MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘CIA’

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Killing Julian Assange: Justice Denied When Exposing Official Wrongdoing — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on November 1, 2019

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/10/31/killing-julian-assange-justice-denied-when-exposing-official-wrongdoing/

Killing Julian Assange: Justice Denied When Exposing Official Wrongdoing

Philip Giraldi

The hideous treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continues and many observers are citing his case as being symptomatic of developing “police state” tendencies in both the United States and in Europe, where rule of law is being subordinated to political expediency.

Julian Assange was the founder and editor-in-chief of the controversial news and information site WikiLeaks. As the name implies, after 2006 the site became famous, or perhaps notorious, for its publication of materials that have been leaked to it by government officials and other sources who consider the information to be of value to the public but unlikely to be accepted by the mainstream media, which has become increasingly corporatized and timid.

WikiLeaks became known to a global audience back in 2010 when it obtained from US Army enlisted soldier Bradley Manning a large quantity of classified documents relating to the various wars that the United States was fighting in Asia. Some of the material included what might be regarded as war crimes.

WikiLeaks again became front page news over the 2016 presidential election, when the website released the emails of candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta. The emails revealed how Clinton and her team collaborated with the Democratic National Committee to ensure that she would be nominated rather that Bernie Sanders. It should be noted that the material released by WikiLeaks was largely documentary and factual in nature, i.e. it was not “fake news.”

Because he is a journalist ostensibly protected by the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, the handling of the “threat” posed by journalist Assange is inevitably somewhat different than a leak by a government official, referred to as a whistleblower. Assange has been vilified as an “enemy of the state,” likely even a Russian agent, and was initially pursued by the Swedish authorities after claims of a rape, later withdrawn, were made against him. To avoid arrest, he was given asylum by a friendly Ecuadorean government seven years ago in London. The British police had an active warrant to arrest him immediately as he had failed to make a bail hearing after he obtained asylum, which is indeed what took place when Quito revoked his protected status in April.

As it turned out, Julian Assange was not exactly alone when he was in the Ecuadorean Embassy. All of his communications, including with his lawyers, were being intercepted by a Spanish security company hired for the purpose allegedly by the CIA. There apparently was also a CIA plan to kidnap Assange. In a normal court in a normal country, the government case would have been thrown out on constitutional and legal grounds, but that was not so in this instance. The United States has persisted in its demands to obtain the extradition of Assange from Britain and London seems to be more than willing to play along. Assange is undeniably hated by the American political Establishment and even much of the media in bipartisan fashion, with the Democrats blaming him for Hillary Clinton’s loss while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has labeled him a “fraud, a coward and an enemy.” WikiLeaks itself is regarded by the White House as a “hostile non-government intelligence service.” Sending Julian Assange to prison for the rest of his life may be called justice, but it is really revenge against someone who has exposed government lies. Some American politicians have even asserted that jail is too good for Assange, insisting that he should instead be executed.

The actual charges laid out in the US indictment are for alleged conspiracy with Chelsea Manning to publish the “Iraq War Logs,” the “Afghan War Logs” and the US State Department cables. On May 23rd, the United States government further charged Assange with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which criminalizes any exposure of classified US government information anywhere in the world by anyone. Its use would create a precedent: any investigative journalist who exposes US government malfeasance could be similarly charged.

Assange is currently incarcerated in solitary confinement at high-security Belmarsh prison. It is possible that the Justice Department, after it obtains Assange through extradition, will attempt to make the case that Assange actively colluded with the Russian government, a conspiracy to “defraud the United States” to put it in legalese. Assange is unlikely to receive anything approaching a fair trial no matter what the charges are.

Assange’s prison term ended on September 22nd, but an earlier procedural hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court had already decided that a full hearing on extradition to the US would not begin until February 25th, 2020. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange would not be released even though the prison term had ended, because he was a flight risk. His status in the prison system was duly changed from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition and his final hearing would be at the high security Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court rather than in a normal civil court. Belmarsh is where terrorists are routinely tried and the proceedings there permit only minimal public and media scrutiny.

Most recently, on October 21st, 2019, Assange was again in Westminster Magistrates’ Court for a “case management hearing” regarding his possible extradition to the US Judge Baraitser denied a defense team request for a three-month delay so that they could gather evidence in light of the fact that Assange had been denied access to his own papers and documents in order to prepare his defense. British government prosecutor James Lewis QC and the five US “representatives” present opposed any delay in the extradition proceedings and were supported by Judge Baraitser, denying any delay in the proceedings.

Another procedural hearing will take place on December 19th followed by the full extradition hearing in February, at which time Assange will presumably be turned over to US Marshalls for transportation to the Federal prison in Virginia to await trial. That is, of course, assuming that he lives that long as his health has visibly deteriorated and there have been claims that he has been tortured by the British authorities.

Former British Ambassador Craig Murray, who knows Julian Assange well, was present when he appeared in court on the 21st. Murray was shocked by Assange’s appearance, noting that he had lost weight and looked like he had aged considerable. He was walking with a pronounced limp and when the judge asked him questions, to include his name and date of birth, he had trouble responding. Murray described him as a “shambling, incoherent wreck” and also concluded that “one of the greatest journalists and most important dissidents of our times is being tortured to death by the state, before our eyes.”

The British court was oblivious to Assange’s poor condition, with Judge Baraitser telling the clearly struggling prisoner that if he were incapable of following proceedings, then his lawyers could explain what had happened to him later. Objections to what was happening made by both Assange and his lawyers were dismissed by the Crown’s legal representatives, often after discussions with the American officials present, a process described in full by Murray, who, after describing the miscarriage of justice he had just witnessed observed that Julian Assange is being “slowly killed in public sight and arraigned on a charge of publishing the truth about government wrongdoing.” He concluded that “Unless Julian is released shortly he will be destroyed. If the state can do this, then who is next?” Indeed.

