The Evil That Men Do Lives After Them
How about some accountability for Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen?
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • AUGUST 24, 2021
If you want to know how the United States wound up with “government by stupid” one need only look no farther than some of the recent propaganda put out by members of Congress, senior military officers and a certain former president. President George W. Bush, who started the whole sequence of events that have culminated in the disaster that is Afghanistan, is not yet in prison, but one can always hope.
Regarding the current crisis, former FBI special agent and 9/11 whistleblower Coleen Rowley cited Richard W. Behan who mused over “How perverse we have become. We chastise President Biden for a messy ending of the war in Afghanistan and fail to indict George Bush for its illegal beginning.” She then observed, in her own words on Facebook, “So Rehabilitated War Criminal Bush can maintain his legacy as stalwart statesman as he cutely dances with Ellen DeGeneris and Michelle Obama on television screens. Washington is just a big fact-free political show where the blame game winners are the best manipulators.”
I would add to that the hubris of the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the tower of an aircraft carrier as Bush, wearing a flight suit, inaccurately announced victory and an end of combat in Afghanistan, presumably so he could focus on his new war in Iraq. As the Taliban had not attacked or threatened America, had no means of doing so, and were even willing to turn over “their guest” Osama bin Laden to US justice after the bombing of the USS Cole in late 2000, they were hardly a formidable foe. The Bush Administration refused the offer to surrender bin Laden on four occasions before 9/11 and once more five days after the attack because it wanted a war. Given all of that backstory, what Bush and his posse of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Tenet, Feith, Powell and Libby did was indisputably a war crime. And they followed up with fake intelligence to justify a second war against Saddam Hussein, who had also sought to avoid war by offering to go into voluntary exile. The Nuremberg tribunals considered aggressive war against an unthreatening nation to be the ultimate war crime. That would make it an ultimate war crime times two, not to mention the killing of civilians and torture that went along with it. And President Barack Obama added to that toll by subsequently destroying an unthreatening Libya. Unfortunately, many of those war criminals from the Bush and Obama cliques who are still alive are sitting fat and pretty in retirement or in lucrative private sector positions while the only ones who have been punished are the whistleblowers who tried to stop the madness.
George W. Bush is not particularly good at apologies so it is not surprising that he did not deliver one regarding the war he unnecessarily started and even more unnecessarily prolonged through the US occupation. In his view, the US should now remain in Afghanistan and he claims to be worrying about what will happen to Afghan women in particular and to the growing number of refugees, who he opines should be allowed to enter the United States. His statement includes a tip of the hat to the armed forces: “Many of you deal with wounds of war, both visible and invisible… And some of your brothers and sisters in arms made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror. Each day, we have been humbled by your commitment and your courage. You took out a brutal enemy and denied Al Qaeda a safe haven while building schools, sending supplies, and providing medical care. You kept America safe from further terror attacks, provided two decades of security and opportunity for millions, and made America proud. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts and will always honor your contributions.”
The delusional Bush makes it all sound like a mission of mercy which inter alia destroyed a ruthless enemy preparing to strike and kept America free of terror, none of which is true but it certainly sounds nice. But what is really interesting is how the fall of Afghanistan is being used by some to hype Bush’s war on terror, making the case that it is now more important than ever to strengthen US counterterrorism efforts. Which is another way of saying, “keep the cash flowing!” Those who have a vested interest in the war on terror are warning that the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan has raised concerns relating to a possible resurgence of terror groups that might once again use the country as a home base. The frequently wrong on every issue General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that “the United States could now face a rise in terrorist threats from a Taliban-run Afghanistan.”
Of course, if that were the case, Afghanistan might well face a bout of heavy strategic bombing by the United States, so there is not exactly an incentive for them to do something that provocative. Nor do they have the resources to act outside their own borders and they presumably would not welcome any of their “guests” provoking another US invasion.
Milley’s dumb comments on Afghanistan, to include the astonishingly wrong claim that US intelligence did not report in extenso the sorry state of the Afghan Army and the imminent collapse of the government, demonstrate that ignorance on major issues relating to foreign policy is not limited to those who call themselves Republicans. Secretary of State Tony Blinken insists that the retreat from Kabul is not a replay of Saigon, nor were the withdrawal plans, such as they existed, “botched.” Word in Washington is that Blinken will be the designated fall guy for the disaster to protect his boss.
Apart from the Afghanistan fiasco, stupid extends to how the government operates, particularly in Congress. In a recent memo to supporters and constituents Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner, who heads the Senate Intelligence committee described his top priorities. Three of them are quite interesting. They are: “(1) Root out anti-government extremism, including the white nationalist militias who participated in the January 6th insurrection at our Capitol; (2) Rebuild intelligence community agencies and departments that were understaffed and under-resourced in the previous administration, and (3) Depoliticize our intelligence-gathering apparatus, so these tireless and patriotic public servants can stay above the partisan fray and focus on their jobs: defending the American homeland.”
Enough has been said about the Democratic Party’s obsession with putting white Americans in their proper place, which is some deep hole where they can be ignored and berated as necessary. Purges are already taking place at the Pentagon and at the Justice and Homeland Security Departments. But Warner’s stated “priority” to engage in the rebuilding of an intelligence community that has seen its budget grow year after year comes as somewhat of a surprise. Perhaps it needs the extra cash to root-out those pesky whites. And finally, “depoliticizing” intelligence gathering has to be something of a joke, coming as it does from the party that did the most to politicize it in the first place under President Barack Obama working hand-in-hand with the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign to promote the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. I suppose Senator Warner does not see the party in power using the CIA, NSA and FBI to discredit an opponent and destroy his campaign as politicization. Or you can always blame it on the Russians.
All in all, we have had a fine team working in harmony to protect the American people. Hopefully the time they spend in prison somewhere down the road will not discourage them and they will emerge with their brilliant insights fully intact. With leaders like Bush, Milley, Blinken and Warner, what could possibly go wrong?
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
Washington’s Terrorist Friends: Prominent Americans Continue to Support a Murderous Cult
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 5, 2021
One might ask if Washington’s obsession with terrorism includes supporting radical armed groups as long as they are politically useful in attacking countries that the US regards as enemies? It is widely known that the American CIA worked with Saudi Arabia to create al-Qaeda to attack the Russians in Afghanistan and the same my-enemy’s-enemy thinking appears to drive the current relationships with radical groups in Syria.
Given the fact that Iran continues to be the Biden Administration’s enemy du jour, it is perhaps not surprising to observe that the US also supports terror groups that are capable of attacking targets in the Islamic Republic. To that end, recently a number of former senior government officials and politicians were involved in cultivating their relationships with the Iranian terrorist group Mojahedin e Khalq (MEK), which held its most recent annual international summit in Paris for three days starting on July 10th. The event was online due to French COVID prevention guidelines and the featured speaker was Michele Flournoy, former US undersecretary of defense for policy under President Barack Obama. Flournoy was once considered a front runner to be President Joe Biden’s defense secretary and she currently heads a consulting firm WestExec Advisors that she co-founded with current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken which has had considerable influence over staffing and other issues in the White House. In her talk, she accused Iran of posing a danger to the security of the Middle East, the United States, and to its own people, elaborating how “Since 1979, every US administration has had to deal with the threat posed by Iran’s revolutionary regime and the Biden administration is no different. Iran is one of the most urgent foreign policy issues on the president’s desk.” She called for an “internal regime change” in the Islamic Republic.
