Iranian scientist jailed in US returns home
By Ghanbar Naderi – Press TV – June 8, 2020
Iranian scientist Majid Taheri, who was imprisoned in the US for more than 16 months, finally returned home on Monday. Upon arrival, Taheri was received by his family as well as high-ranking Iranian officials at the Imam Khomeini International Airport.
The Iranian national who was a longtime resident of the US state of Florida, spent 16 months in prison for allegedly violating US sanctions on Iran. Speaking to Press TV, he denied all allegations.
The development came days after another Iranian scientist Sirous Asgari, a professor of material sciences at Sharif University of Technology, also returned home.
He spent about three years in US detention on trumped-up charges of fraud and theft of information relating to his work with a university in Ohio. The case however, was dismissed by a US district judge and he managed to return to his country.
Iran has called on Washington to release all other Iranian citizens taken hostage. The country says the US must make up for the damages caused by detaining Iranian scientists.
Israel lobby in Canada
By Yves Engler · June 7, 2020
The Trudeau government has been campaigning aggressively for a seat on the Security Council, but its bid to win a place on the UN’s most powerful decision-making body will be hampered by Canada’s decidedly anti-Palestinian voting record. Despite claiming to support the “international rules based order”, the Trudeau government has voted against more than 50 resolutions upholding Palestinian rights. The extent to which the Liberals have mimicked the Stephen Harper Conservative’s position regarding General Assembly resolutions, which are little more than symbolic acts of solidarity with the long-beleaguered Palestinians, highlights the power of the Israel lobby in Canada.
Together the United Jewish Appeal/Combined Jewish Appeal of Toronto, Montréal, Winnipeg, Windsor, Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton, London, Ottawa, Vancouver and Atlantic Canada raise over $100 million annually and have about $1 billion in assets. For half a century UJA Toronto has organized an annual Walk with Israel and the Montréal branch organizes an annual Israel Day march. Many thousands march each year. The lobbying arm of the UJA/CJA, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs has over 40 staff and a $10 million budget. In addition, B’nai B’rith has a handful of offices across the country. For its part, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center Canada’s budget is $7-10 million annually. These groups work closely with StandWithUs Canada, CAMERA, Honest Reporting Canada and other (often extreme right wing) Israeli nationalist political organizations. Dozens of registered Canadian charities, ranging from the Jewish National Fund to Christians United for Israel also engage in at least some pro-Israel campaigning.
Since 2013 the chief fundraiser for the Trudeau Liberals has been Stephen Bronfman, scion of an arch Israeli nationalist family. Bronfman has millions invested in Israeli technology companies and over the years the Bronfman clan has secured arms for Israeli forces and supported its military in other ways.
Other notable Canadian moguls have long histories of ensuring ties between Israel and Canada.
Worth more than $3 billion prior to his death, David Azrieli was among the richest Canadians. In his youth he served in the paramilitary Haganah group during the 1948 war. His unit was responsible for the Battle of Jerusalem, including forcibly displacing 10,000 Palestinians. Azrieli was also a real estate developer in Israel and in 2011 he made a controversial donation to Im Tirtzu, a hardline Israeli-nationalist organization (deemed a “fascist” group by an Israeli court).
Worth $1.6 billion, Gerald Schwartz and his wife Heather Reisman created the Heseg Foundation for Lone Soldiers, which provides millions of dollars annually for non-Israelis who fight in the IDF.
In recent years Canadian-Israeli billionaire Sylvan Adams has plowed tens of millions of dollars into various sports and cultural initiatives to rebrand Israel.
Other Canadian billionaires Larry Tanenbaum, Mark Scheinberg, David Cheriton, Daryl Katz, Seymour Schulich, as well as the Zekelman, Reichmann and Sherman families, all back Israel.
In “A story of failed re-engagement: Canada and Iran, 2015–2018” University of Ottawa professor Thomas Juneau highlighted the Israel lobby’s role in deterring the government from re-establishing diplomatic relations with Iran:
“Initially, Cabinet and most caucus supported re-engagement. Dion, who was actively lobbied by Bombardier (whose headquarters were in his riding) and the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, was especially keen. Other senior ministers such as Freeland (International Trade) and Harjit Sajjan (Defence) also supported. With time, however, opposition within caucus grew. It was led by Michael Levitt, the influential MP for York-Center and chair of the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group, and also included Anthony Housefather (MP for Mount-Royal). These MPs had support from former minister Irwin Cotler, who had long argued for harsher policies towards Iran.”
Juneau continued, “other interviewees also highlighted the differences in organization among pressure groups. Between the tabling of the motion [to oppose reengaging with Iran] and the vote four days later, groups opposing reengagement, such as the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs, rapidly launched an effective campaign to pressure MPs. Groups favoring reengagement, however, such as the Iranian Canadian Congress, were unable to match these lobbying efforts.”
For a movement defending open racism and colonialism the Israel lobby wields a unique and powerful stick: The ability to play victim and smear those advocating for justice as racist.
The Liberals ousted high-profile Imam Hassan Guillet as a candidate to run for the party in 2019 after B’nai B’rith attacked him for challenging Israeli expansionism. The winner of the Saint-Leonard-Saint-Michel riding nomination gained global notoriety for his sermon at the memorial for the victims of the 2017 Québec City mosque attack, but when B’nai B’rith twisted his pro-Palestinian statements to imply he was anti-Semitic the Liberals dumped their star candidate.
Similarly, when members of the extremist Jewish Defence League attacked peaceful pro-Palestinian activists protesting a presentation by Israeli military reservists at York University Trudeau sided with the thugs crying anti-Semitism. Following a statement by B’nai B’rith, CIJA and the Israel lobby’s point person in the Liberal government, Michael Levitt, Trudeau denounced “anti-Semitism” by pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
The influence of CIJA, B’nai B’rith, Bronfman, Schwartz, etc. largely explains the Trudeau government’s anti-Palestinian voting record at the UN. Whether that will scuttle Canada’s bid for a seat on the Security Council is to be determined.
But, we should hope so. Please join over 100 organizations and dozens of prominent individuals that have signed an open letter calling on UN member states to vote for Canada’s competitors, Norway and Ireland, for the two non-permanent Security Council spots open for Western countries.
FBI launches open attack on ‘foreign’ alternative media outlets challenging US foreign policy
By Gareth Porter | Grayzone Project | June 5, 2020
The FBI has publicly justified its suppression of dissenting online views about US foreign policy if a media outlet can be somehow linked to one of its adversaries. The Bureau’s justification followed a series of instances in which Google and other social media platforms banned accounts following consultations with the FBI.
In a particularly notable case in 2018, the FBI encouraged Facebook, Instagram and Google to ban the American Herald Tribune (AHT), an online journal that published critical opinion articles on US policy toward Iran and the Middle East. The bureau has never offered a clear rationale, however, despite its private discussions with Facebook on the ban.
The FBI’s first step toward intervening against dissenting views on social media took place in October 2017 with the creation of a Foreign Influence Task Force (FTIF) in the bureau’s Counterintelligence Division. Next, the FBI defined any effort by states designated by the Department of Defense as major adversaries (Russia, China, Iran and North Korea) to influence American public opinion as a threat to US national security.
In February 2020, the FBI defined that threat in much more specific terms and implied that it would act against any online media outlet that was found to fall within its ambit. At a conference on election security on February 24, David K. Porter, who identified himself as Assistant Section Chief of the Foreign Influence Task Force, defined what the FBI described as “malign foreign influence activity” as “actions by a foreign power to influence US policy, distort political sentiment and public discourse.”
Porter described “information confrontation” as a force “designed to undermine public confidence in the credibility of free and independent news media.” Those who practice this dark craft, he said, seek to “push consumers to alternative news sources,” where “it’s much easier to introduce false narratives” and thus “sow doubt and confusion about the true narratives by exploiting the media landscape to introduce conflicting story lines.”
