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Trump admin sanctions International Criminal Court officials investigating US war crimes

RT | June 11, 2020

The Donald Trump administration is imposing economic sanctions on International Criminal Court officials who are engaged with “any effort” to investigate or prosecute US personnel for war crimes.

In a statement on Thursday, the White House press office said President Donald Trump has also authorized the “expansion of visa restrictions” against ICC officials and their family members.

The US has repeatedly threatened to impose sanctions on the Hague-based court and asserted that it has no right to investigate or prosecute US personnel without Washington’s consent.

The White House statement described the court’s actions as “an attack on the rights of the American people” and a threat to “infringe upon our national sovereignty.”

It added that the ICC was established “to provide accountability for war crimes” but said “in practice” it had become “unaccountable and ineffective.”

Efforts by the ICC to investigate allegations of war crimes by Israel against Palestinians have also drawn ire from the Trump administration.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued in May that Palestine does not “qualify as a sovereign state” and that the court cannot conduct “illegitimate” investigations against Israel. He threatened that the US would “exact consequences” if the court continued its efforts to investigate alleged crimes.

In the Thursday statement, the White House said the ICC was pursuing “politically-motivated investigations” against the US and its allies “including Israel.”

Without offering evidence, the statement said the US was concerned that “adversary nations are manipulating” the court by “encouraging” allegations against American personnel.

It claimed there is “strong reason to believe” that there is “corruption and misconduct” at the “highest levels” of the court which call its integrity into question.

June 11, 2020 Posted by | War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

The Spirit of Hoover’s FBI is Revived under New Cyber-Warfare Protocols

By Matthew Ehret | American Herald Tribune | June 11, 2020

This week, the Grayzone’s Gareth Porter exposed an important strategy led by the FBI to purge the internet of alternative media outlets who question the mainstream narratives being used to shepherd society into an Orwellian post-COVID world order.

Although FBI propagandists strewn throughout mainstream media have attempted to project the idea that the corrupt days of America’s internal Gestapo operation led by J. Edgar Hoover are a thing of the past, the reality is that its days of COINTEL PRO, MK Ultra, assassinations and media manipulation of the 1960s and 1970s not only didn’t go away but only amplified their influence during the modern age of cyberwarfare.

Porter’s Insight into the FBI’s Censorship Agenda

In his June 5, 2020 article entitled ‘FBI Launches Open Attack on ‘Foreign’ Alternative Media Outlets Challenging US Foreign Policy’, Porter exposed the FBI’s recent counter-intelligence strategy which was launched in the wake of the 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton.

Knowing that alternative media was a decisive factor in the downfall of Hillary (and her neocon backers), a vast operation was put into motion designed to convince Americans that the elections were never really legitimate in the first place because… Russia.

Four years of Russiagate contaminated the American political landscape ultimately producing both a multi-million dollar nothing burger and also one of the most dangerous reforms in counter-intelligence operations that currently threatens to render what little remains of the first amendment forever obsolete.

Countering Malign Foreign Influences in the Media

In his article, Porter begins by describing the creation of the October 2017 creation of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Counter-Intelligence Task Force which generated a new procedure for extending internet censorship to any media outlet that could be labelled a “malign foreign influence” if connected in any way to America’s major adversaries of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

Porter describes how Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram promptly interfaced with the Task Force and began deleting accounts and pages of alternative media outlets who were labelled puppets of foreign actors. The biggest purge occurred in 2018 as Facebook deleted 559 pages and 251 accounts including Anti-media, the Free Thought Project and Naked Empire due to their supposed “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” tied to shadowy “malign foreign influences”.

While the American Herald Tribune was not officially listed as one of the targets during this operation, it’s de-platforming over Facebook, Instagram and Google was later admitted to have been part of the purge (more to be said on that below).

Shadowy Enemies and New Protocols

In an April 26, 2019 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, FBI director Christopher Wray described “malign foreign influence” to be “the fairly aggressive campaign we saw in 2016 and that has continued pretty much unabated, is the use of social media, fake news, propaganda, false personas etc… to spin us up, pit us against each other, sow divisiveness and discord, and undermine America’s faith in democracy”.

According to Wray (and echoed in recent days by former Obama advisor Susan Rice), such divisiveness and discord as we see across America’s protests now have less to do with the systemic corruption, economic injustice (or even George Soros’ moneybags fueling the fires of chaos)… but rather Russia, China and Iranian fake news campaigns.

Gareth Porter cites the important February 2020 remarks by the FBI’s Assistant Section for the Foreign Influence Task Force David Porter, who described the foreign operations which “seek to weaken an adversary from within” using “information confrontation to target the perceptions of their adversaries’ population”. These methods then “erode confidence in democratic values and institutions, encourage negative sentiment, apathy and mistrust of government.” One of the most dangerous by-products for agent David Porter is that the public loses confidence in the “credibility of an established, free and independent news media” pushing “consumers towards alternative news sources of news media where of course it is much easier to introduce false narratives.”

