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How the CIA, Mossad and “the Epstein Network” are Exploiting Mass Shootings to Create an Orwellian Nightmare, by Whitney Webb – The Unz Review

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2019

In each case, these companies’ products are built in such a way that they can easily be used to illegally surveil the governments, institutions and civilians that use them, a troubling fact given Unit 8200’s documented prowess in surveillance as a means of obtaining blackmail and Israel’s history of using tech companies to aggressively spy on the U.S. government.

Following another catastrophic mass shooting or crisis event, aggressive efforts will likely follow to foist these “solutions” on a frightened American public by the very network connected, not only to Jeffrey Epstein, but to a litany of crimes and a frightening history of plans to crush internal dissent and would-be dissenters in the United States.

http://www.unz.com/article/how-the-cia-mossad-and-the-epstein-network-are-exploiting-mass-shootings-to-create-an-orwellian-nightmare/

Following the arrest and subsequent death in prison of alleged child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a little-known Israeli tech company began to receive increased publicity, but for all the wrong reasons. Not long after Epstein’s arrest, and his relationships and finances came under scrutiny, it was revealed that the Israeli company Carbyne911 had received substantial funding from Jeffrey Epstein as well as Epstein’s close associate and former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist and prominent Trump backer Peter Thiel.

Carbyne911, or simply Carbyne, develops call-handling and identification capabilities for emergency response services in countries around the world, including the United States, where it has already been implemented in several U.S. counties and has partnered with major U.S. tech companies like Google. It specifically markets its product as a way of mitigating mass shootings in the United States without having to change existing U.S. gun laws.

Yet, Carbyne is no ordinary tech company, as it is deeply connected to the elite Israeli military intelligence division, Unit 8200, whose “alumni” often go on to create tech companies — Carbyne among them — that frequently maintain their ties to Israeli intelligence and, according to Israeli media reports and former employees, often “blur the line” between their service to Israel’s defense/intelligence apparatus and their commercial activity. As this report will reveal, Carbyne is but one of several Israeli tech companies marketing themselves as a technological solution to mass shootings that has direct ties to Israeli intelligence agencies.

In each case, these companies’ products are built in such a way that they can easily be used to illegally surveil the governments, institutions and civilians that use them, a troubling fact given Unit 8200’s documented prowess in surveillance as a means of obtaining blackmail and Israel’s history of using tech companies to aggressively spy on the U.S. government. This is further compounded by the fact that Unit 8200-linked tech companies have previously received U.S. government contracts to place “backdoors” into the U.S.’ entire telecommunications system as well as into the popular products of major American tech companies including Google, Microsoft and Facebook, many of whose key managers and executives are now former Unit 8200 officers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it no secret that placing Unit 8200 members in top positions in multinational tech companies is a “deliberate policy” meant to ensure Israel’s role as the dominant global “cyber power”, while also combating non-violent boycott movements targeting Israel’s violations of international law and stifling the United Nations’ criticisms of Israeli government policy and military operations abroad.

As Jeffrey Epstein’s links to intelligence in both the United States and Israel — the subject of a recent four-part series exclusive to MintPress — began to be revealed in full, his financing of Carbyne came under scrutiny, particularly for the company’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence as well as to certain Americans with known connections to U.S. intelligence. Ehud Barak’s own role as both financier and chairman of Carbyne has also added to that concern, given his long history of involvement in covert intelligence operations for Israel and his long-standing ties to Israeli military intelligence.

Another funder of Carbyne, Peter Thiel, has his own company that, like Carbyne, is set to profit from the Trump administration’s proposed hi-tech solutions to mass shootings. Indeed, after the recent shooting in El Paso, Texas, President Trump — who received political donations from and has been advised by Thiel following his election — asked tech companies to “detect mass shooters before they strike,” a service already perfected by Thiel’s company Palantir, which has developed “pre-crime software” already in use throughout the country. Palantir is also a contractor for the U.S. intelligence community and also has a branch based in Israel.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, whatever technological solution is adopted by the Trump administration, it is set to use a controversial database first developed as part of a secretive U.S. government program that involved notorious Iran-Contra figures like Oliver North as a means of tracking and flagging potential American dissidents for increased surveillance and detention in the event of a vaguely defined “national emergency.”

As this report will reveal, this database — often referred to as “Main Core” — was created with the involvement of Israeli intelligence and Israel remained involved years after it was developed, and potentially to the present. It was also used by at least one former CIA official on President Reagan’s National Security Council to blackmail members of Congress, Congressional staffers and journalists, among others.

Given recent reports on the Trump administration’s plan to create a new government agency to use “advanced technology” to identify “neurobehavioral signs” of “someone headed toward a violent explosive act” using data collected by consumer electronic devices, the picture painted by the technology currently being promoted and implemented under the guise of “keeping Americans safe” is deeply Orwellian. In fact, it points directly to the genesis of a far-reaching surveillance state far more extensive than anything yet seen in American history and it is being jointly developed by individuals connected to both American and Israeli intelligence...

Perhaps most disturbing of all, whatever technological solution is adopted by the Trump administration, it is set to use a controversial database first developed as part of a secretive U.S. government program that involved notorious Iran-Contra figures like Oliver North as a means of tracking and flagging potential American dissidents for increased surveillance and detention in the event of a vaguely defined “national emergency.”…

While Epstein and Barak are the two financiers of Carbyne whose ties to intelligence are clearest, another funder of Carbyne, Peter Thiel, has ties to U.S. intelligence and a history of investing in other companies founded by former members of Unit 8200. Thiel co-founded and still owns a controlling stake in the company Palantir, which was initially funded with a $2 million investment from the CIA’s venture capital fund In-Q-Tel and quickly thereafter became a contractor for the CIA.

After the success of its contract with the CIA, Palantir became a contractor for a variety of federal agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Homeland Security(DHS) and the military’s Special Operations Command, among others. Last year, it won a contract to create a new battlefield intelligence system for the U.S. Army. Palantir is also in demand for its “pre-crime technology,” which has been used by several U.S. police departments. According to the Guardian, “Palantir tracks everyone from potential terrorist suspects to corporate fraudsters, child traffickers and what they refer to as ‘subversives’… it is all done using prediction.”…

Aside from the dystopian nature of both DARPA and potentially HARPA’s approach to mental health, there is grave cause for concern regarding the Trump administration’s moves to address U.S. mass shooting events by implementing pre-crime technology based on artificial intelligence, data-mining and mass surveillance, technologies already laying in wait thanks to companies like Palantir and numerous Israeli tech start-ups led by former Unit 8200 officers.