“Information confrontation”, however, is simply the literal Russian translation of the term “information warfare.” Its use by the FTIF appears to be aimed merely at justifying an FBI role in seeking to suppress what it calls “alternative news sources” under any set of circumstances it can justify.
While expressing his intention to target alternative media, Porter simultaneously denied that the FBI was concerned about censoring media. The FITF, he said “doesn’t go around chasing content. We don’t focus on what the actors say.” Instead, he insisted that “attribution is key,” suggesting that the FTIF was only interested in finding hidden foreign government actors at work.
Thus the question of “attribution” has become the FBI’s key lever for censoring alternative media that publishes critical content on US foreign policy, or which attacks mainstream and corporate media narratives. If an outlet can be somehow linked to a foreign adversary, removing it from online platforms is fair game for the feds.
The strange disappearance of American Herald Tribune
In 2018, Facebook deleted the Facebook page of the American Herald Tribune, a website that publishes commentary from an array of notable authors who are harshly critical of US foreign policy. Gmail, which is run by Google, quickly followed suit, along with the Facebook-owned Instagram.
Tribune editor Anthony Hall reported at the time that the removals occurred at the end of August 2018, but there was no announcement of the move by Facebook. Nor was it reported by the corporate news media until January 2020, when CNN elicited a confirmation from a Facebook spokesman that it had indeed done so in 2018. Furthermore, the FBI was advising Facebook on both Iranian and Russian sites that were banned during that same period of a few days. As Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos noted on July 21, 2018, “We have proactively reported our technical findings to US law enforcement, because they have much more information than we do, and may in time be in a position to provide public attribution.”
On August 2, a few days following the removal of AHT and two weeks after hundreds of Russian and Iranian Pages had been removed by Facebook, FBI Director Christopher Wray told reporters at a White House briefing that FBI officials had “met with top social media and technology companies several times” during the year, “providing actionable intelligence to better enable them to address abuse of their platforms by foreign actors.” He remarked that FBI officials had “shared specific threat indicators and account information so they can better monitor their own platforms.”
Cybersecurity firm FireEye, which boasts that it has contracts to support “nearly every department in the United States government,” and which has been used by Department of Homeland Security as a primary source of “threat intelligence,” also influenced Facebook’s crackdown on the Tribune. CNN cited an unnamed official of FireEye stating that the company had “assessed” with “moderate confidence” that the AHT’s website was founded in Iran and was “part of a larger influence operation.”
The CNN author was evidently unaware that in US intelligence parlance “moderate confidence” suggests a near-total absence of genuine conviction. As the 2011 official “consumer’s guide” to US intelligence explained, the term “moderate confidence” generally indicates that either there are still differences of view in the intelligence community on the issue or that the judgment ”is credible and plausible but not sufficiently corroborated to warrant higher level of confidence.”
CNN also quoted FireEye official Lee Foster’s claim that “indicators, both technical and behavioral” showed that American Herald Tribune was part of the larger influence operation. The CNN story linked to a study published by FireEye featuring a “map” showing how Iranian-related media were allegedly linked to one another, primarily by similarities in content. But CNN apparently hadn’t bothered to read the study, which did not once mention the American Herald Tribune.
Finally, the CNN piece cited a 2018 tweet by Daily Beast contributor Josh Russell which it said provided “further evidence supporting American Herald Tribune’s alleged links to Iran.” In fact, his tweet merely documented the AHT’s sharing of an internet hosting service with another pro-Iran site “at some point in time.” Investigators familiar with the problem know that two websites using the same hosting service, especially over a period of years, is not a reliable indicator of a coherent organizational connection.
CNN did find evidence of deception over the registration of the AHT. The outlet’s editor, Anthony Hall, continues to give the false impression that a large number of journalists and others (including this writer), are contributors, despite the fact that their articles have been republished from other sources without permission.
However, AHT has one characteristic that differentiates it from the others that have been kicked off Facebook: The American and European authors who have appeared in its pages are all real and are advancing their own authentic views. Some are sympathetic to the Islamic Republic, but others are simply angry about US policies: Some are Libertarian anti-interventionists; others are supporters of the 9/11 Truth movement or other conspiracy theories.
One notable independent contributor to AHT is Philip Giraldi, an 18-year veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine Service and and an articulate critic of US wars in the Middle East and of Israeli influence on American policy and politics. From its inception in 2015, the AHT has been edited by Anthony Hall, Professor Emeritus at University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada.
In announcing yet another takedown of Iranian Pages in October 2018, Facebook’s Gleicher declared that “coordinated inauthentic behavior” occurs when “people or organizations create networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are what they’re doing.” That certainly doesn’t apply to those who provided the content for the American Herald Tribune.
Thus the takedown of the publication by Facebook, with FBI and FireEye encouragement represents a disturbing precedent for future actions against individuals who criticize US foreign policy and outlets that attack corporate media narratives.
Shelby Pierson, the CIA official appointed by then director of national intelligence in July 2019 to chair the inter-agency “Election Executive and Leadership Board,” appeared to hint at differences in the criteria employed by his agency and the FBI on foreign and alternative media.
In an interview with former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell in February, Pierson said, “[P]articularly on the [foreign] influence side of the house, when you’re talking about blended content with First Amendment-protected speech… against the backdrop of a political paradigm and you’re involving yourself in those activities, I think that makes it more complicated” (emphasis added).
Further emphasizing the uncertainty surrounding the FBI’s methods of online media suppression, she added that the position in question “doesn’t have the same unanimity that we have in the counterterrorism context.”
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.
Rush to trash hydroxychloroquine exposes fundamental flaws in profit-based medical ‘science’
By Helen Buyniski | RT | June 4, 2020
As the WHO and prestigious medical journal the Lancet back away from questionable data provided by healthcare analytics firm Surgisphere, ulterior motives for the rush to demonize hydroxychloroquine become clear.
The World Health Organization (WHO) sheepishly resumed testing the off-patent malaria drug hydroxychloroquine on coronavirus patients on Wednesday after pausing that arm of its ‘Solidarity’ clinical trial based on data that appeared to show the drug contributed to higher death rates among test subjects. That data, it turned out, came from a tiny US healthcare analytics firm called Surgisphere, and calling it faulty would be excessively charitable.
Not only is Surgisphere a company lacking in medical expertise – its employees included an “adult” entertainer and a science-fiction writer – but its CEO Sapan Desai co-authored two of the damning studies that used the firm’s data to smear hydroxychloroquine, already thoroughly demonized in the media thanks to its promotion by US President Donald Trump, as a killer. All data is sourced to a proprietary database supposedly containing a veritable ocean of real-time, detailed patient information yet curiously absent from existing medical literature.
The Surgisphere-tainted study appeared to show increased risk of in-hospital deaths and heart problems with no disease-fighting benefits, confirming the suspicions of medical-industry naysayers already inclined to hate the off-patent drug due to the lack of profit potential and Trump’s incessant boosterism. Italy, France, and Germany rushed to ban hydroxychloroquine, citing “an increased risk for adverse reactions with little or no benefit.”
But such a shameless character assassination performed against a potentially-lifesaving drug – especially one with a decades-long track record of safety in malaria, lupus, and arthritis patients that came highly recommended by some of the world’s most eminent disease experts, including France’s Didier Raoult – could only be accomplished with help from industry prejudice. It required ignoring numerous existing studies showing hydroxychloroquine was beneficial in treating early-stage Covid-19 patients, as well as anecdotal reports from thousands of doctors who’d successfully used it.
It also required trusting a fly-by-night company with next to no internet or media presence to make decisions that could affect the lives of millions of people. It’s not like there weren’t warning signs Surgisphere was something other than the top-notch medical analytics firm it presented itself as. The company began life as a textbook publisher in 2008 and hired most of its 11 employees two month ago, according to an investigation by the Guardian, yet it claimed ownership of a massive international database of 96,000 patients in 1,200 hospitals worldwide. One expert interviewed by the outlet said it would be difficult for even a national statistics agency to do in years what Surgisphere had supposedly done in weeks, calling the database “almost certainly a scam.” Yet no one at the Lancet or WHO thought to look a gift horse in the mouth – not when that gift drove a stake through the heart of hydroxychloroquine as Covid-19 treatment.