David Porter focuses his discourse on Russia and China explaining that the two nations differ in their methods of information warfare in the following manner: Where China “confines its manipulation to its geostrategic economic goals” and “wants to manage our gradual economic decline over the course of generations”, Russia is more vicious and just “wants to see us tear ourselves apart”.

How does the FBI decide who is guilty of “malign foreign influence”? Not by wasting their time “chasing content” or looking at what websites actually say, but rather by “attribution”. In laymen’s terms, “attribution” merely implies using behavioral pattern recognition logarithms to de-platform and censor alt media accounts. Evidence of actual funding by a foreign government or even systemic lying need not be considered under this sort of attribution. Merely having shared a server with a company that “at some point may have” hosted a website affiliated with a foreign government, or publishing narratives that are critical of the western establishment are sufficient proof to remove and blacklist you under this new digital McCarthyism.

The Targeting of the American Herald Tribune

Gareth Porter takes the time to showcase the important case study of American Herald Tribune as an example of the FBI’s brazen abuse of this loosely defined standard of “attribution”. Just days after the August 2018 takedown of the Tribune’s pages on Facebook (and Google’s cancellation of the site’s ad service which act as a vital revenue stream for any alternative media agency), Christopher Wray admitted to have provided social media companies with the “specific threat indicators” used to justify censorship… although they did not openly admit to targeting the American Herald Tribune at this time.

It was only on January 24, 2020 that Facebook finally confirmed publicly in the form of a CNN report) that American Herald Tribune was taken down due to Wray’s counter-intelligence program. The January 24 CNN article cited by Porter asserted that a Facebook spokesperson asserted that the Cybersecurity company FireEye (which is highly enmeshed in all branches of American intelligence agencies) found the AHT’s links to the Iran government’s larger influence operation “with moderate confidence”.

For anyone familiar with the modern newspeak of the FBI’s lexicon, “moderate confidence” means little more than “we feel that there may be some connection but have no actual evidence.”

Illustrating the Tribune’s great sin, the CNN article in question stated that “The articles posted to American Herald Tribune are largely in line with the views of Iran’s ruling establishment. It publishes stories criticizing American foreign policy and attacking President Donald Trump and Israel. Often the criticism is not unlike viewpoints expressed on authentic US-based independent websites, especially ones with an anti-establishment perspective.”

Here we have the essence of what the FBI considers the Tribune’s great crime: Permitting anti-establishment views to be published critical of American foreign policy. It’s really that simple.

The Strategic Reality of the Fight: A Word from Anthony Hall

Grayzone’s expose should be studied in tandem with a powerful report written by American Herald Tribune Editor in Chief Anthony Hall published on June 8 entitled COVID-19, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter: The Battle for Control of the Internet. In this important article, Hall explains that the current convergent of major global developments has come to a historic head.

As we move into and through this turbulent phase of history, the speed of world events has accelerated to unprecedented levels exemplified from the quick change of focus from one controlled fallacious narrative featuring Gates as the star performer Global Pandemic show to a new Soros-managed narrative of controlled chaos across America under the Black Lives Matter/Antifa show.

In his article, Hall points out: “In recent days the focus suddenly shifted from COVID-19 and compulsory vaccines to insurrection and anarchy from within. Suddenly the vaccine czar, Bill Gates, has been swept from the center stage of current events. Suddenly multi-billionaire Gates has been upstaged by multi-billionaire George Soros.”

In both cases of COVID-19 and Soros-financed mass anarchy, the target is the same thing: The free access to information on the internet which has become a focal point for the battle ground for the future of the human race. As Hall points out, “the drama of these cataclysmic times is serving to highlight the importance of the Internet not only as a medium for reporting events but as a vehicle that is instrumental in the shaping of events; in determining what actually happens or not.”

In the case of the current controlled chaos agenda, this battle is playing out over President Trump’s recent Executive Order invoking Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act of 1996 in defense of a free and uncensored internet. On this point, Hall writes: “Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has recently moved forward with the most significant anti-censorship initiative in the history of the Internet. Trump is seeking to stop the takeover of humanity’s most vital infrastructure of communications by a cabal of extremists.”

Trump’s Executive Order stands in direct opposition to those forces of the Anglo-American Five Eyes empire which seeks nothing less than to turn humanity into a society of sheepish zombies as pliable as the mobs of Ancient Rome who would as soon cheer for Pompei one day as they would Julius Caesar, Brutus or Marc Antony the next… as long as blood and wine continued to flow in the gladiator arenas.

It is important to emphasize here that no one is safe from this new age of post-2016 cyberwarfare.