With companies like Carbyne — with its ties to both the Trump administration and to Israeli intelligence — and the Mossad-linked Gabriel also marketing themselves as “technological” solutions to mass shootings while also doubling as covert tools for mass data collection and extraction, the end result is a massive surveillance system so complete and so dystopian that even George Orwell himself could not have predicted it.

Following another catastrophic mass shooting or crisis event, aggressive efforts will likely follow to foist these “solutions” on a frightened American public by the very network connected, not only to Jeffrey Epstein, but to a litany of crimes and a frightening history of plans to crush internal dissent and would-be dissenters in the United States.

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Israeli spying on U.S. extends to every man, woman, and ...

 

 

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Will NPR Now Officially Change Its Name to National Propaganda Radio? – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2019

“It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them. … “What good fortune for those in power that the people do not think.” — Adolf Hitler

Government propaganda minister is NPR CEO.

Before next commercial free presentation let us mention our “contributors” – what they do, their products, where they are located and their hours.

https://original.antiwar.com/edward_curtin/2019/09/09/will-npr-now-officially-change-its-name-to-national-propaganda-radio/
by

Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to “court the compatible left.” He knew that drawing liberals and leftists into the CIA’s orbit was the key to efficient propaganda. Right-wing and left-wing collaborators were needed to create a powerful propaganda apparatus that would be capable of hypnotizing audiences into believing the myth of American exceptionalism and its divine right to rule the world. The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites.

Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively covers this in her 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters, and Joel Whitney followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, with particular emphasis on the complicity between the CIA and the famous literary journal, The Paris Review. By the mid-1970s, as a result of the Church Committee hearings, it seemed as if the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. had been caught in flagrante delicto and disgraced, confessed their sins, and resolved to go and sin no more. Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media (The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world. It seemed as if all would be hunky-dory now with the bad boys purged from the American “free” press. Seemed to the most naïve, that is, by which I mean the vast numbers of people who wanted to re-stick their heads in the sand and believe, as Ronald Reagan’s team of truthtellers would announce, that it was “Morning in America” again with the free press reigning and the neo-conservatives, many of whom had been “converted” from their leftist views, running things in Washington.

So again it is morning in America this September 6, 2019, and the headline from National Public Radio announces the glad tidings that NPR has named a new CEO. His name is John Lansing, and the headline says he is a “veteran media executive.” We are meant to be reassured. It goes on to say that Mr. Lansing, 62, is currently the chief executive of the government agency, The U.S. Agency for Global Media, that oversees Voice of America, Radio and Television Marti, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, among others. We are furthermore reassured by NPR that Lansing “made his mark in his current job with stirring defenses of journalism, free from government interference.” The announcement goes on to say:

Lansing has earned an advanced degree in political agility. At the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Lansing championed a free press even as leaders of many nations move against it.

‘Governments around the world are increasingly cracking down on the free flow of information; silencing dialogue and dissent; and distorting reality,’ Lansing said in a speech he delivered in May to the Media for Democracy Forum. ‘The result, I believe, is a war on truth.’

He continued: ‘Citizens in countries from Russia to China, from Iran to North Korea, have been victimized for decades. But now we’re seeing authoritarian regimes expanding around the globe, with media repression in places like Turkey and Venezuela, Cambodia and Vietnam.’

So we are reassured that the new head of NPR, the chief of all U.S. propaganda, is a champion of a free press. Perhaps NPR will soon enlighten the American public by interviewing its new head honcho and asking him if he thinks Julian Assange and Chelsey Manning, by exposing America’s war crimes, and Edward Snowden, by exposing the US government’s vast electronic surveillance programs of its own citizens, deserve to be jailed and exiled for doing the job the American mainstream “free press” failed to do. What NPR failed to do. Perhaps they will ask him if he objects to the way his own government “interfered” in the lives of these three courageous people who revealed truths that every citizen of a free country is entitled to. Perhaps they will ask him if the US government’s persecution of these truthtellers is what he means by there being “a war on truth.” Perhaps they will ask him if he thinks the Obama and Trump administrations have been “distorting reality” and waging a war on truth.

Perhaps not. Of course not…

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Operation Mockingbird (FakeNews Express) - YouTube

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From mind control to murder? How a deadly fall revealed the CIA’s darkest secrets | US news | The Guardian

Posted by M. C. on September 7, 2019

Frank Olson died in 1953, but, because of clandestine US government experiments, it took decades for his family to get closer to the truth

CIA 101

What is it doing to  now?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/06/from-mind-control-to-murder-how-a-deadly-fall-revealed-the-cias-darkest-secrets

By

Frank Olson died in 1953, but, because of clandestine US government experiments, it took decades for his family to get closer to the truth. By

Glass shattered high above Seventh Avenue in Manhattan before dawn on a cold November morning in 1953. Seconds later, a body hit the sidewalk. Jimmy, the doorman at the Statler hotel, was momentarily stunned. Then he turned and ran into the hotel lobby. “We got a jumper!” he shouted. “We got a jumper!”

The night manager peered up through the darkness at his hulking hotel. After a few moments, he picked out a curtain flapping through an open window. It turned out to be room 1018A. Two names were on the registration card: Frank Olson and Robert Lashbrook.

 

Police officers entered room 1018A with guns drawn. They saw no one. The window was open. They pushed open the door to the bathroom and found Lashbrook sitting on the toilet, head in hands. He had been sleeping, he said, and “I heard a noise and then I woke up.”

“The man that went out the window, what is his name?” one officer asked.

“Olson,” came the reply. “Frank Olson.”

“In all my years in the hotel business,” the night manager later reflected, “I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn.”