Be seeing you

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

My Corner by Boyd Cathey Military Coup against Trump

Posted by M. C. on October 26, 2019

https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/

Boyd Cathey

The Deep State Out in the Open

Calls for a Military Coup against Trump

Friends,

This past Christmas at a social gathering of some former high school classmates I had a brief conversation with an old friend, a liberal—I still have one liberal friend, but he’s about the only one left.  Aware of my positions on issues, and, yes, having actually read a few of the columns and essays I’ve written over the years, my friend—let’s call him Dave—enjoys needling me as a “conspiracy theorist.” And at that event he was at it again.

I don’t mind his banter, and, in a jocular fashion, I hand it right back at him.

This past Christmas Dave was all exercised about some of my pieces on “the Deep State,” and insisted that such discussion was nothing more than “right-wing talking points,” “conspiratorial exaggerations about legitimate government,” and, basically, much ado about nothing. The Deep State he explained, did not really exist—rather, I was “making it all up,” and that my criticism was actually misdirected at noble professionals who had dedicated their lives and careers to what he termed “the betterment of all Americans.”

How dare I attack those hard-working men and women who actually “made this country work!” [I am quoting his words, as I distinctly remember them.]

I don’t think my conversation that isolated in today’s America. But I also believe that the more zealous and frenzied the opposition to President Trump becomes, the more the reality of the Deep State has also become. As I have written previously, the election of the “great disruptor” has forced the administrative and managerial elites, fearful of losing their power and influence, increasingly out of the closet into the open. Indeed, Donald Trump, with all his bluster and unorthodox (according to Washington DC) manner of doing and saying things, has torn the mask off, at least partially, of the permanent, largely faceless bureaucratic class that has for so long dominated this country…and our lives.

But until recently, a full admission of this from the agents of the Deep State was unthinkable. The narrative was exactly that of my friend Dave: those upright and dedicated bureaucrats and experts, in government and in think tanks, were simply doing their job as professionals…but now that uncouth and ignorant “bull-in-a-china-shop” Donald Trump had attacked them, and he was thus “endangering our democracy” because of it.

Speaking, as it were, for most of the major media, Glenn Carle, a former CIA “clandestine services officer and an expert on national security,” called the very idea of a Deep State a “dark conspiracy.” Joined by other members of our intelligence agencies, he declared in May 2017:

The president has cast doubt on proven truths, undermined the laws, undermined the judiciary, the free press, the intelligence community…He’s undermined the very values upon which this society was built. So, what do you do if you’re an intelligence official? …This dilemma…has been widely discussed among those in the intelligence community, who have been forced to assess which is the greater threat: Trump’s “authoritarian tendencies” which threaten “the fabric of the nation,” or the clear national-security risks posed by a sustained stream of classified information being made public….”When leaks come from the intelligence community, it’s not to undermine the president or to protect the deep state. It’s to protect democracy — it stems from a sense of profound patriotism,” Carle said. “The deep state does not exist in fact but it exists in the minds of Trump supporters…”

Talk about “projection”!  Protecting democracy—by undermining it?…when for decades this country (as most of the nations in Europe) has been virtually ruled and governed by an unelected, untouchable caste of managers whose vision increasingly centers on a universalist globalism in which the citizens of the American republic will have become mere cogs: do your work, pay taxes, but shut up and don’t ask questions about “things that don’t concern you,” like running this country.

But now that symbol and beacon of the American Establishment, The New York Times, has come full circle: yes, the Deep State DOES indeed exist, it asserts, but that is actually a “good thing,” good for you and good for the country. Perhaps the insistent talk by the president and increasingly by some conservatives forced the Times out from the shadows?

Here was the headline of the Times editorial on October 20, 2019: “They Are Not the Resistance. They Are Not a Cabal. They Are Public Servants.”

Ironically, this admission/defense by “the Grey Lady” comes just a few days after a major Leftist columnist and contributing editor to Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi, blew the whistle on his fellow bedfellows. In a major essay—curiously not heralded on Fox and ignored by such media as CNN and MSNBC—Taibbi, no friend at all to President Trump or his policies, suggested that his friends on the frenetic Left “might soon wish they just waited to vote their way out of the Trump era,” and that, indeed, we ARE living through an attempted “coup” against the president and his agenda, that we are watching an hysterical effort to negate and undo the results of the 2016 election by any means.

Taibbi wishes to see the president gone, but he also sees that what is happening before us in Congress, in the press, and in academia,  is worse, far more damaging and dangerous to the survival of the American republic than the perceived infractions or lese-majeste’ of Donald Trump. The consequences of what the Left, the Democrats, and Never Trumpers are attempting and inciting are, in fact, driving a poisonous and violent stake into what is left of the republic.

I pass on a slightly-edited copy of Taibbi essay. Notice near the beginning as he writes about our divided country, he intimates that “we are speeding toward a situation when someone in one of these camps refuses to obey a major decree, arrest order, or court decision, at which point Americans will get to experience the joys of their political futures being decided by phone calls to generals and police chiefs.”

That incredibly chilling prediction is undergirded by an OpEd, again in The New York Times, by retired Admiral and Clinton loyalist, William McRaven [“Our Republic is Under Attack from the President,” October 18], in which he argues forcefully “that senior military leaders have lost confidence in the president and feel he is a threat to the nation,” and that “action” must be taken, “the sooner the better.” In other words…a military coup.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup?fbclid=IwAR2ZclK5zzGIxMU7fMFgmQ5fMGcinw_E6rVOKTeHlAFiCSXosXxkVLBo2yQ

Be seeing you

 

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

Of Two Minds – Welcome to the USSR: the United States of Suppression and Repression

Posted by M. C. on October 24, 2019

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct19/US-suppression-repression10-19.html?fullweb=1

Charles Hugh Smith

We’re all against “fake news,” right? Until your content is deemed “fake news” in a “fake news” indictment without any evidence, trial or recourse.

