The Truth About the United States’ “Continuity of Government” Plans & The Coronavirus Perfect Storm
By Whitney Webb | The Last American Vagabond | March 23, 2020
WASHINGTON DC — Last week, Newsweek published a report entitled “Inside The Military’s Top Secret Plans If Coronavirus Cripples the Government,” which offers vague descriptions of different military plans that could be put into effect if the civilian government were to be largely incapacitated, with a focus on the potential of the current novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic to result in such a scenario.
The article’s author, William Arkin, largely frames these plans as new, though — buried deep within the article — he eventually mentions that such contingency plans can be traced back to the Eisenhower administration (though they were in place before) and have since been developed and updated by most subsequent administrations, largely through the issuance of executive orders. Arkin also points out that some of these “Continuity of Government”, or COG, plans include the “devolution” of leadership and Constitutional authority, which he notes “could circumvent the normal Constitutional provisions for government succession, and military commanders could be placed in control around America.”
Yet, there are key aspects of COG and its development that Arkin leaves out. For instance, in his timeline on how such plans have developed in the post-World War II era, he conveniently fails to mention any of the Reagan administration’s major changes to COG, including the Reagan-era Executive Order on which all current COG programs are based. Indeed, many of the “extra-Constitutional” aspects of COG that Arkin mentions began during the Reagan administration, when these plans were redrafted to largely exclude members of Congress, including the Speaker of the House, from succession plans and even moved to essentially eliminate Congress in the event of COG being implemented, with near total power instead being given to the executive branch and the military. It was also during this time that the “devolution” aspect of COG was hammered out, as it created three president-cabinet “teams” to be stationed in different parts of the country outside of the nation’s capital. Arkin’s decision to not mention how COG was a major focus of the Reagan administration is striking given that that administration poured hundreds of millions of dollars annually into COG planning and development and also conducted COG drills on a regular basis.
Furthermore, the Miami Herald revealed in 1987, that the COG programs of that era were deeply connected to what the Herald termed “a virtual parallel government outside the traditional cabinet departments and agencies” that began operating “almost from the day Reagan took office” and included many of Reagan’s closest advisers, including then-CIA Director William Casey. The Herald further claimed that this “parallel government” had been responsible for the Iran-Contra scandal (i.e. “involved in arming the Nicaraguan rebels”) as well as “the drafting of martial law plans for national emergencies,” i.e. COG, as well as “the monitoring of U.S. citizens considered potential security risks.”
Other key players in those Reagan-era COG developments, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, former CIA Director James Woosley and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, are also left unmentioned in Arkin’s article. Not mentioning Cheney and Rumsfeld are particularly glaring omissions given that they were involved in the implementation of aspects of those COG plans that went live in the wake of the September 11 attacks, when both men were serving in key posts in the George W. Bush administration.
While Arkin’s omission of the role of the Reagan administration and leading neoconservatives in the development and use of COG is significant, arguably more significant is his failure to mention one of COG’s major components, one that has gone essentially unmentioned by well-known media outlets for well over a decade – Main Core.
The government’s database of “potential troublemakers”
When Reagan issued Executive Order 12656, he created COG plans that could be implemented during “any national security emergency,” which the E.O. loosely defined as “any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.” E.O. 12656 also put the National Security Council (NSC) in charge of developing and administering COG policies. The NSC official placed in charge of this “secret” COG program was Oliver North, whose name would later become infamous for the key role he played in the Iran-Contra Scandal. During the Iran-Contra hearings in the late 1980s, then-Representative Jack Brooks (D-TX) attempted to ask the following question to North: “Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?” Brooks, however was immediately cut off by Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), who stated ” I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir.” Brooks protested, but North was ultimately not required to give an answer.
As the de facto leader of COG development and planning during the Reagan administration, North oversaw the creation of a controversial database that later became known simply as “Main Core.” The Main Core database, first built using the stolen PROMIS software (more information on PROMIS here and here), was essentially a list of American dissidents and “potential troublemakers.” A senior government official with a high-ranking security clearance and service in five presidential administrations described the database to journalist Chris Ketcham in 2008 as follows:
“A database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”
In 1993, Wired magazine stated that:
“Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude.”
Main Core is the aspect of COG that is most often ignored in reporting on these types of plans, with Arkin’s article being just a more recent example. While most of the rare mentions of COG in the mainstream touch on how those plans would result in the implementation of martial law and the suspension of the Constitution, they even more rarely — if ever — mention Main Core. Indeed, the last “mainstream” reports on Main Core were written over a decade ago — all in 2008 — by Chris Ketcham in Radar, by Scott Horton in Harpers and by Tim Shorrock in Salon.
Given that COG is now creeping back into mainstream reporting, revisiting Main Core is essential as the database still exists and has grown considerably since Oliver North first oversaw its creation in the early 1980s. In Ketcham’s 2008 article on the subject, he quotes then-senior government officials who said that, at the time, the number of “unfriendly” Americans on that database was approximately 8 million. Ketcham further notes that, in the event COG is implemented, these individuals could be subject to anything ranging from “heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”
Tim Shorrock, in his coverage of Main Core, noted that the database was seen in use at the White House following the September 11 attacks and there is strong evidence pointing to it having been used by the George W. Bush administration to guide its domestic surveillance activities in the post-9/11 era. A government official who had told a reporter about having seen the database operational at the White House following September 11th “turned white as a sheet” when the reporter mentioned the name “Main Core” specifically. Shorrock’s reporting also details how Main Core includes vast amounts of information on those “unfriendly” Americans, including the fruits of the vast domestic surveillance programs of the NSA and other U.S. federal agencies that continue today and are now set to be expanded due to the current coronavirus crisis.