A bipartisan group of US lawmakers also spoke before the online gathering. Speakers included House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Senator Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as Democratic Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Also participating were Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida and both Texas Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. Former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile also spoke as did former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said that the MEK should be “blessed and protected.”
The summit self-described as “the largest-ever online international event dedicated to liberating Iran” with the objective of “inciting uprisings against the government in the Islamic Republic.” Though it would be charitable to suggest that the congressmen and former officials were largely involved to pick up the generous fees paid to speakers, it must also be noted that knowledge of MEK and its history is readily available on the internet and elsewhere. Flournoy in particular should have known better but even she, after the fact, claimed implausibly that she did not know that she was speaking to a former terrorist group that had killed Americans.
It should also be observed that the participating Congressmen all have extremely close ties to Israel and its domestic lobby, which have been assiduous in their efforts to vilify Iran as America’s designated enemy. To be sure, no one at the summit even mentioned Israel’s use of MEK operatives to carry out assassinations of scientists and sabotage operations inside Iran.
MEK is a curious hybrid creature in any event in that it pretends to be an alternative government option for Iran even though it is despised by nearly all Iranians. It is considered to be both irrelevant and ineffective but Iran hatred is so prevalent that it is greatly loved by the Washington Establishment which would like to see the Mullahs deposed and replaced by something more amenable to US and Israeli worldviews.
MEK is run like a cult by its leader Maryam Rajavi, with a number of rules that restrict and control the behavior of its members. One commentary likens membership in MEK to a modern-day equivalent of slavery. A study prepared by the Rand corporation for the U.S. government conducted interviews of MEK members and concluded that there were present “many of the typical characteristics of a cult, such as authoritarian control, confiscation of assets, sexual control (including mandatory divorce and celibacy), emotional isolation, forced labor, sleep deprivation, physical abuse and limited exit options.”
The group currently operates out of a secretive, heavily guarded 84 acre compound in Albania that is covertly supported by the United States intelligence community, as well as through a “political wing” front office in Paris, where it refers to itself as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). MEK is financially supported by Saudi Arabia, which enables it to stage events in the United States and in Europe where it generously pays politicians to make fifteen-minute speeches praising the organization and everything it does. It’s bribing of inside the Beltway power brokers and its support by Israel proved so successful that it was removed from the State Department terrorist list in 2012 by Hillary Clinton even though it had killed Americans in the 1970s.
As indicated above, MEK made the transition from terrorist group to “champions of Iranian democracy” by virtue of intensive lobbying of Iran haters. A Guardian article also describes how “A stupendously long list of American politicians from both parties were paid hefty fees to speak at events in favor of the MEK, including Rudy Giuliani, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Newt Gingrich, Elaine Chao and former Democratic party chairs Edward Rendell and Howard Dean – along with multiple former heads of the FBI and CIA. John Bolton, who has made multiple appearances at events supporting the MEK, is estimated to have received upwards of $180,000. According to financial disclosure forms, Bolton was paid $40,000 for a single appearance at the Free Iran rally in Paris in 2017.”
It apparently has never occurred to the congressmen and senior officials that the MEK group had a whole lot of history before it appeared on the scene in Washington and began buying American politicians. MEK, which consisted of a group of dissident students having Marxism inspired anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist roots, had a bloody falling out with the Iranian revolution leaders in 1979, forcing it to resettle at Camp Ashraf, near Baghdad. It was protected by Saddam Hussein and used to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran. It was also fiercely anti-American beginning back in the 1970s when it was still in Iran, to include attacks on US businesses and denunciations of the United States presence in Iran under the Shah. In 1979 it supported executing the US Embassy hostages rather than negotiating their release. One of its songs went “Death to America by blood and bonfire on the lips of every Muslim is the cry of the Iranian people. May America be annihilated.”
Within the US government, MEK was notorious for its assassination of at least six US Air Force officers and civilian defense contractors. One particularly audacious ambush in which two air force officers were murdered by MEK while being driven in from the airport was reenacted for each incoming class at the Central Intelligence Agency training center in the late 1970s to illustrate just how a perfectly executed terrorist attack on a moving vehicle might take place.
Given how currently nearly every news cycle includes stories about fake news on social media, it is surprising that MEK is never mentioned. Its current Albanian operational center uses banks of computers manned by followers, some of whom are fluent in English, who serve as bots unleashing scores of comments supporting regime change in Iran while also directing waves of criticism against any pro-Iranian pieces that appear elsewhere on social media, to include Facebook and Twitter. By one account, more than a thousand MEK supporters manage thousands of accounts on social media simultaneously. The objective of all the chatter is to convince the mostly English-speaking audience that there is a large body of Iranians who are hostile to the regime and supportive of MEK as a replacement.
It is an indisputable fact that over the past ten years, members of both major parties in Congress have either traveled to the group’s compound in Albania or spoken via video messages or live appearances in exchange for hefty speaking fees. The support provided by prominent officeholders and policymakers to include effusive praise of a terrorist group that is viscerally anti-American and has killed US officials is a disgrace. It is also a symptom of deeper problems in terms of how our foreign policy has been developed through the ascendancy of special interests. That America’s Iran policy should lead to praise of a radicalized extremist cult that is funded by authoritarian Saudi Arabia and politically supported by apartheid Israel ignores US actual interests at our peril.
Why People Don’t Trust the Mainstream Media
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | August 4, 2021
An article in the Washington Post about the January 6 protests at the Capitol goes a long way toward explaining why people do not trust the mainstream media. The article, written by a Post reporter named Mike DeBonis, focuses on allegations that the FBI infiltrated the ranks of the protestors and actually helped to incite them to illegally enter the Capitol and engage in mayhem after doing so.
The overall tone that DeBonis sets forth is one that is oftentimes found in the mainstream media when it comes to alleged wrongdoing by the federal government. The article has a mocking tone to it, suggesting that the people who are making this allegation are conspiracy theorists for actually believing that federal officials would do such a horrible thing.
There is a critical sentence in DeBonis’s article: “The FBI declined to comment.”
Why is that line important? Because there are two ways that a reporter can go when he is writing a story about this type of allegation.
On the one hand, he can mock and ridicule those who are making the allegation, pointing out that they haven’t produced any evidence to support their “unfounded claim.”
On the other hand, he can aggressively go after FBI officials and demand a definitive yes-or-no answer instead of simply settling for a “no comment” by the FBI and also engage in an aggressive investigative effort to determine whether there is evidence to support the allegation.
DeBonis chose the first route. But why? After all, a “no comment” answer by the FBI is about as incriminating as an answer can be, short of an outright admission of wrongdoing. That’s because if the FBI were not guilty of the wrongdoing, it would undoubtedly simply say, “The allegation is false.” The FBI clearly did not do that with its “no comment” answer. It’s “no comment” answer leaves open the possibility — perhaps even the likelihood — that the FBI was involved in wrongdoing,
DeBonis makes a big issue of out of the fact that the people who are making this allegation have not provided any evidence to support their allegation. But what people have pointed out is a similar course of conduct by the FBI in other cases, which would be enough to cause any reasonable person to assume that it might have engaged in the same course of conduct with respect to the January 6 protests.
For example, consider the case that involves the alleged kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. DeBonis is aware of that case because he links to an article from BuzzFeedNews.com about the case. That article alleges that the FBI played a major role in inducing the defendants in the case to commit the kidnapping. Even if what the FBI allegedly did wasn’t enough to support a defense of entrapment, its alleged actions are nonetheless enough to cause any reasonable citizen, including investigative journalists, concern.
