FBI lawyer who altered evidence to enable spying on Trump gets PROBATION instead of jail
RT | January 29, 2021
The only FBI official charged in the improper use of FISA warrants to spy on President Donald Trump via campaign aide Carter Page got a slap on the wrist. Kevin Clinesmith’s sentence was a year of probation, and community service.
Clinesmith worked at the FBI General Counsel’s Office (GCO) and was assigned to Crossfire Hurricane, the probe of Trump’s alleged ties with Russia during the 2016 election. In that capacity, he altered an email from the CIA that described Page as a source for the spy agency, to say he was “not” a source – enabling the FBI to request a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against Page as a “Russian agent” – and, through him, spy on the Trump campaign, transition and presidency.
Boasberg was reportedly swayed by Clinesmith’s insistence that he’d acted in good faith and that his wife has a baby on the way, while shrugging-off Page’s testimony that his life had been ruined as the result of false claims he was a “Russian agent.” On Friday, federal judge James Boasberg – who also sits on the FISA court – sentenced Clinesmith to 12 months’ probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $100 fine.
The Republicans sitting on the House Judiciary Committee called the sentence “insanity” and “outrageous.”
Led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California), the Judiciary GOP first exposed the FISA abuse and published a memo about it in February 2018, revealing that the FBI had relied on the “Steele Dossier” – a collection of spurious claims compiled by a British spy and paid-for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign – in the initial spying request.
Others pointed out that Clinesmith’s transgression was far greater than almost anyone who ended up going to jail as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s ‘Russiagate’ probe. Campaign aide George Papadopoulos spent two weeks in jail for allegedly lying to the FBI – the same process crime Clinesmith pled guilty to last August – and General Michael Flynn spent four years trying to beat the same charge.
Clinesmith is also the only FBI official to face any scrutiny over the bureau’s handling of Crossfire Hurricane. Former director James Comey, his deputy Andy McCabe, lead agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page – all of whom were involved in the probe – have landed lucrative book contracts or cable news jobs, or become heroes of the Democrat “resistance” instead.
“The entire game is rigged,” said Federalist editor Sean Davis. “The rule of law is dead.”
The lenient sentence for a FBI lawyer altering evidence was seen as especially egregious, as, earlier this week, a Trump supporter going by the handle ‘Ricky Vaughn’ on Twitter was arrested and charged by the Biden administration for “conspiracy to deprive people of their voting rights” by posting memes that allegedly misled Clinton voters in 2016.
“As outrageous as this is, it’s also useful. It’s in our faces now,” wrote lawyer and filmmaker Mike Cernovich. “When they come for more Trump supporters… Remember today.”
Democrats, who spent the past four years insisting that “no one is above the law” and that Trump must be investigated for an array of suspected crimes, did not comment.
UK Climate Assembly was undemocratic
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 29, 2021
Ben Pile lifts the lid on the undemocratic Climate Assembly:
London, 29 January: The UK Climate Assembly, which claimed to have delivered a mandate for a green revolution, could not have delivered a mandate of any kind, according to a new analysis published by the Global Warming Policy Forum.
According to the report’s author, Ben Pile, the Assembly was set up to deliver a preordained result:
It was in no way a democratic process. Almost everyone involved with convening the assembly, and almost everyone who spoke to it, was involved with environmental campaigning to some extent. Most can be linked to a small group of wealthy environmental funders.”
Pile says that the Assembly was actually set up because the public were unpersuaded of the case for radical action.
Politicians agreed the net zero target without debate and at best lukewarm public support. The Assembly was an attempt to provide a justification for strong policy measures, but it is ridiculous to suggest that a project like this could deliver some sort of a mandate. The assembly was an attempt to sidestep the democratic process.”
The UK Climate Assembly: Manufacturing Mandates can be downloaded here
https://www.thegwpf.com/climate-assembly-was-undemocratic/
Ben’s conclusion sums it up nicely:
Particularly intriguing is Ben’s exposure of the flagrant bias of the speakers and organisers. I have already highlighted the fact that the four Expert Leads, who organised the assembly, are all part of the climate mafia. Ben goes further:
This is really quite disgraceful, and is the sort of thing that would have been at home in the USSR.
Morley v. CIA
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | January 27, 2021
After the end of World War II, the U.S. national-security establishment convinced the American people that there existed an international communist conspiracy to take over the United States and the rest of the world. This supposed conspiracy, U.S. officials steadfastly maintained, was based in Moscow, Russia. During the Cold War, the tentacles of this supposed conspiracy spread to China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and other places around the world, including the United States. The Reds, they said, were everywhere and were coming to get us.
This supposed threat of communism, in fact, is what motivated U.S. officials to convert the federal government into a national-security state, a totalitarian type of governmental structure in which officials wield omnipotent powers, such as assassination. It also motivated U.S. officials to intervene in the civil wars in Korea and Vietnam, which killed more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers, many of whom had been conscripted to “serve.” The Pentagon and the CIA maintained that if the communists weren’t stopped over there, they would soon be in the halls of Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, not to mention the public schools, running the country over here.
Thus, for an American few things could be considered worse than to be labeled a communist. People who were suspected of being communists were fired from their jobs, ostracized, and sometimes criminally prosecuted. Recall the McCarthy hearings, when many people’s lives were destroyed simply through the government’s asking the question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Recall the Hollywood Blacklist and the criminal prosecution of Hollywood writer Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Ten. Recall the spying on and blackmail of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, who U.S. officials suspected of being a communist.
Immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy, the word went out that he had been killed by a communist, a young former U.S. Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald. The very first organization to begin publicizing Oswald’s communist bona fides was an anti-Castro exile group in New Orleans called the DRE, which immediately sent out a press release announcing that Oswald was a communist. The publicity was highly effective in dissuading people, especially people on the left, from questioning the official narrative of the assassination — that Kennedy had been killed by a communist. People were scared to death that if they questioned the official narrative, they would be labeled communists or communist sympathizers.
What people did not know at the time — and what they would not discover for several decades — was that the DRE was being secretly funded and directed by the CIA. The CIA’s supervising officer for the DRE was a man named George Joannides.