And while Australian researchers found flaws in the Surgisphere data just days after the May 22 publication of the Lancet study, noting that the number of Covid-19 deaths cited by the study as coming from five hospitals exceeded the entirety of Covid-19 deaths recorded in Australia at that time, the Lancet – instead of investigating just who this Surgisphere company really was, and why it had made such a glaring mistake – merely published a minor retraction related to the Australian data and put the controversy to bed.
The full-frontal assault on hydroxychloroquine was instead allowed to continue unchecked in the media, as mainstream outlets focused their energies on fluffing up remdesivir – a costly, untested drug manufactured by drug maker Gilead that has so far produced lackluster results in clinical trials – and stumping for an eventual vaccine. Hydroxychloroquine’s off-patent status meant it was a dead end as far as profits were concerned, while remdesivir and whatever vaccine is ultimately green-lighted will make a lot of people very rich. Perhaps hoping to throw their audiences off the real reason for their hydroxychloroquine hatred, several outlets hinted that Trump stood to make money off the drug (which costs about 60 cents per pill) – but even Snopes, no fan of the ‘Bad Orange Man’, had to pour cold water on that speculation.
The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine have – belatedly – published “expressions of concern” about the Surgisphere hydroxychloroquine study, and an independent audit is being conducted. But the problem of biased health authorities selectively embracing some trial results while rejecting others is unlikely to stop there.
The Lancet study is hardly the only one to show hydroxychloroquine lacks efficacy in treating Covid-19. Multiple studies conducted by the US National Institutes of Health on hospitalized (i.e. severely-ill) coronavirus patients have yielded poor results, but even the drug’s most ardent evangelists acknowledge it doesn’t help end-stage or very sick patients. Raoult has even claimed France banned the drug’s use in all but the most severely ill patients in order to discredit it as a treatment. The US National Institutes of Health was publishing studies in its journal Virology touting chloroquine as “a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection” as far back as 2005, yet ‘coronavirus czar’ Anthony Fauci throws shade at the drug whenever he gets a chance.
As long as deadly diseases like Covid-19 are seen as profit sources first and human rights issues second (or third, or tenth…), treatments that aren’t profitable will always be marginalized in favor of costly and frequently less-effective pharmaceuticals. Drug industry profiteering has already killed hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of people in the US alone. Taking the profit motive out of healthcare can help ensure its body count stays as low as possible.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
Staggering Death Rate in 7 US States
American deaths per million equal or exceed Europe’s worst-hit nations in several locales
click to enlarge
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | June 3, 2020
At first glance, the United States appears to have fared reasonably well during this pandemic. So far, 327 Americans have died of the coronavirus out of every one million in the population.
That’s according to official numbers. Which are all we have to work with at the moment. (There are solid reasons why official numbers should be viewed as provisional and inexact. See the bottom of the page here.)
If we compare its overall rate of 327 deaths per million to the hardest hit nations in Europe, America looks blessed. Belgium has experienced 820 deaths per million. Spain and the UK, 580. Italy, 555.
But peer a bit closer, and another story emerges. America’s number is low because many parts of that country have (so far) been spared a serious outbreak. In places where the virus gained a foothold in the wider community, the death rate exceeds even the worst countries in Europe:
New York state: 1,546
New Jersey: 1,327
Connecticut: 1,114
Massachusetts: 1028
Rhode Island: 691
District of Columbia: 666
Louisiana: 611
Michigan: 556
This being an election year, some people are blaming US President Donald Trump, a Republican, for the lives lost. It’s worth observing, therefore, that the governor is a Democrat in six of the seven US states is which the death per million rate equals or surpasses Italy.
Likewise, the mayor of the District of Columbia is a Democrat. Only in Massachusetts is a Republican in charge.
The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil Unrest
“Warning shots will not be fired”
By Larry Romanoff – Global Research – November 27, 2019
Preparing For Civil War?
US authorities have for decades become increasingly prepared for mass civil disturbances resulting from government and corporate attacks on American society. We can recall that in the early 1980s the Hidden State launched its open war on the middle class by the savage FED-induced recession and the unilateral revocation of the social contract that had existed since 1946. At that time, the US government had already anticipated widespread public unrest, fully expecting mass protests and riots, and had made preparations to deal with them in the form of internment camps. In a real sense, the government had prepared for another civil war.
Like most of the “Great Transformation”, it began during Reagan’s reign with what was called “Rex 84”, an abbreviation for Readiness Exercise 1984, a plan by the US government to detain large numbers of American citizens in case of civil unrest. This master plan involved the FBI, Department of Defense, the Emergency Measures group, the Secret Service, the CIA and altogether 34 government agencies.
It was presented as an exercise to test military assistance in civil defense in times of national emergency, but in fact the plan was anticipating civil disturbances, major demonstrations and labor strikes that would affect continuity of government. The anticipated civil unrest from the FED-induced financial crisis that devastated the middle class was considered “subversive”, REX-84 being an authorisation for the US military to implement government-controlled movements of civilian populations at both state and regional levels, the arrest of many segments of the American population, and the imposition of martial law. (1) (2)
The Rex-84 program was created under the pretense of a possible mass exodus of illegal aliens attempting to cross into the US from Mexico, but when the program accidentally became public during the Iran-Contra Congressional hearings in 1987 it was revealed that it was in fact a secret federal government program
“to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, assign military commanders to take over state and local governments, and detain large numbers of American citizens determined by the government to be ‘national security threats’.”
This was part of a master contingency plan for which the FBI today has a primary list of more than 100,000 Americans, and a secondary list ten times larger, who are targeted to be rounded up as subversives, including labor leaders, scholars and public figures, the incarceration designed to isolate political dissidents and to contain civil unrest.
And these are prison camps, ringed with fences, barbed wire and armed guards, not places from which escape would be likely, and they were designed to hold Americans, not Mexicans. (3)
There is no question the US government is prepared for the possibility of widespread and uncontrollable domestic disorder. This program in place and building for years was encouraged by fears of a massive public uprising in the wake of the 2008 banking fraud.
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said some years ago that concentration camps were a likely future reality for Americans and that the Supreme Court would not do anything about the tyranny should the executive branch think it necessary. He mentioned the World War II internment of Japanese in the US and said of these camps,
“you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again”. (4) (5)
In 2009, as the US financial crisis deepened and concern about public unrest was increasing, the US National Guard was posting job opportunities for “Internment/Resettlement Specialists” to work in “civilian internee camps” within the United States, and Halliburton [former] subsidiary KBR was seeking subcontractors to staff “emergency environment” camps located in five regions of the US. Earlier, in 2006, KBR was contracted by Homeland Security to build detention centers designed to deal with “the rapid development of unspecified “new programs” that would require large numbers of people to be interned.” (6) (7)
The US has for many years been dangerously close to a situation where, if the American people take to the streets in protest, these internments can be easily carried out. By 2004, there were more than 800 of these internment camps in the US, all empty, but all fully operational, staffed, and surrounded by full-time guards, ready to receive prisoners. I have seen photos. As well, many military bases are slated to be closed down and used as extra civilian prisons if the need arises, all intended for the internment of dissidents and others deemed “potentially harmful to the state”. Some camps can each hold 20,000 or more prisoners, a massive effort at civilian population control, and the program is still expanding. The US is very near the point today where political dissidents questioning the actions of their government will risk being rounded up and forced into these prison camps, essentially a government plan to forcibly suppress political dissent under the guise of rooting out domestic “terrorism”.