In a report written last year on the involvement of U.S. and Israeli intelligence and their private sector allies in pushing for new, troubling pre-crime programs, I noted that Main Core is not only available to U.S. intelligence but also Israel’s intelligence apparatus and that Israeli intelligence was involved in the creation and expansion of Main Core. That report also detailed how Main Core was used by members of Reagan’s NSC to blackmail members of Congress, a practice that is likely to have continued under subsequent administrations. It also noted how Main Core today likely involves the same software now used by every U.S. intelligence agency and numerous other federal agencies that is marketed by Palantir, a company created and owned by Trump ally Peter Thiel. Palantir’s software boasts “predictive policing” capabilities and tracks a category of person using the label “subversive,” very much in keeping with the spirit of Main Core.
Main Core and Bill Barr’s Power Grab
Though Main Core was reportedly in use after September 11 to target “unfriendly” individuals for increased domestic surveillance, concern that COG plans in the age of coronavirus could take a more drastic turn and involve the detention of Americans included in that database now seems more plausible than ever. On Saturday, Politico reported that the Department of Justice has demanded new “emergency powers” during the current pandemic and these powers include being able to indefinitely detain Americans without trial. Politico also noted that the DOJ’s controversial new requests “span several stages of the legal process, from initial arrest to how cases are processed and investigated.” Per the DOJ’s requests, indefinite detention would emerge through a new ability whereby the Attorney General or a judge could pause court proceedings whenever courts are “fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.”
What Politico did not include in its report is that current Attorney General William Barr has spent the past several months fine-tuning and implementing a “pre-crime” program. Officially known as the “National Disruption and Early Engagement Program” (DEEP), it aims to “identify, assess and engage” potentially violent individuals “before they strike.” Barr first announced this program last October in an official memorandum and therein stated that the program was to be implemented sometime over the course of 2020 and would involve “an efficient, effective and programmatic strategy to disrupt individuals who are mobilizing towards violence, by all lawful means.”
A training conference for that program took place this past December and involved members of the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation and “private sector partners.” One recent DOJ statement regarding an arrest made last year in Nevada, claimed that that specific case was part of the DOJ’s “National Disruption and Early Engagement Program,” suggesting that this program is already in use — at least in some parts of the country.
In his memorandum, Barr further notes that the program’s “early engagement tactics” were “born of the posture we adopted with respect to terrorist threats” following the September 11 attacks, essentially stating that this pre-crime program will utilize methods from the “War on Terror” domestically and on a massive scale.
Given the context of the current coronavirus crisis, the DOJ’s recent request for sweeping new powers and the role of Main Core in COG plans, one part of Barr’s pre-crime memorandum stands out. In the part of the document where Barr outlines what actions will be taken once an individual is deemed potentially violent or threatening, he writes that those individuals will be subject to detention, court-ordered mental health treatment and electronic monitoring, among other measures.
The possibility of pre-crime detention was also present in the DOJ’s recent request for new “emergency powers” in light of the coronavirus crisis, as it specifically asks that those new powers apply to “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings.” Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told Politico that the inclusion of the term “pre-arrest” likely means that “you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying.”
Thus, if DOJ is granted these new powers it has requested, the William Barr-led Department of Justice will not only be authorized to indefinitely detain Americans without trial, it will be able to detain them without any proof of those detainees having committed a crime or even having plans or the intent to commit a crime. Instead, the DOJ only needs to argue that the individual was “mobilizing towards violence,” an extremely vague phrase that could potentially be used against anyone who expresses discontent with the government or government policy.
Furthermore, with the FBI having recently flagged “conspiracy theorists” (and by extension those who distrust or question government narratives of both past and present) as a “domestic terror threat,” the DOJ could even make the case that failure to blindly trust government narratives presents a threat to the public order. Given that the Main Core database in its current form contains bulk surveillance gathered from social media, phone conversations/messaging apps and even financial information (i.e. purchasing history, etc.) on Americans deemed unfriendly “often for the slightest and most trivial reason,” this unprecedented power grab by the DOJ has an authoritarian and Orwellian potential to target legitimate dissent like never before.
With the specter of COG now snaking its way into mainstream discourse during the coronavirus crisis, it is essential that Americans stay vigilant, as these Orwellian and dystopian “solutions” to allegedly protect us from the current pandemic have been in place long before COVID-19 made its appearance on the world stage or landed on U.S. shores.
It is also essential to remember that COG, Main Core and the DOJ’s pre-crime program were all created and are currently controlled by extremely corrupt and fundamentally untrustworthy individuals who have not only been involved in, innumerable scandals, over the years, but have also installed and supported some of the most authoritarian, savage and horrific dictators the world has ever seen. To trust them with such unprecedented and dangerous powers in a period of national confusion and panic is tantamount to beckoning the horrors of those dictatorships — past and present — to come home to roost.
The Deep State’s Demolition of Democracy
By James Bovard | FFF | March 26, 2020
“Thank God for the Deep State,” declared former acting CIA chief John McLaughlin while appearing on a panel at the National Press Club last October. In 2018, the New York Times asserted that Trump’s use of the term “Deep State” and similar rhetoric “fanned fears that he is eroding public trust in institutions, undermining the idea of objective truth and sowing widespread suspicions about the government and news media.”
But barely a year later, the Deep State had gone from a figment of paranoid right-wingers’ imagination to the great hope for the salvation of American democracy. Much of the media is now conferring the same exulted status on the Deep State that was previously bestowed on Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Almost immediately after its existence was no longer denied, the Deep State became the incarnation of virtue in Washington.
The Deep State commonly refers to officials who secretly wield power permanently in Washington, often in federal agencies with vast sway and little accountability. A New York Times article in October gushed that “over the last three weeks, the deep state has emerged from the shadows in the form of real live government officials, past and present … and provided evidence that largely backs up the still-anonymous whistle-blower” on Donald Trump’s phone call to the president of Ukraine. New York Times columnist James Stewart declared, “There is a Deep State, there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law…. They work for the American people.” New York Times editorial writer Michelle Cottle proclaimed, “The deep state is alive and well” and hailed it as “a collection of patriotic public servants.” They were echoing earlier declarations by Washington Post columnist Eugene Roberts and former top Justice Department official Preet Bharar: “God bless the ‘Deep State.’”