In the late 1990s, former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley uncovered Joannides’ role in the DRE back in 1963 and began requesting the CIA for its files on Joannides. The CIA steadfastly refused to comply with Morley’s request and made it clear that it would never disclose most of Joannides’s secret activities.
Morley filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the CIA, which, owing to the massive resistance of the CIA, lasted for years. The fascinating story of Morley’s battle against CIA secrecy on Joannides is now told in FFF’s newest book, Morley v. CIA: My Unfinished JFK Investigation, which is available in Kindle format on Amazon for $1.
In the course of his investigation and litigation, Morley uncovered some fascinating and intriguing facts about Joannides. In the 1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations reopened the investigation into the Kennedy assassination. When committee attorneys began seeking too many documents relating to Oswald’s trip to Mexico City, the CIA called Joannides out of retirement, ostensibly to serve as a facilitator between the House committee and the CIA.
As it turned out, however, Joannides’s real role was to serve as an obstructor to the efforts by the House committee attorneys to securing JFK-assassination-related information from the CIA, including information relating to Oswald’s trip to Mexico City. In the process, Joannides and the CIA failed to disclose his role with the DRE in the months leading up to the assassination, just as they had failed to disclose it to the Warren Commission back in 1964.
During the term of the Assassination Records Review Board, Joannides and the CIA once again failed to disclose his pre-assassination relationship to the DRE. Former House Select Committee counsel Robert Blakey later accused the CIA of obstruction of justice, which is a felony. Judge John Tunheim, who chaired the ARRB, declared that “the Agency should come completely clean.”
But the CIA refused to come clean on Joannides, as detailed in Morley’s fascinating account of his long judicial fight against the CIA.
Morley is the author of another book published by FFF: CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files. He will be delivering two presentations at FFF’s upcoming online weekly conference series “JFK’s Foreign Policy and the Assassination.”
The conference series will begin on Wednesday, March 3, and continue weekly on Wednesdays through April 21. Registrations will open next month. Admission will be free.
Proud Boys Leader Was ‘Prolific’ FBI Snitch: Court Docs
Enrique Tarrio (left)
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | January 27, 2021
While US officials claim that ‘far-right extremism’ is one of the largest threats facing America, the leader of the group most commonly singled out as an example – the Proud Boys – was a ‘prolific’ informant for federal and local law enforcement, according to Reuters, citing a 2014 federal court proceeding.
Enrique Tarrio repeatedly worked undercover for investigators following a 2012 arrest, court documents reveal.
Curiously, Tarrio was ordered to stay away from Washington D.C. one day before the January 6 Capitol riot after he was arrested on vandalism and weapons charges – upon a request by government prosecutors that he be prohibited from attending. At least five Proud Boys members were charged as part of the riot.
In the 2014 hearing, a federal prosecutor, an FBI agent and Tarrio’s attorney describe his undercover work – noting that the Proud Boys leader helped authorities prosecute over a dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling, according to Reuters.
In a Tuesday interview with Reuters, Tarrio denied working undercover or cooperating in cases.
“I don’t know any of this,” he said, adding “I don’t recall any of this.”
Law-enforcement officials and the court transcript contradict Tarrio’s denial. In a statement to Reuters, the former federal prosecutor in Tarrio’s case, Vanessa Singh Johannes, confirmed that “he cooperated with local and federal law enforcement, to aid in the prosecution of those running other, separate criminal enterprises, ranging from running marijuana grow houses in Miami to operating pharmaceutical fraud schemes.”
Tarrio, 36, is a high-profile figure who organizes and leads the right-wing Proud Boys in their confrontations with those they believe to be Antifa, short for “anti-fascism,” an amorphous and often violent leftist movement. The Proud Boys were involved in the deadly insurrection at the Capitol January 6.
The records uncovered by Reuters are startling because they show that a leader of a far-right group now under intense scrutiny by law enforcement was previously an active collaborator with criminal investigators. – Reuters
During Tarrio’s 2014 hearing, both the prosecutor and Tarrio’s defense attorney asked for a reduced prison sentence after pleading guilty in a fraud case related to the relabeling and sale of stolen diabetes test kits. In requesting leniency for Tarrio and two co-defendants, the prosecutor noted that Tarrio’s information had resulted in the prosecution of 13 people on federal charges in two separate cases, and helped local authorities investigate a gambling ring.
Tarrio’s former attorney, Jeffrey Feiler, noted that his client worked undercover several times – one involving “wholesale prescription narcotics,” another involving the sale of anabolic steroids, and a third involving human smuggling. Tarrio also helped police uncover three marijuana grow houses, and was a “prolific” cooperator, according to the report.
In the smuggling case, Tarrio, “at his own risk, in an undercover role met and negotiated to pay $11,000 to members of that ring to bring in fictitious family members of his from another country,” the lawyer said in court.
In an interview, Feiler said he did not recall details about the case but added, “The information I provided to the court was based on information provided to me by law enforcement and the prosecutor.”
An FBI agent at the hearing called Tarrio a “key component” in local police investigations involving marijuana, cocaine and MDMA, or ecstasy. The Miami FBI office declined comment. –Reuters
Reuters notes that there is no evidence Tarrio has cooperated with authorities since his previous involvement, however he admitted to notifying local law enforcement prior to Proud Boys rallies in various cities – letting police know of the group’s plans. Tarrio said he stopped this coordination after December 12 due to the DC police cracking down on the group.
Tarrio’s involvement with law enforcement will no doubt fuel speculation over just how ‘organic’ the threat of ‘far-right extremism’ is, particularly when the vast majority of violence observed over 2020 was committed by far-left groups rioting in the name of racial justice.
Signal, the ‘encrypted messenger of the future,’ has shady links to US national security interests
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | January 27, 2021
If the sudden popularity of the encrypted messenger Signal has seemed suspicious to you, you may be onto something – the app is at least partially funded through American foreign influence cutouts.
On January 4, WhatsApp announced sweeping changes to its privacy policies, affecting the vast bulk of its approximately two billion users globally.
The poorly explained rules were interpreted by many as proof that the messaging service was about to commence sharing users’ private data, including their conversations, with parent company Facebook, and in response millions the world over began flocking to alternative messaging services that offered end-to-end encryption.