The Statler Hotel in Manhattan
The Statler Hotel in Manhattan. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

Leaving the police officers, the night manager returned to the lobby and, on a hunch, asked the telephone operator if any calls had recently been made from room 1018A. “Yes,” she replied – and she had eavesdropped, not an uncommon practice in an era when hotel phone calls were routed through a switchboard. Someone in the room had called a number on Long Island, which was listed as belonging to Dr Harold Abramson, a distinguished physician, less well known as an LSD expert and one of the CIA’s medical collaborators.

“Well, he’s gone,” the caller had said. Abramson replied: “Well, that’s too bad.”

To the first police officers on the scene, this seemed like another of the human tragedies they saw too often: a distressed or distraught man had taken his own life. They could not have known that the dead man and the survivor were scientists who helped direct one of the US government’s most highly classified intelligence programmes.

Early the next morning, one of Olson’s close colleagues drove to Maryland to break the terrible news to the dead man’s family. He told Alice Olson and her three children that Frank “fell or jumped” to his death from a hotel window. Naturally, they were shocked, but they had no choice other than to accept what they were told. Alice did not object when told that, given the condition of her husband’s body, family members should not view it. The funeral was held with a closed casket. There the case might have ended.

Decades later, however, spectacular revelations cast Olson’s death in a completely new light. First, the CIA admitted that, shortly before he died, Olson’s colleagues had lured him to a retreat and fed him LSD without his knowledge. Then it turned out that Olson had talked about leaving the CIA – and told his wife that he had made “a terrible mistake”. Slowly, a counter-narrative emerged: Olson was disturbed about his work and wanted to quit, leading his comrades to consider him a security risk. All of this led him to room 1018A.

Frank Olson had been one of the first scientists assigned to the secret US biological warfare laboratories at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland during the second world war. There Olson began working with the handful of colleagues who would accompany him throughout his clandestine career. One was Harold Abramson. Others included ex-Nazi scientists who had been brought to work on secret missions in the US. For a time they worked on aerosol technologies – ways to spray germs or toxins on enemies and to defend against such attacks. Later, Olson met with American intelligence officers who had experimented with “truth drugs” in Europe.

Olson was discharged from the army in 1944, but remained at Fort Detrick on a civilian contract and continued his research into aerobiology. Several times he visited the secluded Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, which was used for testing “living biological agents, munitions and aerosol cloud production”. He co-authored a 220-page study entitled Experimental Airborne Infections, which described experiments with “airborne clouds of highly infectious agents”.

In 1949, he travelled to the Caribbean for Operation Harness, which tested the vulnerability of animals to toxic clouds. The next year, he was part of Operation Sea Spray, in which dust engineered to float like anthrax was released near San Francisco. He regularly travelled to Fort Terry, a secret army base on Plum Island, off the eastern tip of Long Island, which was used to test toxins too deadly to be brought on to the US mainland.

This was the period when senior army and CIA officers were becoming deeply alarmed at what they feared was Soviet progress toward mastering forms of warfare based on microbes. Their alarm led to the creation of the special operations division. Rumours about its work spread through offices and laboratories. Olson learned of it over an evening game of cards with a colleague, John Schwab, who unbeknown to him, had been named the division’s first chief. Schwab invited him to join. Olson accepted immediately.

Less than a year later, Olson succeeded Schwab as chief of the special operations division. His job description was vague but tantalising: collect data “of interest to the division, with particular emphasis on the medico-biological aspects”, and coordinate his work with “other agencies conducting work of a similar or related nature”. That meant the CIA.

Olson’s speciality was “the airborne distribution of biological germs”, according to one study. “Dr Olson had developed a range of lethal aerosols in handy sized containers. They were disguised as shaving cream and insect repellants. They contained, among other agents, staph enteroxin, a crippling food poison; the even more deadly Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis; and most deadly of all, anthrax … Further weapons he was working on included a cigarette lighter which gave out an almost instant lethal gas, a lipstick that would kill on contact with skin and a neat pocket spray for asthma sufferers that induced pneumonia.”

Frank Olson in 1952.

Pinterest
Frank Olson in 1952. Photograph: AP

By the time Olson stepped down as chief of the special operations division in early 1953, complaining that the pressures of the job aggravated his ulcers, he had joined the CIA. He stayed with the division, which was officially part of the army but functioned as a CIA research station hidden within a military base. There he came to know Sidney Gottlieb and his deputy, Robert Lashbrook, the two scientists who would soon be running a top-secret CIA project codenamed MK-Ultra.

Gottlieb was the CIA’s chief poison-maker. Over two decades, he oversaw medical experiments and “special interrogation” projects in which hundreds of people were tormented and many minds were permanently shattered. During this period, there was an obsession at the CIA: there is a way to control the human mind, and if it can be found, the prize will be nothing less than global mastery. MK-Ultra was a top secret programme of experiments in mind control that used, as its basic formula, doses of LSD given to “expendables”. Gottlieb wanted to discover how much LSD a human being could take. Could there be a breaking point, he wondered – a dose so massive that it would shatter the mind and blast away consciousness, leaving a void into which new impulses or even a new personality could be implanted?…

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CIA Mind Control Experiments In Vermont, Surviving Evil ...

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Noam Chomsky Calls Out Israel For Interfering In US Elections & Says Russian Interference Is “A Joke” – Collective Evolution

Posted by M. C. on September 6, 2019

Modern day politics is extremely corrupt, and here at CE we’ve been presenting evidence for years that many of our political ‘leaders’ are actively engaged and involved in some very unethical and immoral behaviour

Israeli intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies – what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015.

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2019/09/05/news-noam-chomsky-calls-out-israel-for-interfering-in-us-elections-says-russian-interference-is-a-joke/

By

CE Staff Writer

  • The Facts:Noam Chomsky calls out Israel for interfering in the US elections. He also confirms the obvious, that the Russian Interference narrative is a joke.
  • Reflect On:Why does the media only focus on certain figures to create a narrative? Who is guiding the media to create these narratives?

It’s important to understand why Donald Trump, since he decided to run for president, gets demonized by mainstream media. The answer is simple, it’s because he is a disrupter. Many minds will have a hard time seeing this, and this is the power that mainstream media has had over the minds of the masses for years. It’s not hard for them to program a perception about an event or a person into the mind of the average human being. They have a very powerful ability to do so, and these programs stem from mainstream media’s relationships with intelligence agencies like the CIA. It’s simply a tool used to brainwash the masses.