Whether you place yourself on the “left” or on the “right” of America’s political spectrum, the chances are that if your conscience is intact, then you don’t want your nation to become a dictatorship, you prefer the constitution not be shredded and you certainly don’t want the American Military Industrial Complex to blow up the world. If this is the case, then you would do well to pay attention to any FBI-run protocols which demand that the population be kept fearful and confused enough to willingly renounce their liberties, free speech and very constitution upon which so many people gave their lives, in exchange for a Deep State bureaucrat’s definition of “security”.

Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review.

June 11, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

What Went Wrong in Massachusetts?

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | June 10, 2020

Last week the Boston Globe published an impressive, 12,000-word account of COVID-19’s rampage through Massachusetts. Titled The Virus’s Tale, it asks how a state “famous for health care excellence” could have experienced “such a vast loss of human life?”

That isn’t media exaggeration. 7 million people reside there. So far, 7,408 have died of the virus.

California, with 5.5 times the population, has lost only 4,775 people. Canada, with five times the population, has lost 7,897.

So what went wrong in Massachusetts? The full answer won’t be known for some time. But the news article describes how a doctor in a town near the New York state border had to make three telephone calls, three days in a row, to a hotline operated by the Department of Public Health before she was allowed to test a highly symptomatic patient for the virus.

By January, everyone knew an infectious disease characterized by particular symptoms was wreaking havoc in China. Yet during the first week of March, this doctor was told she must be mistaken. It wasn’t possible for her patient, who hadn’t traveled outside the country, to have caught it. She was told this by a government hotline whose purpose is to monitor precisely these kinds of health threats. Twice.

In fact, the patient did test positive. Which meant the coronavirus was on the loose – spreading from person to person, even in small communities of 1,700 people. It also meant that hospital staff had been caring for this patient without proper safety equipment. In the words of the Boston Globe:

the hospital rushed to determine how many of its staff had been exposed as they had waited for permission to test patients. Within a few days, as more patients tested positive, almost 70 workers would be quarantined.

This failure to take the virus seriously, on the part of those who should have known better, is echoed by the events connected to a corporate leadership conference held in a Boston hotel on February 26 and 27.

Biogen, whose headquarters are in nearby Cambridge, describes itself as “one of the world’s first global biotechnology companies.” Its personnel, it says, are “pioneers in neuroscience.”

Yet the Boston Globe reports that these medically sophisticated individuals, who had flown in from other countries (including from Italy) as well as from elsewhere in the US, apparently behaved as if the virus was nothing more than a fairy tale:

The conference spanned two days. Attendees packed into the hotel elevators and onto its escalators, handed tongs and serving spoons back and forth at every buffet meal, gripped the levers of the self-serve coffee dispensers that got a workout during every break.

On Wednesday night, the action moved to a [restaurant] dinner…Afterward, a group of eight Biogen colleagues took the long way back to [their hotel], stopping at a bar that boasted an extensive collection of fine whiskeys.

“You have to try this one,” one executive told another, holding his glass aloft to offer a sip.

Attendees began running fevers soon afterward. One went to an emergency department on March 1st, but was told they didn’t meet testing criteria. On March 3rd, Biogen reportedly advised government public health officials that approximately 50 attendees were now suffering symptoms. But no testing occurred then, either.

The newspaper says that, after learning that two European conference attendees had received positive test results in their own countries, many Boston-area Biogen employees became alarmed. It was at that point a company official instructed them to stay away from Massachusetts General Hospital:

“You will not be tested,” the e-mail read, adding that such demands by Biogen employees “are overwhelming the emergency room.” Ominously, the company’s warning concluded with this sentence: “Hospital leaders have warned Biogen that they may need to have the Hospital Police Department intervene to prevent Biogen employees from entering the emergency room.”

This solid piece of journalism makes it clear numerous officials, from the governor on down, repeatedly assured everyone there was no cause for alarm.

They said the public health system was reliable. They said it was prepared for this virus.

They were wrong.

Read The Virus’s Tale here.

June 10, 2020 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Okinawa’s Governor Promises ‘Fierce Opposition’ to Plan for New US Missile Bases

Sputnik – 10.06.2020

A US plan to build new missile sites on the Japanese island of Okinawa has encountered stiff resistance by locals, including the governor, who was elected on a position of getting US forces out of the prefecture.

‘Absolutely Unacceptable’

In the event of a war with China, land-based missiles placed on Okinawa would provide a major leverage point for US forces. However, with the island already a major target due to several large US military installations, Okinawans are fed up with the idea of bringing in even more targets for China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

“I firmly oppose the idea,” Okinawa Governor Denny Tamaki told the Los Angeles Times for a Wednesday story. “If there is such a plan, I can easily imagine fierce opposition from Okinawa residents.”

“Intermediate-range ballistic missiles can be used to attack other countries, so deploying them would conflict with the Constitution and lead to a further build-up of the US bases,” Tamaki told Bloomberg News last November. “To have new military facilities would be absolutely unacceptable.”