The most common destinations for WhatsApp exiles were, and remain, Signal and Telegram. For reasons unclear, while available figures suggest the latter has to date received many orders of magnitude more fresh arrivals than the former, corporate news outlets have overwhelmingly focused on Signal’s surging intake.
Much of this coverage has been highly approving – for instance, The Guardian published a lengthy explainer on January 24 titled “Is it time to leave WhatsApp, and is Signal the answer?” The headline was answered very much in the affirmative, to the extent that readers were offered advice on persuading their contacts to likewise make the switch.
The media’s damascene conversion to the cause of encrypted communication is rather incongruous. With a few notable exceptions, mainstream reporting on encryption is typically neutral, if not outright condemnatory, the capability frequently framed as purposefully offering sanctuary to philanderers, drug dealers, paedophiles, assassins, and anyone with something sinister to hide in general.
Such perspectives strongly reflect the public positions of governments and security services worldwide, to which end-to-end encryption is by definition an extreme detriment, significantly curtailing the monitoring and collection of citizens’ communications. Privacy advocates contend authorities’ oft-expressed anxieties about encryption providing a “safe space” for criminals and the like are a cynical smokescreen to justify crackdowns on their usage and availability.
Whatever the truth of the matter, efforts to restrict access to end-to-end encryption are demonstrably ongoing, but have predominantly gone largely uncriticized if not outright unremarked upon. Now though, news outlets seem widely gripped by encryption fever.
In a palpable illustration of this abrupt paradigm shift, a mere three days before it effectively urged its readers to install Signal, The Guardian lambasted Facebook’s plans to implement end-to-end encryption across all its messaging platforms, on the basis that the move could harm efforts to reduce child exploitation.
‘At no cost around the globe’
Serious discussion of Signal’s history, and funding sources, has been entirely absent from the deluge of puff pieces on the platform to circulate far and wide in recent weeks – an omission perhaps predictable given the centrality of the US national security state to the app’s financing, creation and promotion.
Signal was launched by now-defunct Open Whisper Systems (OWS) in 2013, brainchild of shadowy tech guru ‘Moxie Marlinspike’ – real name Matthew Rosenfeld. In February 2018, responsibility for managing the app passed to the nonprofit Signal Foundation, launched with $50 million in startup capital provided by billionaire former Facebook higher-up Brian Acton, the Foundation’s executive chair.
OWS never published financial statements or disclosed the identities of its funders at any point during its operation, although the sums involved in launching and maintaining a messaging platform used by a vast number of people internationally over several years were surely significant.
Rosenfeld alleges the app “never [took] VC funding or sought investment” at any point during that time, and quite how much money was involved in total is a mystery. It’s clear though that at least $2,955,000 was provided by the Open Technology Fund (OTF) 2013-2016, and the organization’s website refers to Signal being “originally developed with OTF funding.”
The site is also home to a dedicated OWS profile, which boasts of how the OTF “enabled the OWS team to continue providing Signal at no cost around the globe and adapt their operations for a growing user base.”
Propaganda radio rabbit hole
The OTF was created in 2012 as a pilot program of Radio Free Asia (RFA), an asset of US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which is in turn funded by US Congress to the tune of $637 million annually – in August 2018, its then-CEO acknowledged the outlet’s priorities “reflect US national security interests.”
RFA’s own origins harken back to 1948, when National Security Council Directive 10/2 officially authorized the then-newly created Central Intelligence Agency to engage in operations targeted at communist states, including propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, subversion, and “assistance to underground resistance movements.”
After the CIA’s role was made public in the 1970s, Congress took over running and funding the stations, before in 1999 they were grouped along with other state-run media entities under the umbrella of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, USAGM’s forerunner.
The station formed a key part of this effort, along with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation From Bolshevism, later Radio Liberty – it broadcast unrelenting propaganda in China, North Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere. In 2007, the CIA’s official website stated these “psychological warfare” initiatives were among “the longest-running and successful covert action campaigns” the US ever mounted.
‘Shadow internet systems’
The launch of the OTF followed the US State Department, then led by Hillary Clinton, pursuing an “Internet Freedom” policy, ostensibly an effort to develop tools to subvert restrictive internet policies.
However, an extensive June 2011 New York Times investigation pointed to a far darker raison d’etre, concluding that the endeavor was in fact an effort “to deploy ‘shadow’ internet and mobile phone systems dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments.”
Among these assets were State Department-funded “stealth wireless networks,” which would enable activists “to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya.”
Reinforcing this conclusion, in February 2015 Jillian York, director of the International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an OTF advisory board member, stated that she “fundamentally” believed Internet Freedom was “at heart an agenda of regime change.”
It may be no coincidence that Signal founder Rosenfeld previously created encrypted communications programs TextSecure and RedPhone, both featured in a March 2013 Gizmodo guide, “Which Encryption Apps Are Strong Enough to Help You Take Down a Government?”
USAGM is moreover evidently extremely proud of Signal, an official factsheet published November 2019 giving the app top-billing in a list of “tools supported by OTF.” The agency might be, given how popular it has become with dissidents overseas, including those in countries and regions of intense interest to Washington.
For example, Signal became the messaging platform of choice for protesters in Hong Kong after its launch, just as the National Endowment for Democracy, the US government regime-change arm, greatly increased its direct and indirect support and promotion of activists and activist groups there.
In an unexpected twist, in June 2020 funding for a number of USAGM projects was unexpectedly frozen, including OTF plans to directly aid protesters in Hong Kong, just as the administrative region prepared to implement a highly controversial and much-contested national security law.
One was the creation of cybersecurity incident response teams to analyze Chinese surveillance techniques in real-time during demonstration, and share relevant information directly with developers of secure communications apps, in order to circumvent crackdowns and restrictions. Another shelved initiative was a $500,000 rapid response fund in support of anyone subject to “digital attack” by authorities.
Still, the next month Signal became the most-downloaded app in Hong Kong, the app’s official Twitter account resultantly boasting that unlike competitor Telegram, which had just announced it would cease cooperating with authorities’ requests for user data, “we never started turning over user data to HK police.”