But that’s not all. As journalist Glenn Greenwald has documented, the FBI has a long history of inciting people to commit acts of domestic terrorism. The idea is to incite people to commit crimes so that the FBI can then be praised and glorified for busting them up. See Greenwald’s July 24 article “FBI Using the Same Fear Tactic From the First War on Terror: Orchestrating its Own Terrorism Plots.” Also, see the July 31 article “Will More Media Bias Save Democracy?” by James Bovard.
Given the history of the FBI engaging in this type of misconduct, you would think that any journalist worth his salt would say, “I need to get to the bottom of this latest assertion. I need to know whether the FBI did the same thing here. Rather than mocking and ridiculing these people by pointing out that they have furnished no evidence to support their allegation, I need to do my job and go after the FBI to see if there is any evidence to support the allegation.”
Rather than do that, DeBonis goes off on the other track by implicitly assuming that the FBI would never do such a thing and implicitly assuming that those who are making the allegation are nothing more than “conspiracy theorists.”
That’s why so many people don’t trust the mainstream media.
This is not a recent phenomenon.
We can go all the way back to Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s secret program in the 1960s and 1970s whose aim was to acquire CIA assets from within the mainstream press, whose secret job would be to come to the defense of the national-security establishment whenever necessary, including but calling people “conspiracy theorists” whenever they allege wrongdoing on the part of CIA officials.
According to the Wikipedia entry on “Operation Mockingbird,”
In a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, “The CIA and the Media,” reporter Carl Bernstein expanded upon the Church Committee’s report and said that around 400 press members were considered intelligence assets by the CIA, including New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, columnist and political analyst Stewart Alsop and Time magazine. Berstein documented the way in which overseas branches of major US news agencies had for many years served as the “eyes and ears” of Operation Mockingbird, which functioned to disseminate CIA propaganda through domestic US media.[6]
The best example, of course, of the deference to the authority of the national-security establishment relates to the Kennedy assassination. Today, there are two separate worlds when it comes to that assassination: the world of the mainstream media and the world of Internet. They are two completely different worlds — actually, parallel universes.
On the Internet, it’s possible to find people analyzing, questioning, and challenging the official lone-nut theory of the case, pointing to the mountain of evidence, for example, that establishes that the national-security establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy on President Kennedy’s body. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 as well as the recorded presentations at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s recent conference “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination.”
Not so in the mainstream press. It is considered verboten in the mainstream press for any reporter or commentator to challenge or question any aspect of the official lone-nut theory of the assassination. Woe to the reporter or commentator who does so. He will be looking for a new job post haste — somewhere on the Internet.
In the December 6, 1963, issue of Life magazine, a well-known Life magazine reporter named Paul Mandel wrote an article about the assassination in which he claimed that the famous Zapruder film showed that the president had turned around to face the Texas School Book Depository. The president’s action, Mandel said, explained how it was that the president was shot in the throat.
No one could verify Mandel’s statement because Life magazine had purchased the film from Abraham Zapruder for $150,000, which in today’s dollars amounted to around $1.2 million. Life locked the film away, saying that it wanted to protect the American people from ever having to see such violence.
In 1969, Jim Garrison, the district attorney in New Orleans, brought a criminal prosecution against a man named Clay Shaw in which Garrison alleged that the Kennedy assassination was actually a sophisticated regime-change operation on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment. Garrison subpoenaed the Zapruder film from Life magazine and showed it in court. The film showed that the president had never turned around and faced the school book depository. By this time, of course, the official story revolved around the magic bullet theory, which posited that the president had actually been shot in the rear of the neck (i.e., not through the throat), with the bullet supposedly having come out the front (and then supposedly striking Gov. John Connally in multiple places, with the bullet magically ending up in a pristine condition.)
In other words, Mandel had lied, either intentionally or because someone at Life magazine had falsely told him that that’s what the film showed. There is no other conclusion that can be reached. There is no way that Mandel’s allegation could be construed to be an innocent mistake, because Life magazine had the film.
There is another interesting aspect to the saga. According to Wikipedia:
General Charles Douglas (C. D.) Jackson (March 16, 1902 – September 18, 1964) was a United States government propagandist and senior executive of Time Inc. As an expert on psychological warfare he served in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and later as Special Assistant to the President in the Eisenhower administration…. After Abraham Zapruder took the famous film in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Jackson purchased it on behalf of Time/Life to “protect the integrity of the film.” Upon viewing it on Sunday morning, he ordered it locked in a vault at the Time/Life building in Manhattan.
In 1972 — three years after the Zapruder film was shown in the Shaw trial — Life magazine, which had been one of the most popular weekly magazines in history, cease publication as a weekly. Some people said that it was because of the rising popularity of television. Another possibility is that people no longer trusted Life magazine.
For the past 25 years, the mainstream media has been losing readership and money. Some people blame it on the rising popularity of the Internet. Another possibility is that people no longer trust the mainstream media.
A Country That Has Lost Its Way: U.S. Government and Corporations Combine to Strip Citizens of Their Rights
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 8, 2021
The American people have increasingly become aware that government surveillance and corporate censorship have combined to keep people ignorant and controlled. What is taking place has generated some dark humor. A friend of mine, also a former CIA officer, wrote to me recently and said tongue-in-cheek that he retains a lot of respect for the Agency because it is the only major government national security entity that does not read our mail and emails. Those jobs are the responsibility of the NSA and FBI. I responded that I would imagine that CIA does in fact read quite a lot of mail where it operates overseas but it is probably done the old-fashioned way by recruiting an underpaid mail clerk as an agent.
The whole issue of the government spying illegally on its own citizens has again made the news with the claims by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that NSA has been spying on him, presumably because he has connections that the government regards either as subversive or, in the new reckoning, as “extremists” who are potential “domestic terrorists.” Given the reasonable assumption that anyone who voted for Donald Trump might well fall under those categories, that means that something like half the U.S. population could be under suspicion.
Mass electronic surveillance of literally trillions of phone calls and messages worldwide without a warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment restrictions on searches without probable cause or a proper warrant issued by a judge has been the regular NSA authorized procedure at least since 9/11 and there is no reason to assume that it is no longer the practice. It basically is initiated by the agency involved (normally NSA or FBI) going to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court or to some other appropriate judge to get a warrant on an individual where there is some probable cause. Probable cause can consist of “someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.” The Court then gives its approval, which it does in the case of FISA 99% of the time. When that individual is then surveilled, the names of his or her contacts are also added to the investigation. And it goes on from there, expanding and growing until it includes thousands of phone numbers and email addresses, individuals who are overwhelmingly innocent of any wrongdoing.
So, it is safe to assume that many of us are right at this moment eligible for being monitored electronically by the federal government. If one combines that with the Biden Administration’s June 1st announcement of a war on “domestic terrorism,” which it clearly considers to be a function of “white supremacists,” it is easy to see where all that is going. Biden pulled no punches, describing the threat from “white supremacy” as the “most lethal threat to the homeland today,” so that would mean that the government is doing all in its power to stamp it out, whatever it takes and whatever that means.
Surveilling ordinary Americans for what they might be thinking, which is what this comes down to, would be a George Orwellian 1984 tale for our times, updated from when Winston Smith was doing mandatory daily exercises in front of his television set. He slacked off a bit and the TV instantly admonished him. He then wondered whether it was possible that he and all the other residents of Airstrip One (once called Britain) are surveilled all the time. He concluded that they were.