The Straits-Times noted last November that similar opposition is just as likely from other US allies, such as Australia and South Korea, which would then become targets in the event of a shooting war between Washington and Beijing. Similar fears quelled early Cold War enthusiasm in Canberra for a nuclear weapons program, too.

Last October, the Okinawan daily Ryukyu Shimpo reportedly uncovered evidence the US government had informed the Russian government in August 2019 of its intent to base missiles violating the shredded Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in Okinawa within two years. The US formally withdrew from the treaty, which governed the ranges of land-based missiles used by Russia and the US, just days earlier.

Battle Plans Hinge on Okinawa

Never having been bound by the INF Treaty, the PLA has spent decades building up its Rocket Force into a formidably armed corps, wielding a variety of long-range cruise missiles and ballistic missiles and even hypersonic weapons, which the US has yet to field.

Sitting just 500 miles from Shanghai and 400 miles from the Zhejiang coast, Okinawa-based missiles would find much of mainland China within striking distance. However, the Ryukyu Islands would almost certainly fall under heavy attack by the PLA during a prospective war with US allies, as the archipelago falls within the “First Island Chain,” or the first string of islands sitting just off the east Asian coast. Beijing’s long-term strategic plans call for forcing its adversaries increasingly away from the Asian mainland, beginning with the First Island Chain, which stretches from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula south to Borneo, in Indonesia.

Likewise, the US Marine Corps is busy reenvisioning the way it wages war, including a pivot from the heavy land-based forces of the last several decades toward a more maritime role.

Commandant of the US Marine Corps Gen. David Berger told Congressional lawmakers in March that the Corps would be expanding its missile capabilities twentyfold in the next five years, as well as introducing the Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS), which is based on the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) but mounted atop a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle chassis. The weapons system will be able to fire a variety of anti-air and anti-ship missiles.

The purpose of these weapons can be found in Expeditionary Advance Base Ops (EABO), in which Marines will rush forward to set up small outposts on scattered islands that would house batteries of long-range anti-ship and anti-air missiles, creating a “no-go zone” for Chinese air and sea forces. A graphic illustrating the concept by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think tank happens to show EABOs deployed across the Ryukyuan chain.

Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

Land-based missiles deployed at “Expeditionary Advance Bases” could form a virtual wall against Chinese aggression

Widespread Japanese Opposition to US Missiles

US plans for deploying weapons previously banned by the INF Treaty elsewhere in Japan have met strong resistance as well. An Aegis Ashore system that was to have been built in the western city of Akita was canceled last month amid heavy opposition from locals. Another site, on the western coast of Yamaguchi Prefecture, also met opposition, but so far plans for its construction remain unchanged.

Tokyo approved their construction to provide anti-missile defense against potential attack from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), but with the US out of the INF Treaty, the Aegis Ashore systems can easily be converted to fire offensive weapons, as the site in Deveselu, Romania, has already demonstrated.

Sonata
Marine Corps Station Futenma, in Ginowan, Okinawa

Okinawans have also fought the continued presence of several US military bases on the island, which was stormed by US forces in the closing months of World War II in a furious battle that killed nearly half the island’s population of 300,000 at the time. US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma sits in the middle of Ginowan City, and Tamaki was elected to the governorship on a campaign to get the base removed from the prefecture. Just four miles north of Futenma is another air base, the US Air Force’s colossal Kadena Air Force Base; between the two installations are half of the 50,000 US service members deployed in all of Japan.

In a February 2019 referendum, 70% of Okinawans voted against a US-Japanese plan to relocate Futenma on the island, but Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe insisted Tokyo “cannot avoid the necessity of moving Futenma,” and land reclamation for the new site, on the coast of rural Henoko to the north, has continued.

June 10, 2020 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

‘It’s their war, not ours’: Russian space agency boss says not upset by manned SpaceX launch, but BOEING should be

RT | June 10, 2020

The US finally getting a crewed spaceship in no way means the end of Russia’s space program, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said, insisting that the Soyuz still remains the most cost-efficient way to get people to the ISS.

After SpaceX’s Crew Dragon delivered two astronauts to the International Space Station – the first US spaceship to do so for nine years – at the end of May, US media not only praised Elon Musk’s company, but also piled scorn on the Russian space program.

It was “strange” when some in the US, including NASA officials, “started making wreaths for the ‘funeral’ of Russian Soyuz,” Rogozin wrote in an opinion piece for Forbes magazine, published on Monday. While the Russian space chief’s social media rivalry with Musk and his past quotes played a role in the reaction, he made a stand for the iconic Russian spacecraft that has ferried US astronauts to orbit for all those years since the Space Shuttle program shut down.

Rogozin rejected the claim that the manned launches by SpaceX – which said it would charge anything from $55 million per seat for transporting the astronauts – would be so cheap that Russia would start reserving Crew Dragon seats for its cosmonauts.