Devil on your shoulder
There’s no suggestion whatsoever that any US security agency had a direct hand in crafting the app’s now world-standard encryption system, or plays a day-to-day role running the company. However, the same can’t be said of popular internet anonymity browser Tor, which is frequently recommended by privacy advocates in the same breath as Signal.
First developed by US Naval Research Laboratory employees in the mid-1990s, Tor quickly caught the attention of the Defense and Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and since then has been almost entirely funded by US government entities, including the Pentagon, to the tune of tens of millions.
Its original purpose was to shield clandestine government operatives from detection in the field, by insulating them from the inherently open nature of the internet, although the potential of Tor’s anonymizing powers to enable regime change in enemy countries wasn’t lost on its funders. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s also supported by the OTF, and features alongside Signal in the aforementioned USAGM factsheet.
In March 2011, Tor developer Mike Perry conceded the browser may “unfortunately” not provide effective sanctuary from prying governmental eyes.
“Extremely well-funded adversaries that are able to observe large portions of the internet can probably break aspects of Tor and may be able to deanonymize users,” he said. “Though I personally don’t believe any adversary can reliably deanonymize all Tor users… attacks on anonymity are subtle and cumulative in nature.”
Among the most well-funded “adversaries” of internet privacy are of course the NSA and GCHQ, and classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed the partner agencies devote considerable time and resources to attacking and undermining the service and its users.
However, the papers also indicated the pair were keen not to discourage citizens from using Tor. After all, given that it congregates anyone and everyone with something or other to hide on a single network, surveilling their activities is made all the easier. So does Signal – and therein lies the rub.
Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
How the FBI Created Domestic Terrorism: 80 Years of Psychological Warfare Revealed
By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | January 25, 2021
Since it has become increasingly evident that a vast extension of the Patriot Act will soon be unveiled that threatens to re-define “the war on terror” to include essentially anyone who disagrees with the governing neoliberal agenda, it is probably a good time to evaluate how and why terrorism – domestic or otherwise – has tended to arise over the past century.
If, in the course of conducting this evaluation, we find that terrorism is truly a “naturally occurring phenomenon”, then perhaps we might conclude alongside many eminent figures of the intelligence community and Big Tech, that new pre-emptive legislation targeting the rise of a new conservative-minded domestic terrorist movement is somehow necessary. Maybe the censoring of free speech, and the surveillance of millions of Americans by the Five Eyes is a necessary evil for the sake of the greater good.
However, if it is revealed that the thing we call “terrorism”, is something other than a naturally occurring, self-organized phenomenon, but rather something which only exists due to vast support from western political agencies, then a very different conclusion must be arrived at which may be disturbing for some.
But how to proceed?
Before it was revealed that ISIS was being supported by a network of Anglo-American intelligence agencies and their allies in a failed effort to overthrow Bashar al Assad, an exhaustive 2012 study was conducted by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. This study provides a convenient entry point to our inquiry.
In this course of its investigation, researchers at Fordham discovered that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the 138 terrorist incidents recorded in the USA between 2001-2012 involved FBI informants who played leading roles in planning out, supplying weapons, instructions and even recruiting Islamic terrorists to carry out terrorist acts on U.S. soil. Reporting on the Fordham study, The Nation reported on this scandal stating:
“Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants—who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own—have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.”
Of course, this trend preceded 9/11 itself as we see in the case of FBI informant Emad Salem (formerly associated with the Egyptian Military) who recorded hundreds of hours of conversation between himself and his FBI handlers which were reported publicly by the New York Times on October 28, 1993. Why is this important? Because Emad Salem was the figure who rented the van, hotel rooms, provided bomb-making instruction, tested out explosives on behalf of Mohammed Salamah and 15 other terrorists who carried out the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing which injured 1000 and killed 6 people.
Even though several large-scale military war game scenarios were conducted between October 2000 and July 2001 featuring planes flying into both the World Trade Center buildings and Pentagon, the incoming Neocon administration were somehow caught with their pants down when the events of 9/11 finally took place (conveniently at a moment that NORAD had suffered a total breakdown of their continental warning and response systems). When all flights were grounded over the coming several days, Cheney and his PNAC cohorts ensured that the only flights permitted to leave the USA was crammed with high level Saudi royals- including the Bin Laden family.
Why was this done?
As the declassified 28 pages from the 9/11 Commission report went far to demonstrate, the Saudis- largely coordinated by Prince Bandar Bin Sultan (Saudi Ambassador to the USA from 1983-2005 and Bush family insider) had provided the foundation for a cover story that was carefully scripted to justify the 9/11 incident.
Whether the plot was hatched by CIA-Saudi sponsored terrorists as some assume, or whether it was a controlled demolition as hundreds of architects and engineers have testified to (or whether it was a combination of both stories), one thing is certain: The official narrative is a lie and no matter how you try to explain it, two airplanes cannot cause the collapse of three WTC buildings.
Another thing is certain: Biden was happy.
Not only did Joe Biden act as one of the most aggressive voices for the invasion of Iraq in the days following 9/11, but he even bragged publicly that John Ashcroft’s 2001 Patriot Act was modelled nearly verbatim on his own failed 1994 Omnibus domestic surveillance legislation drafted in response to the first 9/11 attack and 1994 Oklahoma City bombing.
Another important outcome of 9/11 involved the re-organization of the FBI with a focus on domestic terrorist surveillance, prevention, disruption and entrapment.
In 2001, MI5’s Chief came to the USA where then-FBI director Robert Mueller was assigned the task of carrying out this new remix of U.S. intelligence that involved re-activating many of the worst characteristics of the FBI’s earlier COINTEL PRO operations that were made public during the 1974 Church Committee hearings.
A Christian Science Monitor report from May 19, 2004 cited the changes in the following terms:
“They have done a number of things to move them in the direction of an MI5,” says a person close to the changes. “They’ve created agents who are trained to have an intelligence function. They’re monitoring organizations within the U.S. that pose threats to national security … not with an eye toward prosecuting, but toward collecting and analyzing that information.”