So, if your television set suddenly speaks to you in the next few months, it might not be Alexa. The other development that has surfaced in the past couple of weeks is the increased corporate cooperation with what the government is saying and doing. Mainstream media has certainly done its share of obfuscation, including the current near total suppression of the story that a key witness who provided false testimony against journalist Julian Assange languishing in a British prison has turned out to be a pedophile, diagnosed sociopath and serial liar. But the major player is inevitably social media, which has enormous power in the United States and also elsewhere to shape opinions and propagate false information that serves the government agenda. The media has banned numerous groups, individuals, and links to sites from its pages, a barrier to free speech and freedom of expression. And it has, for example, enthusiastically cooperated fully with the essentially fraudulent government claims of Russian interference in the two most recent U.S. elections. It is censoring or denigrating material that is at variance with official policies, including, for example, Facebook’s pop-ups that appear whenever there is any article that contests the approved version of the response to the COVID virus.
Back in June, the Biden administration said it would also be working with some of the large high-technology and social media companies to “increase information sharing” to assist in combatting radicalization. Biden announced that his Justice Department would create ways for Americans to report radicalized friends and family to the government. One senior official put it this way: “We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs… If you see something, say something. This involves creating contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence.”
In other words, in plain English, the Biden Administration is calling on Americans to spy on friends, neighbors and family and reporting any “extremist” views to the authorities. Well, Facebook is now fully on board with more of the same, engaged in the “hot” war against the “white supremacists/extremists/domestic terrorists.” It has blocked or shut down many former contributors and also begun posting at least two versions of warnings to users. One targets individuals who might have personally been visiting an “extremist” site while the other encourages users to snitch on friends or family who might be enticed by such material. The personalized pop-up reads as follows: “[Name of Recipient], you many have been exposed to harmful extremist content recently – Violent groups try to manipulate your anger and disappointment. You can take action now to protect yourself and others.-Get support from experts-Spot the signs, understand the dangers of extremism and hear from people who escaped violent groups.”
The snitch on friends version reads: “Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?-We care about preventing extremism on Facebook. Others in your situation have received confidential support. How you can help. Hear stories and get advice from people who escaped violent extremist groups-Get support.”
To be sure, one has to ask how Facebook knows that one has visited an “extremist” site since they have blocked such material. Are they somehow hacking into the personal accounts of their own users? The situation is dire, no doubt about it, but it has provoked a backlash, including this post: “Become the extremist Facebook warned you about!” One also has to wonder how Facebook will deal with individuals who complain about some other groups with a demonstrated history of promoting violence, including black lives matter, that are not white supremacist related. It will almost certainly do nothing, just like the federal government’s demonstrated “racially sensitive” supine response to a year of riot, burning, looting and homicide. In truth Americans are standing at the edge of a precipice with just one more “crisis” possibly coming that will tip everyone over the edge so we wind up with a totalitarian government which works hard to keep everyone safe by doing the opposite. We are almost there, and if you doubt it just go take a look at Facebook.
Inside Biden’s new “domestic terrorism” strategy
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | July 1, 2021
Following the (completely contrived) Capitol Hill “riot” on January 6th, Joe Biden made it clear – or rather, the people that control Joe Biden made it clear – “domestic terrorism” was going to be a defining issue of his presidency.
Indeed, in an act of startling prescience, the incoming administration had been talking about a new “Domestic Terrorism Bill” for well over three months before the “riot” happened. The media had been calling for one for at least six. Major universities were writing papers about it.
It’s funny how often that happens, isn’t it?
I wrote at the time that the Capitol Hill “riot” could prove to be America’s Reichstag Fire – a fake attack, blamed on an invisible enemy and used to rush through restrictive legislation and emergency powers. A 9/11 sequel, extending the Patriot Act franchise.
Now, just a few short months later, the Biden White House has released their National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. Let’s take a look inside it, shall we?
SO, WHAT IS “DOMESTIC TERRORISM”?
The first thing to say about the “strategy”… is that it’s not really a strategy. It’s more of a mission statement or even a press release. It hits talking points, but not real policies. Its watchword is “vague” – in both definition of the problem and proposed solutions (with a couple of noteworthy exceptions, but we’ll get to that.)
For starters – who or what IS a “domestic terrorist”?
Well, their answer to that is, essentially, potentially anybody. They’re not identifying any particular ideology or cause or group – but rather EVERY ideology cause or group. I wrote, back in January, that any definition would be kept intentionally loose, and the strategy does not disappoint.
The cause of “domestic terrorism” can be racism, religious intolerance, environmental protest, anti-government feeling, animal rights, anti-abortion campaigners, “perceived government overeach”, “incel ideology”, “anti-corporate globalization feeling” or a mixture of any of the above.
“Domestic terrorists” may espouse violence or they may not espouse violence. They may work in groups, or be loners, or be loose associations with no organizational structure. They can be left wing or right wing, religious or secular.
They can be anybody who thinks anything.
There is a lot of entirely intentional vagueness here. Again and again, we are told that “the domestic terrorism threat is complex, multifaceted, and evolving”. They are keeping their options open.
Don’t expect ANY specifics on who is a “domestic terrorist” until AFTER any legislation is passed. That way, the great American public can insert their own personal bugbear into the ellipsis (and then be taken completely by surprise when it turns out the new laws apply to everyone).
That said, there have been some clues as to the kind of person that might be the target of any new anti-terror legislation.
In the Washington Post, in February this year, California State Senator Richard Pam wrote:
Anti-vaccine extremism is akin to domestic terrorism
He wasn’t alone, on this side of the Atlantic the head of the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit “called for action against coronavirus anti-vaxxers”.
Even this document makes insinuations on that front.
In a startling contradiction, after spending five or six pages talking up the “complex” and “unpredictable” nature of “domestic terrorism,” they then make an incredibly specific prediction about a future “domestic terrorist attack”:
Taken from the “Assessment of the Domestic Violent Extremism Threat” (p. 10):
Newer sociopolitical developments–such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID–19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence–will almost certainly spur some DVEs to try to engage in violence this year.
Apparently, the official position of the FBI, CIA, NSA and DHS is that domestic terrorism is a vast cloud of mystery, swirling with unknown and conflicting motivations…. but they definitely know when the next attack will happen, and why it will take place..
SO WHAT’S TO BLAME?
The evil “domestic terrorists” and “violent extremists” might be widely diverse in their ideologies, social structures, motives and political leanings… but nevertheless, they ALL use the same exact methods of communication, and the same platforms to host their “misinformation”.
It turns out, according to this strategy, there’s really only one thing at the root of all “domestic terrorism”: The internet.
Yes, the vast majority of this “strategy” is focused on the digital world. In only 28 pages of text the words “online”, “social media”, “internet”, “platform”, “encryption”, and “site” occur well over 60 times combined. Here’s some examples:
… social media, file–upload sites, and end–to–end encrypted platforms, all of these elements can combine and amplify threats to public safety…
*
DVEs exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications to recruit new adherents, plan and rally support for in-person actions, and disseminate materials that contribute to radicalization and mobilization to violence
*
Recruiting and mobilizing individuals to domestic terrorism [is] increasingly happening on Internet–based communications platforms, including social media, online gaming platforms, file–upload sites, and end–to–end encrypted chat platforms
*
… extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.