The US government defines many Americans as having become “pre-revolutionary” from their outrage at the 2008 government-approved housing collapse, with increasing concern that massive civil unrest would emerge from both the poverty-stricken lower classes and the eviscerated middle class, leading to what would become an internal civil war. This is the reason that the FBI and DHS increasingly focus their “anti-terror” apparatus on white middle-class Americans like the Occupy Wall Street protestors who were categorised as “low-level terrorists”.
In 2008, the Washington Post reported government plans to station many tens of thousands of troops inside the country for purposes referred to as “domestic security” in the light of massive civil unrest that would follow an economic collapse or serious financial crisis, perhaps stemming from 2008.
According to the government document,
“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security”,
stating that the military may be needed to quell “purposeful domestic resistance”. To prepare for this quelling of resistance, the US has resorted to demonising its own citizens, a recent study funded by DHS conveniently identifying those Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority” and who exhibit signs of being “reverent of individual liberty”, and re-categorising them as “extreme right-wing” terrorists. (8) (9) (10)
The program is designed to “reduce and eliminate” all domestic resistance to the US government. “Crowd control agents” will be used for this purpose, and government agencies will be involved in “gathering information on dissidents” to identify all those who have either “threatened or are creating disturbances”. The US military produced a manual on what it termed “Civil Disturbance Operations” that outlines how military assets will be used to “help local and state authorities to restore and maintain law and order” in the event of mass riots and civil unrest. Military and other law-enforcement will be tasked with “breaking up unauthorized gatherings” and restoring order by
“presenting a show of force, establishing roadblocks, breaking up crowds, employing crowd control agents, and other operations as required”.
The same government manual describes how prisoners will be processed through these internment camps, and outlines how these internees would be “re-educated” while detained in prison camps inside their own country by their own government. A leaked military document titled ‘FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations’, outlined a program for “re-education camps” in the US which contained plans for “political activists” to be “pacified” by various psychological officers into “sympathising” with the government and into “developing an appreciation of US policies” while detained in prison camps inside the US. The document was restricted to Department of Defense personnel but was been leaked and posted online. It outlined policies for “processing detainees into internment camps” and made clear these operations would be used for domestic civilian situations. (11) (12) The full document is available here: (13)
“Once the detainees have been processed into the internment camp, the manual explains how they will be “indoctrinated”, with a particular focus on coercing political dissidents into expressing support for U.S. policies.”
Part of the stated role of the psychological officers would be to identify political activists, political leaders, ‘malcontents’, and other agitators, and to develop and execute appropriate
“indoctrination programs to reduce or remove antagonistic attitudes”.
However, their first task would be to “pacify and acclimate detainees to accept the internment facility’s authority and regulations”.
There are also disturbing insights into the government’s intention to use brutal force to violently quell any civil political unrest. The manual includes a long list of weapons meant to be used against protesting American civilians, including anti-riot grenades. Page 20 of the manual authorises the use of “deadly force” in confronting these peaceful political “dissidents”, the murderous intent made disturbingly clear with the directive that “Warning shots will not be fired” first. Northcom itself, in a September 8, 2008 Army Times article, said the first wave of the deployment, which was put in place on October 1st at Fort Stewart and at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, would be aimed at tackling “civil unrest and crowd control”.
In November of 2013, Forbes Magazine ran an article based on the AP newswire, detailing that DHS had been assembling a massive weapons arsenal since 2011 or 2012. (14) The AP reported that Homeland Security had been stockpiling ammunition by buying more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition in addition to a prior purchase of 1.5 billion rounds, for a staggering total of more than three billion rounds. This is more ammunition than the US military used collectively in all its wars in the last decade, and represents about ten shots for every man, woman and child in America. There were also confirmed purchases by various government agencies, of hundreds of millions of hollow-point rounds to be delivered to dozens of locations around the US. These bullets are so lethal they are banned for battlefield use during wars because they mushroom and fragment on impact, their only purpose being to cause the maximum possible damage to internal organs. Also purchased were large numbers of magnum rounds with the power to penetrate walls, and a frightening hundreds of millions more rounds of specialty sniper ammunition.
Even more, it was reported in early 2015 that DHS had placed orders for massive amounts of other kinds of anti-civilian weaponry termed “Less Lethal Specialty Munitions”, which were described as “an arsenal of specialized weaponry for training and deployment against crowds”. These included flash grenades, light bursts, gas and chemical grenades, riot rounds, rubber bullets, and much more. These are all heavy-duty crowd control and civilian intimidation weapons. They have no other purpose and, in the volume in which they are being purchased, it is clear the US government is expecting some very serious civil disturbances, possibly a revolution, and soon.
As recently as 2018, Forbes was reporting more of the same, that these purchases have reached an astonishing ubiquity. It isn’t only Homeland Security who is arming to the teeth. Thousands of agents at the IRS now have tactical assault rifles and heavy weaponry.
Screenshot Forbes, October 20, 2017
The Small Business Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs have purchased thousands of Glock handguns. The Health Services agencies purchased millions of dollars worth of Glock handguns – equipped with silencers. The US Geological Survey, which is a weather bureau, purchased millions of dollars worth of Winchester Black Shadow shotguns with large bulk ammunition orders in addition to Glock handguns. Even the Department of Education purchased millions of dollars worth of Glock handguns, shotguns and body armor. I am unaware of any nation in the world where the income tax department or the departments of education and health care require huge amounts of military-grade weapons, much less body armor and gun silencers.
In June of 2016, RT reported that non-military federal agencies had more firepower than the entire US Marine Corps, this including agencies like education, health and income tax. (15) RT documented, a new report where 67 non-military federal US agencies spent $1.50 billion purchasing guns, ammunition and military-style equipment. The details came from the Militarization of America: non-military federal agencies purchases of guns, ammo, and military-style equipment, published by the non-profit good government group OpentheBooks.com. (16) (17)
In addition to the massive purchase of ammunition, DHS was showing off its acquisition of heavily armored and mine-resistant personnel carriers which have been seen on streets all across America and verified with photos and video. Forbes noted that these vehicles are equipped with gun ports and are “designed to withstand IEDs, mine blasts and 50 caliber hits to bullet-proof glass”, and asked why they would be necessary on American streets. The DHS also purchased large amounts of riot gear and bullet-proof checkpoint booths, as well as a purchase of 7000 automatic rifles, and 2700 armored vehicles, and the deployment of drones with allowance for their use on US citizens.
The DHS is becoming a massive domestic army to handle domestic conflict. In the words of Ellen Brown,
“somebody in government is expecting some serious civil unrest …”
DHS chief Janet Napolitano claimed this was to prepare for a mass influx of immigrants into the United States that would require the “shelter and processing” of large numbers of people, but this is nonsense. By whom will the US be attacked that Homeland Security would be responsible for defense, and from where would arise a mass of peaceful immigrants so large as to require more than three billion bullets to repel them?
This is the same government that recently shut down many of its operations including most of the National Parks, for lack of funds, yet had sufficient money to purchase billions of bullets for a non-existent civilian army. A spokesperson was quoted as justifying this massive purchase to “help the government get a low price for a big purchase”, and claimed DHS used “as many as 15 million rounds every year in training exercises”. Someone should ask DHS to divide 3 billion by 15 million, which tells us the ammunition purchase will supply DHS needs for the next 200 years. The authorities naturally attribute criticism and hard questions to mentally-unbalanced ‘conspiracy theorists’, but this is one more instance where actions appear irrational and the official story is so full of holes that it makes no sense.
Another DHS purchase that produced a firestorm of anger when its news went viral, was the supply of what we might call ‘unconventional’ paper targets which were used as practice shooting targets in ‘training exercises’. These targets consisted of figures of American civilians in residential settings. They included small children, a young pregnant mother, old women in robes, grandmothers and grandfathers in their kitchens and front yards, teenagers in parks, little girls and more, perhaps the most frightening part being that all these were termed “no hesitation targets”, meaning to fire without hesitation at the sight of these enemies. What could possibly justify the supply of such targets to a military force, with such an instruction? The US fedbiz.op website took down the solicitation after Infowars broke the story, and eventually apologized publicly for creating these targets of small children.