An incredible report by investigative Journalist Edward Spannaus included a short list of some of the most extreme cases of FBI entrapment between 2001-2013 in the USA:
“One of the most egregious of these cases is the so-called “Newburgh Four” in New York State, in which an informant in 2008-09 offered the defendants $250,000, as well as weapons, to carry out a terrorist plot. The New York University Center for Human Rights and Justice reviewed this case and two others, and concluded: “The government’s informants introduced and aggressively pushed ideas about violent jihad and, moreover, actually encouraged the defendants to believe it was their duty to take action against the United States.”
The Federal judge presiding over the Newburgh case, Colleen McMahon, declared that it was “beyond question that the government created the crime here,” and criticized the Bureau for sending informants “trolling among the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role—any role—in criminal activity.”
In Portland, Ore., it was disclosed during the trial of the “Christmas Tree bomber” earlier this year, that the FBI had actually produced its own terrorist training video, which was shown to the defendant, depicting men with covered faces shooting guns and setting off bombs using a cell phone as a detonator. The FBI operative also traveled with the target to a remote location where they detonated an actual bomb concealed in a backpack as a trial run for the planned attack.
In Brooklyn, N.Y., in 2012, an FBI agent posing as an al-Qaeda operative supplied a target with fake explosives for a 1,000-pound bomb, which the FBI’s victim then attempted to detonate outside the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan.
In Irvine, Calif., in 2007, an FBI informant was so blatant in attempting to entrap members of the local Islamic Center into violent jihadi actions, that the mosque went to court and got a restraining order against the informant.
In Pittsburgh, Khalifa Ali al-Akili became so suspicious of two “jihadi” FBI informants who were trying to recruit him to buy a gun and to go to Pakistan for training, that he contacted both the London Guardian and the Washington-based National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, and told them that he feared the FBI was trying to entrap him. The National Coalition scheduled a press conference for March 16, 2012, at which al-Akili was to speak and identify the informants, but the day before the scheduled press conference, the FBI arrested al-Akili, charging him not with terrorism, but with illegal possession of a firearm.
The chief informant trying to entrap al-Akili turned out to be Shaden Hussain, a longtime FBI informant who had set up two earlier terrorism cases: the above-cited Newburgh, N.Y., case for which he was paid $100,000, and another in Albany, N.Y., for which his payments are not known.”
Not Only the USA
This post 9/11 practice was not isolated to the USA, as a Canadian appeals court overruled guilty sentences handed down to an idiotic couple who were caught by the RCMP before their July 2016 jihadi plot to bomb a public venue on Canada Day could occur. Why did the appeals judge overrule their sentence? Because it became clear that every single member of the operation which radicalized the young couple, trained them to make bombs and even scripted their attack were RCMP informants!
Earlier cases of controlled domestic terrorist movements in Canada saw CSIS (Canada’s Security and Intelligence Service) erase thousands of hours of wiretaps of Sikh terrorists that detonated bombs in 1984 which lead to 329 dead in the worst act of aviation terrorism until 9/11. Despite this destruction of evidence, CSIS was absolved of its sins in 2005 by the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC). It was also this same organization that was revealed to have co-founded the white supremacist Heritage Front in 1988, and continued to finance it with tax payer funds using CSIS agent Grant Bristol as the conduit and Heritage Front controller until at least 1994.
Anglo-Canadian intelligence controls of domestic terrorism actually go as far back as the bomb-loving Front de Liberation Quebec (FLQ) of the 1960s that set dozens of mailbox bombs across the province. Not only did the RCMP Security Services get caught red handed managing FLQ cells, spreading FLQ graffiti on buildings and even supplying explosives to the group itself, but the FLQ’s “intellectual leader” (Pierre Vallieres) was also the Editor-in-Chief of the very same magazine (Cite Libre) which was run for a decade by none other than Canada’s Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau!
When major press agencies blew the whistle on the federal intelligence agencies behind the FLQ which justified months of Martial Law in Quebec in 1970, Trudeau’s right hand man (and fellow Cite Libre writer) Michael Pitfield created a new organization called the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in 1983 as a branch of the Privy Council Office in order to continue psychological operations going under a new name.
If anyone wishes to look through the voluminous RCMP/CSIS files accumulated on Pierre Trudeau’s strange connections with the FLQ and broader Fabian Society networks during the Cold War, they would be out of luck as historians were informed in 2019 that the entire Trudeau record archive were secretly destroyed by CSIS in 1989 simply because they “weren’t interesting”.
It is important to keep in mind that the RCMP’s techniques were not specifically Canadian, but were innovated by the FBI’s Counter-intelligence Program (COINTEL PRO) which J. Edgar Hoover launched in 1956 in order to subvert “dangerous civil rights groups” then emerging under the leadership of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King Jr. From the program’s inception until its nominal death in 1975, not only did the FBI infiltrate every anti-establishment grouping from the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA), to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), NAACP to the Black nationalist movements throughout the 1960s, but ensured that its informants played leading roles in instilling internal conflict, radicalized groups towards violence and even set up leaders like Fred Hampton for assassination.
The strange case of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers who enjoyed vast institutional support and protection after their time running domestic terrorism as leaders of the Weather Underground is something that should also be investigated. The fact that both domestic terrorists not only became affluent Soros-tied education reformers, and early sponsors of Barack Obama’s political career is more than just a tiny anomaly which can simply be dismissed. (1)
Where did Hoover’s FBI generate COINTEL PRO tactics?
To answer this question, we need to look further back to British Intelligence’s Camp X, established in December 1941 in Canada with the mandate to train American and Canadian spies under the control of spymaster William Stephenson (station chief for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in New York).
The motive for Camp X had two interconnected components:
1) Prepare the groundwork for a deeper integration of U.S.-British Intelligence in preparation for the purge of patriotic U.S. intelligence officers allied to FDR’s vision of the post-war age, and
2) Train U.S. spies in the art of “secret warfare” which included counterfeiting, psychological warfare, propaganda, counter insurgency, assassination, and infiltration of target groups.
The integration of “full spectrum” alternative warfare tactics such as MK Ultra (modelled and steered by Britain’s earlier Tavis stock clinic), media propaganda (see: Project Mockingbird) and cultural war (see: the rise of modern art and atonalism promoted by the Congress For Cultural Freedom) were but a few of the tactics that were integrated during this process, and which continue virulently to this day.