*
DVE attackers often radicalize independently by consuming violent extremist material online.
It goes on, and on and on in that fashion.
As much as the Deep State talks up the supposedly unknowable nature of “domestic terrorism” early on, they are equally sure that every single one of them is on the net. Which, fortunately from the state’s point of view, means they can all be tackled with the same solution.
WHAT THEY’RE GONNA DO ABOUT IT
You probably don’t need me to tell you what the supposed “solution” to this entirely created “problem” is. It’s the same grab-bag of solutions that a power-hungry state will always seek, given the opportunity. Yes, there’s a token reference to guns and “high-capacity” magazines, but really it’s all about controlling the internet.
Specifically – it’s about surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. The big three.
Of course, the document never ever uses those words. Surveillance is “information gathering”. Propaganda is “messaging” or “education”. Censorship is “countering propaganda” or “working with media partners to remove incitement of violence”.
They use the shifting, indirect language of government, but the meaning is clear if you know how to read it:
… the Department of Homeland Security and others are either currently funding and implementing or planning evidence–based digital programming, including enhancing media literacy and critical thinking skills, as a mechanism for strengthening user resilience to disinformation and misinformation online for domestic audiences. The Department of State and United States Agency for International Development are doing similar work globally.
Translation: The DHS is funding massive propaganda campaigns designed to both brainwash the public, and discourage them from reading any sources which disagree with the official line.
The Department of Homeland Security has expanded its efforts to provide financial, educational, and technical assistance to those well placed to recognize and address possible domestic terrorism recruitment and mobilization to violence and will ensure that its counter–domestic terrorism prevention efforts are driven by data and informed by community–based partners.
Translation: DHS is working with social media monopolies to censor certain people, and paying them to pass citizens’ private information to the government and/or intelligence agencies.
Enhancing faith in American democracy demands accelerating work to contend with an information environment that challenges healthy democratic discourse. We will work toward finding ways to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.
Translation: “Enhancing faith in democracy” means censoring anybody who posts evidence that elections are fixed, that the political class is corrupt or that the media are servants of the state who peddle lies for cash.
And then there are some phrases that need no translation at all:
the Department of Justice is examining carefully what new authorities might be necessary and appropriate.
… seems pretty clear.
The obvious end goal here is new legislation granting greater powers to the state.
THE NATURE OF “VIOLENCE”
Time to address the elephant in the room: “violence”. The word is used a lot in the report. One-hundred and eleven times in 28 pages. It’s never just “extremism” when it can be “violent extremism”. But what does that word really mean in this context?
The answer to that is “absolutely nothing”. It is a phrase robbed of meaning. Applied on an ad hoc basis, based on political convenience rather than physical reality.
A reminder that this is described as “violent extremism”:
And this as “mostly peaceful”:
And this is “inciting violence”:
If the President of the United States can be deleted from the internet, impeached and tried before the Senate because “go home in peace and love” and “stay peaceful” are “inciting violence”, then the word is totally meaningless and we should simply ignore it.
Essentially, they have demonstrated they will classify anything they want as violent, and ignore any actual violence if they need to.
THE ROLE OF IDENTITY POLITICS
I doubt any White House policy announcement has ever leaned so heavily into the politics of identity before now. “Hatred”, “bigotry”, “LGBTQI+” “racism”… and so on. They all get a lot of mentions. But why?
Well, the simple answer is camouflage. Generally, by draping the inevitable Patriot Act 2.0 in the language of identity, they can trick “liberals” into believing it’s some kind of progressive policy.
More specifically, they can align “anti-government” with “white-supremacy”, as if they are always the same. In this sentence for example:
Today’s domestic terrorists espouse a range of violent ideological motivations, including racial or ethnic bigotry and hatred as well as anti–government or anti–authority sentiment…
Look at the other causes listed alongside “White supremacy” in this document: “perceived government overreach”, “anti-corporate globalization”, “opposing government institutions”, “anti-authority sentiment”. Rational, reasonable anti-government positions, bracketed alongside bigotry and racism.
General Mark Miley recently testified in front of the senate about how the need to “understand white rage”.
As Glen Greenwald wrote, this is not about racism, but about aligning the “progressive left” with the military. Turning militaristic, totalitarian Imperialism into a progressive cause, whilst smearing all those who oppose it as bigots and potential “domestic terrorists”.
THE WAY AHEAD
This strategy is just the latest domino put in place. It’s a long con, with multiple moving pieces, but the end is clear. Though this document is deliberaletely cagy about the possibility of new legislation, that is all part of the dance.
The manipulation of the public has been government practice since the dawn of time. The contrived public reticence to act, concealing intrigues behind the scenes which create an apparent need for action. Eventually, the public will beg the state to “do something”, and they’ll unveil the something they were planning the whole time. Tale as old as time. True as it can be.
This is no different.
Only last night, the US Senate voted to create a “select committee” investigating the Capitol Hill riot. This political pantomime will roll on for a few weeks with “shocking testimony” from FBI agents and military intelligence operatives.
They will detail how “misinformation radicalised people online”, alongside admitting they “had knowledge, but lacked the power to act” or that “counter-terrorism forces were focused on foreign groups” and/or lacked “legal authority” to surveil domestic threats. There will be a couple of throwaway admissions, something akin to a “failure of imagination”.
Senators from liberal states will make speeches about how the military/CIA/FBI are institutionally racist because they assumed white people can’t be terrorists, and a few willing uniformed fall guys will look appropriately shame-faced behind their medals.
There will be no real inquest, and no new information. It will be an exercise in reinforcing an entirely fake reality. And the final findings will be that the FBI/CIA/NSA… or whoever…needs more money and power. A new bill (likely already written) will be pushed into the hands of some hip “liberal” politician, who will do a decent job pretending they wrote it.
If there is any noteworthy public objection to the new powers, well then we’ll see another “domestic terrorist” attack. Maybe there’ll be one anyway, just to underline how vital the new bill is. (They’re prepping us already, with the DHS warning about attacks on July 4th and a possible “summer of violence”).
And then, stirring itself to act only at the insistence of the Democrat-controlled Senate, the White House will sign-off on its Patriot Act 2.0.
The final paragraph of the strategy document reads:
This document represents that Strategy – a Strategy whose implementation is, already, well underway.
No kidding.
America Leader of the Free World? How to Forget U.S. interference in Foreign Elections
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 1, 2021
After only five months in office, [proclaimed] President Joe Biden has already become notorious for his verbal gaffes and mis-spokes, so much so that an admittedly Republican-partisan physician has suggested that he be tested to determine his cognitive abilities. That said, however, there is one June 16th tweet that he is responsible for that is quite straightforward that outdoes everything else for sheer mendacity. It appeared shortly after the summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and was apparently intended to be rhetorical, at least insofar as Biden understands the term. It went: “How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country.”
There have been various estimates of just exactly how many elections the United States has interfered in since the Second World War, the numbers usually falling somewhere between 80 and 100, but that does not take into account the frequent interventions of various kinds that took place largely in Latin America between the Spanish-American War and 1946. One recalls how the most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps Major General Smedley Butler declared that “War is a racket” in 1935. He confessed to having “…helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”
And there have been since 1900 other regime change and interventionist actions, both using military force and also brought about by corrupting local politicians with money and other inducements. And don’t forget the American trained death squads active in Latin America. Some would also include in the list the possibly as many as 50 Central Intelligence Agency and Special Ops political assassinations that have been documented, though admittedly sometimes based on thin evidence.