The US officials who repeated that claim “just got bedeviled in a mass of figures,” he said. While Russia did charge the US $90 million a seat for Soyuz launches, Rogozin maintains that the Russian-crewed rocket launches still remain more cost-efficient than those of SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

While SpaceX has made the partial reusability of the Falcon a key marketing point, both Crew Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner – which is only expected to carry out its first mission next year – are launched to orbit by heavy rockets, while Soyuz requires a cheaper, medium-class booster, he said.

“Therefore, our space launches cost much less than the American ones,” making Soyuz “unparalleled” when it comes to delivering people to the ISS, Rogozin wrote.

He even compared the spaceship to the AK-47 rifle, saying that both Soviet designs were not only extremely reliable, but also continuously improved all the time. Soyuz is such a workhorse that it will continue to fly even after Russia’s next-generation ‘Orel’ (Eagle) spaceship is introduced.

It’s not our mood that Elon Musk spoiled on May 30, but that of his countrymen from Boeing, by starting flight tests ahead of them. It’s their war, not ours. Our space transport system has been operational for a long time and without interruptions.

He did point out that SpaceX could hardly argue to be the “first private company” to launch humans into space, given that NASA had subsidized both SpaceX and Boeing to the tune of $8 billion to develop rival spaceships. Musk’s company was the first to complete testing and perform its launch.

Roscosmos decided to maintain cooperation with NASA even in the face of sanctions introduced by Washington against Moscow – including Rogozin personally – and continued delivering Americans to the ISS for years at the expense of Russia’s own crews, Rogozin reminded.

It’s only because of Russia that NASA “didn’t have to use a trampoline” to launch astronauts to space, Rogozin wrote, referencing his notorious joke from six years ago.

June 10, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Worst Literal Hitler Ever

Democrats honor George Floyd with eight minutes of silence in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center June 8, 2020 in Washington, DC © Getty Images / Chip Somodevilla
By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory | June 10, 2020

So, the GloboCap-Resistance Minneapolis Putsch appears to have not gone exactly to plan. Once again, Trump failed to go full-Hitler, despite their best efforts to goad him into doing so. They gave it quite a good shot, however. It was more or less a textbook regime-change op, or “color revolution,” or whatever you call it. All the essential pieces were in place. All they needed Trump to do was declare himself dictator and impose martial law, so the generals could step in and remove him from office.

Unfortunately for the Resistance, Trump didn’t do that. Instead, he did what he usually does, which is make a total ass of himself on international television. Which … OK, was cringeworthy, but didn’t quite provide the GloboCap gang with the pretext they needed to perp-walk him out of the Oval Office. Which, needless to say, was incredibly frustrating. After four long years of propaganda foreplay, there we were, finally at the moment of truth, and Adolf goes and loses his erection.

This guy is the worst literal Hitler ever.

Still, as far as regime-change ops go, and given that this one was a domestic operation, so trickier than the usual foreign version, I’d give the Resistance a B+ for effort.

Now, before my “conspiracy theorist” readers get too excited about where I’m going with this column … no, this was not a “fake” uprising. There was an authentic uprising at the center of it. There’s always an authentic uprising at the center of every regime-change op, or at least the type that GloboCap has been carrying out and attempting recently. Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, the Ukraine, Bolivia, Venezuela; these things go pretty much by the numbers.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how that works.

First, you need your civil unrest, large-scale protests, rioting, looting, indiscriminate violence, and so on. Any number of “trigger events” will be sufficient to get this going. Once it is, you can grow it and focus it. A lot of this unrest needs to be authentic, so it’s best to conduct an overwhelming multi-year propaganda campaign to delegitimize and demonize your target as some sort of treasonous Hitlerian monster who’s responsible for every major problem in the country. That way, no matter which trigger event gets things going, it will be his fault.

You will want your local government officials to allow this civil unrest to go on until it reaches the point where rioters and looters are rampaging through the hearts of cities, raiding both high-end corporate chain stores and local mom-and-pop-type businesses, and brutally assaulting their defenseless proprietors. This does not mean that these local officials have to restrain or stand down their cops. On the contrary, you want them to unleash their cops, on the protesters, rioters, and TV reporters (during their “live” reports, if possible), and just generally beat the living crap out of everyone. The goal is to generate as much hatred as possible against the regime you are trying to change, and to pressure your designated Hitler-target into losing his patience and overreacting, so you want things to get extremely ugly.

Then, you unleash the power of the media to whip folks up into a mindless frenzy of rage against your designated Hitler. You have your “respectable” pundits publish articles calling for his removal from office. You get the military (and former military) to start making noise about how your Hitler is out of control and on the brink of fascism. Then you wait for your Hitler to overreact and attempt to call in the military and impose some form of martial law, at which point you can safely depose him, and pretend that democracy has won the day.

