MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘CIA’

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

British Court Trusts US to Protect Assange Even Though CIA Plotted to Kill Him

Posted by M. C. on December 17, 2021

Meanwhile, Assange’s mental and physical health continue to deteriorate. He suffered a stroke in late October as the extradition hearing began. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer was not surprised. Melzer wrote in a Twitter post that the “U.K. is literally torturing him to death,” adding, “As we warned after examining him, unless relieved of the constant pressure of isolation, arbitrariness & persecution, his health would enter a downward spiral endangering his life.”

https://truthout.org/articles/british-court-trusts-us-to-protect-assange-even-though-cia-plotted-to-kill-him/

By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout

Part of the Series

Human Rights and Global Wrongs

In a patently political decision, the U.K. High Court reversed the British lower court’s denial of extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States on a narrow ground, despite the recent revelations of a CIA plot to kidnap and assassinate him.

Assange was charged by the Trump administration with violation of the Espionage Act for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. He could be sentenced to 175 years in prison if he is tried and convicted in the United States. But instead of dismissing Trump’s indictment, the Biden administration continues to pursue the case against Assange, notwithstanding the grave threats his prosecution poses to investigative and national security journalism.

The High Court judges did not question U.K. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s conclusion that it would be “oppressive” to extradite Assange due to his mental health. Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London, testified that Assange “suffers from a recurrent depressive disorder … sometimes accompanied by psychotic features, often with ruminative suicidal ideas.” He added that the “imminence of extradition or extradition itself would trigger a suicide attempt, but it was Mr. Assange’s mental disorder that would lead to an inability to control his wish to commit suicide.” Although the Biden administration challenged Kopelman’s credibility, the High Court affirmed Baraitser’s reliance on his testimony, which was corroborated by an experienced developmental psychiatrist, Quinton Deeley, who said Assange’s Asperger’s diagnosis means he is at heightened risk of suicide if extradited to the United States.

See the rest here

Marjorie Cohn sits on the national advisory board of AssangeDefense. She is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.’s Heroic Resistance to the CIA’s Continuing Covid Coup D’état – Edward Curtin

Posted by M. C. on December 11, 2021

By stupid he did not mean that such people lacked intellectual ability, for they were often very smart, but that they had fallen under the spell of public power and lost all independence of mind. Thus he adds, “He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.”

http://edwardcurtin.com/robert-francis-kennedy-jr-s-heroic-resistance-to-the-cias-continuing-covid-coup-detat/

ejcurtin

A Meditation

With his extraordinary new book, The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, RFK, Jr. has made it very clear that he will not allow Orwell’s 1984 totalitarian boot to stamp on his face.  His is a very rare moral courage, and he is asking us to join him, before it is too late and we enter into a new dark age, in recognizing and resisting the evil forces intent on stamping out democracy around the world.  He is not pulling his punches with language as he accuses the political-intelligence-media-money-medical-corporate-pharmaceutical conspirators of executing “the controlled demolition of American constitutional democracy.”  For a brilliant and highly accomplished lawyer and excellent writer and speaker, the choice of those words “controlled demolition” is clearly intentional.

For anyone who doubts that the Covid-19 crisis is an intelligence-run operation controlled by spooks working with medical technocrats like Anthony Fauci, billionaires such as Bill Gates, the military, media, Big Pharma, the World Economic Forum, etc., a close reading of this book – with its 2,194 references – will disabuse one of that illusion.

The CIA has long been deeply involved with vaccines, viruses, drugs, weaponizing cancer, biological weapons, and of course massive mind-control operations – deadly propaganda in plain English – for use in controlling U.S. Americans and foreigners alike.  As Kennedy writes in an ironically understated way, “The pervasive CIA involvement in the global vaccine putsch should give us pause.”  Yes, a long pause.  He continues:

There is nothing in the CIA’s history, in its charter, in its composition, or in its institutional culture that betrays an interest in promoting either public health or democracy. The CIA’s historical preoccupations have been power and control. The CIA has been involved in at least seventy-two attempted and successful coup d’état between 1947 and 1989, involving about a third of the world’s governments. Many of these were functioningd democracies. The CIA does not do public health. It does not do democracy. The CIA does coups d’état. [my emphasis]

Just as it does Kennedy assassinations.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

CIA Chief: No Evidence Iran Has Decided to Develop a Nuclear Weapon – News From Antiwar.com

Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2021

The admission comes after the US and Iran resumed indirect negotiations to revive the nuclear deal

Burns’ comments counter the Israeli claims and could be a sign that the US might be breaking from Israel on the issue. Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett demanded to Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the US must “immediately” halt negotiations with Iran

https://news.antiwar.com/2021/12/07/cia-chief-no-evidence-iran-has-decided-to-develop-a-nuclear-weapon/

by Dave DeCamp

On Monday, CIA Director William Burns said the US does not have evidence that Iran has decided to weaponize its nuclear program.

The CIA “doesn’t see any evidence that Iran’s Supreme Leader [Ali Khamenei] has made a decision to move to weaponize,” Burns told The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO Council, The Times of Israel reported.

Burns’ admission comes a week after the US and Iran resumed indirect negotiations in Vienna to revive the nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA. The latest round of talks concluded Friday and are expected to resume this Thursday.

Israeli officials have been claiming that Iran is only trying to buy time with the negotiations as it secretly develops a nuclear bomb. For decades now, Israel has been making similar warnings, but Iran has always insisted it does not want nuclear weapons and Israel is currently the only nuclear-armed state in the region.

Burns’ comments counter the Israeli claims and could be a sign that the US might be breaking from Israel on the issue. Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett demanded to Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the US must “immediately” halt negotiations with Iran.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

NATO’s Jan Stoltenberg needs to calm it down – Responsible Statecraft

Posted by M. C. on December 4, 2021

NATO: CIA and Pentagram sock puppet public relations department

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/12/03/natos-jan-stoltenberg-needs-to-calm-it-down/

Written by
Daniel Larison

Twice in the last two weeks, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has made public comments that threaten to worsen already strained relations between Russia and the alliance.

Instead of calming things down, Stoltenberg has been carelessly ratcheting up tensions over nuclear weapons in Europe and the conflict in Ukraine. At exactly the moment when the U.S. and NATO need to be working to deescalate the situation with Russia over Ukraine, the top official in NATO has been throwing kerosene on the flames. 

While he was urging the new German coalition government to continue hosting U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, Stoltenberg made the dangerous suggestion that the weapons could end up with NATO members to the east of Germany: “So, of course, Germany can, of course, decide whether there will be nuclear weapons in your country, but the alternative is that we easily end up with nuclear weapons in other countries in Europe, also to the east of Germany.” Raising the possibility of moving these weapons closer to Russia was bound to elicit a sharply negative reaction, and that is what happened. 

Stoltenberg’s remarks prompted immediate outrage in Moscow, and it led the Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko to announce this week that Belarus would welcome Russian nuclear weapons to its territory in response to any NATO redeployment to the east. Stoltenberg’s warning may have been intended for Berlin, but it had its greatest and most destabilizing impact in Moscow and Minsk. At a time when the Russian government already perceives a growing threat coming from the West, talking about moving nuclear weapons into eastern Europe was a serious mistake. 

It is worth noting that the continued presence of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe serves no real purpose. As Global Zero’s Derek Johnson has pointed out, these weapons are a relic of the Cold War and they were originally deployed to be used against countries that are now members of NATO. In any event, the new German government still supports nuclear sharing, so the weapons stored in Germany won’t be going anywhere in the near future. Nonetheless, conjuring up the specter of American nuclear weapons moving closer to Russia was enough to further sour relations. Coming on the heels of the breakdown in NATO-Russian relations that began with the expulsion of Russian diplomats in October, this could only serve to deepen mistrust between Russia and the alliance. 

Stoltenberg also repeated the standard NATO line that Russia has no part in decisions about alliance expansion: “Russia has no veto, Russia has no say, and Russia has no right to establish a sphere of influence trying to control their neighbors.” Since Russia has already demonstrated its ability to thwart at least one aspirant state’s ambitions to join the alliance, the Secretary-General’s platitudes seemed almost as if he were trying to dare Moscow into taking more aggressive action. The U.S. and NATO may not like it, and it may not be the way that we want things to be, but the fact is that Russia absolutely does have a veto in practice over which of its neighbors become members of an anti-Russian military alliance. We already know that the Russian government will exercise that veto. The Secretary-General’s saying that Russia has no say is practically an invitation to Putin to prove him wrong.

Whether NATO officials agree with the assessment or not, the Russian government views NATO as the principal military threat to their country. Given the Russian experience of suffering devastating attacks from the west several times over the last two hundred years, their leaders have naturally been wary of the eastward expansion of the alliance, and they have made it very clear that they consider further advances to be intolerable. NATO’s “open door” to Ukraine and Georgia may seem like so much boilerplate rhetoric to Western officials, but it needlessly antagonizes Russia while offering these countries false hope of alliance membership that will likely never materialize. Stoltenberg’s latest remarks will likely have the same effect of angering Russia while giving the Ukrainian government the mistaken impression that their future entry into the alliance is guaranteed. One could hardly ask for a message more likely to promote misunderstanding and miscalculation.

It is not a coincidence that heightened tensions between Russia and Ukraine have been preceded by Kyiv’s frequent agitation for a Membership Action Plan over the last year and the Biden administration’s endorsement of Ukraine and Georgia’s future alliance membership in recent months.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

A Fat, Comfortable Military Is a “Woke” Military | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on November 12, 2021

For more astute observers of government institutions, of course, none of this will be surprising. Military and intelligence agencies are fundamentally nothing more than tax-funded bureaucratic agencies, and as such are political organizations. They will identify which way the political winds are blowing in Washington and then pander to the groups most likely to increase their budgets and privileges.

https://mises.org/wire/fat-comfortable-military-woke-military

Ryan McMaken

Over the past decade federal military and intelligence agencies have increasingly embraced so-called woke campaigns and policy positions. Specifically, these government agencies have taken explicitly ideological positions in promoting “pride month” and more recruitment of larger numbers of gay and transgender personnel explicitly for purposes of increasing “diversity.” Actual military concerns appear to be receding into the background even as the US military establishment has recently lost yet another war and blown trillions of taxpayer dollars.

For example, as early as 2014, the CIA was bragging that it “has participated in the DC Capital Pride Festival for the past three years … and is active in advancing LGBT diversity and inclusion efforts throughout the Intelligence Community.” More recently, the CIA in May 2021 released a series of recruitment videos clearly focused on recruiting personnel which would allow the agency to check certain diversity boxes.

Also, in May of this year, the US Army released a recruitment video celebrating a lesbian wedding and a pride march. In November, the navy launched the USNS Harvey Milk, named after the famed gay rights activist and icon. 

For more astute observers of government institutions, of course, none of this will be surprising. Military and intelligence agencies are fundamentally nothing more than tax-funded bureaucratic agencies, and as such are political organizations. They will identify which way the political winds are blowing in Washington and then pander to the groups most likely to increase their budgets and privileges.

The latest effort at “woke” politics is simply public relations designed to maximize budgets and increase influence. Moreover, because the US military establishment so rarely faces any real political scrutiny or fiscal discipline, it need not concern itself with efficiency or serving customers, as a private firm must. Instead, military and intelligence bureaucracies are free to spend time on political and ideological concerns instead. 

Left versus Right on the Embrace of “Woke”

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Erie Times E-Edition Article- New chief on ‘Havana Syndrome’ named 

Posted by M. C. on November 6, 2021

Another bureau created to investigate something that has been going on for decades. Why don’t I feel better?

To steal a meme from the Russiagate election fraud fiasco. Why are we paying $billions to the FIB, CIA, NSA?

https://erietimes-pa-app.newsmemory.com/?publink=459268a9c_1345fc6

Matthew Lee and Nomaan Merchant

WASHINGTON – The State Department on Friday named a new coordinator for its investigation into cases of Havana Syndrome, responding to increased pressure from lawmakers to investigate and respond to hundreds of brain injuries reported by diplomats and intelligence officers.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken appointed a high-ranking deputy, Jonathan Moore, to coordinate the department’s task force on the cases. He replaces Pamela Spratlen, a retired diplomat temporarily called back into service by Blinken before leaving in September.

Blinken also appointed retired ambassador Margaret Uyehara to lead efforts to directly support care for State Department employees.

Investigators have been studying a growing number of reported cases by U.S. personnel around the world and whether they are caused by exposure to microwaves or other forms of directed energy. People affected have reported headaches, dizziness, nausea, and other symptoms consistent with traumatic brain injuries.

Possibilities under consideration include the usage of a surveillance tool or a device intended to harm. The cases are known as “Havana Syndrome” dating to a series of reported brain injuries in 2016 at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba.

After years of investigation, the U.S. government has still not publicly identified what or who might be behind the incidents or whether they are attacks. But leaders in the State and Defense departments and at the CIA have pushed employees to report possible brain injuries and in some cases removed leaders who were seen as unsympathetic to the cases.

“This is about the health and security of our people and there’s nothing we take more seriously,” Blinken said Friday.

Several hundred cases are under investigation. There have been multiple reports in recent weeks of potential incidents linked to visits by high-profile U.S. officials, including a case involving a member of CIA Director William Burns’ traveling party in India and incidents at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, before a visit by Blinken.

The State Department said Friday that Deputy Secretary Brian McKeon had met with diplomats in Vienna to discuss possible cases reported this year in Austria.

Democrats and Republicans have pressed President Joe Biden’s administration to determine who and what might be responsible for the cases and improve treatment for victims, many of whom have long said government officials aren’t taking their cases seriously. Biden earlier this month signed a bill intended to improve medical care for victims.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said at a recent hearing that after speaking to victims, there was still “clearly a disconnect as to what is happening at the top levels of the State Department and how victims are being treated in some cases.”

Shaheen has introduced new legislation to fix what she described as differences in how various agencies are investigating and treating cases.

“There’s still not enough information that’s being shared, not enough coordination that’s being done,” she said in an interview. “There’s not a unanimity of response on how to deal with it.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks while announcing that Jonathan Moore, back, is the new coordinator for its investigation into cases of Havana Syndrome. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/POOL VIA AP

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

What the CIA Is Hiding in the JFK Assassination – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on October 29, 2021

They know that if they do talk, they run the risk of themselves being murdered, maybe their families too. People who participate in murder schemes know that they had better keep their mouths shut or else.

One example is Mafia figure Jimmy Hoffa. We still don’t know who killed Hoffa. That’s because no one talked. Another example is Johnny Roselli, the liaison in the CIA-Mafia partnership to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. We still don’t know who murdered Roselli. No one has ever talked.

https://www.fff.org/2021/10/26/what-the-cia-is-hiding-in-the-jfk-assassination/

by Jacob G. Hornberger

With President Biden succumbing to the CIA’s demand to continue keeping the CIA’s records relating to the Kennedy assassination secret, the question naturally arises: What is the CIA still hiding? (See my blog post of yesterday entitled “Surprise! Biden Continues the CIA’s JFK Assassination Cover-Up.”)

To understand what they are still hiding and why they are still hiding it, it’s necessary to go back to the 1990s during the era of the Assassination Records Review Board — and even further back than that to November 22, 1963 — the day that Kennedy was assassinated. 

People often say that if the CIA and the Pentagon had orchestrated the assassination of President Kennedy, someone would have talked by now. 

That’s just not true. When it comes to murder, people don’t talk. They know that if they do talk, they run the risk of themselves being murdered, maybe their families too. People who participate in murder schemes know that they had better keep their mouths shut or else.

One example is Mafia figure Jimmy Hoffa. We still don’t know who killed Hoffa. That’s because no one talked. Another example is Johnny Roselli, the liaison in the CIA-Mafia partnership to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. We still don’t know who murdered Roselli. No one has ever talked.

People who talk also run the risk of being prosecuted because there is no statute of limitations for murder. A good recent example is real-estate heir Robert Durst. He was recently convicted of murdering a person twenty-one years ago.

So, it was always a safe bet that the CIA and the Pentagon would be able to keep their regime-change operation in Dallas sealed in secrecy.

However, not so with respect to the fraudulent autopsy that the Pentagon carried out on President Kennedy’s body on the evening of the assassination. When the ARRB released people who had participated in the autopsy during the 1990s, they talked.

As I detailed in my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 and in my online presentation in our Zoom conference last spring, a fraudulent autopsy was an essential part of the cover-up in the assassination.

The problem that the plotters had, however, is that in order to carry out this part of the cover-up, they had to enlist the assistance of many people within the vast national-security establishment who played no role in the assassination. Since all those people were innocent and mostly unwitting participants to the cover-up, they didn’t have the same incentive to stay quiet as the people who knowingly participated in the assassination itself.

The military did its best to keep everyone quiet by telling the autopsy participants that what they were doing was classified. Everyone in the military knows what that means — people are expected to take classified secrets to the grave with them. Participants to the autopsy were required to sign written secrecy oaths. They were also threatened with court martial or criminal prosecution if they ever revealed what they had done or seen.

As I pointed out in The Kennedy Autopsy, the scheme for a fraudulent autopsy was actually set into motion at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Immediately after Kennedy was declared dead, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, announced his intent to conduct an autopsy on the president’s body, as Texas law required. That was when a team of armed Secret Service agents, brandishing guns, told Rose in no uncertain terms that they would not permit him to do the autopsy. Forcing their way out of Parkland Hospital, they took the body to Dallas’s Love Field, where new President Lyndon Johnson was waiting for it. Johnson then took the body back with him to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where he delivered it into the hands of the military.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

Colin Powell: A Neocon Fellow Traveler | Chronicles

Posted by M. C. on October 21, 2021

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/colin-powell–a-neocon-fellow-traveler/

At a crucial juncture in his life Colin Powell decided that he would just follow orders, like countless officers before him, most notably German ones. He may have been a decent sort to start with, but the Superior Orders defense is unlikely to save him from the harsh judgment of history.

By Srdja Trifkovic

“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared on the afternoon of Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2003, at the Security Council of the United Nations. “These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”   Powell, who died Monday due to complications from COVID-19, was seeking the Council’s endorsement of the U.S. attack on Iraq, which had been already decided upon by the neoconservative inner circle surrounding President George W. Bush. He asserted that Saddam Hussein already had at his disposal biological and chemical weapons, that he was developing a nuclear arsenal, and that therefore Iraq was a legitimate target for military action.   To support his claim, Powell produced a vial of white powder, allegedly anthrax from the Iraqi arsenal. He played a recording of a supposed discussion among Iraqi military officers about UN inspection teams, which had been doctored to make the proceedings appear sinister. Staking his reputation as a cautious, matter-of-fact soldier, four-star general, and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who served four presidents, he produced photographs of alleged Iraqi WMD depots and other facilities. He also showed detailed drawings of what he claimed were Saddam Hussein’s mobile chemical weapons production facilities.   As we now know, and as some of us suspected at the time, every statement Powell made on that day was untrue. Every single assertion was backed by “sources” fabricated by the neocon cabal which had decided to push America into war against Iraq many years earlier. Powell never belonged to this group, which looked down on him and eagerly plotted to exploit him. They wanted to turn him into a useful idiot, to use him – broadly speaking – the way Stalin used Walter Duranty and Hitler used Lloyd George.    Colin Powell, to his eternal discredit, allowed some very bad people to use him. He failed to check the veracity of the material they prepared for him, even though his presentation was potentially a matter of life and death for thousands of people. He was told that his speech had been prepared by the National Security Council. In reality it was written by Vice President Dick Cheney’s team, which in the words of a summary of events published Monday by The Guardian,  “led the charge in browbeating CIA analysts into coming up with evidence and when that failed, going around the CIA altogether.”   Could Powell not smell a rat? Two years later, when he was no longer a senior official, Powell said the speech was “a blot” on his career. “It was painful,” Powell told Barbara Walters. “It’s painful now.”    His expression of remorse isn’t enough to exculpate him. Powell could not have been willfully oblivious to what was going on, as some of Stalin’s fellow travelers were. He made a deliberate moral choice, fully in accordance with his rank and station. “For Colin Powell, the situation put reputation and duty in conflict,” according to Sir Christopher Meyer, the UK ambassador in Washington at the time. “When the commander in chief of the United States of America says ‘Go to New York and deliver a presentation,’ a man like Powell doesn’t say no.”   Indeed; this is the crux of the matter. At a crucial juncture in his life Colin Powell decided that he would just follow orders, like countless officers before him, most notably German ones. He may have been a decent sort to start with, but the Superior Orders defense is unlikely to save him from the harsh judgment of history.

Srdja Trifkovic

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of Chronicles, is the author of The Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Daniel Ellsberg On The CIA Plan To Kidnap And Possibly Kill Julian Assange, The End Of The Afghanistan Occupation, And The Ongoing Us Drone War – CounterPunch.org

Posted by M. C. on October 19, 2021

So, I think we have to accept that if Biden’s appeal is successful and Assange is brought back here and tried, that will not be the last, and we won’t have to wait for a Republican either or for Trump. Even under Biden it will not be the last, and yes, the New York Times itself will find that it has to defend and maybe a little late because the precedent will have been set.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/11/daniel-ellsberg-on-the-cia-plan-to-kidnap-and-possibly-kill-julian-assange-the-end-of-the-afghanistan-occupation-and-the-ongoing-us-drone-war/

by Dennis Bernstein

There are many things to say about Legendary Whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg. First and foremost of course is that he blew the whistle on the big lies behind the US Justification for the Vietnam war. Indeed, in 1967 while at the Rand Institute Daniel Ellsberg worked on the top-secret McNamara Study, US Decision Making in Vietnam, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969 he photocopied the 7,000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers.

Ellsberg’s subsequent trial on 12 felony counts posing a possible sentence of some 115 years was dismissed in 1973 on the grounds of governmental misconduct against him, leading to the convictions of several White House aides and figuring in the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon. Now in his 90’s, Dan Ellsberg is front and center in the battle to free Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. We spoke to Ellsberg on the heels of the troubling revelations that the US CIA was considering kidnapping and even killing Assange.

Dennis: Good to speak to you again Dan. Let’s start with this: Why do you think the former CIA Director under Donald Trump thought that it might be necessary not only to kidnap, to maybe kill, Julian Assange? Why did they find him so dangerous?

Dan: You know, the – I notice on the news, on Wiki, Google News, a couple headlines that I haven’t seen yet about why did the CIA want to kill Assange. I’m interested in those stories. I haven’t been able to read them yet. Actually, it’s on a podcast. I’ll have to listen to it in England, because that isn’t self-evident why at that point they would want to kill him, except that yes, they wanted him to come into trial, they wanted to kidnap him, and get him back here. Or now they’re still trying to extradite him under Biden and get him for trial.

But on the other hand, a trial isn’t actually perfect for them because that will certainly bring up two kinds of problems, the crimes that he revealed, the war crimes, the things that Chelsea Manning had given to him about Afghanistan and Iraq revealing enormous numbers of civilians killed which had not been reported, a major program of torture by our Iraqi allies which continued into the Biden – into the, I’m sorry, Obama Administration when Biden was Vice President, and definitely would have constituted war crimes. So, these are not things they wanted discussed in open-ended trial all that much, although they do want to make an example of Julian.

I really think that in one – I’ve always thought that to some extent the best thing for him is just to keep him there in a prison without having to go through a trial and reveal any of this stuff, or have him even in Sweden on that. But since they don’t want to concede that what he did was not criminal, as I would say was not under any constitutional reading of the Espionage Act, they want to continue that and have to at least go through the motions of trying to expedite him.

But of course, assassinating him would cut that short, just keep him silent, keep him out of the way, certainly form a good example, counter, to people who might be tempted to follow in his footsteps as to what to expect if you take on not only the world’s richest and strongest imperial power, the United States, but really this was a challenge to secrecy in all governments in the world. And I doubt if he has very many admirers within state governments, practically anywhere in the world, although there were many countries where he’s extremely popular.

Germany, for example, being one for various reasons. But their – and even their Bundestag has tried to get him to come as a witness about the secrecy system. But governments that want to be tight in hand with their rich uncle here, Uncle Sam, do not want to antagonize America, and that turns out to be Biden as well as Trump. So, he’s challenged all of them, and that puts you by way of a lot of retribution.

Dennis: How would you – how do you consider Julian Assange? Do you see him as a publisher and poet and journalist? People call him lots of different things. And apparently he’s been, although he’s helped a great deal in publishing a number of incredible stories in various news organizations, he’s been sort of betrayed, set aside, forgotten. How do you see him? Is he – is his work important in terms of journalism, and what role does it play in the public knowledge?

Dan: Well first take the position that the government – that he’s put himself in as government, our government, has put him in of being under charges as a publisher, as a journalist. He’s the first actually to be indicted in this country in a way that is blatantly in contradiction to the First Amendment, “Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of the press, freedom of speech.” There could hardly be a more clear-cut denial of the protection to the press, that the First Amendment author than to be indicting and prosecuting Julian Assange.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Why the Mainstream Media Remains Silent on the JFK Records Deadline – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on October 18, 2021

What is the reason that has caused the CIA to want to keep these thousands of records secret from the American people. The reason, I am more convinced than ever, is that the CIA knows that those remaining records constitute more pieces to the overall puzzle of criminal culpability on the part of the CIA in the regime-change operation that took place on November 22,1963. 

https://www.fff.org/2021/10/13/why-the-mainstream-media-remains-silent-on-the-jfk-records-deadline/

by Jacob G. Hornberger

With the October 26 deadline only two weeks from now on releasing the 60-year secret records of the CIA relating to the Kennedy assassination, the silence from the mainstream press is deafening. The great mainstream defenders of transparency and openness in government, at least when it comes foreign dictatorships, cannot bring themselves to openly advocate for the release of thousands of records relating to the JFK assassination that the CIA still insists on keeping secret.

Why the silence? I will explain the reason, but first please permit me to restate the prediction I have made regarding this matter.

I predict that within the next weeks, President Biden will grant a request by the CIA for continued secrecy of its assassination-related records. I predict that Biden will order the release of some of the records for appearance’s sake, but he will cite “national security” to justify continuing the secrecy of the vast majority of the records.

Why do I make this prediction? Because the reason that the CIA needed to keep these records secret 60 years ago still exists. That same reason was why it it needed to keep them secret during the 1990s, when the Assassination Records Review Board was enforcing the JFK Records Act of 1992, which mandated the release of all federal records relating to the assassination. 