The coordinated efforts among major news outlets including CNN, NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, and USA Today are no different from the concerted media attacks against Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, which resulted earlier in 2016 in her impeachment and removal from power. In the case of Rousseff, we see what has been alternately described as a soft coup or a Wall Street coup, along the lines of the “color revolutions” that occurred a few years earlier (which are now largely understood as CIA-NGO orchestrated). In both cases, pretexts were created and hammered home by an insistent media that whipped up public opinion. In Brazil, it worked. It seemed like it would work in the US.

As for Donald Trump, his presidency in many ways falls against the two key pillars of the American ruling elite’s ideology: neoliberalism and neoconservatism. And this is why we constantly see him being demonized, and efforts to impeach him are abundant. It’s also why the ‘Russian collusion’ narrative existed, something that many should have been able to recognize as being completely fake.

There has clearly been an ongoing deep state attack on Trump. Whether or not you hate Trump, far beyond the point, what is being exposed here is far bigger than that.

Welcome to America, where fake news is pushed as real, and real news is heavily censored and ridiculed.

Not long ago, Noam Chomsky offered his thoughts and made some very good points on this. Chomsky is known as a deep critical thinker, a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist, among other things. I’m a longtime fan, and much of the work he’s put out deeply resonates with me, but at the same time, much of it does not.

 

He is usually spot on for the most part, in my opinion,  when it comes to his analysis of modern day politics. He recently shared his thoughts on this entire Russian collusion debacle.

He explained in an interview with Democracy Now that the media’s focus on Russian collusion with regards to the 2016 US election was a “joke.”

He did not confirm or deny his belief on whether or not it even happened, but rather explained:

First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support.

Israeli intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies – what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015.

It’s a great point. Three-time presidential candidate and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dr. Ron Paul, has been outspoken about the US meddling in the elections of other countries. He noted that in an ideal world, the US wouldn’t be concerned about other countries trying to interfere with their elections, and that the reason it’s not happening is because the US government is steeped in hypocrisy, doing the exact same thing they are accusing Russia of doing.

“The American people should be worried about the influence of our CIA in other people’s elections, I mean probably hundreds. It’s constant,” he said, even mentioning “domestic assassinations” the CIA has apparently been a part of.

Paul stirred the pot further by revealing that a “shadow government,” in the words of RT, has teamed up with major media in order to push an anti-Russian narrative on the public to instil fear and hatred and ultimately rile up more arguments between the opposing Republican and Democratic parties.

There Are More Important Issues

The point of presenting the interview with Chomsky and the points he makes is that there are more pressing issues. The supposed Russian hacking in the US election is not really important, it’s simply being used for political purposes and assassinations.

Modern day politics is extremely corrupt, and here at CE we’ve been presenting evidence for years that many of our political ‘leaders’ are actively engaged and involved in some very unethical and immoral behaviour. That shouldn’t really come as a surprise if you take a look at what is happening to our planet–it’s truly the result of psychopathic leaders that we, the people, allow to control all our resources and make decisions for us.

Furthermore, the interview also sheds light on interference in our electoral process that never gets any media attention. So, ask yourself, why?

Who Is Really In Charge? Do We Really Live In A Democracy?

One of many popular quotes we use here at Collective Evolution to shed light onto the world of modern day politics comes from New York City mayor, John F. Hylan, who once said, “like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation.” This “little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties … [and] control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country.“

This begs the question, do we really live under a system of democratic vote? Do the people truly have a voice? It seems that corporations and other higher powers have complete control over political policy, and the will of the people is never really considered. For the most part, especially in the United States, elections come down to two people who don’t really have the best interests of the people or humanity at heart. Despite this fact, we keep voting, something that gives us the illusion that we are living in a democracy. Voting does absolutely nothing for change, and yet many Americans still give it grave importance. It seems that both democrats and republicans have simply been representing two different wings from the same bird for a long time.

This is the way the system works, it’s a rotten system, and I see elections as so much of a charade. So much deceit goes on… whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat president, the people who want to keep the status quo seem to have their finger in the pot and can control things. They just get so nervous so, if they have an independent thinker out there, whether it’s Sanders, or Trump, or Ron Paul, they’re going to be very desperate to try to change things… More people are discovering that the system is all rigged, and that voting is just pacification for the voters and it really doesn’t count.”  – Dr Ron Paul

There are dozens upon dozens of politicians who have referenced the ‘Deep State,’ not just Donald Trump. Despite the fact that Trump has often been labelled as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ by mainstream media, he joins a long list of politicians who have expressed the same things.

Another great example comes from Theodore Roosevelt,

Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. From these great staffs, both of the old parties have ganged aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them in martialling [sic] to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. (source)

The point is, politics is not what we think it is. Not all that is presented to us is as it seems, and this is far from a conspiracy theory. We cannot keep going through the same process every four years believing that a difference will be made via the modern day political system.

Something needs to change because the human race has so much potential and we are squandering it.

The Takeaway

At the end of the day, politics has clearly been exposed as a game where one group tried to slander another for their own purposes. Rarely are decisions made with the intention of benefiting the people or the planet.  Politics is not about the will of the people, but rather a means to bamboozle the population into thinking a certain way while benefiting a small group of the financial elite. It’s become completely useless, and participation in it should be discouraged.

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Forget the Russians: It’s the Federal Reserve Seeking to Meddle in Our Elections

Posted by M. C. on September 3, 2019

Fed President Bill Dudley. Dudley wrote that, “Trump’s re-election arguably presents a threat to the United States’ and global economy, and if the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, the Fed’s officials should consider how their decisions would affect the political outcome of 2020.”

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2019/september/02/forget-the-russians-it-s-the-federal-reserve-seeking-to-meddle-in-our-elections/

Written by Ron Paul

The US Constitution never granted the federal government authority to create a central bank. The Founders, having lived through hyperinflation themselves, understood that government should never have a printing press at its disposal. But from the very beginning of America’s founding, the desire for a crony central bank was strong.
In fact, two attempts were made at creating a permanent central bank in America prior to the creation of the Fed. Fortunately, the charter for The First Bank was allowed to expire in 1811, and President Andrew Jackson closed down the Second Bank in 1833.