When propaganda is cleverly engineered, people don’t even recognize it as propaganda: welcome to the USSR, the United States of Suppression and Repression. The propaganda in the U.S. has reached such a high state that the majority of people accept it as “pravda” (truth), even as their limbic system’s BS detector is sensing there is a great disturbance in the Force.

Inflation is a good example. The official (i.e. propaganda) inflation rate is increasingly detached from the real-world declines in the purchasing power of the bottom 80%, yet the jabbering talking heads on TV repeat the “low inflation” story with such conviction that the dissonance between the “official narrative” and the real world must be “our fault”–a classic technique of brainwashing.

To give some examples: healthcare is over 18% of the nation’s GDP, yet it makes up only 8.7% of the Consumer price Index. Hundreds of thousands of families have to declare bankruptcy as a result of crushing healthcare bills, but on the CPI components chart, it’s a tiny little sliver just a bit more than recreation (5.7%).

Then there’s education, which includes the $1.4 trillion borrowed by student debt-serfs–which is only part of the tsunami of cash gushing into the coffers of the higher-education cartel. Yet education & communication (which presumably includes the Internet / mobile telephone service cartel’s soaring prices) is another tiny sliver of the CPI, just 6.6%, a bit more than fun-and-games recreation.

As for housing costs, former Soviet apparatchiks must be high-fiving the Federal agencies for their inventive confusion of reality with magical made-up “statistics.” To estimate housing costs, the federal agency in charge of ginning up a low inflation number asks homeowners to guess what their house would rent for, were it being rented–what’s known as equivalent rent.

Wait a minute–don’t we have actual sales data for houses, and actual rent data? Yes we do, but those are verboten because they reflect skyrocketing inflation in housing costs, which is not allowed. So we use some fake guessing-game numbers, and the corporate media dutifully delivers the “pravda” that inflation is 1.6% annually–basically signal noise, while in the real world (as measured by the Chapwood Index) is running between 9% and 13% annually. How the Chapwood Index is calculated)

As the dissonance between the real world experienced by the citizenry and what they’re told is “pravda” by the media reaches extremes, the media is forced to double-down on the propaganda, shouting down, marginalizing, discrediting, demonetizing and suppressing dissenters via character assassination, following the old Soviet script to a tee.

(Clearly, the CIA’s agitprop sector mastered the Soviet templates and has been applying what they learned to the domestic populace. By all means, start by brainwashing the home audience so they don’t catch on that the “news” is a Truman Show simulation.)

In 2014, Peter Pomerantsev, a British journalist born in the Soviet Union, published Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia which drew on his years working in Russian television to describe a society in giddy, hysterical flight from enlightenment empiricism. He wrote of how state-controlled Russian broadcasting “became ever more twisted, the need to incite panic and fear ever more urgent; rationality was tuned out, and Kremlin-friendly cults and hatemongers were put on prime time.”

Now, he’s written a penetrating follow-up, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality that is partly an effort to make sense of how the disorienting phenomena he observed in Russia went global. The child of exiled Soviet dissidents, Pomerantsev juxtaposes his family’s story — unfolding at a time when ideas, art and information seemed to challenge tyranny — with a present in which truth scarcely appears to matter.

“During glasnost, it seemed that the truth would set everybody free,” he writes. “Facts seemed possessed of power; dictators seemed so afraid of facts that they suppressed them. But something has gone drastically wrong: We have access to more information and evidence than ever, but facts seem to have lost their power.”

(source)

“Facts” are a funny thing when the data sources and massaging of that data are all purposefully opaque. Again, inflation is a lived-world example of how “official facts” are clearly massaged to support an essential narrative–that inflation is so low it’s basically signal noise, while in the real world it has impoverished the bottom 95% to a startling (but unmentionable) degree.

This is the reality as inflation has eaten up wages’ purchasing power: Families Go Deep in Debt to Stay in the Middle Class Wages stalled but costs haven’t, so people increasingly rent or finance what their parents might have owned outright Median household income in the U.S. was $61,372 at the end of 2017, according to the Census Bureau. When inflation is taken into account, that is just above the 1999 level.

We’re all against “fake news,” right? Until your content is deemed “fake news” in a “fake news” indictment without any evidence, trial or recourse. This is what happened to this site in the bogus PropOrNot propaganda campaign of 2016, in which every alternative-media website that questioned the “approved narratives” was labeled “fake news” in a classic propaganda trick of labeling dissenters as propagandists to misdirect the citizenry from the actual propaganda (PropOrNot), which by the way was heavily promoted on page one by Jeff Bezos’ propaganda mouthpiece, The washington Post. (Who’s your daddy, WP “journalists”?)

Meanwhile, back in reality, the primary source of data here on oftwominds.com is 1) the Federal Reserve data base (FRED) 2) IRS data and 3) content and charts posted by the cream of the U.S. corporate media Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Fake news, indeed. Those individuals who support the “approved narratives” and orthodoxies win gold stars, and so virtue-signaling is now the nation’s most passionate hobby. (Shades of the Stasi…)

In the wake of the 1976 Church Committee revelations on the institutional lawlessness and corruption of the FBI and CIA, the idea that former CIA propagandists and spy masters would be on TV as “commentators” would have been laughed off as a bad joke. Yet here are Clapper, Brennan et al, the “most likely to lie, obfuscate, rendition and propagandize” individuals in the nation welcomed as “experts” who we should all accept as trustworthy Big Brother. (Ahem)

What if every employee in the corporate media who was paid (or coerced) by the FBI, NSA, CIA etc. had to wear a large colorful badge that read, “owned by the FBI/CIA”? Would that change our view of the validity of the “approved narratives”?