In early 2014 it was reported that the US military had built a $100 million fake city of about 300 acres in Virginia, for use in training troops for the occupation of cities, complete with a sports stadium, bank, school, and an underground subway in order to train for future combat scenarios in American urban areas. The subway carriages even carry the same logo as those in Washington DC. More disturbingly, it was reported that
“soldiers are being taught that Christians, Tea Party supporters and anti-abortion activists represent a radical terror threat, mirroring rhetoric backed by the Department of Homeland Security which frames “liberty lovers” as domestic extremists.”
The DHS is also building a 176-acre secure compound in the lowest-income area of Washington, DC, which seems almost certainly a preparation for civil war. (18) (19)
The trigger could be an economic collapse that causes angry Americans to flood the streets similar to the Occupy Wall Street and other scenes witnessed across both the US and Europe during the last FED-induced economic crisis. It is worth noting that the Occupy Wall Street protest had the right idea but the wrong target. Wall Street is just an idea, and a bit player. The ultimate cause is the FED, and that should have been their focus. But the FED, the bankers and the FBI saw this coming and infiltrated and financed the protest groups as a way to take control and deflect them from any useful action or focus.
In the middle of 2013 several US local media reported the DHS was conducting widely public but still “top secret” exercises categorised as “full scale terrorism drills” across the entire nation with the stated purpose of making citizens “feel safe”, but which resulted in thousands of terrified people not knowing how to respond to what appeared as a domestic invasion by the US military. People were capriciously apprehended and released after having their belongings searched, but nevertheless urged to celebrate their “independence” from tyranny. These drills were presented as readiness training for potential terrorist incursions, though DHS failed to mention the New York Times observation that all the domestic terror plots in the United States over the last decade were “hatched by the FBI”.
One other worrying development was the appearance of US military C-130 cargo planes apparently spraying mosquitoes over various Florida cities at an altitude of less than 50 meters. Pest control is hardly a military duty, these events immediately reminding me of the US military spraying bacterial and other pathogens over many parts of the US in various CIA-related experiments on the domestic population. These low-altitude overflights are almost certainly practice runs for potential crowd control in the future, for dispensing tear gas or other non-lethal (or lethal) material that would disperse or disorient protestors. I cannot imagine all the possibilities, but the US military most certainly is not going into the mosquito-spraying business. (19) (20)
US Major General Curry was quoted as stating,
“We have local police, backed up by each state’s National Guard, backed up by the Department of Defense. So in addition to all these forces why does Homeland Security need its own private army? Why do the SSA, NOAA and other government agencies need to create their own civilian security forces armed with hollow nose bullets?”
Some may want to dismiss this as just another conspiracy theory, but we might recall the words of Senator Daniel Inouye in 1987,
“There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.”
The threats to civil liberties go much farther and are much more ominous than I’ve related so far. Another factor is the spate of secret Executive Orders that Obama signed without Congressional approval, observers claiming those orders violated existing laws and were therefore illegal but that the powers behind the White House considered themselves above all law. One of the most sinister was Executive Order 13603 which granted authorization to seize possession of every possible resource, including property and “all food storage facilities”. One author wrote that “This extremist, maniacal edict is designed to enforce our submission, rendering us totally dependent on Big Brother government or face the obvious – starvation and extermination.”
What could possibly have instigated such an order, unless the government is preparing for an all-out war against the American people? What possible excuse, during peace-time, would a “democratic” government have, for the initiation of a program to seize all the “food, water and food storage facilities” of a nation? If we add these to the internment camps and the bullets, what conclusions are possible?
Another ominous threat is that much of the NSA’s illegal intelligence-gathering activities were transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, the same people with the 800 internment camps and the 3 billion bullets. The apparent reason is that the NSA can collect information on domestic political dissidents but has no police powers to act on them, whereas DHS has legislative authority to gather, arrest and incarcerate anyone on their watch lists. DHS is apparently creating a “graded list” of these targeted so-called “security threats”, with those at the top of this list assessed according to how widely disseminated are their anti-establishment views, the followers they appear to have, and these will be the first to disappear into the internment maze. This new policy gives Homeland Security full authority to effectively terrorise the American people under a pretense of controlling domestic terrorism. When we consider these two items, Executive Order 13603 and the new powers granted to DHS, the only possible response can be fear.
If all this isn’t enough, DHS was revealed to have a secret procedure for the instant shutting down of all private communications in America, including mobile phone networks, a program accidentally revealed when government officials in San Francisco disabled all mobile phone calls during a peaceful protest against yet another man shot dead by the police. The administration insisted it had the legal authority to control these communications “during times of national crisis”, “for the purpose of ensuring public safety”, but it has also given DHS the power to actually “seize” all privately-owned communications facilities in order to prevent any civilian communications occurring. Some individuals applied to the courts for further information on these new procedures and policies, but DHS claimed it was “unable to locate or identify any records” in relation to the matter. Nothing more to be said, but it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the US government is quickly becoming fully prepared for war against its civilian population.
With the NSA revelations by Edward Snowdon, there is no longer any question that many US government agencies have been monitoring and gathering information on large numbers of known American political dissidents, these agencies including the NSA, FBI, CIA, DHS, various military groups and another 70 or 80 so-called “public-private fusion centers” scattered around the US. Former NSA Technical Director William Binney claimed in an interview that the NSA had a list of 500,000 to one million people in the US who were closely watched and whose every communication and bit of personal data were recorded. These are not terrorists in any sense, but potential leaders of political dissension and therefore potential suspects in the event of civil disturbances.
There also exists a database known as “Main Core”, containing names of Americans who might be considered troublesome, and which knowledgeable sources claim contains the names and communication information of more than eight million Americans who would be potential suspects of political activism, which would include “national opposition to US military invasion abroad”. It includes political dissidents, environmental and other activists, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, and many more who are most likely harmless, average people.
The database apparently contains all to and from email addresses, all email content, all in and out phone numbers plus duration of calls, the amounts and locations of ATM withdrawals, all credit card purchases and much more. It appears that this dissident surveillance program dates back to the early 1980s, the time of our Great Transformation, when it was revealed that Oliver North, operating from a secure White House site, had been using a database called PROMIS which was part of the REX-84 plan, to track dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. This database was meant to identify and immediately locate perceived “enemies of the state” if mass civil disturbances were to break out. (21) (22)
The Middle-Class Revolt
In late 2008 a leaked internal memo from Tom Fitzpatrick, Citibank’s chief technical strategist, contained ominous predictions for American civil society after the vicious financial crisis. He wrote,
“The world is not going back to normal ‘after the magnitude of what they have done’”.
Fitzpatrick claimed that the massive destruction of the middle class, the draining of all the wealth from the population, and the QE money creation by the FED would either bring about a resurgence of inflation or that the US would fall into “depression, civil disorder and possibly war”. He claimed that with the passing of each week and month there was a growing danger that could lead to political instability, a risk of domestic unrest because people were becoming increasingly disenfranchised and impoverished.
Lest we succumb to the temptation of accepting the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting loss of homes as an accident of fate, it would be wise to consider these quotes by Montagu Norman, Governor of The Bank of England prior to the crash of 1929, addressing the United States Bankers’ Association, New York, Idaho Leader, 26 August 1924.
“Capital must protect itself in every possible way, both by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through process of law, the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of the government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. These truths are well known among our principal men, who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world.”
And his thoughts on democracy:
“By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance.” “It is thus, by discrete action, we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished.”
The US government has developed an increasing fear of its own middle class, wide awake to the protests and uprisings in other nations where governments have colluded with the international bankers and large multi-nationals to gut their middle classes and effect the same transfer of wealth to the top 1% as occurred in America. People in many Western societies have become disgruntled and bitter at the increasing evidence that their vaunted democracies have been usurped by the unrestrained capitalists, creating intolerable situations where the people are sacrificed for the increasing wealth of that same top 1%.