Further, that same reason obviously caused the CIA, despite the law’s mandate, to continue keeping its records secret for another 25 years after the JFK Records Act was enacted. When that deadline came due in 2017, that same reason obviously motivated the CIA to petition President Trump for another extension of time for secrecy, which Trump dutifully granted. That deadline comes due on October 26, 2021 — two weeks from now — and mark my words: The same reason will cause the CIA to request that Biden grant another extension of time for secrecy, which Biden, like Trump, will dutifully grant.

What is the reason that has caused the CIA to want to keep these thousands of records secret from the American people. The reason, I am more convinced than ever, is that the CIA knows that those remaining records constitute more pieces to the overall puzzle of criminal culpability on the part of the CIA in the regime-change operation that took place on November 22,1963. 

After all, let’s face it: No matter what definition is put on that nebulous and meaningless term “national security,” there is no possibility that anything bad will happen to the United States if those 60-year-old secret records are released to the American people. The United States will not fall into the ocean. The supposed international communist conspiracy to take over the United States that was supposedly based in Moscow, Russia (yes, that Russia!) during the Cold War won’t be reinvigorated. Communist Cuba will not invade the United States. The dominoes near North Vietnam will not fall to the communists. North Korea will not come and get us. 

President Biden just ordered the release of President Trump’s secret records relating to the January 6 Capitol protests. Why not the same decision with respect to those 60-year-old secret records of the CIA relating to the Kennedy assassination?

Why won’t the mainstream press call on Biden to enforce the JFK Records Act of 1992? They’re scared to do so. In a remarkably candid and direct statement made to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in 2017, New York Senator Charles Schumer explained why they are scared: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer said to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

Schumer was referring to President Trump, but actually the admonition applies to everyone. The CIA, the Pentagon, the NSA, and the FBI — i.e., the entire intelligence community — has “six ways from Sunday at getting back” at anyone who takes it on, including newspaper owners, publishers, and editors.

Most people know about Operation Mockingbird, the top-secret operation of the CIA to acquire assets within the mainstream press to advance the CIA’s propaganda. Does anyone really think that the CIA would stop there in the quest to expand its power and influence? 

Not a chance! For example, the entire national-security establishment would concentrate on acquiring, installing, and grooming assets in Congress, which sets the budgets. Does anyone think it’s just a coincidence that Congress gives the national-security establishment whatever it wants plus sometimes even more than what it wants? There is good reason why President Eisenhower planned to use the term “military-industrial-congressional” complex in his Farewell Address. No one can reasonably deny that Congress is owned lock, stock, and barrel by the national-security establishment.

But they obviously would not stop there. They would also be acquiring assets within the IRS, one of the most powerful and tyrannical agencies within the federal government. There isn’t anyone, including newspaper owners, publishers, and editors, who isn’t afraid of receiving an audit notice from the IRS.

And if it happens, no one would ever be able to prove that it originated with the CIA or the rest of the national-security establishment. It would just look like it was occurring at random. If any victim of an IRS audit accused the CIA or the rest of the national-security establishment of being behind the audit, they would be ready to hurl the infamous “conspiracy theorist” label at him.

What newspaper owner, publisher, or editor wants to take that chance? They all know that the national-security establishment frowns very seriously on any mainstream media outlet that even remotely suggests that the Kennedy assassination was a regime-change operation, no different in principle from those in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Congo, and Chile both before and after the Kennedy assassination. But they also do not want to take the chance of upsetting the CIA by simply calling on it to release its 60-year-old still-secret records relating to the assassination.

After all, everyone knows that if an entity is powerful enough to regime-change presidents and prime ministers, both foreign and domestic, with impunity, it can easily destroy any mainstream media executive who dares to buck the CIA on the assassination. 

It’s just the way life works in a national-security state. It’s why the mainstream media is maintaining strict silence on the upcoming October 26 deadline on the release of those 60-year-old still-secret records of the CIA relating to the Kennedy assassination.

This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »