much between friends and enemies when it conducts espionage. In fact, spying targeting the U.S. is probably its number one priority due to the fact that the Jewish state is so heavily dependent on American support that it feels compelled to learn what discussions relating to it are taking place behind closed doors.
Israeli penetration of U.S. telecommunications began in the 1990s, when American companies like AT&T and Verizon, the chief conduits of the National Security Agency (NSA) for communications surveillance, began to use Israeli-produced hardware, particularly for law enforcement-related surveillance and clandestine recording. The devices had a so-called back door, which meant that everything they did was shared with Israel. Israeli cyber-specialists even broke into classified networks with the NSA and FBI aware of what was going on but unwilling to confront “America’s best ally.” President Bill Clinton once quipped to Monica Lewinski that they should avoid using the Oval Office phone because someone might be listening in. He was referring to Israel.
To be sure, the Jewish state’s high-tech sector has been much assisted in its effort by “own goals” provided by the United States, which allows Israel to bid on government contracts relating to national security, virtually guaranteeing that any technical innovations will be stolen and re-exported by Israeli high-tech companies. Major technology innovators like Intel, which works with the NSA, have set up shop in Israel and have publicly stated, “We think of ourselves as an Israeli company as much as a U.S. company.” Vulture capitalist Zionist billionaire Paul Singer has recently been accused of steering highly paid U.S. tech sector jobs to Israel, jobs that are lost to the American economy forever.
So, Israel is a leader in using electronic resources to carry out espionage and collect information on various targets of interest. Israel is also an innovator, and its close relationship with the U.S. intelligence community (IC), most particularly the NSA, means that technologies and procedures developed by the Jewish state will inevitably show up in America.
The U.S. is in any event working hard on its own tools for managing the public, spurred by Covid-19 hysteria. Special ID cards could help track the health status of individuals. This status would be recorded and updated on a chip readable by government scanners that, by some accounts, might be either carried or even permanently embedded in everyone’s body. Another plan being promoted in a joint venture by Apple and Google that appears to have White House support involves “add[ing] technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19. People must opt into the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population” with monitoring done by central computers. Once the legal principle is established that phones can be manipulated to do what is now an “illegal search,” there are no technical or practical limits to what other tasks could also be performed.
DEVELOPMENTS IN ISRAEL
With those steps being taken to control the movements of possibly infected citizens in mind, some recent developments in Israel are, to put it mildly, ominous. The Jewish state is currently achieving multi-level 24/7 surveillance of everyone residing in the country conducted in real time. Investigative reporter and peace activist Richard Silverstein describes in some detail why it is happening now, what it means, and how it works.
Per Silverstein, Israel, like every other authoritarian state, is currently taking advantage of the distraction caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political fortunes seemed to be on the wane due to three hung elections, exploited the fear of the virus to assume emergency powers and obtain Knesset approval to use a highly classified national database “compiled by the Shin Bet and comprising private personal data on every Israeli citizen, both Jewish and Palestinian. In the aftermath of 9/11, Israel’s Knesset secretly assigned its domestic intelligence agency the task of creating the database, which was ostensibly meant as a counterterrorism measure.”
The database, nicknamed “The Tool,” includes names, addresses, phone numbers, employment, and educational information but it goes well beyond that in using phone tracking data to record every phone call made by the individual to include names and numbers of those called and the geo-location of where the call was made from. Phone tracking also enabled Shin Bet to create a log of where the caller traveled in Israel and the occupied territories. Internet use, if active on the phone, was also recorded. It is as complete and total surveillance of an individual as is possible to obtain and it does not involve any human participation at all, every bit of it being done by computer.
Netanyahu publicly proclaimed his intention to use the database, stating that it would be employed to combat the coronavirus, which he described as a threat to national survival. As a result of the claimed crisis, he and his principal opponent, Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz, were able to come to terms on April 20 to form a “national emergency unity government” with Netanyahu as prime minister yet again. The exploitation of the fear of the virus plus that revelation about Israel’s powerful technical tool to thwart it produced a victory for Netanyahu, who effectively portrayed himself as a strong and indispensable leader, erasing the stigma resulting from his pending trial on charges of massive corruption while in office. One of the first steps Netanyahu will reportedly take is to replace the attorney general and state prosecutor who were seeking to send him to prison, effectively taking away the threat that he might go to prison.
The exposure of the existence of the database inevitably led to charges that Netanyahu had, for personal gain, revealed Israel’s most powerful counterterrorism weapon. There were also concerns about the significance of the huge body of personal information collected by Shin Bet, to include suggestions that it constituted a gross violation of civil liberties. But carefully stoked fear of the virus combined with some political deals and maneuvers meant that use of the data was eventually approved by the Knesset security committee at the end of March.
Israel, which has closed its borders, and which still has a relatively low level of coronavirus infections and deaths, has already started using the Shin Bet database while also turning the attempts to deal with the disease as something like an intelligence war. The information obtained from “The Tool” enables the police and military to determine if someone were standing near someone else for more than a few minutes. If the contact included someone already infected, all parties are placed under quarantine. Any attempt to evade controls leads to arrest and punishment of a six-month prison term plus a $1,500 fine. Armed soldiers patrolling the streets are empowered to question anyone who is out and about.
Mossad is also involved in fighting the virus, boasting of having “stolen” 100,000 face masks and also respirators from a neighboring country presumed to be the United Arab Emirates. Silverstein observes that “Israel’s far-right government has militarized the contagion. Just as a hammer never met a nail it didn’t want to pound, it is only natural for a national security state like Israel to see Covid-19 as a security threat just as much or more than a health threat.” And when it comes to bioweapons, Israel is no parvenu. Ironically, the hidden story behind the “war on the coronavirus” is that Israel is itself one of the most advanced states in developing and testing biological weapons at its lab at Nes Tziona.
Returning to the emergence of “The Tool,” hardline Defense Minister Naftali Bennett has also suggested monetizing the product by selling a “civilian version of it,” to include its operating system, analytic capabilities, and setup details to foreign countries, including the United States. Israel has already successfully marketed to security agencies and governments a similar product called Pegasus, which has been described as the most sophisticated malware on the market.
Like The Tool, Pegasus does data mining and real-time analysis of individuals based on a range of collection techniques. The Israeli cyber company NSO Group that markets Pegasus was recently involved in an attempt to hack Facebook-owned secure communications system Whats-App, targeting journalists and political activists, on behalf of an unknown client. Ironically, it is believed that Facebook had earlier used NSO Group’s somewhat shadowy services. Perhaps more notoriously, Pegasus was also used to monitor contacts and establish physical location in the case of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi intelligence agents in Istanbul.
So, Americans should beware when confronted by the new cyber-security software being promoted by Israel because the Jewish state is also exporting its own vision of a centrally controlled militarized state where all rights are potentially sacrificed for security. As whistleblower Edward Snowden has already revealed, the NSA has the capability to collect vast amounts of information on citizens. If the United States government falls for the bait and moves in the Israeli direction, using that data to enable the surveillance and manage all the people all the time, the temptation will be great to employ the new capability even if its use is not strictly speaking warranted.
And there will be no one there to say nay to the new powers, not in Congress, on the Supreme Court or in the White House. And the media will be on board, too, arguing that security against external and internal threats requires some infringements of individual rights. It is one of the ironies of history that the United States of America, with its vast resources, large population and legacy of individual freedom, has been becoming more like its tiny militarized client state Israel. It is a tendency that must be resisted at all costs by every American who cares about fundamental liberties.
Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
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From the Archives
World War II Didn’t End The Great Depression
Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | April 4, 2024
A principal goal of Stark Realities is to “expose fundamental myths across the political spectrum” — and few myths are as universally embraced as the notion that US participation in World War II (1941-1945) lifted the American economy out of the Great Depression.
This myth is dangerous not only because it leads citizens and politicians to see a bright side of war that doesn’t really exist, but also because it helps foster a belief that government spending is essential to countering economic downturns. That belief, in turn, has helped propel us to a point where the national debt now exceeds $34.6 trillion, with interest payments alone on pace to reach $1 trillion a year in 2026, inviting financial catastrophe. … continue
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