The media is essential here, because you need to convince the majority of the public (i.e., not just the people protesting and rioting) that things have gotten so out of control, and your imaginary Hitler has gotten so dangerous, that a military coup is the best solution.

What you’re looking for are headlines like these:

“We are teetering on a dictatorship” — CNN

“‘Words of a dictator’: Trump’s threat to deploy military raises spectre of fascism” — The Guardian

“Donald Trump is Trying to Start a Race War” — Rolling Stone

“Remove Trump Now” — Slate

“The Trump Presidency is Over.” — The Guardian

“Trump Must Be Removed” — The Washington Post

Also, while the media are doing their thing, you want to get any former members of the intelligence community (or the secret police) to issue public statements like this:

“There should be no place in American society, much less in our government, for the depravity being demonstrated daily by Donald Trump. Members of his Cabinet who enable such behavior are betraying their oath of office by supporting an increasingly desperate despot.” — John Brennan, former CIA director

Then you bring the politicians and the military in. This kind of language will usually do it:

“The fascist speech Donald Trump just delivered verged on a declaration of war against American citizens. I fear for our country tonight and will not stop defending America against Trump’s assault.” — Senator Ron Wyden

“These are not the words of a president. They are the words of a dictator.” — Senator Kamala Harris

“‘There is a thin line between the military’s tolerance for questionable partisan moves over the past three years and the point where these become intolerable,” a retired general said.” — The New York Times

“We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution … We can unite without [Trump], drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.” — General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, former Secretary of Defense

Once the generals have started in growling, you get the media to hype that, hard. Headlines like these will get people’s attention:

“Revolt of the Generals” — The Washington Post

“The Officers’ Revolt” — Slate

“President Donald Trump is facing an unprecedented revolt from the elite corps of ex-military leaders and presidents …” — CNN

“The US president’s desire to act the strongman poses urgent questions that America’s generals, voters and allies must all answer” — The Guardian Editorial Board

If you can, it is always a really nice touch if you can drum up … oh, let’s say 280 former national security officials who are really concerned about the state of democracy and “the misuse of the military for political purposes,” and get them to spontaneously call each other up and decide to write a letter together accusing your Hitler of “dividing Americans,” which the media can then disseminate, widely.

And, of course, what you need for the “educated classes” is an official propagandist like Franklin Foer (who broke the big story about the non-existent “Trump-Russia server” back in 2016 and was rewarded for his service to GloboCap with a lucrative staff writer position at The Atlantic) to come right out and explain that what’s happening is a textbook regime-change operation (because you don’t have to dupe the “educated classes,” most of whom will already be on your side). Something more or less like this:

“Twitter’s decision to label Trump’s posts as misleading was a hinge moment … once Twitter applied its rules to Trump — and received accolades for its decision — it inadvertently set a precedent … a cycle of noncooperation was set in motion. Local governments were the next layer of the elite to buck Trump’s commands. After the president insisted that governors ‘dominate’ the streets on his behalf, they roundly refused to escalate their response. Indeed, New York and Virginia rebuffed a federal request to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. Even the suburb of Arlington, Virginia, pulled its police that had been loaned to control the crowd in Lafayette Square. As each group of elites refused Trump, it became harder for the next to comply in good conscience. In Sharp’s taxonomy, the autocrat’s grasp on power depends entirely on the allegiance of the armed forces. When the armed forces withhold cooperation, the dictator is finished.”

As I said, it went pretty much right by the book.

After four long years of official propaganda designed to convince the Western masses that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, GloboCap, the liberal Resistance, and the corporate media all did their best to harness the authentic protests and rioting that routinely follow the murder of an unarmed Black person by the cops, and use it to remove him from office. It would have been a spectacular catharsis, a fitting climax to the War on Populism, but Trump refused to play his part … so, OK, maybe he’s not as dumb as I thought, or at least not totally suicidal.

No matter, it’s still a big win for GloboCap. Forcibly removing Trump from office is, and has always been, gravy. The main goal of the War on Populism is to delegitimize and demonize him, and everyone who voted for him (and Jeremy Corbyn, and even Bernie Sanders, and everyone who voted for them). Trump is just a symbol, after all. It’s the dissatisfaction with global capitalism (and its smiley, happy, valueless values, and its post-ideological ideology) that GloboCap is determined to crush, so they can get back to the unfinished business of restructuring the entire Middle East, and anywhere else that’s not playing ball, and dissolving what is left of national sovereignty, and transforming the world into one big marketplace, where there will be no fascists, no evil Russians, no religious extremists, no racist statues, no offensive movies, or books, or artworks, no more unauthorized ass-clown presidents, and everyone will be “contact-traced” with their digital health-certificate implants, and the children will stand inside their little “social-distancing” boxes and circles and sing the Coca-Cola theme song through their anti-virus masks at school …

Sorry … I got a little off-track there. I forgot that this was strictly about racism, and police brutality, and nothing else. I’ll try to stick to the script from now on, but it might be difficult, given my “privilege.” Maybe, if I wrapped myself in kente cloth and got down on my knees in public, that might help me get my mind right. Or, I don’t know. What do you think?

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June 10, 2020 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Anarchists & ‘antifa’ occupy Seattle police station abandoned by ‘regime’ forces, set up ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’

File photo
RT – June 9, 2020

Six blocks of downtown Seattle have been declared the ‘Free Capitol Hill Zone’ or ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’ (CHAZ), according to area activists that have taken control of Seattle PD’s East Precinct, on 12th Avenue and E. Pine Street.

Journalist Julio Rosas tweeted out photos from the ‘Zone,’ including flyers demanding that Seattle PD be defunded, and declaring that police “will always be racist because capitalism requires inequality.”

Journalist Andy Ngo described the group in control of the area as “Antifa,” and cited tweets to suggest there were armed guards among them.

The report of armed personnel seems to have been confirmed by another activist, who said that members of the John Brown Gun Club – a leftist militia also known as Redneck Revolt – “showed up to offer help, some armed.”

Sympathizers have described the atmosphere inside the zone as “wonderful” and peaceful, more like a concert than anything else.

“Police want you to think that without them there will be chaos. But what if without them there was peace?” mused Resistance activist Joshua Potash, holding up Seattle as an example of what Democrat demands to ‘defund police’ might result in.

Police Chief Carmen Best confirmed that her department evacuated the precinct on Monday evening as an exercise in “trust and deescalation.”

Two days earlier, Seattle PD used flash-bangs and pepper spray to push back demonstrators at 11th Avenue and Pine Street, just a block away, after they had moved a security barricade and allegedly threw objects at the officers. Protesters insisted that tear gas had been used, but police denied it, saying they had not violated the 30-day moratorium on the substance declared by Mayor Jenny Durkan, a Democrat.

City authorities may be expecting the activists to disperse, but the barricades and the content of their social media suggest they intend to stay. Local businesses and residents have “agreed to disaffiliate from Seattle basically,” in the words of one activist, who called it a “flux state in the making” – a reference to an anarchist commune from the fiction series Shadowrun.

Maps of the zone apparently made by the activists refer to ‘Captured Regime East Precinct’ and also use ‘regime’ to refer to reported police positions.

Democrats have ruled Seattle for almost 50 years. The current city council has eight Democrats and one socialist.

June 9, 2020 Posted by | Aletho News | | Leave a comment

AfD Lawmaker: Anti-Nord Stream 2 Sanctions Are Form of Economic Imperialism by US Fracking Industry

Sputnik – 08.06.2020

Washington’s desire to levy further sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline constitutes a form of economic imperialism designed to support the US fracking industry, Heiko Hessenkemper, a member of the Bundestag Committee on Economic Affairs and Energy from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, said.

“So the political pressure is understandable, because America, the American economy, and the American financial industry, are up to their necks in the fracking industry … They use illegal transnational sanctions to protect their interests. In summary, this is nothing more than economic imperialism,” Hessenkemper stated.

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline will be vital to ensure Europe’s energy security, the lawmaker said, citing the Dutch government’s decision to wind down the country’s production of natural gas and Germany’s plans to close down many coal and nuclear power plants.

Consequently, Washington’s decision to levy sanctions on the pipeline is both illegal and threatens the energy security of the entire European continent, Hessenkemper added.

“The American argument that Europe is too dependent on Russia and is open to blackmail is, of course, nonsensical because there are enough liquefied gas terminals in Europe that could be refilled from global sources in the event of a supply shortfall. From all these points of view, America’s sanctions are not only illegal, but they are also not in Europe’s interest,” the lawmaker stated.

According to Hessenkemper, the US fracking industry, which is capital-intensive and has high production costs, has been severely impacted by the global fall in oil and gas demand during the ongoing coronavirus disease outbreak. These factors have forced Washington to look abroad and impose sanctions on the fracking industry’s competitors, the lawmaker stated.

US senators on Thursday introduced a bill that would extend the scope of sanctions levied against Nord Stream 2 to include all companies that provide certification, insurance, and port facilities for pipe-laying vessels that are working on the project.

Swiss pipelaying firm Allseas quit the project in December as a result of US sanctions.

The German government has opposed all extraterritorial sanctions imposed by Washington on the pipeline.

See also:

Berlin May Retaliate to Sanctions Against Nord Stream 2 With Duties on US Gas, Senior Lawmaker Warns

June 8, 2020 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

‘Go on, don’t be shy, show us!’: Beijing taunts US senator who has ‘proof’ that China’s sabotaging Covid-19 vaccine effort

RT | June 8, 2020

A Florida Senator spectacularly claimed he’s got intelligence proving China is obstructing the West’s search for a Covid-19 cure – He shouldn’t be shy to let the world see the “evidence,” Beijing’s diplomats swiftly quipped.

Rick Scott, who sits on the Senate’s Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, pulled no punches when talking China on the BBC on Sunday. Apart from being hostile to the US and democracy, Beijing communists are hindering the development of a coronavirus vaccine, and are trying “to sabotage us or slow it down,” Scott alleged.

He said there’s “evidence” substantiating the bombshell claim but repeatedly refused to disclose it, citing vague considerations regarding secrecy – much to the disappointment of anchor Andrew Marr.

The Senator’s media blitz predictably caught Beijing’s eye the following day. Since the BBC host failed to extract the proof, Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry, challenged Scott into lifting the shroud of mystery.

“Since this lawmaker said he has evidence that China is trying to sabotage Western countries in their vaccine development, then please let him present the evidence. There’s no need to be shy.”

In response to Scott’s assertion that Beijing doesn’t want the West to develop the vaccine first, Hua stated during a regular press briefing that the search for a Covid cure isn’t a competition at all.

Previously, China’s Science and Technology Minister Wang Zhigang gave reassurances that his country would make such a vaccine a “global public good” when it finally arrives.

The claim that China is hindering the anti-Covid research effort may well be riding a wave of another theory, one that alleges that coronavirus is man-made and was released from a virology lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city that was the epicenter of the epidemic.

Aggressively pushed by top US officials, the theory was consistently denounced by Beijing which called it an attempt to switch attention from Washington’s handling of its epidemic at home. Certain American allies also doubted the Covid-19 was a human creation, although some pundits suggested a ‘leak’ from the lab could have been accidental.

June 8, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

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.

June 8, 2020 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

George Floyd protests are just like US-backed color revolutions abroad, says leading Russiagate journalist

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | June 7, 2020

There is no need to speculate any longer about the odd similarities between ‘color revolution’ regime change operations overseas and the current protests across the US, when a leading purveyor of ‘Russiagate’ outright admits it.

What the US is experiencing now is “more like the nonviolent movements that earned broad societal support in places such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia,” the Atlantic’s Franklin Foer said on Saturday, in a piece titled ‘The Trump Regime Is Beginning to Topple’.

Foer doesn’t go into the details of the events in Serbia and Tunisia, and he only brings up Ukraine in the context of the 2013-14 protests that turned violent and resulted in armed militias taking control in Kiev. In his telling, these were all genuine popular movements that overthrew ‘dictators’, which just so happened to be guided by a 93-page pamphlet written by US political scientist Gene Sharp.

He makes no mention of the US government’s role in any of these events – even in Ukraine, where US diplomats handed out cookies to “protesters,” and senators like John McCain shared the stage with their leaders.

Nor does he gush about a US operation of “engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience” emerging as a “template for winning other people’s elections,” as the Guardian described the 2004 turmoil in Kiev, and directly linked with the 2000 events in Serbia.

Instead, Foer says it’s “astonishing” that the events in the US over the past week have “traced the early phases” of Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan revolt. He cites Sharp’s advice to revolutionaries to focus on destroying the “regime” by turning the media, business elites, and police against it. Twitter’s censorship of Trump was a “hinge moment,” he says, and other major corporations followed when it turned out “there was little price to pay for the choice.”

This was then followed by state and local authorities rejecting Trump’s call to bring out the National Guard, the public denunciation by former generals, culminating when Trump’s own secretary of defense “explicitly rejected” the threat of deploying the military to the streets. (Fact check: Not true.)

Foer’s self-professed astonishment is interesting, given that the Atlantic actually provided the platform for retired Admiral Mike Mullen and retired General Jim Mattis to denounce the president.

Then again, he is not just any ordinary journalist, but the famous author of the article (published by Slate in October 2016, just before the election) alleging that communications between a Trump Organization email server and Russia’s Alfa Bank were proof of his “collusion” with the Kremlin.

Alfa Bank and Donald Trump both denied it right away. The FBI actually said in February 2017 there was nothing to it. The Mueller Report, published in April 2019, said there was nothing to it. No matter: the Alfa Bank story kept turning up in ‘Russiagate’ circles, like a bad penny.

Though it was eventually revealed that the Alfa Bank story was sourced from the infamous Steele Dossier, the salacious but entirely unverified document authored by a British spy paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign through a series of proxies, Foer was never called out on it.

As late as last month, he was still insisting Russia meddled in the 2016 election and will do so again in 2020.

So when someone with such connections in the circles of Trump’s political and media critics says the current protests are really about overthrowing the president, and writes approvingly of the tactics involved without once noting they are a weapon previously wielded by both Democrat and establishment Republican administrations overseas, there is no reason not to believe him.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic

June 7, 2020 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

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