Under Stephenson’s direction and staffed with Canadian RCMP operatives, the first generation of OSS spymasters were trained; including leading figures of the FBI’s Division 5 who went onto reformulate their WWII Camp X training in the form of assassination operations such as Permindex (operated by Camp X’s Major General Louis Mortimer Bloomfield).
In Conclusion
While I could have said more about the origins of America’s Secret Police which arose under Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, or the earlier deployment of domestic terrorism by Freemasonic lodges affiliated with Albert Pike (founder of the Ku Klux Klan) in an effort to undo Lincoln’s vision for industrial restoration of the South, these stories will have to be left for another time.
For now, it is enough to state that the “war on terror” set into motion by the World Trade Center attacks of 1993 and 2001, is now expanding to target a broad spectrum of the American population who would be morally resistant to the sorts of anti-human policies demanded by Great Reset Technocrats. This dishonest effort must be exposed and rejected before those actual controllers of terrorism attain their objectives: The destruction of nation states, the imposition of a new ethical paradigm premised on depopulation and entropy.
“I do everything my TV tells me to do” – That’s why we’re hurtling towards the Great Reset
THE DAILY EXPOSE • JANUARY 18, 2021
If the current pandemic of dictatorial tyranny sweeping across the world has taught us anything, it is that the majority of humanity has been so well trained to obey authority that it is now incapable of free thought and afraid to ask questions. Never before have we seen such docile conformance to words echoing from the speakers of a television screen as when the Prime Minister of the UK announced in March 2020 that he had “one simple instruction” for the British people… ”You must stay at home”. But Mr Johnson spoke through the ‘telescreen’, and the nation listened.
Within an instant the UK economy came to a halt, without question, all because a man, in a suit, on the TV said it should. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed their doors to customers and staff. Schools and nurseries closed their doors to children, which in turn lead to parents being unable to work because they could not find care for their children. Unless of course the man, in a suit on the TV told them that there job was deemed essential, in which case it was fine to send their children to school and go out to work.
“Three weeks” was what the man, in a suit, on the TV said the country needed “to flatten the curve,”. But three weeks turned into five weeks, which turned into eight weeks, which turned into fourteen weeks. I wonder how many would have complied for so long with an instruction given to them by a man, in a suit, on the TV if it had not been for another man, in a suit, on the TV promising to subsidize up to eighty percent of their wages for sitting at home and not working?
Sounds great doesn’t it, sitting at home and still being paid. The people so eager to accept this scheme most likely didn’t realise that A) it was not the man, in a suit, on the TV paying these wages, it was in fact the British taxpayer. B) They would have to pay this money back in the future via higher taxes, and C) that’s only if they still had a job to pay those taxes as the only purpose of this scheme was to delay everyone’s unemployment to ensure that they complied. It was never about making sure you were going to be okay and have a job to go back to, it was about making sure you were complicit in the destruction of the job market as we know it, in order to bring in the new age of AI.
We bet the authorities could not believe their luck at how easy it was to get the vast majority of every man and woman in the land to obey an instruction that was emitted via the telescreen, and boy have they made the most of it ever since.
On the 3rd April 2020, Professor Jonathan Van Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England, told the British public via the ‘telescreen’ that he had spoke with a colleague in Hong Kong who had carried out an evidence review for the World Health Organisation and stated they “were of the same mind that there is no evidence that the general wearing of face masks by the public affects the spread of a disease in our society, what matters right now is social distancing. In terms of the hard evidence, we do not recommend face masks for general wearing by the public.”
Yet fast forward four months and the Government enforced the wearing of face coverings in all indoor public settings. However we did not instantly see a swarm of face nappy clad folk outdoors for over a week, and why was that? Because the man, in a suit, on the TV said this would not come into force for another week. That week came and went and on the day of enforcement there was not a smile to be seen. But what does that say about the majority of the British public and their acquiescence to authority. Not wearing a face covering because they genuinely thought it would work in the “fight against the virus”, but wearing it because a man, in a suit, on the TV said they would be subject to a £200 fine if they refused to do so. We know this to be true because they would have worn the face covering from the moment it was announced they were required otherwise.
Fast forward another few months and we were told by Professor Jonathan Van Tam, again via the ‘telescreen’ that he did not think there would “come a moment when we can have a big party and throw our masks and hand sanitiser and say ‘that’s it, it’s behind us’ like the end of the war? No I don’t.” Insisting that the wearing of face masks “may persist for many years and that may be a good thing”.
The contractions on the wearing of face masks alone should have been enough for the British public to wake up and question why they were partaking in the destruction of the world as they knew it, unknowingly bringing in a “new normal” and a chance for the globalists to fast forward their “great reset” agenda. But disappointingly it has yet to be the case.
Instead we are now stuck in a cycle of stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives, repeat. Whenever a man, in a suit, on the TV appears on the British public’s ‘telescreen’s’ they stand to attention and hang on every word that echoes from the speaker. We don’t hold much hope that this will change anytime soon, instead we are stuck firmly on the road to the ‘Great Reset’ and we’re hurtling towards it at a few hundred miles per hour.
They do everything their TV tells them to do…but do you?
Russia rejects any closed-door discussion of Syrian chemical case at UN Security Council
Press TV – January 25, 2021
Russia’s permanent ambassador to the United Nations says Moscow will oppose any attempt to return to closed-door discussions on the purported use of chemical arms in Syria at the UN Security Council.
Vassily Nebenzia, the permanent representative of the Russian Federation to the UN, said on Monday that the United Kingdom, which will become the head of the Council for the month of February, has proposed to return to discussing Syria’s chemical case behind closed doors.
He added, in an interview with TASS news agency, that such discussions would be held “without video conference and also without the participation of the representative of Syria, but we’ll oppose that.”
“With our initiative, these sessions have become open, and we do not see why they should hide from the public community,” Nebenzia further said, as cited by Syria’s official SANA news agency.
The Russian envoy said the international community must be aware of what is going on about the chemical file in Syria, “so we would insist that the meeting be open.”
The Syrian government surrendered its stockpiles of chemical weapons in 2013 to a joint mission led by the UN and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which oversaw the destruction of the weaponry.