Welcome to the USSR: the United States of Suppression and Repression, where your views are welcome as long as they parrot “approved narratives” and the corporate-state’s orthodoxies. “Facts” are only welcome if they lend credence to the “approved narratives” and orthodoxies.

For example, corporate earnings are rising. Never mind estimates were slashed, that was buried in footnotes a month ago. What matters is Corporate America will once again “beat estimates” by a penny, or a nickel, or gasp, oh the wonderment, by a dime, on earnings that were slashed by a dollar when “nobody was looking.” Meanwhile, back in reality, the bottom 95% have been losing ground for two decades. But don’t say anything, you’ll be guilty of “fake news.”

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Only Cowards And Sadists Support The Persecution Of Assange – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on October 23, 2019

Assange’s extradition hearing will commence without delay on February of next year, despite the case violating the 2003 US/UK extradition treaty, and despite new evidence emerging of CIA-tied espionage on Assange and his lawyers while he was at the Ecuadorian embassy. It will commence in a tiny Belmarsh courtroom with almost no room for the public to provide scrutiny, without Assange’s defense having adequate time to prepare.

Keep the pressure up, keep watching, and keep talking about what you’re seeing to anyone who will listen. It may very well save Julian’s life.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/10/22/only-cowards-and-sadists-support-the-persecution-of-assange/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

Former British ambassador Craig Murray has published a very disturbing account of Julian Assange’s court appearance yesterday which I recommend reading in full. There have been many reports published about Assange’s case management hearing, but the combination of Murray’s prior experience with torture victims, his familiarity with British courts, his friendship with Assange, and his lack of reverence for western power structures allowed for a much more penetrating insight into what happened than anyone else has been able to provide so far.

Here is a small excerpt:

Before I get on to the blatant lack of fair process, the first thing I must note was Julian’s condition. I was badly shocked by just how much weight my friend has lost, by the speed his hair has receded and by the appearance of premature and vastly accelerated ageing. He has a pronounced limp I have never seen before. Since his arrest he has lost over 15 kg in weight.

 

But his physical appearance was not as shocking as his mental deterioration. When asked to give his name and date of birth, he struggled visibly over several seconds to recall both. I will come to the important content of his statement at the end of proceedings in due course, but his difficulty in making it was very evident; it was a real struggle for him to articulate the words and focus his train of thought.

 

Until yesterday I had always been quietly sceptical of those who claimed that Julian’s treatment amounted to torture – even of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture – and sceptical of those who suggested he may be subject to debilitating drug treatments. But having attended the trials in Uzbekistan of several victims of extreme torture, and having worked with survivors from Sierra Leone and elsewhere, I can tell you that yesterday changed my mind entirely and Julian exhibited exactly the symptoms of a torture victim brought blinking into the light, particularly in terms of disorientation, confusion, and the real struggle to assert free will through the fog of learned helplessness.

Murray reports that there were no fewer than five representatives of the US government in the Westminster Magistrates Court that day, and that there were seated behind the British prosecutors and essentially giving them orders. The judge, Vanessa Baraitser, reportedly behaved coldly and snarkily towards the defense, smirking and refusing their requests without explanation, while behaving warmly and receptively toward the prosecution. Assange’s extradition hearing will commence without delay on February of next year, despite the case violating the 2003 US/UK extradition treaty, and despite new evidence emerging of CIA-tied espionage on Assange and his lawyers while he was at the Ecuadorian embassy. It will commence in a tiny Belmarsh courtroom with almost no room for the public to provide scrutiny, without Assange’s defense having adequate time to prepare.

Assange’s lawyer Mark Summers told the court that the case was “a political attempt” by the United States “to signal to journalists the consequences of publishing information.” And of course he’s right. Nobody sincerely believes that the 175-year sentence that Assange is looking at if he’s successfully extradited to the US by the Trump administration is a reasonable punishment for publishing activities which the Obama administration had previously declined to prosecute based on the exact same evidence, citing concern for the damage the precedent would do to press freedoms. These charges have nothing to do with justice, and they aren’t meant to be merely punitive. They’re made to serve as a deterrent. A deterrent to journalists anywhere in the world who might otherwise see fit to publish inconvenient facts about the US government.

This is obvious. It is obvious that the US government is destroying Assange to signal to journalists the consequences of publishing information. It is therefore also obvious that any journalist who fails to use whatever platform they have to speak out against Assange’s persecution has no intention of ever publishing anything that the US government doesn’t want published. Their silence on or support for what is being done to this man can and should be taken as an admission that they are nothing other than state propagandists. State propagandists, sycophants, and cowards.

Cowardice is driving public support for Assange’s persecution. Cowardice and sadism. Even if every single bogus smear against him were true, from the lies about feces on embassy walls to the still evidence-free allegation of Trump/Russia collusion, even if every single one of those ridiculous fantasies were true, his punishment to date would be more than enough. I mean, exactly how much torture is appropriate because your preferred candidate wasn’t the one who was elected? How weird is it that such entitled sadism goes unquestioned? To continue to call for more is to reveal your sick fetish, whether you’re one of the powerful people he pissed off or just another mindless repeater in the comments section. Enough. You’ve had your pound of flesh.

We are watching a great tragedy unfold in a fractal-like way, from the zoomed-out meta tragedy of the worldwide death blow to press freedom, drilled down to the personal tragedy of this death blow to a man called Julian Assange. His once encyclopaedic brain can now barely remember his own birthday. This guts me. There are no other minds on earth that understood the power dynamics of invisible imperialism and the Orwellian dangers humanity now faces as we hurtle towards and AI-dominated information landscape as well as his did. That mind has been purposely destroyed. We must never forget that. We must never forgive that.