At first, the US government exhibited a grim and rather reprehensible kind of satisfaction at watching the misery in other nations where the FED and IMF and the International Bankers had succeeded in their aims of wealth transference, but it also realised that the same boiling rage existed in America and perhaps much less controllable.
US citizens were protesting against a government that was no longer democratic in any sense, and was both unwilling and unable to repair a hopelessly corrupt and inefficient system. They finally awoke en masse and objected to ingrained corruption, shoddy public services, high taxes, homelessness, unemployment, rising inflation, the development of a police state, and more. It is public rage at the realisation of having been betrayed by a “democratic” government that converts civil unrest into political activism and revolution, and it is this that lies at the heart of the FBI’s categorisation of US political dissent as “domestic terrorism”. This terminology is important because the US, in all its hypocrisy for democracy, free speech and freedom of assembly, cannot face the world with open and apparent suppression of political dissent. Therefore, US citizens protesting against their own government cannot be exercising free speech but rather anarchy and terrorism, thereby justifying the use of deadly force to control dissension. The powers that control America have no interest in fairy-tales of freedom. They are interested in wealth and control, and the people in any country are irrelevant – including those in the US.
Americans have experienced first-hand the destruction of their quality of life; they see clearly the disappearance of future opportunity for their children, and they recognise better than most the loss of their freedom of expression which they have so valued. And they know it is precisely the retraction of that expression that is necessary for their no-longer-democratic government to maintain control. This is where their economic and social dissatisfaction mutates into political activism – revolution, in fact – and it is this realisation among the authorities that has spawned the internship camps, the billions of bullets purchased, and the “shoot to kill” orders.
Revolution – The Struggle for Class Power
Buried in the litany of troubles the US is facing today is the primary fact that the nation is engaged in a brutal class war, a struggle for class power that the bottom 99% are losing. This war was declared in the late 1970s, gained great momentum in the 1980s and 1990s, and is still accelerating toward its final desperate conclusion. There are few signs on the horizon that cause hope for a change in direction, and I fear it may be too late.
There is still power with the people themselves, and indeed without the both active cooperation and silent complicity of the people, none of the pathological descent into despair would have been possible. Probably the only force in America that can change what is happening is the combined force of labor. This isn’t so easy today, since the government killed most labor organisations and there is now little if any leadership. A total withdrawal of labor succeeded in forcing a new social contract in 1946 and may be the only power remaining today, but times have changed and tactics must change too. If all unions withdrew their services with the full cooperation of unorganised labor, change might be possible.
But realistically, there is no hope that such a mass protest could be organised even though it is the only possible way to get the attention of whatever remains of a conscientious government and force through a reversal of the tide. In any case, taking to the streets is unlikely to produce pleasant results. If the police don’t have enough bodies to beat up and arrest everyone, DHS has its internment camps, its 3 billion bullets, its years of practice with “no-hesitation” human targets, and it will use all of them.
The only safe way for Americans to go on strike today is to stay at home. On this topic, one internet commenter wrote,
“Just don’t go to work. There is no need to picket in the streets to be on strike, and the factories and offices will be just as quiet and empty, and the profits just as non-existent. The police cannot possibly conduct home-by-home visits to beat up strikers one by one, and no military, even the DHS, is efficient when trying to blow up houses scattered all over the county, one by one. Strikers are probably safe if they stay at home and lock their door.”
Another wrote,
“Another tactic is for Americans to simply quit shopping. They don’t have the money anyway, and don’t need all that useless junk. Don’t buy anything you don’t actually need, and delay even those purchases as long as possible, especially the big-ticket items like cars and furniture. If at all possible, delay every purchase for at least one year. As much as is practicable, stop driving your car. Cancel your cable TV and read a book.” Your grandmother gave you advice 100 years ago that is still valid today: “Use it up, wear it out. Make it do. Do without.”
A third commenter gave this advice:
“One thing you can do to get their attention is to stop paying your bills. VISA and MasterCard can’t cancel 800 million credit cards at the same time, and no bank can process 100 million mortgage defaults. No system can cope with massive non-payment of debt. You are their only source of money and you can ensure they don’t get any of it. That will wake them up. Tell them you’ll begin paying when the overseas corporate tax holiday is over, when high income taxes are reinstated for the rich, when the individual bankers are in prison and when the lost jobs begin returning. This isn’t foolproof, but it’s the best I can do.”
And finally, a more ambitious poster offered these comments:
“Today, the US State Department, the CIA and the FBI pride themselves on their ability to use Twitter and Facebook to cause civil unrest, chaos, violence, and even revolutions, in other countries. It may not have occurred to them that the same tools they use against everyone else can be just as easily used against them. The CIA used Gene Sharp and his Einstein Institute to prepare the Otpor civil disobedience manuals that our government used as the gunpowder to destroy Jugoslavia, and as the template for a dozen other “color revolutions” of which it was so proud. Copies are freely available on the internet.”
William Blum again:
“As I’ve said before: Inasmuch as I can’t see violent revolution succeeding in the United States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn’t quite match the government’s firepower, not to mention its viciousness), I can offer no solution to stopping the imperial beast other than this: Educate yourself and as many others as you can, raising their political and ideological consciousness, providing them with the factual ammunition and arguments needed to sway others, increasing the number of those in the opposition until it raises the political price for those in power, until it reaches a critical mass, at which point … I can’t predict the form the explosion will take or what might be the trigger … But you have to have faith. And courage.”
Rebuilding America
This is an amended list of actions Americans must take if they want to bring their country into the community of nations as a civilised member instead of its present status as a genocidal bully, and to begin healing the nation itself. It is compiled from my own notes with the inclusion of excerpts from a speech made by Chris Hedges at Northeastern University. (23)
Discard the existing two-party political system as diseased and useless, and form one new party with a totally new slate of legislators not formerly involved in government. Their first tasks would be to:
1. Arrest all war criminals on American soil. Begin with both Bushes, Cheney and Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice, both Clintons, Kissinger, Albright, and a long list of other White House and Congressional staff, on charges of treason, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
2. Disband the Federal Reserve Banking System and repudiate all outstanding debt to the FED. The government would, according to the law and constitution, issue its own currency from this point forward.
3. Force the break-up of all the big banks and eliminate interstate banking. Nationalise the so-called investment banks like Goldman Sachs, confiscate their assets and shut them all down. Reintroduce banking sector regulations as was done after the 1930s, to ensure a catastrophe cannot recur, with violations punished by mandatory prison sentences. Outlaw program stock trading by the banks. Force the banks to revert to simple banking functions to serve the economy.
4. Disband the CIA and all its clandestine projects by cutting off all funding. Confiscate all CIA records, files, computers, data, and make the details public. Emasculate the FBI and all its executives and officers. Arrest the planners and perpetrators of all false-flag ops. Kill the NSA. Immediately cease all domestic espionage on US citizens. Cut off all funding, seize all bank accounts and confiscate all records and documents. Bomb the Arizona data storage facility to rubble. Kill the Department of Homeland Security and dismantle and close all internment camps within the continental US.
5. Disband the NED, USAID, the VOA and the 100+ other subversive NGOs that are used today to destabilise the governments and societies of other nations. Recall all CIA espionage agents from foreign embassies and consulates, who constitute about 80% of all US foreign “diplomatic” staff. Designate all Foundations and Think Tanks as enemy aliens, and shut them down.
6. Reduce the military budget by 85% and close all foreign military bases. Bring home all foreign-based military personnel and give them jobs guarding the bankers.
7. Totally eliminate the private sector from infrastructure and social services and confine it to commerce where it belongs. Roll back deregulation and privatisation, reclaiming all public infrastructure to be operated by the government for the common good. Especially kill the despicable private prison system, and free the more than one million who should never have been in prison at all. Kill the movements to debtor’s prisons and civil forfeiture before they gain any more momentum, and pass harsh legislation that holds policemen individually responsible for their crimes.