However, Western governments and their allies have never stopped pointing the finger at Damascus whenever an apparent chemical attack has taken place.
Damascus has time and again strongly denied any use of chemical weapons, saying it is not in possession of such weapons and remains committed to cooperating with OPCW.
On January 5, Syria lambasted Western pressure aimed at forcing the OPCW and its member states to adopt a French-Western draft resolution that falsely claimed its “Syria’s non-abidance” by the obligations according to the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Damascus further stressed that any resolution that would be released by the Executive Council based on the fabrications of the OPCW Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) was a politicized resolution with the aim of accusing the Syrian government of using chemical weapons and acquitting the terrorists and their sponsors.
Back in December, Syria also emphasized the necessity of closing its chemical file for good after it fulfilled all the obligations entailed by its accession to the Chemical Weapons Convention 2013.
American Pravda: How the CIA Invented “Conspiracy Theories”
BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 5, 2016
A year or two ago, I saw the much-touted science fiction film Interstellar, and although the plot wasn’t any good, one early scene was quite amusing. For various reasons, the American government of the future claimed that our Moon Landings of the late 1960s had been faked, a trick aimed at winning the Cold War by bankrupting Russia into fruitless space efforts of its own. This inversion of historical reality was accepted as true by nearly everyone, and those few people who claimed that Neil Armstrong had indeed set foot on the Moon were universally ridiculed as “crazy conspiracy theorists.” This seems a realistic portrayal of human nature to me.
Obviously, a large fraction of everything described by our government leaders or presented in the pages of our most respectable newspapers—from the 9/11 attacks to the most insignificant local case of petty urban corruption—could objectively be categorized as a “conspiracy theory” but such words are never applied. Instead, use of that highly loaded phrase is reserved for those theories, whether plausible or fanciful, that do not possess the endorsement stamp of establishmentarian approval.
Put another way, there are good “conspiracy theories” and bad “conspiracy theories,” with the former being the ones promoted by pundits on mainstream television shows and hence never described as such. I’ve sometimes joked with people that if ownership and control of our television stations and other major media outlets suddenly changed, the new information regime would require only a few weeks of concerted effort to totally invert all of our most famous “conspiracy theories” in the minds of the gullible American public. The notion that nineteen Arabs armed with box-cutters hijacked several jetliners, easily evaded our NORAD air defenses, and reduced several landmark buildings to rubble would soon be universally ridiculed as the most preposterous “conspiracy theory” ever to have gone straight from the comic books into the minds of the mentally ill, easily surpassing the absurd “lone gunman” theory of the JFK assassination.
Even without such changes in media control, huge shifts in American public beliefs have frequently occurred in the recent past, merely on the basis of implied association. In the initial weeks and months following the 2001 attacks, every American media organ was enlisted to denounce and vilify Osama Bin Laden, the purported Islamicist master-mind, as our greatest national enemy, with his bearded visage endlessly appearing on television and in print, soon becoming one of the most recognizable faces in the world. But as the Bush Administration and its key media allies prepared a war against Iraq, the images of the Burning Towers were instead regularly juxtaposed with mustachioed photos of dictator Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden’s arch-enemy. As a consequence, by the time we attacked Iraq in 2003, polls revealed that some 70% of the American public believed that Saddam was personally involved in the destruction of our World Trade Center. By that date I don’t doubt that many millions of patriotic but low-information Americans would have angrily denounced and vilified as a “crazy conspiracy theorist” anyone with the temerity to suggest that Saddam had not been behind 9/11, despite almost no one in authority having ever explicitly made such a fallacious claim.
These factors of media manipulation were very much in my mind a couple of years ago when I stumbled across a short but fascinating book published by the University of Texas academic press. The author of Conspiracy Theory in America was Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, a former president of the Florida Political Science Association.
Based on an important FOIA disclosure, the book’s headline revelation was that the CIA was very likely responsible for the widespread introduction of “conspiracy theory” as a term of political abuse, having orchestrated that development as a deliberate means of influencing public opinion.
During the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the Warren Commission findings that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been solely responsible for President Kennedy’s assassination, and growing suspicions that top-ranking American leaders had also been involved. So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational supporters of “conspiracy theories.” Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continuing right down to the present day. Thus, there is considerable evidence in support of this particular “conspiracy theory” explaining the widespread appearance of attacks on “conspiracy theories” in the public media.
But although the CIA appears to have effectively manipulated public opinion in order to transform the phrase “conspiracy theory” into a powerful weapon of ideological combat, the author also describes how the necessary philosophical ground had actually been prepared a couple of decades earlier. Around the time of the Second World War, an important shift in political theory caused a huge decline in the respectability of any “conspiratorial” explanation of historical events.
For decades prior to that conflict, one of our most prominent scholars and public intellectuals had been historian Charles Beard, whose influential writings had heavily focused on the harmful role of various elite conspiracies in shaping American policy for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, with his examples ranging from the earliest history of the United States down to the nation’s entry into WWI. Obviously, researchers never claimed that all major historical events had hidden causes, but it was widely accepted that some of them did, and attempting to investigate those possibilities was deemed a perfectly acceptable academic enterprise.
However, Beard was a strong opponent of American entry into the Second World War, and he was marginalized in the years that followed, even prior to his death in 1948. Many younger public intellectuals of a similar bent also suffered the same fate, or were even purged from respectability and denied any access to the mainstream media. At the same time, the totally contrary perspectives of two European political philosophers, Karl Popper and Leo Strauss, gradually gained ascendancy in American intellectual circles, and their ideas became dominant in public life.
Popper, the more widely influential, presented broad, largely theoretical objections to the very possibility of important conspiracies ever existing, suggesting that these would be implausibly difficult to implement given the fallibility of human agents; what might appear a conspiracy actually amounted to individual actors pursuing their narrow aims. Even more importantly, he regarded “conspiratorial beliefs” as an extremely dangerous social malady, a major contributing factor to the rise of Nazism and other deadly totalitarian ideologies. His own background as an individual of Jewish ancestry who had fled Austria in 1937 surely contributed to the depth of his feelings on these philosophical matters.
Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main problem with “conspiracy theories” was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.
Even for most educated Americans, theorists such as Beard, Popper, and Strauss are probably no more than vague names mentioned in textbooks, and that was certainly true in my own case. But while the influence of Beard seems to have largely disappeared in elite circles, the same is hardly true of his rivals. Popper probably ranks as one of the founders of modern liberal thought, with an individual as politically influential as left-liberal financier George Soros claiming to be his intellectual disciple. Meanwhile, the neo-conservative thinkers who have totally dominated the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement for the last couple of decades often proudly trace their ideas back to Strauss.
So, through a mixture of Popperian and Straussian thinking, the traditional American tendency to regard elite conspiracies as a real but harmful aspect of our society was gradually stigmatized as either paranoid or politically dangerous, laying the conditions for its exclusion from respectable discourse.
By 1964, this intellectual revolution had largely been completed, as indicated by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the famous article by political scientist Richard Hofstadter critiquing the so-called “paranoid style” in American politics, which he denounced as the underlying cause of widespread popular belief in implausible conspiracy theories. To a considerable extent, he seemed to be attacking straw men, recounting and ridiculing the most outlandish conspiratorial beliefs, while seeming to ignore the ones that had been proven correct. For example, he described how some of the more hysterical anti-Communists claimed that tens of thousands of Red Chinese troops were hidden in Mexico, preparing an attack on San Diego, while he failed to even acknowledge that for years Communist spies had indeed served near the very top of the U.S. government. Not even the most conspiratorially minded individual suggests that all alleged conspiracies are true, merely that some of them might be.
Most of these shifts in public sentiment occurred before I was born or when I was a very young child, and my own views were shaped by the rather conventional media narratives that I absorbed. Hence, for nearly my entire life, I always automatically dismissed all of the so-called “conspiracy theories” as ridiculous, never once even considering that any of them might possibly be true.
To the extent that I ever thought about the matter, my reasoning was simple and based on what seemed like good, solid common sense. Any conspiracy responsible for some important public event must surely have many separate “moving parts” to it, whether actors or actions taken, let us say numbering at least 100 or more. Now given the imperfect nature of all attempts at concealment, it would surely be impossible for all of these to be kept entirely hidden. So even if a conspiracy were initially 95% successful in remaining undetected, five major clues would still be left in plain sight for investigators to find. And once the buzzing cloud of journalists noticed these, such blatant evidence of conspiracy would certainly attract an additional swarm of energetic investigators, tracing those items back to their origins, with more pieces gradually being uncovered until the entire cover-up likely collapsed. Even if not all the crucial facts were ever determined, at least the simple conclusion that there had indeed been some sort of conspiracy would quickly become established.
However, there was a tacit assumption in my reasoning, one that I have since decided was entirely false. Obviously, many potential conspiracies either involve powerful governmental officials or situations in which their disclosure would represent a source of considerable embarrassment to such individuals. But I had always assumed that even if government failed in its investigatory role, the dedicated bloodhounds of the Fourth Estate would invariably come through, tirelessly seeking truth, ratings, and Pulitzers. However, once I gradually began realizing that the media was merely “Our American Pravda” and perhaps had been so for decades, I suddenly recognized the flaw in my logic. If those five—or ten or twenty or fifty—initial clues were simply ignored by the media, whether through laziness, incompetence, or much less venial sins, then there would be absolutely nothing to prevent successful conspiracies from taking place and remaining undetected, perhaps even the most blatant and careless ones.
In fact, I would extend this notion to a general principle. Substantial control of the media is almost always an absolute prerequisite for any successful conspiracy, the greater the degree of control the better. So when weighing the plausibility of any conspiracy, the first matter to investigate is who controls the local media and to what extent.
Let us consider a simple thought-experiment. For various reasons these days, the entire American media is extraordinarily hostile to Russia, certainly much more so than it ever was toward the Communist Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. Hence I would argue that the likelihood of any large-scale Russian conspiracy taking place within the operative zone of those media organs is virtually nil. Indeed, we are constantly bombarded with stories of alleged Russian conspiracies that appear to be “false positives,” dire allegations seemingly having little factual basis or actually being totally ridiculous. Meanwhile, even the crudest sort of anti-Russian conspiracy might easily occur without receiving any serious mainstream media notice or investigation.
This argument may be more than purely hypothetical. A crucial turning point in America’s renewed Cold War against Russia was the passage of the 2012 Magnitsky Act by Congress, punitively targeting various supposedly corrupt Russian officials for their alleged involvement in the illegal persecution and death of an employee of Bill Browder, an American hedge-fund manager with large Russian holdings. However, there’s actually quite a bit of evidence that it was Browder himself who was actually the mastermind and beneficiary of the gigantic corruption scheme, while his employee was planning to testify against him and was therefore fearful of his life for that reason. Naturally, the American media has provided scarcely a single mention of these remarkable revelations regarding what might amount to a gigantic Magnitsky Hoax of geopolitical significance.
To some extent the creation of the Internet and the vast proliferation of alternative media outlets, including my own small webzine, have somewhat altered this depressing picture. So it is hardly surprising that a very substantial fraction of the discussion dominating these Samizdat-like publications concerns exactly those subjects regularly condemned as “crazy conspiracy theories” by our mainstream media organs. Such unfiltered speculation must surely be a source of considerable irritation and worry to government officials who have long relied upon the complicity of their tame media organs to allow their serious misdeeds to pass unnoticed and unpunished. Indeed, several years ago a senior Obama Administration official argued that the free discussion of various “conspiracy theories” on the Internet was so potentially harmful that government agents should be recruited to “cognitively infiltrate” and disrupt them, essentially proposing a high-tech version of the highly controversial Cointelpro operations undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
Until just a few years ago I’d scarcely even heard of Charles Beard, once ranked among the towering figures of 20th century American intellectual life. But the more I’ve discovered the number of serious crimes and disasters that have completely escaped substantial media scrutiny, the more I wonder what other matters may still remain hidden. So perhaps Beard was correct all along in recognizing the respectability of “conspiracy theories,” and we should return to his traditional American way of thinking, notwithstanding endless conspiratorial propaganda campaigns by the CIA and others to persuade us that we should dismiss such notions without any serious consideration.
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The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 12, 2022
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
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