It’s been a tough day. My heart has been hurting and my sighs have been long. The only brightness I can see through the bleakness is the quandary that appears to be emerging for these nationless plutocrats who are pulling the strings. The more they get their way, the more obvious their actions must necessarily be, because the thing they are attempting to do is so totally abnormal. Yesterday’s court proceedings were blatantly farcical, from the curious rulings, to the strange sight of US advisers interfering in a UK case about an Australian citizen, down to even the dismissive smirk on the judge’s face. None of this is normal, and when things aren’t normal there is a risk that people will notice, and things are only going to get stranger as they attempt to pull this off.

The only thing keeping people from really seeing what’s going on here is a thin layer of narrative management, and the only thing keeping them from acting on their seeing is feeling like they are alone in their seeing. Keep the pressure up, keep watching, and keep talking about what you’re seeing to anyone who will listen. It may very well save Julian’s life.

_________________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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

Politicians Live in a Parallel Universe – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on October 23, 2019

The Pentagon and the CIA will just have to continue inflicting death, suffering, and destruction on foreigners on a perpetual basis until the war is “won,” that is, when all the Muslim terrorists are finally eradicated, which just might be never, especially since the interventionism produces a never-ending stream of anger and hatred toward the United States.

https://www.fff.org/2019/10/22/politicians-live-in-a-parallel-universe/

by

I’m convinced of it. Politicians definitely live in a parallel universe, one that could easily be called Bizarro World.

Just read a recent op-ed in the Washington Post by Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It provides irrefutable proof that these people live in an alternative universe.

The title of McConnell’s article is “Withdrawing from Syria Is a Grave Mistake.” As you can tell from the title, McConnell, like the good little Republican he is, is an interventionist . That means he believes that the U.S. government should intervene in the affairs of other countries, like with coups, assassinations, invasions, bribery, extortion, sanctions, and embargoes, even while lamenting when foreign governments (e.g., Russia) intervene in the affairs of other countries in the same ways.

Okay, so Republicans are interventionists. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they live in a parallel universe. It just means that they are seriously misguided. The proof that McConnell lives in an alternative universe comes through the analysis he employs to justify his interventionism.

Number 1. McConnell says that that interventionism is necessary to combat “Islamic terrorism.”

What? Is he kidding? He obviously doesn’t get it. He still believes that the terrorists are targeting America because of their supposed hatred for America’s “freedom and values.” He still doesn’t understand that it is interventionism itself (which he ardently supports) that is the root cause of the anger and hatred that foreigners have toward the United States. Stop the interventionism and anti-American terrorism dissipates.

In McConnell’s universe, the “war on terrorism” goes on forever because,  in his mind, the Muslims will hate America forever. The Pentagon and the CIA will just have to continue inflicting death, suffering, and destruction on foreigners on a perpetual basis until the war is “won,” that is, when all the Muslim terrorists are finally eradicated, which just might be never, especially since the interventionism produces a never-ending stream of anger and hatred toward the United States.

Number 2. McConnell says that America’s post-World World II regime has brought an “unprecedented era of peace” to the world.

Is he kidding? Has he never heard of the Korean civil war in the early 1950s, where the U.S. government intervened and killed millions of North Koreans and sacrificed tens of thousands of American soldiers for nothing in an illegal war, given that the president, the Pentagon, and the CIA waged it without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war?

Has he never heard of the Vietnam War, another illegal war that was waged without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war? In that war also, the U.S. national security establishment killed millions of Vietnamese and sacrificed tens of thousands of American soldiers for nothing.

Has he never heard of the CIA’s invasion of Cuba, a country that has never attacked the United States? Has he never heard of the U.S. government’s decades-long brutal economic embargo against that nation, which has targeted the Cuban people with death and impoverishment for the sake of regime change? Is he unaware of the fact that U.S. interventionism against Cuba brought the world to the edge of worldwide nuclear devastation?

Has he not heard of the many state-sponsored assassinations of innocent people by the CIA and the Pentagon since World War II?

How he never heard of MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s secret drug-experimentation program that deliberately murdered innocent people? Has he never heard that the CIA secretly employed Nazi war criminals to help the CIA with its operations? Has he never heard of Operation Northwoods?

Has he never heard of the many regime-change operations, such as in Chile, Guatemala , Libya, and, yes, Syria, which have not only destroyed democratic and non-democratic regimes alike but also subjected millions of innocent people to death, suffering, impoverishment, rape, indefinite detention, torture, execution, or chaos?

Has he never heard of the U.S. government’s undeclared intervention in the Persian Gulf War, which brought about the massacre of thousands of Iraqis? Or the Pentagon’s intentional destruction of Iraq’s water and sewage treatment plants with the aim of killing people through infections and malnutrition? Or the 11 years of brutal sanctions against the Iraqi people, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children? Or UN Ambassador Madeline Albright’s infamous declaration that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions, while hard, were “worth it.”

Has he never heard of President George W. Bush’s undeclared war of aggression against Iraq, which violated the principles set forth at Nuremberg as well as the U.S. Constitution, which succeeded in killing hundreds of thousands of more Iraqis as well as destroying the entire country?

Or the undeclared war against Afghanistan, which has killed hundreds of thousands of more people, 99 percent of whom had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks?

Number 3. McConnell says that American had a “comforting blanket of isolationism in the 1940s.” Is he kidding? How can he not know about President Roosevelt’s interventionist machinations to embroil the United States in World War II? How could he not know about FDR’s Lend-Lease program with England, his military assistance to British forces, his oil embargo on Japan, his freezing of Japanese assets in the United States, and the humiliating dictates he issued to Japan, all with the aim of provoking Germany and Japan to attack and kill U.S. troops, so that he could manipulate the American people into having to enter World War II? How can he not know that that war, which is so beloved to Republicans (and Democrats), delivered Eastern Europe and East Germany into the hands of the Soviet Reds, which was then used to justify the Cold War and the anti-communist crusade (and, later, the anti-Russia crusade), and the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state, which is a totalitarian form of governmental structure?