8. Begin immediate construction of a system of publicly-owned and operated hospitals and medical clinics, and guarantee that all citizens have access to free or easily-affordable health care. Eliminate all insurance companies from the health-care process. Restore funding for universal education.
9. Make all lobbying illegal, with automatic prison sentences for influence-peddling. Designate lobby groups like AIPAC as criminal organisations and hostile enemy aliens, and treat them accordingly. Kill the SuperPacs and corporate donations. Eliminate all corporate contributions to election campaigns, and limit individual contributions to $1,000 maximum. Break the corrupt Zionist control of Congress, Wall Street, the media, the World Bank and the IMF. Terminate their globalism and any reference to a New World Order. Eliminate immediately all funding and financial support for Israel.
10. Eliminate legal immunity for the elites. Make illegal the payment of corporate fines for personal crimes. Put the people in prison. Levy an 85% income tax on all corporate profits being held outside the country by US-based multinationals. Reinstate the taxes on the rich and very rich. Eliminate personal tax breaks on capital gains and institute an 85% tax on all income over $500,000 per year.
11. The media monopoly must be broken by forcing de-centralisation and pushing the ownership once again into thousands of individual companies owned by totally unrelated parties. The current control of the media must be dismantled because of the Zionists’ propaganda and the Hidden State’s political agenda. Force the disintegration of all media holding groups and wide dispersion of all media, restricting ownership to only one newspaper or TV station per market. Outlaw opinion-based journalism and make untruthful news reports punishable by public flogging.
12. Eliminate GM food, or at least legislate full disclosure on food labels. Eliminate factory farms; institute extensive monitoring and harsh penalties for food chemical violations.
13. Use the money collected from the rich, the bankers and the FED to begin repairing America’s dilapidated infrastructure before any more dams and bridges collapse.
14. Close all the torture prisons. Close Guantanamo, Diego Garcia, Abu Ghraib, and the other torture prisons and demand an accounting of all prison ships and their human cargo. Close the School of the Americas and destroy all the torture manuals.
15. Emasculate the US President, the Presidency, and the White House, and return all power to Congress because it is the concentration of power in the office of the President that has permitted the total alien control of all vital parts of the US government.
16. Eliminate all US-sponsored sanctions against other nations, especially China, Russia, Syria and Iran. End the illegal occupation of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Get out of the Ukraine. Dismantle immediately all organised interference in the internal affairs and elections of other nations. Refund the $100 billion of Iraqi gold and cash seized, and the similar amount from Libya.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Notes
(1) Rex 84: FEMA’s Blueprint for Martial Law in America
(2) Rex 84 – Your Internment Camp Awaits You
(3) U.S. Concentration Camps: FEMA and the REX 84
(5) https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/3/justice-scalia-to-lecture-at-univ-of-hawaii/
(6) Army National Guard Advertises for “Internment Specialists”
(7) Video: Become a FEMA Camp Internment/Resettlement Specialist
(8) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/30/AR2008113002217_2.html?hpid=topnews
(9) Pentagon Plans To Keep 20,000 Troops Inside US To Bolster domestic security
(10) Washington Post: 20,000 More U.S. Troops To Be Deployed
(11) FM 3-39.40 INTERNMENT AND RESETTLEMENT
(12) FM 3-39.40 INTERNMENT AND RESETTLEMENT OPERATIONS
(13) https://www.infowars.com/yes-the-re-education-camp-manual-does-apply-domestically-to-u-s-citizens/
(14) Why Are Federal Bureaucrats Buying Guns And Ammo? $158 Million Spent By Non-Military Agencies
(15) 24 Jun, 2016; Non-military federal agencies have more firearm authority than entire US Marine Corps
(16) https://www.openthebooks.com/the-militarization-of-america–open-the-books-oversight-report/
(17) https://www.openthebooks.com/openthebooks_oversight_report_-_the_militarization_of_america/
(17) Asymmetric Warfare Group Built a Fake City in Virginia
(18) US army builds fake city to shoot at during training
(19) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-enlists-u-s-air-force-to-spray-for-mosquitoes-after-harvey/
(20) Pentagon Misinformation Ops Target Press and Public
(23) http://calendar.northeastern.edu/event/political_economy_forum_presents_chris_hedges
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai, 2020
Bigoted Cops and the Drug War
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | June 3, 2020
If Americans want to diminish racial bigotry in police departments across the country, the best way to start is by legalizing drugs, all of them. That would bring an end to the legal opportunity that bigoted cops have in the enforcement of drug laws against blacks.
I’m not saying that all cops are racial bigots. We all know that they’re not. But we also know that some of them are. And the drug war permits them to exercise their racial bigotry to their heart’s content — and even get praised and thanked for their service while doing so.
After all, let’s face it: there are racial bigots in society, and there will always be racial bigots in society. Anyone who thinks he is going to wipe out racial bigotry through “education” and “enlightenment” is living in la la land.
When someone engages in racial bigotry on a private level, he is subject to private and peaceful retaliatory measures, such as loss of sales if he is a business owner or the loss of a job if he is an employee. He is also subject to criticism and social ostracism. The free society makes the bigot bear an economic and social penalty for his bigotry, which might well nudge, not force, him into better behavior.
It’s totally different with drug laws. They have converted police departments into magnets for racial bigots. With the drug war, cops are empowered to stop blacks arbitrarily and subject them to abusive interrogations and intrusive, demeaning, and oftentimes violent searches and seizures of their persons, automobiles, and homes.
As long as they are “searching for drugs,” it’s all okay. No loss of sales. No loss of job. No public criticism. No social ostracism. Hey, they are helping cleanse our society of illegal drugs! They’re considered heroes! People praise them for their courage and thank them for their service.
That includes many judges, some of whom do not hesitate to mete out extraordinarily long jail sentences to blacks. A good example is a black man in North Carolina named Michael Holmes who has now served some 30 years of a 200-year jail sentence for a non-violent drug offense. There are thousands more like him.
The drug war also provides bigoted cops with the perfect opportunity to frame blacks for drug offenses by planting drugs on them or by simply lying about drug transactions. As prosecutors ask jurors, “Who are you going to believe — this upstanding (white) police officer who is simply trying to keep drugs from reaching your children or this (black) defendant who obviously has a motive to lie?” The false and fraudulent arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and harsh jail sentences meted out to dozens of innocent blacks in Tulia, Texas, several years ago is just one example of this phenomenon.
The noted academician Michelle Alexander rightly calls the drug war the new Jim Crow. It gives bigoted cops a license to do what bigoted cops did during the days of racial segregation. In fact, the drug war is without a doubt the most racially bigoted government program since segregation.
The legalization of drugs would, of course, not end racial bigotry in society. But it would end the opportunity that drug laws have given cops to legally exercise racial bigotry. Unable to exercise their bigotry legally through the enforcement of the drug war, police departments would no longer serve as a magnet for racial bigots. Those who are already cops would begin drifting back into the private sector where they would be nudged toward more appropriate behavior with such things as boycotts, criticism, and social ostracism rather than praised and thanked for their bigoted enforcement of the drug war.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.
Israelis Trained the Minnesota Cop How to Kill
By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute For Political Economy | June 2, 2020
Precisely as I reported Minnesota police received Israeli training. The knee-on-neck is an Israeli restraint hold that Israeli forces use for breaking Palestinian necks. I doubt the Minneapolis cop intended to kill Floyd. He probably thought he was just using a restraint technique. In so many of the cases of police-inflicted death and injury there is no need for restraint. People are not resisting. Maybe the cops just want to practice their training.
Another main cause of police-inflicted death and injury are the middle of the night home invasions, sanctioned by courts and local authorities. There is absolutely no reason for these invasions. They are nothing but murder weapons.
The real murderers of George Floyd were the Israelis who taught the Minnesota cops the knee-on-neck restraint technique. The irresponsible court rulings that permit unannounced home invasions have also killed a lot of people. The police have been turned into killers by their absurd and inappropriate training. The cop will pay the price for his wrongful training just as did George Floyd.