But, unfortunately, a third attempt was successful and the Federal Reserve was unconstitutionally created by Congress in 1913. Americans have been living under a corrupt and immoral monetary system ever since. The Federal Reserve is the printing press that has financed the creation of the largest government to ever exist. Endless welfare and endless military spending are both made possible by the Federal Reserve. The Fed can just print the money for whatever the US establishment wants, so those of us who long for a Constitutional and limited government have few tools at our disposal.

Despite all the propaganda claiming “independence,” the Fed has always been a deeply political institution. Because the Fed is a government-created monopoly with key government-appointed employees, its so-called “independence” is a mere fiction. However, the US Congress created the Fed with legislation; it can also abolish the Fed with legislation.

Last week, the facade of Federal Reserve “independence” was dealt a severe blow. Ironically, the person who broadcast to the world that the Fed is anything but “independent” was ex-New York Fed President Bill Dudley. Dudley wrote that, “Trump’s re-election arguably presents a threat to the United States’ and global economy, and if the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, the Fed’s officials should consider how their decisions would affect the political outcome of 2020.”

The timing of Dudley’s threats to use Fed monetary policy to affect the outcome of a US election couldn’t come at a more striking time. After all, for more than two solid years Americans have been bombarded with fabricated stories about Russians rigging our elections. And yet here is a Federal Reserve official threatening to do the same exact thing – but this time for real!

Whether it’s the mainstream media, the CIA, the FBI, or now the Federal Reserve, more and more Americans are waking up to the fact that there is a Deep State in America and its interests have nothing to do with American liberty. In fact, our liberty is what the Deep State wants to abolish.

When it comes to the Federal Reserve, I stand firmly by my conviction that it needs to be audited and then ended as soon as possible.

America’s Founders were not perfect. They were human beings just as capable of error as we are. But they had a remarkable understanding of the ideas of liberty. They understood that liberty cannot exist with a government that has access to a printing press. Sound money and liberty go hand-in-hand. If we want to enjoy the blessings of Liberty, we must audit and then end the Federal Reserve!

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That close

I lowered the interest rate by this much…

 

 

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We’re Listening to the Wrong Voices on Syria

Posted by M. C. on August 29, 2019

In a wildly byzantine and absurdly self-defeating redux of the 2003 Iraq War folly and the 1980s anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, the US again fueled Islamism in the region before subsequently turning on the Frankenstein’s monster of Sunni jihadism to justify “forever war” anew. In retrospect, it was almost as if Washington wanted Syria to collapse, for the war to rage on indefinitely, and for a new, bigger, Islamist bogeyman to rise like the mythical phoenix

If Gabbard and Kucinich were right, it’s clear who was very, very wrong: the late and now canonized John McCain

https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2019/08/28/were-listening-to-the-wrong-voices-on-syria/

by

…Yet, as journalist Max Blumenthal made clear in two illuminating chapters of his latest book, “The Management of Savagery,” the U.S. and its European and Arab “partners” spent most of the brutal civil war backing the very Islamists that most threatened America. As such, the Western-Gulf alliance enabled, even caused, the “Talibanization” of huge swaths of Syria, especially in the oil-rich east.

It worked like this: The CIA set up shop across the border in Turkey and Barack Obama authorized $500 million in military aid—including anti-armor TOW missiles—which ended up in the hands of the Nusra Front and an array of other Islamist groups. At the peak of the mission, $1 in every $15 the CIA spent went to the Syria assistance mission. The blowback, so to speak, was the resurrection of al-Qaida, the empowerment of Islamic State, and the turning of much of Syria into a jihadi stronghold.

It all bore disturbing similarity to Operation Cyclone, the failed, 9/11-catalyzing, CIA assistance mission to the equally theocratic Afghan mujahedeen in its battle against the Soviets from 1979 to 1988. In this tragic counterproductive redux, Turkey stood in as Pakistan, once the way station for arms and cash to the mujahedeen. The US, Western Europe and the Gulf States performed an encore as the largest backers of rebels, and all the blowback was essentially the same—if no worse—in the Syria reprise.

This time around, Israel counterintuitively lent a hand to empower the Nusra Front and even Islamic State. It bombed Syrian targets over the years and funded some Islamists along its Golan Heights border. Indeed, one right-wing, Netanyahu-allied scholar published an op-ed titled, “The Destruction of the Islamic State Is a Mistake.” What’s more, as a former Israeli defense minister emphatically stated in 2016, “In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State.” This was all patently ridiculous, since Islamic State’s ideology poses an enormous threat to Israel’s future, whereas Iran is a boxed-in, sanctions-riddled, non-nuclear power. Yet it reflects exactly the prevailing Israeli—and, by extension, American and Gulf State—strategic dogma in the region.

US policymakers, furthermore, had ample evidence early in the civil war that the rebels were infused with and rapidly dominated by Islamists. Even hyperconservative Defense Intelligence Agency head (and later Trump national security adviser) Michael Flynn reported this, as did the United Nations. It all pointed to the massive empowerment of Islamists, including Islamic State.

Gabbard knew this—saw it, even—from the start. Anyone with a willingness to study recent history should have, though most didn’t. She wasn’t exactly alone, of course. Reliably antiwar Dennis Kucinich, a former Ohio representative, once flippantly, but astutely, asked whether US aid to rebels and strikes on Assad didn’t essentially turn the US into “al-Qaida’s Air Force.” More surprisingly, in what was, at the time, considered one his notorious gaffes, then-Vice President Joe Biden admitted that “[t]he problem is our allies [the Gulf States and Turkey] … they poured in [money and weapons] … and the people who were being supplied were Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” For this nugget of truth, Uncle Joe was sent on an “apology tour” around the region.

If Gabbard and Kucinich were right, it’s clear who was very, very wrong: the late and now canonized John McCain…

All in all, Gabbard was pilloried precisely because she was uncomfortably and rationally correct about the rebels and the course of the war in Syria. Gabbard is no doubt imperfect, but she is remarkably consistent—even when it is politically unpalatable—in her anti-interventionist stances. In this, she’s all but alone in the bloated Democratic primary field; that’s exactly why she’s the most intriguing presidential hopeful. It’s also partly why she’s unlikely to last much longer in the race to the top.