That Joe Biden, who has been at a reasonably high level in the federal government for over forty years, including as Vice President for eight years and now President should appear to be ignorant of what his own government has done and quite plausibly continues to do is astonishing. After all, Biden was VP when Victoria Nuland worked for the Obama Administration as the driving force behind efforts in 2013-2014 to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who is the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square accompanied by Senator John McCain to encourage the protesters.
A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé who is married to leading neocon Robert Kagan, Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. As Biden’s tweet even recognized in a backhanded way, it is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget, but Washington has long believed in a global double standard for evaluating its own behavior. Biden clearly is part of that and also clearly does not understand what he is doing or saying.
Nuland is most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. The Obama and Biden Administration’s replacement of the government in Kiev was the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea. That point of conflict has continued to this day, with a U.S. warships in the Black Sea engaging in exercises with the Ukrainian navy.
Biden was also with the Obamas when they chose to destabilize and destroy Libya. Nor should Russia itself be forgotten. Boris Yeltsin was re-elected president of Russia in 1996 after the Clinton Administration pumped billions of dollars into his campaign, enabling him to win a close oligarch-backed victory that had been paid for and managed by Washington. Joe Biden was a Senator at the time.
And then there is Iran, where democratically elected Mohammed Mossadeq was deposed by the CIA in 1953 and replaced by the Shah. The Shah was replaced by the Islamic Republic in turn in 1979 and the poisoned relationship between Washington and Tehran has constituted a tit-for-tat quasi-cold war ever since, marked by assassinations and sabotage.
And who can forget Chile where Salvador Allende was removed by the CIA in 1973 and replaced by Augusto Pinochet? Or Cuba and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 where the CIA failed to bring about regime change in Havana? Can it be that Joe Biden cannot recall any of those “interventions,” which were heavily covered in the international media at the time?
And to make up the numbers, Joe can possibly consider the multiple “interferences in elections,” which is more precisely what he was referring to. As a CIA officer stationed in Europe and the Middle East in and 1970s through the early 1990s, I can assure him that I personally know about nearly continuous interference in elections in places like France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, all of which had prominent communist parties, some of which were on the verge of government entry. Bags of money went to conservative parties, politicians were bribed and journalists bought. In fact, during that time period I would dare to say there was hardly an election that the United States did not somehow get involved in.
Does it still go on? The U.S. has been seeking regime change in Syria since 2004 and is currently occupying part of the country. And of course, Russia is on the receiving end of a delegitimization process through a controlled western media that is seeking to get rid of Putin by exploiting a CIA and western intelligence funded opposition. China has no real opposition or open elections, nor can its regime plausibly be changed, but it is constantly being challenged by depicting it and its behavior in the most negative fashion possible.
Joe Biden really should read up on the history of American political and military interventions, regime changes and electoral interference worldwide. He just might learn something. The most important point might, however, elude him. All of the intervention and all of the deaths have turned out badly both for the U.S. and for the people and countries being targeted. Biden has taken a bold step to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, though it now appears that that decision might be in part reversed. Much better to complete the process and also do the same thing in places like Iraq, Somalia and Syria. The whole world will be a better place for it.
Meet Jigsaw: Google’s Intelligence Agency
Privacy To Go | June 25, 2021
It’s no secret that Google regularly collaborates with intelligence agencies.
They are a known NSA subcontractor. They launched Google Earth using a CIA spy satellite network. Their executive suite’s revolving door with DARPA is well known.
In the wake of the January 6th Capitol event, the FBI used Google location data to pwn attendants with nothing more than a valid Gmail address and smartphone login:
A stark reminder that carrying a tracking device with a Google login, even with the SIM card removed, can mean the difference between freedom and an orange jump suit in the Great Reset era.
But Google also operates its own internal intelligence agency – complete with foreign regime change operations that are now being applied domestically.
And they’ve been doing so without repercussion for over a decade.
From Google Ideas to Google Regime Change
In 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt created Google Ideas. In typical Silicon Valley newspeak, Ideas was marketed as a “think/do tank to research issues at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.“
Astute readers know this “think/do” formula well – entities like the Council on Foreign Relations or World Economic Forum draft policy papers (think) and three-letter agencies carry them out (do).
And again, in typical Silicon Valley fashion, Google wanted to streamline this process – bring everything in-house and remake the world in their own image.
To head up Google Ideas, Schmidt tapped a man named Jared Cohen.
He couldn’t have selected a better goon for the job – as a card-carrying member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Rhodes Scholar, Cohen is a textbook Globalist spook. The State Department doubtlessly approved of his sordid credentials, as both Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton enrolled Cohen to knock over foreign governments they disapproved of.
Google Ideas’ role in the 2014 Ukraine regime change operation is well-documented. And before that, their part in overthrowing Mubarak in Egypt was unveiled by way of the Stratfor leaks.
More recently, the role of Google Ideas in the attempted overthrow of Assad in Syria went public thanks to the oft-cited Hillary Clinton email leaks:
Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from.
Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition.
Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria. I’ve attached a few visuals that show what the tool will look like. Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything eke you think we need to account for or think about before we launch. We believe this can have an important impact.
-Jared Cohen to State Dept. Officials, July 25, 2012
With all this mounting evidence, surely Google Ideas was decommissioned. Surely Jared Cohen was swiftly ousted from his position at one of America’s premier Big Tech darlings for crimes against humanity, right?
Of course not!
Why scrap all that hard work when you can just rebrand and shift your regime change operations to domestic targets?
Google Jigsaw – USA Psyop Edition
Google Ideas was renamed Google Jigsaw in 2015 after years of bad press and controversy – this time with an eye on performing psychological operations in the United States.
But all that experience data mining and overthrowing Middle Eastern nations wasn’t just thrown out. Rather, Jigsaw repurposed its internal psychological operations program (code-named Operation Abdullah) to instead target “right-wing conspiracy theorists,” as revealed by privacy researcher Rob Braxman.
Using a technique known as the redirect method, Jigsaw attempts to populate outbound links to dissuade potential thought-criminals from looking at wrongthink.
Make no mistake – the redirect method is about more than manipulation of search engine results. It’s one thing to manipulate the content of searches based on query strings, but to target the psychology of the searcher themselves requires an accurate psychological profile of the person doing the searching.
And Google has psych profiles in spades thanks to centralized Google logins: To Android phones, to Gmail accounts, to adjunct services like YouTube, even to children via Google Classroom.
You don’t even need to use Google’s search engine to populate them with weaponized data. In fact, search alone provides far fewer avenues for offensive metadata usage than a cell phone.
We would implore readers to take a look at Jigsaw’s site. It’s a study in how to use front-end design to creep out your visitor, as a snippet of JavaScript code ensures your cursor is tracked in a spotlight throughout your visit:
Jigsaw’s front-end design team has a clear message for you: There’s nowhere to hide.
The site also uses another bit of intelligence tradecraft known as “transferrence” – it’s a simple psychological tactic of shifting blame from yourself to your target.
The four subheaders on Jigsaw’s homepage, Disinformation, Censorship, Toxicity, and Violent Extremism demonstrate this tactic at work.
- There is no greater source of media disinformation than MSM and the information served up by Google search engines.
- Big Tech are at the forefront of destroying free speech through heavy-handed censorship, Google among them.
- Psychological manipulation tactics used by the social justice crowd doubtlessly instill toxicity in those subjected to them.
- And Google’s well-documented history of participating in bloody regime change as described in this article are textbook cases of violent extremism.
Yet Jigsaw markets itself as combating these societal ails. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, just as Google’s former company tag-line of “Don’t Be Evil” was a similar reversal of reality.
And yes, regime change aficionado Jared Cohen is still the CEO of Google Jigsaw. In fact, Jigsaw, LLC was overtly brought back in-house as of October 2020.
In Closing
As we’ve described in previous articles, vast swaths of the State-controlled Panopticon are currently being outsourced to Big Tech companies.
Call this phenomenon a public-private partnership. Call it the Great Reset. Call it Agenda 2030, or Agenda 21, or “stakeholder capitalism,” or any of the other euphemisms dreamt up by these hapless would-be oligarchs to sell neofeudal Technocracy to the public.
Making intelligence services pseudo-independent from the State is simply a mandatory prerequisite for fully globalizing them.
Furthermore, as the Biden administration seeks to reclassify half of the country as domestic extremists, it’s no secret that companies like Google, with their vast data weaponization programs, will play a key role in identifying Public Enemy #1:
You.
There is no “silver bullet” solution to this problem. Nearly all consumer electronics can be exploited at very low levels. Even the Internet itself is a longstanding military intelligence operation.
But this doesn’t mean any action short of becoming a Luddite is meaningless!
If data is the new oil, it’s time to shut off your well:
- Abstain from using Google Mail, Docs, or Search where possible.
- Seek out alternative social media and content creation platforms.
- If your smartphone requires heavy dependence on Apple or Google for logins or closed-source apps, consider privacy-respecting alternatives.
- Familiarize yourself with common data harvesting tactics and take action where you can.
While a full list of meaningful action is beyond the purview of this post (or any single blog entry for that matter), the important takeaway here is this:
We cannot opt out of mass government surveillance. But we knowingly consent to most forms of “privatized” intelligence gathering.
Take the first step and revoke your consent.
The Uyghur Tribunal: Inciting Hatred Against China
By Christopher Black – New Eastern Outlook – 22.06.2021
The fascists are very active these days and one of the proofs of this dark shadow looming over the world is the recent so-called “peoples’ tribunal” put on in London over three days in early June. Otherwise called the “Uyghur Tribunal,” it is headed by Sir Geoffrey Nice, Q.C, the Machiavellian British barrister, knighted by the Queen for his services to Britain, who became notorious for trying to frame-up Yugoslavia’s President Milosevic at the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal.
This new ‘tribunal’ follows on the China Tribunal also headed by Nice and also based in London, which focused on fabricated allegations of forced organ trafficking by China. This second tribunal focuses on fabricated allegations against China concerning the treatment of Uyghurs in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. The allegations before both of these ‘tribunals’ have one objective; to slander the Communist Party of China and to undermine China as a developing and sovereign nation.
The ‘tribunal’ is part of the propaganda matrix being constructed by NATO, led by the USA and UK, which has the objective of manipulating people’s minds to generate hatred and hostility towards China to, at the least, hinder its trade and development, at worst, to prepare the minds of people for war. In that sense this ‘tribunal’ is nothing less than a part of the preparation for war, and can be seen, under international criminal law, as part of a conspiracy to engage in the supreme war crime, the crime of aggression.
The same tactics are being applied to Russia with all the false allegations being made by the Americans against Russia, allegations that Joe Biden shamefully repeated in his meeting with President Putin in Geneva, as if he was king of the world dressing down a wayward vassal. No wonder that meeting was cut short. Only a fly on the wall can tell us what was really said and happened in Geneva, but who can imagine the Russians sitting there for long having to listen to a lecture on how they should stop doing what they are not doing “or face the consequences.” How can any serious person sit there and not either laugh out loud or become angry at the absurdity of it? But of course that is the spin in the western media, the spin that Biden put on the meeting; that he “talked tough to Putin.” Bluster and lies is the American way.
The bluster and lies continued at the Uyghur tribunal over the three days of “hearings” that took place from June 4 to 7 which were staged as a piece of theatre, even to the extent of the organisers selling tickets to attend. It was all acted out by a company of roaming players who go from one forum to another playing their roles, speaking their lines on cue from a script written by shadowy men and women in shadowy rooms in London and Washington.
Geoffrey Nice not only is chair of the two tribunals dealing with China and persecutor of President Milosevic, he is also a co-author of the Caesar Report on Syria, produced by the NATO backed Centre For Justice and Accountability so-called, another propaganda outfit focused on slandering Syria, along with his friend, former US Ambassador For War Crimes, Stephen Rapp. He seems to be NATO’s ever eager go-to lawyer when they need some propaganda put out to justify their wars
One of Nice’s most notorious crimes in the Milosevic show trial at the ICTY was to deliberately mislead the judges and the world by stating that the Kosovo Field speech made by Milosevic proved Milosevic was for a Greater Serbia. But Milosevic produced the real speech proving that he had said the exact opposite of what Nice claimed, that he had called for inter-ethnic tolerance. Nice was proved to be a liar. But the judges did nothing to him. He was allowed to continue spewing lies day after day throughout that show trial because NATO wanted the show to go on and Nice was their chosen circus ringmaster. So, it is no surprise that he was chosen to be ringmaster of this new propaganda circus.
This ‘tribunal’ claims to be independent. Yet it is neither a “tribunal’ nor independent. It has no legal or other authority. It certainly has no moral authority when we look at its funding and the experts called upon to give their ‘evidence,’ for we see clearly the connections between it, the NATO governments and western financial interests.
Much of its funding comes from the World Uyghur Congress whose affiliations with the CIA and funding by the National Endowment For Democracy are well known. In fact it was the World Uyghur Congress that asked Geoffrey Nice to set up the tribunal, according to him, and it provided the initial funding, so that we see right at the beginning, that the US government, through the CIA and NED, is directly involved with the Nice tribunal. Let us look at some of the others involved.
There is Nick Vetch, an extremely rich British businessman, who is founder and CEO of BigYellow a large UK storage company, which, in turn, has some of its shares owned by US financial companies such as Blackrock Inc, Standard Life Aberdeen, American Financial Group and others. Vetch is also a director of the Global Human Rights Fund, a UK “human rights’ organisation, which appears to provide some funding to the Nice tribunal. He is also a member of Nice’s China Tribunal.
Vetch’s connection to the Fund indicates who is behind his activities since the Global Human Rights Fund in turn gets its funding from the European Union, the Swedish Government, the Ford Foundation, George Soros, The Rockefeller Foundation, and other US corporate-backed foundations. The Chair of the Fund is Chris Canavan, managing director of Lion’s Head Global Partners, formerly Director of Global Policy Development for the Soros Fund, formerly senior official with Goldman Sachs Bank in New York and a lifetime member of the US Council on Foreign Relations.
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Other members of the ‘tribunal’ are members of the British Establishment, and aside from anti-China credentials seem to be brought in to add some credibility to the proceedings. They include Dame Parveen Kumar, a UK doctor and member of the British Establishment, Ambreeana Manji, UK law professor who once worked for the British Institute in East Africa, Tim Clark, a UK lawyer and senior director of Vetch’s company Big Yellow and who is also an adviser to G3, which claims to be ‘one of the leading international strategic advisory groups’. Based in London, G3 seems to be an intelligence group with murky connections.