It is pure idiocy to let those responsible for these practices off the hook and to run around shouting “racism.” Knee-on-neck is a restraint technique taught to the police. It is not racism. The technique should not have been taught to American police, and people who are not resisting should not be restrained. George Floyd died because of wrongful police training, not because of racism.
Minnesota cops ‘trained by Israeli forces in restraint techniques’
Israeli police officers detain a Palestinian protestor on March 12, 2019.
By Jon Collins – Morning Star– June 1, 2020
Officers from the US police force responsible for the killing of George Floyd received training in restraint techniques and anti-terror tactics from Israeli law-enforcement officers.
Mr Floyd’s death in custody last Monday, the latest in a succession of police killings of African Americans, has sparked continuing protests and rioting in US cities.
At least 100 Minnesota police officers attended a 2012 conference* hosted by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, the second time such an event had been held.
There they learned the violent techniques used by Israeli forces as they terrorise the occupied Palestinian territories under the guise of security operations.
The so-called counterterrorism training conference in Minneapolis was jointly hosted by the FBI.
Israeli deputy consul Shahar Arieli claimed that the half-day session brought “top-notch professionals from the Israeli police” to share knowledge with their US counterparts.
It is unclear whether any of the officers involved in the incident in which Mr Floyd was killed attended the conference.
Israeli forces broke necks
But in a chilling testimony, a Palestinian rights activist said that when she saw the image of Derek Chauvin kneeling on Mr Floyd’s neck, she was reminded of the Israeli forces’ policing of the occupied territories.
Neta Golan, the co-founder of International Solidarity Movement (ISM) said: “When I saw the picture of killer cop Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd by leaning in on his neck with his knee as he cried for help and other cops watched, I remembered noticing when many Israeli soldiers began using this technique of leaning in on our chest and necks when we were protesting in the West Bank sometime in 2006.
“They started twisting and breaking fingers in a particular way around the same time. It was clear they had undergone training for this. They continue to use these tactics — two of my friends have had their necks broken but luckily survived — and it is clear that they [Israel] share these methods when they train police forces abroad in ‘crowd control’ in the US and other countries including Sudan and Brazil.”
Israeli training of US police is widespread
The training of US police officials by Israeli forces is widespread.
Even Amnesty was compelled to report that hundreds of police from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state and Washington DC had been flown to Israeli for training.
Thousands more have been trained by Israeli forces who have come to the US to host similar events to the one held in Minneapolis. According to the somewhat selective rights organisation, many of these trips are taxpayer-funded, while others are privately funded.
Since 2002 the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have paid for police chiefs, assistant chiefs and captains to train in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), it said.
The Minneapolis Police Department was contacted for comment.
*(embedded links added by If Americans Knew)
[IAK notes: Anoka County (north Minneapolis region) Sheriff James Stuart traveled to Israel last December for a similar training.]
GCHQ propagandizing kids as young as four in secretive school ‘educational’ programs aimed at recruitment
RT | June 2, 2020
Britain’s GCHQ spy agency is running secretive “educational” programs in dozens of schools and disseminating propaganda to children as young as four years old, without the knowledge of parents, it’s been revealed.
The intelligence agency is running the programs in at least 40 schools with access to 22,000 children who are potentially being spied on, according to an investigation by Declassified UK.
According to the investigative website, GCHQ officers themselves are operating in at least one of the schools and parents of the pupils involved have not been made aware of the extent of the spy agency’s role in the so-called Cyber Schools Hub (CSH) programs also known as ‘CyberFirst’.
GCHQ publicly describes the programs as giving children between the ages of 11 and 17 the chance to experience “new ways of learning” in an “innovative cyber environment” and aims to use the school activities to help recruit kids for the cyber security industry.
Yet, Declassified revealed that the efforts have now expanded into primary schools where GCHQ has access to children as young as four years old – and that while the program literature states it is operational in 23 schools, it is actually running in nearly double that number – 10 of which are primary schools.
One of the primary school level “code clubs” is in fact staffed “entirely” by officers from GCHQ. The agency gains access to schools by offering to provide technology to local libraries and “recruitment teams” field enquiries from schools interested in being part of the program, the website said.
More disturbingly, the investigation revealed, local police worked with GCHQ on a “joint tag team event” to gain access to a student who had been reported to authorities as “very talented” by teachers who were worried he may be about to “cross the line” with his cyber activities – though there was no evidence that the child had done anything wrong.
The revelations about GCHQ’s activities in British schools are unsurprising considering US whistleblower Edward Snowden had previously revealed that one of the spy agency’s “top objectives” was to target children and create a “reporting service on radicalisation.”
Children are told that GCHQ, which conducts unlawful mass surveillance, according to the European Court of Human Rights, is the “heart of the nation’s security” system and has “saved countless lives.”
Asked what information was given to parents about the taxpayer-funded program, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) told Declassified it had “no contact with parents” and that what teachers share with parents is up to them.
Declassified UK was rebuffed by both GCHQ and the schools themselves when trying to glean more information about the projects, with both citing “national security exemptions” in order to block freedom of information requests.
The spy agency is attempting to “drip-feed” children with messages aimed at recruiting them for the field over time, Jen Persson, director of Defend Digital Me, told Declassified.
“There is regulation in other areas to protect [children] from undue adult influence, like online advertising – yet it sounds like spies can walk into schools whenever they want with no transparency or independent oversight,” Persson said.
GCHQ has posted “comments” from children on social media apparently praising the program as “the best thing EVER,” “fabulous” and “masses of fun” – but some of these quotes are seemingly made up.
A newsletter on an event for girls includes an alleged quote from Ella and Chloe in Year 8 (12-13 years old) expressing the need for “diversity in perspectives, leadership and experience.” Aside from “sounding more like language used by GCHQ media relations,” Declassified found that the same quote is attributed to 13-year-old Evie in another CSH blog post. Asked about this curious detail, NCSC told the website that teachers provide the quotes from students.
During an unannounced visit to a GCHQ “hub school,” one principal told Declassified that the program has brought his school no investment or new facilities but has simply made the school put more of a focus on cyber security.
Following a “successful” pilot phase in England, the government is now planning to expand the GCHQ program across the whole UK.
Featured Video
Houthis Don’t Have to Conquer Saudi Arabia to Make It Pay
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Newly Released FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | May 17, 2019
NEW YORK — For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- UK whines about losing billions to ‘Putin tax’
- Baghaei to Rubio: Distorted narratives cannot erase US record of broken commitments
- Houthis Don’t Have to Conquer Saudi Arabia to Make It Pay
- MOE: Nearly 22,000 Students and Education Workers Killed
- Guterres in Islamabad: Genocide, cowardice, and the cage of Imran Khan
- Johnson, Marandi say Yemen holds upper hand over Saudi Arabia
- False flags won’t save aggressors, Iran FM spokesman says
- The Makkah Pact Enters Into Force: The End of American Dominance or Its New Form?
- NATO’s top generals gather in Kiev
- EU’s continuing expansion – greater threat to Russia
- If Americans Knew
- Three years of death and devastation: Israel’s war on Gaza in pictures
- Why Hamas believed the status quo was more dangerous than its 7 October gamble
- Debunking Israel’s latest list of ‘terrorist’ journalists in Gaza
- In Gaza, focus is on survival, “every step is a struggle” – Daily Update
- Three Years of Genocide: How America’s Israel-First Media Filtered Out the Truth
- Israeli war chief briefs ministers on potential war against Palestinian Authority
- New Report: Israel Killed nearly 21,000 Palestinian Students and Education Workers in Past Three Years
- Israel’s flailing chatbot army
- Five Palestinians Killed, Others Injured by Israeli Fire in Gaza
- Israel is rewriting the Palestinian curriculum in East Jerusalem to erase Palestinian identity
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