An alliance of beltway insiders, interventionist think-tankers, corporate arms dealers and mainstream Democratic Party stalwarts feel they have to sink her campaign. It must be stillborn, in fact, because they fear her and all she stands for. She seemed to know that while Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s ayatollahs aren’t exactly America’s friends, they did, and do, possess goals in common with the US The Assad-backing coalition also fights terrorists, both native Syrian and transnational. Furthermore, though the generals and admirals will never admit it, the SAA and Russian air force acted as a veritable anvil to the US and Kurdish hammer that rolled back Islamic State in its eastern Syrian stronghold.

To further disturb reflexively liberal friends, Donald Trump—though he did meaninglessly bomb a Syrian runway, leading CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria to declare The Donald presidential—seems to also partly recognize the real score in Syria. Though 2,000 US troops foolishly remain in place in the country, he hasn’t escalated conflict with Russia per se and appears to understand the common goals between the otherwise implacable opponents.

Nevertheless, the situation on the ground in Syria is dangerous as all hell. Through its counterproductive policies, Washington ended up with the worst of all worlds: a costly war with an empowered Islamic State, a hair-trigger standoff with Russia and Iran along the Euphrates River, and another perilous military footprint in an unstable Mideast quagmire. Bravo, America!…

All told, at present, Islamic State is hardly gone and is again gaining strength; Russia, Assad and Iran hold all the high cards in the civil war; US troops remain enmeshed in the East; and the Kurdish question has yet to be solved (and could even lead to a war with Turkey). Moreover, an entire people, and a region, are once more shattered.

That, as recent history demonstrates, makes America less safe and has led to hundreds of thousands of dead brown bodies, for which the US public hardly cares. Which means Tulsi Gabbard, almost alone, was right from the start. And that’s precisely why America’s perpetual warfare state must destroy her.

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America’s Interventionist Middle East Policy Started 66 Years Ago – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on August 21, 2019

The collapse of our towers on September 11th was one large entry in a long running history of western interference in the lands of Islam, and if any more oil tankers get attacked in the Strait of Hormuz, it’s worth remembering that it was not Persia who cast the first stone.

https://original.antiwar.com/andrew_corbley/2019/08/20/americas-interventionist-middle-east-policy-started-66-years-ago/

by

As the late-summer date of August 20th passes stateside, very few Americans will recognize the significance of it in our nation’s history. It marks the 66th anniversary of a sinister turn in the history of American foreign policy, and while neocons and hawks of all sorts will tell you history started on September 12th 2001, a quick visit to the Tehran Times will remind you this is not the case.

In 1953 following a request for assistance by Great Britain, and enthusiastic support from Ike Eisenhower, the United States overthrew the democratically-elected leader of Iran, Mohammed Mosaddegh, in what was the first major coup d’état the United States would carry out since the end of World War II.

Dubbed Operation Ajax, it would set the stage for future decades of America’s sandpaper relations with the greater Middle East.

Dust and echoes

In cutting Britain out of the Iranian oil market, Mohammad Mosaddegh made not one but two terrible enemies as the British asked the Americans for help in reclaiming the oil supply. August 19th comes around and out goes Mosaddegh, his heinous crime being that he thought Persians should be able to elect whom they wish, and decide what happens with the resources extracted within their own borders.

Installed in his place, the shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and General Fazlollah Zahedi – members of a monarchical ruling class directed their efforts into the business of oppressing, torturing, killing, and turning what was becoming a prosperous and democratic country into a tyrannical Bronze Age satrapy.

Two decades later the Islamic revolution sends the shah and his secret police force packing, establishing what is now the Islamic Republic of Iran. Incensed by the attack on American interests, the United States brokers an agreement with neighboring Iraq to invade and repress the popular uprising, setting off the Iran-Iraq War, a horrible conflict that’s been likened to World War I because of the large-scale trench warfare, chemical weapons, bayonet charges, and massive casualty figures, which much like the first World War, all amounted to a steaming pile of nothing in terms of achieved geopolitical objectives.

Iraq started the war on the offensive, attempting to take advantage of the chaos following the Islamic revolution. Saddam Hussein, America’s ally at the time also had the logistical support of the Gulf States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France, while Iran stood alone.

The root of the problem

Ever since the Islamic Republic of Iran stood up against the American-backed dictator, the goal of every presidential administration to take of residence in the White House has been vengeance. Nothing as of yet has stood in America’s way of a Mongol-like destruction of the Shiite Middle East beyond the weapons of Persia herself. Not even our former ally Saddam Hussein was spared from the directive to place the Islamic Republic under the highest degree of geopolitical, military, and economic pressure.

No matter how many times Saddam assured the west that the only WMDs under his belt were the decommissioned chemical weapons which NATO countries had given him to use against the Iranians, he and his Baathist regime would have to go. And thus the United States wrongly invaded Iraq, wherein about four and a half thousand Americans died.

Throughout the 21st century the names of the countries have changed but the victims are always those among her neighbors who Iran might look to for help. Meanwhile the Sunni states all around her pledge in unity to fight the Iranians until the last American, as Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates famously told the French foreign minister in 2010.

Operation Ajax’s legacy

As Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zariff tweeted today: “66 years ago today, a coup instigated by the US and the UK overthrew the democratically-elected Government of Iran. This atrocity followed years of ‘maximum pressure’ on Iranians”.

The maximum pressure levied now against the Iranians is breathtaking in scope. Upon the denizens of this ancient land the United States has placed crippling economic sanctions; upon her borders, an armada of military bases; upon her shores, the crosshairs of the most powerful navy in the world; and upon her neighbors, utter devastation.

President Barack Obama saw a need to “knock Iran down a peg,” with a regime-change war containing all sorts of despicable behavior, such as arming “moderate rebels” like Jabot al-Nusra, an offshoot of al-Qaeda, and using the armed-forces of the United States to bomb sovereign Syrian military targets under the justification of preventing future chemical weapon attacks which have now been widely reported to have been conducted by non-governmental forces.

Not to be outdone, President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear treaty, as Javad Zariff claimed, “without even reading it,” instated further sanctions, and has managed with the help of Iran’s eternal antagonist John Bolton, to press America as close to the brink of a war with Iran as we’ve yet seen.

Americans must remember August 20th 1953 as the day when America dipped her toes into the water (or sand) and thought it good. President Eisenhower thought it was a great way to affect positive change in the world that didn’t involve land invasions. Ike is not unique in holding that perspective, since many presidents have felt the same way about coups, and have since enjoyed playing the coup card in countries like Nicaragua, Guatemala, Libya, Egypt, and most recently Venezuela.

The overthrowing of Mosaddegh was a major step on America’s dangerous path to premier imperial world superpower in the sense that it reminded her that she could get away with murder and political terrorism, and demonstrated how greatly she could affect the world without bothering the American people over the details.

The collapse of our towers on September 11th was one large entry in a long running history of western interference in the lands of Islam, and if any more oil tankers get attacked in the Strait of Hormuz, it’s worth remembering that it was not Persia who cast the first stone.

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Jeffrey Epstein and the Spectacle of Secrecy – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 17, 2019

…the Mueller investigation…one obvious question was never asked: What is the CIA’s role in it all?  It was never asked because the job of the corporate mass media is to work for the CIA, not to expose it as a nest of organized criminals and murderers that it is.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/08/edward-curtin/jeffrey-epstein-and-the-spectacle-of-secrecy/

By

When phrases such as “the deep state” and “conspiracy theory” become staples of both the corporate mainstream media and the alternative press, we know the realities behind these phrases have outlasted their usefulness for the ruling elites that control the United States and for their critics, each of whom uses them refutably or corrobatively. These phrases are bandied about so often that they have become hackneyed and inane.

Everything is shallow now, in our faces, and by being in our faces the truth is taking place behind our backs. The obvious can’t be true since it’s so obvious, so let us search for other explanations, and when the searchers search, let us call them “conspiracy nuts.” It is a mind game of extraordinary proportions, orchestrated by the perverted power elites that run the show and ably abetted by their partners in the corporate mass media, even some in the alternative press who mean well but are confused, or are disinformation agents in the business of sowing confusion together with their mainstream Operation Mockingbird partners. It is a spectacle of open secrecy, in which the CIA, which created the “conspiracy theory” meme to ridicule critics of the Warren Commission’s absurd explanation of the Kennedy assassination, has effectively sucked everyone into a game of to and fro in which only they win.

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”

Only by stepping outside this narrative frame with its vocabulary can we begin to grasp the truth here in our Wonderland of endless illusions.

Death, sex, power, intrigue, murder, suicide – these are the staples of the penny press of the 19th century, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, Hearst’s New York Journal, the tabloids, today’s mass media, and the CIA.  People hunger for these stories, not for the real truth that impacts their lives, but for the titillation that gives a frisson to their humdrum lives. It is why post-modern detective stories are so popular, as if never solving the crime is the point.

To say “we will never know” is the mantra of a postmodern culture created to keep people running in circles. (Note the commentaries about the Jeffrey Epstein case.) Elusive and allusive indeterminacy characterizes everything in the culture of postmodernity. Robert Pfaller, a professor at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria and a founding member of the Viennese psychoanalytic research group “stuzzicandenti,” put it clearly in a recent interview:

The ruling ideology since the fall of the Berlin Wall, or even earlier, is postmodernism. This is the ideological embellishment that the brutal neoliberal attack on Western societies’ welfare (that was launched in the late 1970s) required in order to attain a “human”, “liberal” and “progressive” face. This coalition between an economic policy that serves the interest of a tiny minority, and an ideology that appears to “include” everybody is what Nancy Fraser has aptly called “progressive neoliberalism”. It consists of neoliberalism, plus postmodernism as its ideological superstructure.

The propagandists know this; they created it.  They are psychologically astute, having hijacked many intelligent but soul-less people of the right and left to do their handiwork.  Money buys souls, and the number of those who have sold theirs is numerous, including those leftists who have been bought by the CIA, as Cord Meyer, the CIA official phrased it so sexually in the 1950s: we need to “court the compatible left.”  He knew that drawing leftists into the CIA’s orbit was the key to efficient propaganda. For so many of the compatible left, those making a lot of money posing as opponents of the ruling elites but taking the money of the super-rich, the JFK assassination and the truth of September 11, 2001 are inconsequential, never to be broached, as if they never happened, except as the authorities say they did. By ignoring these most in-your-face events with their eyes wide shut, a coterie of influential leftists has done the work of Orwell’s crime-stop and has effectively succeeded in situating current events in an ahistorical and therefore misleading context that abets U.S. propaganda.

The debate over whether Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide or not is a pseudo-debate meant to keep people spinning their wheels over nothing. It attracts attention and will do so for many days to come. There are even some usually astute people suggesting that he may not be dead but might have been secretly whisked off somewhere and replaced with a dead look-alike. Now who would profit from suggesting something as insane as this? The speculation runs rampant and feeds the spectacle. Whether he was allowed to kill himself or was killed makes little difference.

As it was with Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald, so it is with Epstein. There will be no trial.  Nothing is really hidden except the essential truth.  Guess, debate, wonder, watch, read to your sad heart’s content.  You will have gotten nowhere unless you step outside the frame of the reigning narrative.

A corollary example of another recent national headline grabber, the Mueller investigation, is apropos here.  Douglass Valentine, expert on the CIA and author of The CIA as Organized Crime, said in a recent interview that in all the endless mass media discussions of the Mueller investigation, one obvious question was never asked: What is the CIA’s role in it all?  It was never asked because the job of the corporate mass media is to work for the CIA, not to expose it as a nest of organized criminals and murderers that it is…

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mbird

 

 

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Microsoft Admits that Human Workers Listen to Skype Calls

Posted by M. C. on August 15, 2019

Motherboard now reports that Microsoft has updated its privacy policy to make users aware of the company’s recording of sensitive user information. “We realized, based on questions raised recently, that we could do a better job specifying that humans sometimes review this content,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement.