The list includes Ramindar Kaur, social anthropologist, writer, and “human rights” activist who is also deeply immersed in the British establishment. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and head of a number of government studies on UK social issues. There is Dr. David Lynch, a specialist on cancer at University College London, Audrey Osler, Professor of education and human rights, University of Leeds, an advocate of using human rights education to achieve changes in world societies, and Catherine Roe, who began her career as a British diplomat, specialising in multilateral negotiations and who is now a Trustee of the Institute of International Strategic Studies.
Hamid Sabi, is styled as “counsel to the tribunal.” He is a British lawyer, active in the service of the western powers. He is, among other things, a director of Justice For Iran, an organisation accusing Iran of human rights violations, whose recommendations for sanctions against Iranian officials and Press TV are followed by the US and EU and UK governments and who has a history of attacking China.
He is assisted by Aarif Abraham, another UK lawyer, and former lawyer for the NATO tribunal for Yugoslavia, (ICTY) another very anti-China, pro-foreign intervention type who wrote a paper on the Uighurs accusing China of all sorts of crimes. Another assistant is Aldo Samit Borda, a Maltese, but now a lawyer in the UK involved in human rights, who has connections with the British government as he once worked for the Commonwealth Secretariat. The NATO-ICTY connection continues with Marilena Stegbauer, their general assistant, a German, and former intern for the NATO prosecutor at the ICTY, former researcher at Human Rights Institute in the UK, then a writer for The German Diplomat in Germany, who now calls herself a “human rights consultant”.
There is Frankie Vetch, production assistant, son of the Vetch senior, making the tribunal a bit of a Vetch family affair, and Nevenka Tromp, another NATO asset who also worked at the ICTY as a researcher for prosecution in the Milosevic and Karadzic trials. The group is rounded off with Baroness Helena Kennedy, adviser and member of the British House of Lords, Queen’s Counsel, also member of the International Bar Association Institute of Human Rights who in 2020, worked with the Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith and “democracy activist” with Hong Kong Watch, Luke de Pulford, to create the global pressure group the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, in March 2021,
The Coalition for Genocide Response is a supporter of the tribunal. It is the project of John Luke de Pulford mentioned above who is a prominent London establishment anti-communist, anti Chinese Government figure and a supporter of Nathan Law, the Hong Kong fifth columnist working for British interests in Hong Kong, now fled to London. In fact the tribunal has also revealed that it was launched on 3 September 2020, with assistance from the Coalition for Genocide Response that was founded by John Luke de Pulford, the protégé of British journalist turned activist, Benedict Rogers, and Hong Kong Watch functionary, who also has close links to Stand with Hong Kong. Benedict Rogers is the founder of Hong Kong Watch, a notorious propaganda outfit that specializes in churning out fallacies about China. Rogers also has put out false claims about North Korea, works with governments from the UK to Canada and USA and is a leader of the anti-communist Christian Solidarity Worldwide. He states that he introduced Nice to the Uyghurs a couple of years ago. Rogers recently appointed Nice to Hong Kong Watch as a patron, joining the former British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. Another of its patrons is Lord David Alton, who is linked with the concocted report on the Hong Kong Police Force, which the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong, of which he is a vice-chair, produced in 2020.
On Sept 23, 2020, in the House of Lords, Alton asked the British foreign office minister, Lord Ahmad, if the government would “welcome” the initiative to set up the “Uyghur Tribunal”, and “cooperate” with it. The minister did not give a clear reply but the tribunal has since thanked the British government for fast-tracking visas for foreign nationals to attend the tribunal. In view of Alton’s links with Hong Kong Watch, the extent to which it is covertly involved in the tribunal cannot be underestimated as Benedict Rogers is also an adviser to the World Uyghur Congress. The circle of interconnections is complete.
Those are the people behind the tribunal. Some, like Nice, are clearly NATO assets. None of them are independent or objective.
Since this is supposedly a tribunal they had to produce witnesses. These fit into two categories, expert witnesses and witnesses of fact, that is, people who claim to have observed things.
These were duly paraded before the tribunal, one after one, made statements without offering any proof of their claims and then retired with none of them cross-examined on their statements. Their claims were not tested at all; not by the ‘judges’ who are also in fact the “prosecutors” nor by anyone else. Instead the statements were accepted as true without any examination and when the ‘witnesses’ faltered in reading their lines, the ‘judges’ assisted them. This is not the procedure of a trial or even a hearing. It is more closely associated with an Inquisition. Nice and company are not interested in the truth or falsity of the claims being made. Their only interest is in making sure the statements they require to make effective anti-Chinese propaganda are supplied.
The so-called ‘expert witnesses’ included Ethan Guttman, a Senior fellow at the anticommunist “Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an American organisation funded by the US Congress to “educate people on the evils of communism,” who has made many wild claims about China in particular on allegations of “organ harvesting” and Adrian Zenz, also a fellow at the same anti-communist organisation. His propaganda work is notorious.
It incudes Laura Murphy, trained as a literature scholar, who became a “human rights” professor at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice, University of Sheffield. Harvard educated, she seems to be a professional witness and has worked for US Government Office of Victims of Crime, and other US government agencies, has put out propaganda on the BBC about “forced labour” in China and received an award for her propaganda work from the US government agency the National Endowment For Humanities, and grants from their National Humanities Centre. She also received grants from the British Academy.
Finally there is Dr. Darren Byler, of the University of Colorado, who is engaged in post doctoral work with the ChinaProject, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, a famous, anti-communist organisation founded by Henry Luce, and, Nathan Ruser, an Australian researcher with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute who is an expert in satellite data and surveillance who has written a number of anti-Chinese propaganda articles. There are a few others of the same type.
The factual witnesses are a travelling troupe of players many of whom have given statements in other venues, often contradicting their claims at the tribunal. The Chinese government has exposed the lies of several of these witnesses who travel the world as professional witnesses-earning their keep by telling stories which do not bear up under any scrutiny. But none of the witnesses testified under a real oath, none were questioned on the contents of their statements or how they came to the attention of the organisers, apart from being recruited by the World Uyghur Congress.
Having myself experienced how Nice and the other prosecutors at the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals got people to be witnesses, and how they coerced them into given false testimony when required makes it impossible to accept any of the statements made by these alleged witnesses with anything less than complete disbelief. Not that it matters in legal terms. Despite Nice spouting platitudes about “reasonable doubt” and “assessing the evidence” we all know what the outcome of the hearings, to be continued in September, will be; the condemnation of China.
So there we have it, another propaganda exercise masquerading as a search for justice and accountability, But it is about time these propagandists be held accountable for their actions, for manufacturing hatred and hostility towards a nation that has brought its people out of the poverty imposed on them by the west during the colonial period and which the west wants to impose again.
At the Nuremberg Trials the Nazi propagandist, Julius Streicher, was hanged for putting out propaganda about Jews and inciting hatred leading to genocide. At the Rwanda Tribunal the members of a radio station were convicted of genocide for allegedly making false reports on events that the prosecutors claimed instigated hatred that led to genocide. Hate speech is proscribed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other treaties. Is this not what Nice and his players are doing, trying to instigate hatred and hostility to justify war, to justify harming and killing Chinese? Is this not where it all leads? Is this not a crime against humanity? Are not they the real criminals?
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds.
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Book Review
Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as U.S. Hegemony
By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | February 27, 2013
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.
More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony. … continue
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