How can McConnell not see such things? There can be only one explanation. McConnell is, in fact, living in a parallel universe, one called Bizarro World?

Be seeing you

Comic books in 'Superman Bizarro's World'

 

 

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

Craig Murray – Historian, Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist – Assange in Court

Posted by M. C. on October 23, 2019

Unless Julian is released shortly he will be destroyed. If the state can do this, then who is next?

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/

by

I was deeply shaken while witnessing yesterday’s events in Westminster Magistrates Court. Every decision was railroaded through over the scarcely heard arguments and objections of Assange’s legal team, by a magistrate who barely pretended to be listening.

Before I get on to the blatant lack of fair process, the first thing I must note was Julian’s condition. I was badly shocked by just how much weight my friend has lost, by the speed his hair has receded and by the appearance of premature and vastly accelerated ageing. He has a pronounced limp I have never seen before. Since his arrest he has lost over 15 kg in weight.

But his physical appearance was not as shocking as his mental deterioration. When asked to give his name and date of birth, he struggled visibly over several seconds to recall both. I will come to the important content of his statement at the end of proceedings in due course, but his difficulty in making it was very evident; it was a real struggle for him to articulate the words and focus his train of thought.

Until yesterday I had always been quietly sceptical of those who claimed that Julian’s treatment amounted to torture – even of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture – and sceptical of those who suggested he may be subject to debilitating drug treatments. But having attended the trials in Uzbekistan of several victims of extreme torture, and having worked with survivors from Sierra Leone and elsewhere, I can tell you that yesterday changed my mind entirely and Julian exhibited exactly the symptoms of a torture victim brought blinking into the light, particularly in terms of disorientation, confusion, and the real struggle to assert free will through the fog of learned helplessness.

I had been even more sceptical of those who claimed, as a senior member of his legal team did to me on Sunday night, that they were worried that Julian might not live to the end of the extradition process. I now find myself not only believing it, but haunted by the thought. Everybody in that court yesterday saw that one of the greatest journalists and most important dissidents of our times is being tortured to death by the state, before our eyes. To see my friend, the most articulate man, the fastest thinker, I have ever known, reduced to that shambling and incoherent wreck, was unbearable. Yet the agents of the state, particularly the callous magistrate Vanessa Baraitser, were not just prepared but eager to be a part of this bloodsport. She actually told him that if he were incapable of following proceedings, then his lawyers could explain what had happened to him later. The question of why a man who, by the very charges against him, was acknowledged to be highly intelligent and competent, had been reduced by the state to somebody incapable of following court proceedings, gave her not a millisecond of concern.

The charge against Julian is very specific; conspiring with Chelsea Manning to publish the Iraq War logs, the Afghanistan war logs and the State Department cables. The charges are nothing to do with Sweden, nothing to do with sex, and nothing to do with the 2016 US election; a simple clarification the mainstream media appears incapable of understanding.

The purpose of yesterday’s hearing was case management; to determine the timetable for the extradition proceedings. The key points at issue were that Julian’s defence was requesting more time to prepare their evidence; and arguing that political offences were specifically excluded from the extradition treaty. There should, they argued, therefore be a preliminary hearing to determine whether the extradition treaty applied at all.

The reasons given by Assange’s defence team for more time to prepare were both compelling and startling. They had very limited access to their client in jail and had not been permitted to hand him any documents about the case until one week ago. He had also only just been given limited computer access, and all his relevant records and materials had been seized from the Ecuadorean Embassy by the US Government; he had no access to his own materials for the purpose of preparing his defence.

Furthermore, the defence argued, they were in touch with the Spanish courts about a very important and relevant legal case in Madrid which would provide vital evidence. It showed that the CIA had been directly ordering spying on Julian in the Embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide security there. Crucially this included spying on privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers discussing his defence against these extradition proceedings, which had been in train in the USA since 2010. In any normal process, that fact would in itself be sufficient to have the extradition proceedings dismissed. Incidentally I learnt on Sunday that the Spanish material produced in court, which had been commissioned by the CIA, specifically includes high resolution video coverage of Julian and I discussing various matters.

The evidence to the Spanish court also included a CIA plot to kidnap Assange, which went to the US authorities’ attitude to lawfulness in his case and the treatment he might expect in the United States. Julian’s team explained that the Spanish legal process was happening now and the evidence from it would be extremely important, but it might not be finished and thus the evidence not fully validated and available in time for the current proposed timetable for the Assange extradition hearings.

For the prosecution, James Lewis QC stated that the government strongly opposed any delay being given for the defence to prepare, and strongly opposed any separate consideration of the question of whether the charge was a political offence excluded by the extradition treaty. Baraitser took her cue from Lewis and stated categorically that the date for the extradition hearing, 25 February, could not be changed. She was open to changes in dates for submission of evidence and responses before this, and called a ten minute recess for the prosecution and defence to agree these steps.

What happened next was very instructive. There were five representatives of the US government present (initially three, and two more arrived in the course of the hearing), seated at desks behind the lawyers in court. The prosecution lawyers immediately went into huddle with the US representatives, then went outside the courtroom with them, to decide how to respond on the dates…

In Belmarsh he is kept in complete isolation for 23 hours a day. He is permitted 45 minutes exercise. If he has to be moved, they clear the corridors before he walks down them and they lock all cell doors to ensure he has no contact with any other prisoner outside the short and strictly supervised exercise period. There is no possible justification for this inhuman regime, used on major terrorists, being imposed on a publisher who is a remand prisoner.