It’s the Benjamins, baby. Plus CIA, FBI, NSA and probably Mossad.

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/08/15/microsoft-admits-that-human-workers-listen-to-skype-calls/

by Lucas Nolan

In an update to the company’s privacy policy, tech giant Microsoft has noted that human workers may listen to Skype and Cortana recordings. This is an admission by the software giant that media reports in early August based on internal leaks about contractors monitoring Skype calls are correct.

Recently leaked insider information revealed that Microsoft contractors have been listening in on some Skype and Cortana recordings. From the Breitbart News article last week:

Leaked documents and screenshots obtained by Motherboard reveal that Microsoft contract workers are listening in on personal conversations of Skype users that are using the app’s translation service. According to Skype’s website, the company reserves the right to analyze audio and phone calls through the app’s translation feature in order to improve the translation service. However, it doesn’t note that human workers will be doing some of this analysis by listening in on calls.

According to audio obtained by Motherboard, the recorded calls include conversations between loved ones, some talking about personal issues and others discussing relationship problems. A Microsoft contractor who provided a number of files to Motherboard stated: “The fact that I can even share some of this with you shows how lax things are in terms of protecting user data.”…

Previously, neither Microsoft’s privacy policy or the Skype Translator FAQ made it known that human contractors may listen in on customer’s audio, these have since been updated. The company’s privacy policy now reads: “Our processing of personal data for these purposes includes both automated and manual (human) methods of processing.”…

The firm also now allows users to delete audio recordings made of themselves using an online tool. Some tech firms have suspended the use of human transcribers, Microsoft has not. A spokesperson stated: “We’ve updated our privacy statement and product FAQs to add greater clarity and will continue to examine further steps we might be able to take.”

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The U.S. Government Doesn’t Care About Afghan Women

Posted by M. C. on August 15, 2019

Make no mistake: The well-being of Afghan women hardly motivated the architects of the American invasion and occupation. Need proof? Here’s an ever-so-brief history lesson. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979-89), the CIA not-so-secretly backed some of the worst Islamist theocrat “freedom fighters” against the Soviet-backed secular communist government then in power.

You gotta break a few eggs to build an empire.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-u-s-government-doesnt-care-about-afghan-women/

Maj. Danny Sjursen
The U.S. Government Doesn’t Care About Afghan Women
Afghan women stand outside the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2006, awaiting an appearance by then-U.S. President George W. Bush. (Eric Draper / White House)

In once, and to some extent still, relatively cosmopolitan Baghdad, Iraq, I once saw three young female college students from Mustansiriyah University walking home from class. They couldn’t have been more differently clothed. One wore a full burqa that exposed only her eyes; another a hijab, a more modest head scarf without a facial veil, and a pair of jeans; the third sported a pink miniskirt and a revealing tank top with her long hair fully exposed. Still, they chatted like old friends.

By early 2007, this range of women’s clothing was already highly rare in all but the safest Baghdad neighborhoods, yet it did still happen. I remember woefully realizing that I, a 23-year-old American lieutenant, had been treated to a rare glimpse of Saddam’s largely secular (if brutal) regime that had preceded the U.S. military’s ill-fated invasion. Before Uncle Sam fractured Iraq and empowered Islamist zealots, I was often told by locals that men and women could go on dates and drink alcohol publicly in cafes along the Tigris River. But those days were gone.

Four years later, and even further east in the proverbial Greater Mideast, while patrolling rural Kandahar, Afghanistan—birthplace of the Taliban movement—I hardly even saw a solitary grown woman. There, in the backwater of a country full of backwaters, adult women were rarely seen outdoors and never without a male family member as an escort.

It was all rather archaic and made Baghdad seem as liberal as Boston. I remember one young girl with shocking blue eyes, maybe twelve, playing close to my patrol base in the nearby village of Pashmul. Watching her skip a strange, improvised jump rope gave me rare moments of innocent joy in an altogether dangerous place I shouldn’t have been in in the first place.

Then one day, she disappeared, this (to me) nameless, joyful girl, never to be seen again. Eventually I asked a village elder, who probably played both sides—Taliban and America—against the other, what had happened to the blue-eyed Afghan girl. His answer was simple: puberty. She had had her first period, was immediately deemed a “woman,” and cloistered away behind the mud walls of her family home until her father decided to marry her off—likely to a much, much older man. Such was life in rural southern Afghanistan. It seemed most of the ethnic Pashtun villagers wanted it that way.

I think about that striking young girl occasionally as I repeatedly argue for the full and rapid withdrawal of the U.S. military from Afghanistan—which is, after all, the gold standard of hopeless wars. As I’ve predicted, it seems likely the Taliban will either conquer much of the country outright in the near future or at least maintain de facto control of Afghanistan’s Pashtun-dominated south and east indefinitely. That means Afghan women in those regions, and potentially many others, will suffer.

Yet, here’s the nasty truth: When I (and some 100,000 other U.S. troops) occupied much of Afghanistan, rural women still suffered. We could scarcely alter the longstanding cultural traditions of these regions. If, at the height of Obama’s Afghan surge, the status of most (largely pastoral) women didn’t change, what hope do the remaining 14,500 or so American soldiers still there have to protect these women? And after 18 years of stalemate, if—as now seems obvious—the U.S. can’t meaningfully win this war, what point is there in pining over the fate of human rights in this landlocked Central Asian time warp?

Sure, it’s disturbing, but it’s also a solid fact of life. What’s more, militarist, interventionist mainstream foreign policy wonks’ sudden feigned concern for the fate of Afghan women is cynical bunk meant only to prolong America’s longest ever war. It was never about women’s rights or humanitarianism in general. The U.S. military and CIA invaded Afghanistan out of vengeance for the 9/11 attacks, out of a degree of uncertainty about what else to do. Someone had to pay, someone had to be bombed, and bin Laden was, well, in Afghanistan.

Treating the terror attacks as an act of war rather than an international crime was then the original sin of these forever wars. The rapid decision to shift strategy in Afghanistan from limited counter-terror operations to nation-building, counterinsurgency and prolonged military occupation ought to be considered the second sin…

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U.N.: Despite law, Afghan women still suffer abuse

 

 

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