Former CIA Director John Brennan, appearing on the same panel as McLaughlin in October, declared, “The reason why Mr. Trump has this very contentious relationship with CIA and FBI and the deep state people is because they tell the truth.” Much of the media coverage of the Trump impeachment is following that dubious storyline.
“We lied, we cheated, we stole.”
Five years ago, John Brennan’s CIA ignited what should have been a constitutional crisis when it was caught illegally spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was compiling a massive report on the CIA torture program. After 9/11, the CIA constructed an interrogation regime by “consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods,” the New York Times reported in 2007. Secret Bush administration torture memos “set the C.I.A. loose to slam suspects’ heads into walls up to 30 times in a row, to deprive suspects of sleep for more than a week straight, to confine them to small dark boxes for hours at a time … and to suffocate them with water to induce the perception that they are drowning,” Georgetown University law professor David Cole noted. But the only official who went to prison was John Kirakou, a former CIA analyst who publicly admitted that the CIA was waterboarding.
Is the Deep State more trustworthy when it is killing than when it is torturing? Brennan declared in 2016 that “the president requires near-certainty of no collateral damage” before approving a drone strike. Confidential CIA documents revealed that the CIA had little or no idea whom it was killing most of the time with its drone attacks in Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other nations. Salon.com summarized an NBC News report: “Even while admitting that the identities of many killed by drones were not known, the CIA documents asserted that all those dead were enemy combatants. The logic is twisted: If we kill you, then you were an enemy combatant.” Lying about drone killings quickly became institutionalized throughout the Deep State. The New York Times reported in 2015, “Every independent investigation of the [drone] strikes has found far more civilian casualties than administration officials admit.”
The Deep State is practically designed to destroy privacy while enabling government officials to deny sweeping abuses. Former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden declared in 2014, “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.” The NSA’s credibility was obliterated in 2013 when Snowden revealed the NSA can tap almost any cell phone in the world, access anyone’s email and web-browsing history, and crack the vast majority of computer encryption. But the NSA’s definition of “terrorist suspect” was ludicrously broad, including “someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.” Snowden also revealed that each day phone companies turned over tens of millions of phone records of average Americans to the feds. A few months before Snowden’s revelations, National Intelligence director James Clapper lied to Congress when he denied that the NSA collects “any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans.” The fact that Clapper was not charged with perjury did nothing to burnish the credibility of the Justice Department.
Impeachment proceedings have been spurred in large part by disputes over Donald Trump’s phone call to the president of Ukraine. The House Intelligence Committee heard testimony from Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the Ukrainian-born officer who listened in to the call while serving on the National Security Council. Vindman was “deeply troubled by what he interpreted as an attempt by the president to subvert U.S. foreign policy,” the Washington Post reported. Which provision of the Constitution gives junior military officers sway over foreign policy? Because Vindman objected to Trump’s efforts to decrease tension with Russia, the Washington establishment quickly hailed him and thus encouraged other military officers and government officials to pull strings to subvert policies of which the media disapprove.
It is naive to expect the Deep State to provide an antidote to the sordidness of American politics. The Friends of the Deep State talk of certain federal agencies as if they exist far above the sordid details of political life — or even of human nature. Former CIA boss McLaughlin declared, “This is the institution within the U.S. government that … is institutionally committed to objectivity and to telling the truth. It’s whole job is to speak the truth — it is engraved in marble in the lobby.” But historically, atrium engravings have proven a weak surety for bureaucratic candor. In reality, the CIA and other Deep State agencies are notorious for suppressing convicting truths about themselves. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently described the CIA’s modus operandi when he was director: “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s like we had entire training courses.”
Power and truth
Promises that the chiefs of the CIA and other intelligence agencies will “speak truth to power” have become a Washington ritual in the years since the 9/11 attacks. No matter how brazenly political appointees lie, members of Congress assure the media and constituents that the next nominee will be as honest as George Washington. The “speak truth to power” bromide was recited after Trump nominated Gina Haspel as CIA chief. At her confirmation hearings, the public heard plenty about Haspel’s meeting with Mother Teresa but almost nothing about her key role in the CIA torture scandal — including the illegal destruction of recordings of torture sessions.
Another reason to distrust the Deep State is that its arch practitioners are honored regardless of their iniquities. Former CIA bosses McLaughlin and Brennan were speaking on a panel sponsored by the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security, named after the former chief of the National Security Agency and the CIA. As Trevor Timm noted in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2017, “Hayden has a long history of making misleading and outright false statements, and by the estimation of many lawyers, likely committed countless felonies during the Bush administration.” Hayden set up the illegal, unconstitutional wiretapping program after 9/11 that the New York Times exposed in late 2005. When the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on CIA torture in 2014, it included a 36-page appendix filled with Hayden’s “testimony to Congress, next to the actual facts showing statement after statement he made was inaccurate, misleading, false, or outright lies,” Timm noted. Naming that Center after Hayden simply reflects the prevailing Deep State aggrandizement in the Greater Washington Metropolitan area.
The Deep State has an appalling record of abusing the whistleblowers who are now being acclaimed. A draft Intelligence Community Inspector General report last year found that intelligence agencies refused to recognize retaliation against whistleblowers in 99 percent of cases. A 2017 report by Foreign Policy magazine concluded that “the intelligence community’s central watchdog is in danger of crumbling thanks to mismanagement, bureaucratic battles, clashes among big personalities, and sidelining of whistleblower outreach and training efforts.” After CIA Inspector General John Helgerson compiled a condemnatory report on the CIA’s post–9/11 interrogation program, CIA chief Michael Hayden launched a major investigation of Helgerson in 2007, provoking outrage on Capitol Hill. (The CIA managed to delay the release of Helgerson’s report for five years, thereby keeping both Congress and the American people in the dark regarding shocking abuses.)
The Trump–Deep State clash is a showdown between a presidency that is far too powerful versus federal agencies that have become fiefdoms that enjoy immunity for almost any and all abuses. Most of the partisans of the Deep State are not championing “government under the law.” Instead, this is a dispute over who will be permitted to break the law and dictate the policies to America and the world. Former CIA and NSA boss Hayden proudly proclaimed, “Espionage is not just compatible with American democracy, espionage is essential to American democracy.” And how can we know if the Deep State’s espionage is actually pro-democracy or subversive of democracy? If they told you, they would have to kill you. The Founding Fathers never intended for covert agencies to trumpet a right to correct voters’ verdicts.
Neither the White House nor the CIA, NSA, nor other Deep State agencies should enjoy immunity from the law or deserve blind trust from average Americans or the establishment media. A wayward president (especially a first-term president) can eventually be checked at the ballot box. But who or what can check the Deep State?
This article was originally published in the February 2020 edition of Future of Freedom.
Digital Dollars and Technocracy on Steroids – #NewWorldNextWeek
corbettreport
Welcome to the 402nd episode of New World Next Week — the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
Story #1: The ‘EARN IT’ Bill Is the Government’s (Open) Plan to Scan Every Message Online
https://bit.ly/2wCpMVq
S.3398 – EARN IT Act of 2020
https://bit.ly/2UzpXsw
The EARN IT Act Is the New FOSTA
https://bit.ly/2xnVqWH
Congress Must Stop the Graham-Blumenthal Anti-Security Bill
https://bit.ly/39luy78
Video: The EARN IT Act – Holding the Tech Industry Accountable in the Fight Against Online Child Sexual Exploitation
https://bit.ly/2WICs7O
Story #2: ‘Digital Dollar’ Stripped From Pelosi Plandemic Bill, Still
https://bit.ly/2vNRMF5
White House, Senate Reach Historic $2 Trillion Stimulus Deal Amid Growing Coronavirus Fears
https://cnn.it/33LW6Bd
Episode 328 – The Bitcoin Psyop
https://bit.ly/33WYUff
Story #3: Mobile Phone Industry Explores Worldwide Tracking Of Users
http://archive.is/4azLv
GSMA: Global System for Mobile Communications
https://bit.ly/2WICzjK
Police in California Plan to Use Drones to Enforce Quarantine Lockdown
https://bit.ly/33L90zz
Israel Joins Totalitarian States Using Coronavirus To Spy On Citizens
https://bit.ly/2UjUQ5f
U.S. Government, Tech Industry Discussing Ways To Harness Location Data To Combat Coronavirus
https://bit.ly/39gSPuP
Suspending the Constitution: Police State Uses Crises to Expand Its Lockdown Powers
By John W. Whitehead | Rutherford Institute | March 24, 2020
You can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured.
This coronavirus pandemic is no exception.
Not only are the federal and state governments unraveling the constitutional fabric of the nation with lockdown mandates that are sending the economy into a tailspin and wreaking havoc with our liberties, but they are also rendering the citizenry fully dependent on the government for financial handouts, medical intervention, protection and sustenance.
Unless we find some way to rein in the government’s power grabs, the fall-out will be epic.
Everything I have warned about for years—government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on—has coalesced into this present moment.
The government’s shameless exploitation of past national emergencies for its own nefarious purposes pales in comparison to what is presently unfolding.
It’s downright Machiavellian.
Deploying the same strategy it used with 9/11 to acquire greater powers under the USA Patriot Act, the police state—a.k.a. the shadow government, a.k.a. the Deep State—has been anticipating this moment for years, quietly assembling a wish list of lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.
It should surprise no one, then, that the Trump Administration has asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deems it necessary during this coronavirus pandemic and “other” emergencies.
It’s that “other” emergencies part that should particularly give you pause, if not spur you to immediate action (by action, I mean a loud and vocal, apolitical, nonpartisan outcry and sustained, apolitical, nonpartisan resistance).
In fact, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been quietly trotting out and testing a long laundry list of terrifying powers that override the Constitution.
We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die…
You’re getting the picture now, right?
These are powers the police state would desperately like to make permanent.
Bear in mind, however, that these powers the Trump Administration, acting on orders from the police state, are officially asking Congress to recognize and authorize barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has already unilaterally claimed for itself.
Unofficially, the police state has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.
The seeds of this present madness were sown several decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.“
Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives, which do not need congressional approval, provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”
Mind you, that national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president. Indeed, the U.S. military has reportedly already been given standby orders under COG for this present coronavirus pandemic.
So what is the bottom line here?
We are, for all intents and purposes, one crisis away from having a full-fledged authoritarian state emerge from the shadows, at which time democratic government will be dissolved and the country will be ruled by an unelected bureaucracy.
Thus far, we have at least pretended that the government abides by the Constitution.
The attempts by each successive presidential administration to rule by fiat merely plays into the hands of those who would distort the government’s system of checks and balances and its constitutional separation of powers beyond all recognition.
Remember, these powers do not expire at the end of a president’s term. They remain on the books, just waiting to be used or abused by the next political demagogue.
So, too, every action taken by Trump and his predecessors to weaken the system of checks and balances, sidestep the rule of law, and expand the power of the executive branch of government has made us that much more vulnerable to those who would abuse those powers in the future.
Think on this: the presidential election is right around the corner.
Suddenly, the improbable possibility of any incumbent president attempting to extend the police state’s stranglehold on power by using current events to justify postponing or doing away with an election—forfeiting the people’s rights to govern altogether—and establishing a totalitarian regime seems less far-fetched than it did even a few years ago.
The emergency state is now out in the open for all to see. Unfortunately, “we the people” refuse to see what’s before us. Most Americans, fearful and easily controlled, would sooner rouse themselves to fight for that last roll of toilet paper than they would their own freedoms.
This is how freedom dies.
We erect our own prison walls, and as our rights dwindle away, we forge our own chains of servitude to the police state.
Be warned, however: once you surrender your freedoms to the government—no matter how compelling the reason might be for doing so—you can never get them back.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, no government willingly relinquishes power.
If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.
The America metamorphosing before our eyes is almost unrecognizable from the country I grew up in, and that’s not just tragic—it’s downright terrifying.
Illinois goes on coronavirus lockdown days after holding ‘fine & safe’ Democratic primaries
RT | March 20, 2020
Having insisted on holding Democratic presidential primaries just days earlier, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has now placed the state on “shelter-in-place” regime over the Covid-19 pandemic, following California and New York.
The measure will go into effect on Saturday evening, March 21. All non-essential businesses – not including hospitals, doctors’ offices and grocery stores – are to be closed indefinitely, Pritzker announced after consulting with experts. “To avoid the loss of tens of thousands of lives we must order an immediate shelter-in-place.”
Pritzker admitted the state does not have “the resources, the capacity, or the desire to police every individual’s behavior,” so the enforcement of the order will come down to “Illinoisans to be good members of their communities and good citizens,” he told the Chicago Tribune.
The statewide measure follows the order of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot to close down the city, declaring that “now is not the time for half measures” but also that this is “not a lockdown, or martial law.”
Just three days prior, however, the state refused to cancel, postpone or enable mail-in voting in the Democrat presidential primary.
“I feel good about the decision to have the election go on tomorrow,” Pritzker had said Monday afternoon. “We do believe it’s safe. We’ve certainly consulted experts, and we think that the election will go on just fine.”
With many poll workers not showing up due to fears of contagion and numerous polling places closed, the voting involved large crowds clustering together for many hours – conditions ideal for spreading the coronavirus.
The primary was overwhelmingly carried by establishment favorite Joe Biden (924,771 votes, 59 percent), whereupon Pritzker and the experts appear to have suddenly changed their minds.
As of Friday, Illinois had 585 registered Covid-19 cases, with five fatalities.
9/11 Truth, Coronavirus Truth: Zionist Hysteria, MSM Lockdown
War on the Horizon?
By Kevin Barrett • Unz Review • March 18, 2020
“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor.”… “And advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.” The Project for a New American Century, Rebuilding America’s Defenses (September 2000)
I spent most of 2004 through 2006 blaming Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for 9/11. As you can imagine, I got plenty of pushback. Strangely, the loudest, most hysterical shrieks came not from red-white-and-blue Republican patriots, but from seemingly insane Zionists screaming: “Why do you hate the Jews so much, you anti-Semite?”[1]
At first, I could not for the life of me figure out why blaming two non-Jews, Cheney and Rumsfeld, elicited that kind of reaction. It also seemed odd that anyone talking about the explosive demolitions of World Trade Center Towers 1, 2, and 7 was reviled as a Jew-hater.[2] Questioning what happened to the Pentagon, whether there were really any hijackers or cell phone calls, who really sent the anthrax, who bought the put options, who exhibited foreknowledge, and so on elicited the same hysterical reaction from Israel-firsters. It was only after I looked into the ethnic and foreign-loyalist backgrounds of PNAC, Larry Silverstein, and other 9/11 suspects that it began to dawn on me that “the Zionist doth protest too much.”
We are now experiencing 911-2B, the coronavirus black swan. Just as 9/11 terrorized, shocked, and shut down the USA for a few days, it seems that Covid-19 will do the same, only more so. Instead of a few days, we may be shut down for a few months, maybe even a few years. And once again, Zionists are hysterically pushing back against those of us questioning the official story. The Israel-lobby propaganda site The Algemeiner recently published a hit piece headlined Islamists Call Coronavirus a Zionist-American Conspiracy. It featured the following attack on yours truly:
Press TV, meanwhile, published an article by American conspiracy theorist Kevin Barrett to back the claim that the coronavirus is a US-Israeli conspiracy using biological warfare to hurt Iran. “US, Israel waging biological warfare on massive scale,” was the March 7 story’s headline.
Barrett, a “9/11 truther,” got crazier in the story:
“The United States waged biological warfare against its own Congress in 2001 with the anthrax component of the 9/11 anthrax false flag operation, which terrorized Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, the leaders of the movement that blocked the Patriot Act, into giving up and allowing the Patriot Act.
“So the United States is run by lunatics, by psychopaths who are entirely capable of launching World War 3 by way of a biological warfare attack on China and Iran, with the Iran component presumably led by Israel. That’s the most likely explanation for what we’re seeing.”
This is the kind of rot Press TV publishes.
The Algemeiner also vilified Muslims reacting negatively to Israel’s announcement that it would have a coronavirus vaccine ready “in a few weeks.” It cited British, Iranian, and Algerian Muslims balking at the prospect of buying vaccines from Israel, and/or questioning how Israel could possibly develop a vaccine for a new rogue virus in such short order, assuming it hadn’t simultaneously developed both the virus and the vaccine.
Might Israel profit from a disastrous black swan that it helped create? It already happened once. Prior to 9/11, the Jewish population of Israel was fleeing, with net emigration outpacing net immigration, while the dotcom bust and suicide bombings collapsed the Jewish State’s economy. The global Islamic movement was picking up steam; it seemed likely that Muslims might soon win back custody of their holy places. (Muslims have administered the holy sites in and around Jerusalem/al-Quds virtually ever since Islam existed, minus a couple of brief and bloody crusader interludes, until the current Zionist genocide began less than a century ago.)
During the run-up to 9/11, as Naomi Klein explains in The Shock Doctrine,[3] Israel put all its chips into anti-terror start-ups—and hit the jackpot on 9/11/2001. An anti-Islam propaganda tidal wave swept the globe, washing away the Islamic Awakening surge and leaving in its place the 27-million-Muslim holocaust that continues today.
The 9/11 black swan was in essence a propaganda operation designed to demonize Islam and Muslims in general, and anti-Zionists ones in particular, in service to changing the arc of history to benefit Israel. But it was sold by PNAC crypto-Zionists to people like Cheney and Rumsfeld as a recipe for prolonging US empire for a New American Century by way of a “New Pearl Harbor.”
Today’s coronavirus black swan, like 9/11, has all the characteristics of a trauma-based mass-mind-control op. It has already been used to demonize China in the same way 9/11 was used to demonize Islam: Just as we were supposed to hate the crazy suicidal Muslims yearning for harems of afterlife virgins, we are now supposed to feel disgust for Chinese slurpers of bat soup. And just as we were supposed to loathe the brutal and incompetent governments of Muslim-majority nations, now we are told to revile the oppressive censorship-addicted regime in Beijing. It may be purely coincidental that this wholesale demonization of the world’s two greatest classical civilizations, based on two fear-inciting black swan events of suspicious origin, just happened to arrive in the wake of the Bernard Lewis-Samuel Huntington pronouncement that the 21st century would be the era of the “clash of civilizations.” After all, even the craziest coincidence theories sometimes turn out to be true.
It also may be a coincidence that the primary US bioweapons lab, Ft. Detrick, was shut down in summer 2019 over fears that weaponized pathogens might escape. It may be a coincidence that absurdly under-performing US military athletes came to Wuhan for the World Military Games in October and have since been accused by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs of being the source of the Covid-19 pandemic. It may be a coincidence that at the same time those “athletes” were in Wuhan, the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, and other Establishment titans were hosting a pandemic simulation called Event 201. It may be purely coincidental that the virus appeared in Wuhan, home of China’s biggest biodefense laboratory, and China’s biggest transportation hub, just in time for the Chinese New Year, when most Chinese travel to visit relatives. Likewise, it could be coincidental that the real-life Covid-19 pandemic almost perfectly mimics Lockstep, the Rockefeller Foundation’s recipe for a global police state emerging on the back of a coronavirus-style pandemic.
Then again, it could be that the Chinese government’s suspicions about the US, or others’ suspicions about Israel (especially regarding the coronavirus catastrophe in Iran) are justified. But such possibilities are far outside of the mainstream media’s Overton Window. The whole topic of bioweapons in relation to coronavirus is an MSM no-go zone, just as the evidence and arguments refuting the official story was a no-go zone after 9/11. The very fact that such things are unspeakable in the Mockingbird media suggests that yet another nefarious propaganda operation is underway.
Just as I came to reject the official story of 9/11 by comparing the arguments and evidence cited by proponents and opponents of that thesis, I am currently leaning toward the “Anglo-Zionist bioweapon” interpretation of coronavirus based on what I’ve seen so far by opponents as well as proponents. I recently listened to Peter Myers’ arguments that Covid-19 was made in a lab—”most likely from Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).” (Read his sources here.) Myers focuses on a paper trail documenting bat virus research at Wuhan and the University of North Carolina, allegations of Chinese germ warfare espionage, and so forth. While his scenario, an accidental release from WIV, is not impossible, the evidence he cites is also compatible with the deliberate fabrication of a second-level cover story that would be deployed if the first-level legend, “Covid-19 spontaneously jumped from bats to humans,” is conclusively disproven. The same second-level cover story would in the meantime function as a “blame the Chinese” conspiracy theory pushed by Steve Bannon, Tom Cotton, and other neocon and anti-China sources.
The question of whether the virus is naturally evolved or man-made is still open. Mainstream authorities like Nature Magazine are, quite naturally, pushing the “naturally evolved” position as hard as they can… which they would be expected to do whether or not it was true. Other sources claim “The spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV contains a cleavage absent in CoV – showing that it was engineered rather than evolved.” Perhaps readers more familiar with the science than I am can arbitrate such disputes in the comments section.
As with 9/11, the scientific evidence on coronavirus may give rise to a long-running debate. Meanwhile the world moves on. With 2020 hindsight I can now see that I should have interpreted 9/11 as a likely false flag immediately, based on cui bono. Today, asking the same question about coronavirus, “who benefits,” yields only slightly less obvious results.
But if Covid-19 was a biological attack on China, China’s number one European partner Italy, and China’s close Middle Eastern friend (and Anglo-Zionist arch-enemy) Iran, why is it spreading elsewhere? A skeptic on Pepe Escobar’s email list recently responded: “Hi Pepe, I’m convinced the facts do not support your theory. The damage to the West is greater than to China and it would be suicidal for US to engineer this. Why rule out natural causes like the Spanish flu?”
It is true that most military strategists dislike bioweapons due to their massive blowback potential: There is no guarantee that a mutating virus will stick to the race or geographical area you are attacking. Though Covid-19 hit China first, under highly suspicious circumstances, making it “the Chinese virus” in the words of Donald Trump (and, subliminally, in MSM reporting and global public opinion) it is now cratering the US and European economies. Could any US biowar team, however “rogue”—much less the commanding heights of the National Security State—have been crazy enough to risk that kind of blowback?
They were certainly crazy enough in 2001. Covid-19 is the new 9/11, the new “Transformative Event,” the new “watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security… Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and an after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.”
That sounds, to most of us, like an unpleasant prospect. Yet one of the authors of “Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,” Philip Zelikow, is a leading suspect in the orchestration of 9/11, which occurred less than three years after that article was published. Cover-up czar Zelikow, essentially the sole author of the risible work of fiction known as The 9/11 Commission Report, might conceivably have viewed the massage damage to the United States—not just the loss of the condemned-for-asbestos Trade Towers and a few thousand replaceable people, but also the hemorrhage of more than $6 trillion dollars alongside the even greater reputational loss in the 9/11-triggered “forever wars”—as being “worth it,” in the same way Madeleine Albright famously said that murdering half a million Iraqi children was “worth it.”
Might the neocon crazies who thought 9/11 was worth it feel the same way about a coronavirus biowar strike? They might. As Pepe Escobar suggested, the Covid-19 Transformative Event is acting as a “global circuit breaker.” His conclusion: “What’s certain is that the whole global economy has been hit by an insidious, literally invisible circuit breaker. This may be just a ‘coincidence.’ Or this may be, as some are boldly arguing, part of a possible, massive psy-op creating the perfect geopolitical and social engineering environment for full-spectrum dominance.”
How could a circuit-breaker foster full-spectrum dominance? First, the neocons recognize that China’s inexorable rise to #1 world power status,[4] and the concomitant collapse of the Anglo-Zionist Empire, is pretty much a done deal absent some circuit-breaking black swan event. Just as the Zionists needed the 9/11 black swan to get their “Clean Break” with a historical trajectory leading towards the end of the apartheid Jewish State, so too the Anglo-Zionists might realize that something equally “transformative” would be required to forestall the rise of China.
The US cannot win a trade war with China. It cannot win a nuclear war. It cannot win a conventional land war. Yet from the neocon perspective it needs some kind of war ASAP before China grows too strong. So if you were a hardline neocon strategist dedicated to stymieing China at all costs, you might opt for a stealth 5G warfare approach featuring deniable biowar strikes among other tactics. You might be stupid or crazy enough not to consider the possibility of blowback. But more likely you would welcome the blowback as an opportunity to tear down the current US economy, which is totally dependent on Chinese imports, and rebuild a new, more Spartan system geared for a long 5G war on China (and Russia and Iran and Venezuela and anybody else who won’t follow your orders).
Strategic analysts agree that the necessary prelude to ramped up US-vs.-China warfare would be a decoupling of the US and Chinese economies. That decoupling is happening now, thanks to coronavirus. Once it has passed the point of no return, war becomes far more likely.
Hunkering down for a serious war on China and its allies would also require a momentous psychological and cultural shift on the part of the American people. Until now, they have been lazy, undisciplined, addicted to consumption without much production, and unwilling to sacrifice themselves (though quite willing to murder foreigners from the safe distance of a drone base). Only a profound psychic shock, and some serious deprivation, could retool them as potential soldiers and total war participants in a deadly and dangerous struggle to maintain their rulers’ global dominance privileges. Or so the neocons might imagine.[5]
Will the panicked American sheeple, stampeded toward the toilet paper aisles by Coronavirus 911-2B, be redirected into a hyper-militarized mode of life befitting a long war for full spectrum dominance? Will the Great Coronavirus Depression end in World War III just as the first Great Depression ended in World War II, with military Keynesianism once again “rescuing” a dead-in-the-water economy? Will 9/11 and the 9/11 wars seem like small potatoes once we’ve seen the Coronavirus Wars?
Notes
[1] From 2006 through around 2011 my 9/11 truth focused Wikipedia page was defaced by false accusations, sourced to an anonymous blog, that I was a “supporter of Holocaust deniers.” At the time I knew almost nothing about Holocaust revisionism, and did not even recognize the name of the “Holocaust denier” I was accused of supporting. Over a period of several years, countless attempts to correct the dozens of false statements about me on Wikipedia were made, but the false information would immediately reappear within hours, sometimes within minutes.
[2] When I brought Richard Gage of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth to Madison, Wisconsin, the WORT “alternative” radio interviewer’s first question was “why do you hate the Jews?” Gage was nonplussed. He and his organization focus on scientific evidence of controlled demolition, not the question of who did it.
[3] “A slew of new start-ups were launched, specializing in everything from ‘search and nail’ data mining, to surveillance cameras, to terrorist profiling. When the market for these services and devices exploded in the years after September 11, the Israeli state openly embraced a new national economic vision: the growth provided by the dot-com bubble would be replaced with a homeland security boom.” (Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p.435)
[4] Chinas Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is poised to end Western dominance of world trade in the same way the European sea route to Asia ended Muslim dominance via the Silk Road 500 years ago. For historical perspective, read Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World.
[5] “On this perverse (neocon) view of the world, if America fails to achieve her national destiny, and is mired in perpetual war, then all is well. Man’s humanity, defined in terms of struggle to the death, is rescued from extinction… To my mind, this fascistic glorification of death and violence springs from a profound inability to celebrate life, joy, and the sheer thrill of existence.” – Shadia Drury
Woman Sues TSA for Inserting Fingers Inside of Her During “Search”
By Jonathan Corbett | Professional Troublemaker | March 9, 2020
Michele Leuthauser was traveling from Las Vegas-McCarran International Airport last June wearing yoga pants that should have made it quite easy to determine that she was concealing nothing on the lower half of her body. But, because the TSA uses body scanners with a false positive rate somewhere in the range of 20-40% (some studies higher), Michele was flagged for additional screening: a pat-down of her “groin area.”
Unfortunately, a yet-to-be-identified TSA screener used this as an opportunity to violate Michele. While typically body scanner alarms are resolved with a quick and limited (yet still often invasive) pat-down right next to the machine, the screener directed Michele to a “private room.” Screening in a private room is supposed to be an option offered to passengers who feel more comfortable (an option I advise all travelers against taking at all costs), but for Michele it was mandatory.
When doing pat-downs, the TSA has little mats with footprints painted on to indicate to the passenger how to stand. But, the screener told Michele to spread her legs far wider than the mat — an order that seems common for TSA screeners about to inflict abuse.
She then proceeded to rub her hand on Michele’s vulva, pressing firmly enough to penetrate her labia with her finger through her leggings, and then continuing to rub her vulva until Michele, in shock, finally recoiled and told the screener to stop.
On Friday, I filed suit on behalf of Michele after TSA supervisors, local police, and TSA’s Office of the Chief Counsel refused to do anything about this incident.
While TSA policies (and the Constitution) obviously prohibit checkpoint body cavity searches, no one seems to care when normal screening turns to blatant sexual assault. I look forward to giving TSA incentive to care in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada.
Leuthauser v. TSA – Complaint (.pdf)
Jon Corbett is a civil rights attorney known for filing the first lawsuit against the deployment of TSA nude body scanners, as well as defeating the body scanners live in “How to Get ANYTHING Through TSA Nude Body Scanners.” Twitter: @_JonCorbett, Web: https://professional-troublemaker.com/
US Intel Agencies Played Unsettling Role in Classified and “9/11-like” Coronavirus Response Plan
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | March 13, 2020
As the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis comes to dominate headlines, little media attention has been given to the federal government’s decision to classify top-level meetings on domestic coronavirus response and lean heavily “behind the scenes” on U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon in planning for an allegedly imminent explosion of cases.
The classification of coronavirus planning meetings was first covered by Reuters, which noted that the decision to classify was “an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion.” Reuters further noted that the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Alex Azar, and his chief of staff had “resisted” the classification order, which was made in mid-January by the National Security Council (NSC), led by Robert O’Brien — a longtime friend and colleague of his predecessor John Bolton.
Following this order, HHS officials with the appropriate security clearances held meetings on coronavirus response at the department’s Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF), which are facilities “usually reserved for intelligence and military operations” and — in HHS’ case — for responses to “biowarfare or chemical attacks.” Several officials who spoke to Reuters noted that the classification decision prevented key experts from participating in meetings and slowed down the ability of HHS and the agencies it oversees, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to respond to the crisis by limiting participation and information sharing.
It has since been speculated that the decision was made to prevent potential leaks of information by stifling participation and that aspects of the planned response would cause controversy if made public, especially given that the decision to classify government meetings on coronavirus response negatively impacted HHS’ ability to respond to the crisis.
After the classification decision was made public, a subsequent report in Politico revealed that not only is the National Security Council managing the federal government’s overall response but that they are doing so in close coordination with the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. military. It states specifically that “NSC officials have been coordinating behind the scenes with the intelligence and defense communities to gauge the threat and prepare for the possibility that the U.S. government will have to respond to much bigger numbers—and soon.”
Little attention was given to the fact that the response to this apparently imminent jump in cases was being coordinated largely between elements of the national security state (i.e. the NSC, Pentagon, and intelligence), as opposed to civilian agencies or those focused on public health issues, and in a classified manner.
The Politico article also noted that the intelligence community is set to play a “key role” in a pandemic situation, but did not specify what the role would specifically entail. However, it did note that intelligence agencies would “almost certainly see an opportunity to exploit the crisis” given that international “epicenters of coronavirus [are] in high-priority counterintelligence targets like China and Iran.” It further added, citing former intelligence officials, that efforts would be made to recruit new human sources in those countries.
Politico cited the official explanation for intelligence’s interest in “exploiting the crisis” as merely being aimed at determining accurate statistics of coronavirus cases in “closed societies,” i.e. nations that do not readily cooperate or share intelligence with the U.S. government. Yet, Politico fails to note that Iran has long been targeted for CIA-driven U.S. regime change, specifically under the Trump administration, and that China had been fingered as the top threat to U.S. global hegemony by military officials well before the coronavirus outbreak.
A potential “9/11-like” response
The decision to classify government coronavirus preparations in mid-January, followed by the decision to coordinate the domestic response with the military and with intelligence deserves considerable scrutiny, particularly given that at least one federal agency, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), will be given broad, sweeping powers and will work closely with unspecified intelligence “partners” as part of its response to a pandemics like COVID-19.
The CBP’s pandemic response document, obtained by The Nation, reveals that the CBP’s pandemic directive “allows the agency to actively surveil and detain individuals suspected of carrying the illness indefinitely.” The Nation further notes that the plan was drafted during the George W. Bush administration, but is the agency’s most recent pandemic response plan and remains in effect.
Though only CBP’s pandemic response plan has now been made public, those of other agencies are likely to be similar, particularly on their emphasis on surveillance, given past precedent following the September 11 attacks and other times of national panic. Notably, several recent media reports have likened coronavirus to 9/11 and broached the possibility of a “9/11-like” response to coronavirus, suggestions that should concern critics of the post-9/11 “Patriot Act” and other controversial laws, executive orders and policies that followed.
While the plans of the federal government remain classified, recent reports have revealed that the military and intelligence communities — now working with the NSC to develop the government’s coronavirus response — have anticipated a massive explosion in cases for weeks. U.S. military intelligence came to the conclusion over a month ago that coronavirus cases would reach “pandemic proportions” domestically by the end of March. That military intelligence agency, known as the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), coordinates closely with the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct “medical SIGINT [signals intelligence].”
The coming government response, the agencies largely responsible for crafting it and its classified nature deserve public scrutiny now, particularly given the federal government’s tendency to not let “a serious crisis to go to waste,” as former President Obama’s then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel infamously said during the 2008 financial crisis. Indeed, during a time of panic — over a pandemic and over a simultaneous major economic downturn — concern over government overreach is warranted, particularly now given the involvement of intelligence agencies and the classification of planning for an explosion of domestic cases that the government believes is only weeks away.
Israel’s persecution of Khalida Jarrar, Member of Palestinian Parliament
If Americans Knew | March 10, 2020
Tell Congress to Free Khalida Jarrar: https://israelpalestinenews.org/actio…
Craig Murray kept in Strange Limbo, can’t gain access to Alex Salmond trial
By Craig Murray | March 10, 2020
My efforts to accredit to cover the Alex Salmond trial continue to be stonewalled. I therefore cannot gain access to the court which is closed to the public while the anonymous accusers give their evidence. Media only are able to watch via CCTV from a media room, which is where I am trying to get. The established media are of course overwhelmingly hostile to Alex Salmond.
You will recall the media behaviour at the coverage of the Julian Assange hearing. They turned up in force on day one and gave major coverage to the prosecution opening statement. The headlines screamed that Julian Assange had “put lives at risk”, and was just an “ordinary criminal”. They then almost entirely left, and gave virtually zero coverage to the defence’s comprehensive refutation of these arguments.
I suspect we are going to see a similar dynamic at play here. The prosecution led yesterday with its key witness and the most serious accusations. The media have used screaming headlines – today’s Times has five separate articles on the trial – and Ms H’s accusations are given in enormous, salacious detail. I am willing to wager very large sums of money that the defence are not given nearly the same level of coverage. Which is why I need to be in there to record what really happens.
I have established firmly that I am not being kept out for reasons of space. I have been passed around various officials, but the lady from “judicial communications” in charge of the court is willing to admit me provided the Scottish Courts and Tribunal Service (SCTS) is willing to accredit me with their media card. I filled in the forms for that and sent in the photo last week. So far no response from SCTS, except that they yesterday referred me to “judicial communications”, who referred me straight back to SCTS again. The old runaround.
I am extremely frustrated by this as this is the key witness (I know who Ms H is, incidentally) and key evidence I am missing. There are a number of other subjects on which I might be blogging, but the annoyance is knocking my concentration at present, for which I apologise.
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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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