I have been both cataloguing and protesting for years the increasingly authoritarian powers of the UK state, but that the most gross abuse could be so open and undisguised is still a shock. The campaign of demonisation and dehumanisation against Julian, based on government and media lie after government and media lie, has led to a situation where he can be slowly killed in public sight, and arraigned on a charge of publishing the truth about government wrongdoing, while receiving no assistance from “liberal” society.

Unless Julian is released shortly he will be destroyed. If the state can do this, then who is next?

Be seeing you

 

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

The Fatal Loop of Recursivity – Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on October 21, 2019

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-fatal-loop-of-recursivity/

James Howard Kunstler

Here’s one big reason that America is driving itself batshit crazy: the explosion of computerized records, emails, inter-office memos, Twitter trails, Facebook memorabilia, iPhone videos, YouTubes, recorded conversations, and the vast alternative universe of storage capacity for all this stuff makes it seem possible to constantly go back and reconstruct reality. All it has really done is amplified the potential for political mischief to suicide level.

It’s a major unanticipated consequence of the digital “revolution.” It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we’d only be watching jumbotron replays while failing to pay attention to the action on the field.

Before all this, history was left largely to historians, who curated it from a range of views for carefully considered introduction to the stream of human culture, and who managed this process at a pace that allowed a polity to get on with its business at hand in the here-and-now — instead of incessantly and recursively reviewing events that have already happened 24/7. The more electronic media has evolved, the more it lends itself to manipulation, propaganda, and falsification of whatever happened five minutes, or five hours, or five weeks ago.

This is exactly why and how the losing team in the 2016 election has worked so hard to change that bit of history. The stupendous failure of the Mueller Investigation only revealed what can happen when extraordinary bad faith, dishonesty, and incompetence are brought to this project of reinventing “truth” — of who did what and why — while it provoked a counter-industry of detecting its gross falsifications.

This dynamic has long been systematically studied and applied by institutions like the so-called “intelligence community,” and has gotten so out-of-hand that its main mission these days appears to be the maximum gaslighting of the nation — for the purpose of its own desperate self-defense. The “Whistleblower” episode is the latest turn in dishonestly manipulated records, but the most interesting feature of it is that the release of the actual transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call did not affect the “narrative” precooked between the CIA and Adam Schiff’s House Intel Committee. They just blundered on with the story and when major parts of the replay didn’t add up, they retreated to secret sessions in the basement of the US capitol.

Perhaps you can see why unleashing the CIA, NSA, and the FBI on political enemies by Mr. Obama and his cohorts has become such a disaster. When that scheme blew up, the intel community went to the mattresses, as the saying goes in Mafia legend and lore. The “company” found itself at existential risk. Of course, the CIA has long been accused of following an agenda of its own simply because it had the means to do it. It had the manpower, the money, and the equipment to run whatever operations it felt like running, and a history of going its own way out of sheer institutional arrogance, of knowing better than the crackers and clowns elected by the hoi-polloi. The secrecy inherent in its charter was a green light for limitless mischief and some of the agency’s directors showed open contempt for the occupants of the White House. Think: Allen Dulles and William Casey. And lately, Mr. Brennan.

The recently-spawned NSA has mainly added the capacity to turn everything that happens into replay material, since it is suspected of recording every phone call, every email, every financial transaction, every closed-circuit screen capture, and anything else its computers can snare for storage in its Utah Data Storage Center. Now you know why the actions of Edward Snowden were so significant. He did what he did because he was moral enough to know the face of malevolence when he saw it. That he survives in exile is a miracle.

As for the FBI, only an exceptional species of ineptitude explains the trouble they got themselves into with the RussiaGate fiasco. The unbelievable election loss of Mrs. Clinton screwed the pooch for them, and the desperate acts that followed only made things worse. The incompetence and mendacity on display was only matched by Mr. Mueller and his lawyers, who were supposed to be the FBI’s cleanup crew and only left a bigger mess — all of it cataloged in digital records.

Now, persons throughout all these agencies are waiting for the hammer to fall. If they are prosecuted, the process will entail yet another monumental excursion into the replaying of those digital records. It could go on for years. So, the final act in the collapse of the USA will be the government choking itself to death on replayed narratives from its own server farms. In the meantime, events are actually tending in a direction that will eventually deprive the nation of the means to continue most of its accustomed activities including credible elections, food distribution, a reliable electric grid, and perhaps even self-defense.

Be seeing you

How to Manage Email - Email Management Best Practices, Tips

 

 

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

The time has come for President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and put down the lawless, left-wing insurrection against America – NaturalNews.com

Posted by M. C. on October 19, 2019

It is not safe in Minneapolis any longer for Trump supporters. Please stay away from the vicinity and do not come out with branded gear…

https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-10-11-president-trump-invoke-insurrection-act-lawless-left-wing.html

by:

(Natural News) The lunatic, lawless Left is out of control. The corporate-run media has become a CIA propaganda front that ignores reality while fabricating fake stories to destroy America. The tech giants despise free speech for conservatives while demanding “equality” for transgenders. And left-wing governors and mayors are openly advocating Antifa-style lawlessness and violence in America, as long as that violence is directed at conservatives and Trump supporters.

(By the way, do you remember all the hype to push “Net Neutrality?” It was supposed to protect dissenting voices and diverse views on the ‘net. The tech giants pushed it aggressively, and the moment Trump got elected, those same evil tech companies like Google and Facebook then systematically silenced all conservative voices. The entire “Net Neutrality” push was a con job. They never believed in neutrality; only tyranny.)

Just last night, lunatic left-wing mobs violently attacked Trump supporters who were leaving the Trump rally in Minneapolis. Via Breitbart News:

Left-wing rioters attacked supporters of President Donald Trump leaving a rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Thursday evening — assaulting them in groups, setting fire to pro-Trump hats, and attacking the police.

 

Local Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter Liz Sawyer noted there were several hundred rioters, and that some were singling out Trump supporters and surrounding them in groups before attacking them. Some also attacked police…

It’s time to stop the violence, the lunacy and the insurrection. PJ Media’s David Solway has written an outstanding article that makes the case. Via PJmedia.com:

Any decent and impartial observer can see that leftist and corporate America has come to resemble a cloacal bog of lies, corruption, slander, censorship, entitlements and violence, a veritable “swamp” as it has been aptly called. What commentator Diana Sitek writing in American Thinker calls “the entitlement to depravity embedded in the Left’s social justice dogma” is both massive and unrelenting. The media, the academy, the entertainment industry, Big Tech, the Democrat Party, and the “Deep State” are profoundly engaged in a networked alliance to overturn the results of a lawful election and subvert a legitimate and effective presidency. President Trump has vowed to “drain the swamp” but it is moot whether a single individual, regardless of the power of high office, with little in the way of institutional support — and despite his strength of character and resolve — can thwart what is nothing less than an ongoing political putsch.

Be seeing you

facebook_1568111427238.jpg

 

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

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : So, Admiral McRaven Just Called for a Military Coup, Kinda

Posted by M. C. on October 19, 2019

You can smell the desperation of the deep state warparty. Don’t be surprised if there are desperate actions.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2019/october/18/so-admiral-mcraven-just-called-for-a-military-coup-kinda/

Written by Peter Van Buren

Admiral William McRaven, famous for being the guy who told the guy who told the other guy who told the other guy who told that guy to go kill bin Laden, has essentially called for a military coup against the President of the United States in a New York Times Op-Ed.

He begins with something to get the blood up, a call to the good military stuff, invoking generals who are “highly decorated, impeccably dressed, cleareyed and strong of character, [yet] were humbled by the moment” at a change of command ceremony. Then a little history, invoking the WWII Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to today’s CIA and Special Operations community, who had “faith that these values were worth sacrificing everything for.” In case it wasn’t clear, they “personified all that is good and decent and honorable about the American military,” his Op-Ed’s intended audience.

Then, invoking that oath that requires the military to protect America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, McRaven explains to them why they are being now called to battle: “The America that they believed in was under attack, not from without, but from within.” This is not subtle.

McRaven continues: “These men and women, of all political persuasions, have seen the assaults on our institutions: on the intelligence and law enforcement community, the State Department and the press. They have seen our leaders stand beside despots and strongmen, preferring their government narrative to our own. They have seen us abandon our allies and have heard the shouts of betrayal from the battlefield. As I stood on the parade field at Fort Bragg, one retired four-star general, grabbed my arm, shook me and shouted, ‘I don’t like the Democrats, but Trump is destroying the Republic!’”

Quick Summary: The president is destroying the Republic, from within. The last folks who wanted to destroy the Republic were the Nazis, the Commies, and the terrorists and you know what we did to them.

McRaven’s next step is reassuring the troops that whomever they are next ordered to kill, it is all for a good cause. “We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.”

That leaves aside the silliness of such a statement in light of what hell the American pursuit of justice has wrought among the millions dead in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, never mind in an earlier century across Southeast Asia and the Americas. This is not about that. This is about dehumanizing the next enemy, who may look alot like you this time McRaven is hinting, to convince his shooters they are killing for freedom.

Finally, what this is really about. You guys need to be ready to take out Trump.

Here are McRaven’s words: “If this president doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs, both domestically and abroad, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office — Republican, Democrat or independent — the sooner, the better. The fate of our Republic depends upon it.”…

Be seeing you

OPERATION ZIPPER: The CIA’s Highly Organized Conspiracy to ...

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

The CIA Goes HBCU | Black Agenda Report

Posted by M. C. on October 11, 2019

Government schooling

Imagine the psy-ops inflicted on these people.

The Kool Aid is flowing.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/cia-goes-hbcu

Glen Ford, BAR executive editor

The world’s most prolific assassins, regime changers and disinformation specialists have been given free rein to recruit and shape curriculum at the largest Black higher education system in the nation.

“The Democratic Party’s Black minions have insanely embraced the agency as part of the ‘resistance’ to Trump’s raging racism.”

The Southern University System has opened its arms to the CIA with an agreement  to allow the agency to recruit operatives and shape classroom workshops and curriculum on the system’s five historically Black campuses in Louisiana. According to a press release featuring the smiling faces of Southern University president-chancellor Ray Belton and agency operatives, the super-spooks hope to “foster ongoing relationships with key university staff and personnel” and gain access to “a qualified and diverse applicant pool.” University chief Benton — the “Spook Who Opened the Door,” not to be confused with “The Spook Who Sat by the Door ,” the Black insurrectionary novel  and movie – said the CIA connection enhances Southern’s “public-private partnerships portfolio.” He praised the “reputable stature” of the CIA as “an asset to the university, students and faculty.”

The Southern University-CIA collaboration is a gift from President Trump, the first of many in-plain-sight CIA infiltrations of Black higher education envisioned under his White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Defenders of hard-pressed HBCUs will doubtless offer an “any port in a storm” excuse for subjecting young Black minds and underpaid faculty to the enticements of global Murder Incorporated – the assassins of Patrice Lumumba and countless other freedom fighters, as well as the planet’s most accomplished psychological warfare specialists. Some Negroes are capable of excusing anything – and do…

 

Be seeing you

?u=https1.bp.blogspot.com-21je6qbGpuYWbP_oknTIQIAAAAAAAApsg37eDfz-Vh8oZXOSlTzcqR2lMNJLWUs_RwCLcBGAss1600Uncle-Sam-in-Control-Sans.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

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

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »