Denk niet dat er nog iemand is die gelooft dat de FBI een nette politie organisatie is, of je moet werkelijk niets hebben gelezen over deze organisatie, bovendien zijn er flink wat films waarin de FBI een uiterst dubieuze rol speelt (en ja ik weet: er zijn er ook genoeg die het tegenovergestelde proberen te laten zien)…….
In een zaak tegen een ‘white supremacist’ (ofwel een neonazi) heeft de verdachte de FBI beschuldigd van het 16 jaar lang werken met een uitgever van racistische (en nazi-) publicaties….. Deze zou van de FBI voor zijn heilzame werkzaamheden maar liefst een bedrag van in totaal $ 144,000 hebben ontvangen en voor de zaak tegen de verdachte nog eens $ 82,000….. Daarnaast was deze uitgever 15 jaar geleden gearresteerd voor het illegaal (zonder vergunning) hebben van een vuurwapen, waarvan het serienummer was weggevijld, bovendien had hij voor dat wapen een ongeregistreerde geluidsdemper, de straf werd niet opgelegd daar deze figuur beloofde voor de FBI te zullen werken…… (‘goed hè?’ het systeem van ‘kroongetuige….’)
Het Department of Justice (DOJ), te vergelijken met ons Ministerie van Justitie, stelt lak te hebben aan e.e.a. men zou de verdachte toch wel hebben berecht, voorts wordt het wapenbezit gebagatelliseerd…… Je ‘zou bijna denken’ dat het DOJ zich onder en boven de wet stelt, immers een kroongetuige mag in de VS geen geldelijk gewin halen, noch andere voordelen hebben bij het getuigen tegen een verdachte…… Dit valt uiteraard ook de FBI kwalijk te nemen, echter dat die organisatie onder en boven de wet staat is zonder meer zeker, de bewijzen daarvoor vullen intussen een gigantisch archief…… Bovendien ‘zou je kunnen denken’ dat het DOJ en de FBI zijn afgeladen met racisten……
Verderop in het artikel hieronder opgenomen, geschreven door Ken Silva en dat werd gepubliceerd op The Epoch Times, stelt Silva dat de beschuldigingen tegen de informant vooraf werden gegaan door de rol die FBI informanten hebben gespeeld in de mislukte samenzwering om Michigan gouverneur Gretchen Whitmer te ontvoeren: uit onderzoek van Buzzfeed News bleek dat de FBI minstens 12 informanten gebruikte die bij het plan tot ontvoering waren betrokken, waardoor de idee is ontstaan dat het plan tot ontvoering van Whitmer zonder de FBI niet zou hebben bestaan…..
Voorts zijn er vragen gesteld over de rol van de FBI bij de bestorming van het Capitol op 6 januari dit jaar. Glenn Greenwald, die vaak over smerige zaken van de FBI heeft geschreven, stelde dat het niet shockerend zou zijn als zou blijken dat de FBI informanten en andere infiltranten had in de groepen die de rellen van 6 januari planden, maar wat wel shockerend, bizar en onverklaarbaar zou zijn is als de FBI deze groepen niet onder strenge controle zou hebben gehad……..
FBI headquarters in Washington on Feb. 2, 2018. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
FBI Allegedly Funded White Supremacist Publisher: Court Documents
By Ken Silva August 29, 2021Updated: August 29, 2021
The FBI allegedly paid a publisher of white supremacist literature more than $144,000 over 16-plus years to serve as a confidential informant, according to recent filings in an ongoing domestic extremism case.
These allegations were made earlier this month by Kaleb Cole, an accused member of the white supremacist group Atomwaffen. Cole was arrested in February 2020 for allegedly participating in an Atomwaffen intimidation campaign against Jewish people and journalists of color.
On Aug. 13, Cole filed a motion to suppress evidence seized during the FBI’s search of his Texas home. According to Cole, the FBI failed to disclose the sordid background of one of its confidential informants in the bureau’s application for a search warrant.
“The CI [confidential informant] is a convicted felon and currently owns and operates a publishing company that distributes white supremacist writings,” Cole said in his Aug. 13 filing.
“The CI began his long career as a professional informant in exchange for consideration regarding his sentence on a federal conviction for possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number and an unregistered silencer.
“He has continued this work for pay.”
According to Cole, the FBI has paid this white supremacist more than $144,000, including more than $82,000 for his work in this case.
Cole’s attorneys argued that the FBI’s omissions violate requirements for law enforcement to disclose whether their informants have financial or other ulterior motives for providing information.
“The failure to include the information about the CI’s incentives is made more egregious by the fact that the warrant application incriminated Mr. Cole based almost solely on the alleged observations of the CI,” Cole’s motion said.
The Department of Justice admitted in filings last week that the FBI failed to disclose information about the confidential informant’s criminal history—though prosecutors said the search warrant used against Cole was still legally obtained.
“Although the defense is correct that certain potential impeachment information about the informant was not included in the affidavit, that omission is hardly fatal,” the DOJ said. “The omitted information was limited to the fact that the informant was well compensated by the FBI over a 16-year period, and was convicted of a firearms crime over 15 years ago.”
According to prosecutors, the FBI didn’t include this information because agents believed in good faith that probable cause wasn’t dependent on the informant’s credibility.
Moreover, the FBI didn’t believe that including the informant’s criminal history would have changed the judge’s decision to issue a warrant to search Cole’s home, prosecutors said. In fact, the DOJ argued that the FBI’s use of the informant for more than 16 years suggests that the FBI consistently found the informant reliable.
“And it is far-fetched to suggest that a single 15-year-old firearms conviction would have caused the magistrate judge to refuse to sign off on the warrant,” the DOJ said. “And finally, as the affidavit outlined in great detail, the agents were able to corroborate the information the informant had relayed about the plot.”
The DOJ’s response didn’t address Cole’s allegation that the FBI informant is a white supremacist publisher.
When contacted by The Epoch Times, a DOJ spokesperson said, “Our filings in this case speak for themselves, and we have no additional comment to add at this time.” Cole’s attorney declined to comment, while the FBI’s Houston office directed inquiries to the national press office, which has not responded.
Cole’s case is set for jury trial on Sept. 27.
The allegations about the Atomwaffen informant follow revelations about the heavy role FBI informants played in the failed plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. A Buzzfeed News investigation last month found that the FBI used at least 12 informants involved with the kidnapping—suggesting that the scheme might not have started in the first place without the FBI.
“Working in secret, they [the informants] did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception,” Buzzfeed reported. “The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.”
Questions have also been raised about the role FBI informants may have played in the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots.
“What would be shocking and strange is not if the FBI had embedded informants and other infiltrators in the groups planning the January 6 Capitol riot,” said journalist Glenn Greenwald, who’s been extensively documenting various questionable activities of the national security apparatus, in a recent op-ed. “What would be shocking and strange—bizarre and inexplicable—is if the FBI did not have those groups under tight control.”
Ken Silva
Ken Silva covers national security issues for The Epoch Times. His reporting background also includes cybersecurity, crime and offshore finance – including three years as a reporter in the British Virgin Islands and two years in the Cayman Islands. Contact him at ken.silva@epochtimes.us
‘Ex-FBI bons geeft toe dat FBI zich bezighield en houdt met het manipuleren van VS verkiezingen…..‘ (24 januari 2019; inclusief een gecensureerde video….) En dan lopen de reguliere westerse media maar te zeiken over Russische bemoeienis met verkiezingen elders, terwijl de VS niet anders doet, niet alleen elders maar ook in eigen land, echter daarvoor is amper of geen belangstelling bij die media….. (en zie de links in dat bericht, o.a. verwijzend naar Martin Luther King, die slachtoffer werd van een FBI samenzwering….)
In een vijf uur durend parlementair verhoor heeft het congres in de VS (hé!) de CEO’s van de grote techbedrijven geëist dat ze een meer agressieve censuur op hun platforms (de sociale media) moeten doorvoeren, aldus Glenn Greenwald, die vervolgd met te zeggen dat het werkelijke repressieve doel van het door de Democraten gedomineerde congres is om de macht van toezicht en censuur op de politieke maatschappelijke ‘discussie’ van deze techbedrijven naar zichzelf toe te trekken………
Het congres en een paar sub-comités hebben tijdens deze 5,5 uur durende verhoor meermaals bij 3 tech CEO’s aangedrongen om meer politiek inhoud te censureren op hun platforms, waarbij de 3 werden gedreigd met ‘wettelijke vergelding’ als ze niet voldoen aan deze eis…… Je begrijpt dat e.e.a. het gevolg is van de bestorming van het Capitol op 6 januari jl., waarvoor deze 3 CEO’s tijdens het verhoor geen verantwoording op zich wensten te nemen…… Het verhoor was volgens Greenwald een verbluffende weergave van de groeiende autoritaire poging van het congres om de macht die deze techbedrijven van de sociale media hebben op het politieke debat naar zichzelf toe te trekken voor de eigen politieke belangen en doelen….. Kortom men wil de sociale media zoals Facebook, Twitter en Google controleren uit eigenbelang……
De Democratische kwaadaardigheid Lizzie Fletcher suggereerde dat de overheid een lijst met organisaties moet opstellen, die het zelf aanmerkt als binnenlandse terreurorganisatie en waar de genoemde techbedrijven de groepen op die lijst zouden moeten zien als terreurorganisaties ISIS en Al Qaida, ofwel de berichten van die organisaties verwijderen en accounts opheffen….. Let wel: het gaat daarbij niet alleen om rechts radicale of beter gezegd fascistische groepen, die verantwoordelijk zijn voor de bestorming van het Capitol, maar ook om organisaties als Antifa, Black Lives Matter (BLM), vredesgroeperingen en milieuorganisaties…… (in Groot-Brittannië vinden al een aantal dagen demonstraties plaats tegen de wil van politie en politici om demonstraties te kunnen verbieden, ofwel ook daar wil men diverse actiegroepen monddood maken….)
Dit is de derde keer binnen 5 maanden dat men in de VS deze CEO’s ter verantwoording riep over de politieke uitingen op hun platforms; moet je nagaan: e.e.a. terwijl die 3 platforms al censuur uitoefenen op hun platforms en dat op schandelijke hoogte, zelfs in ons land worden berichten op die platforms ontoegankelijk gemaakt, zoals Twitter berichten van de politiek activist Sarah Wilkinson over Israëlische agressie tegen Palestijnen, deze zijn meermaals verwijderd van haar platform, of wat dacht je van de censuur die Google en YouTube uitoefenen op berichten en video’s van Brasscheck TV…….
Overigens verwijderden Facebook en Twitter al een enorm aantal accounts van Palestijnen die terecht kritiek hadden op het bloedige optreden van Israël, zonder dat ze antisemitische bewoordingen gebruikten…… Israël is al een paar jaar bezig om de westerse landen zover te krijgen dat elke kritiek op Israël moet worden gezien als antisemitisme, de reguliere westerse media dragen daar een flinke steen aan bij, zo kostte dit Jeremy Corbyn de laatste landelijke verkiezingen in Groot-Brittannië, ook de media in ons land deden daar vol vuur aan mee, terwijl Crobyn juist z’n leven lang al een groot tegenstander is van fascisme en antisemitisme……
Neem ook de censuur op foto’s en video’s op het internet waarin geweld tegen dieren in de intensieve veehouderij (en daarmee bedoel ik de hele keten, dus ook de slachthuizen) worden gecensureerd, oké je kan na nog een keer klikken de meeste video’s nog wel zien, maar foto’s worden telkens weer verwijderd….. De nieuwste ‘vinding’ op censuurgebied is dat je moet bewijzen dat je volwassen bent en dat middels het tonen van een creditcard of je identiteitsbewijs, dan kan het nog 3 dagen duren vioor de video wordt vrijgegeven, ook al zit je al meer dan 18 jaar op de sociale media……. Je kan er donder op zeggen dat de machtige landbouwlobby hier aan de touwtjes trekt…… Zonder probleem kan die lobby smerige misleiding middels video’s en berichten op de sociale media plaatsen, daar wordt niet eens gekeken of hier sprake is van misleiding en manipulatie, terwijl daar geen sprake van is bij degenen die de mensheid de waarheid over deze doodsindustrie willen laten zien…….
Vergeet niet dat deze doodsindustrie de klimaatverandering op een gigantische manier aanjaagt, dit middels de uitstoot van CO2 en methaangas (een broeikasgas dat meer dan 80 keer zo sterk is dan CO2), terwijl de landbouw en dan m.n. de intensieve veehouderij in de EU meer CO2 uitstoot dan de totale auto-uitstoot aan CO2 in datzelfde gebied…… Om over het platbranden van oerwoud t.b.v. de sojateelt voor die veehouderij nog maar te zwijgen, ook daarbij komen enorme hoeveelheden CO2 en methaangas vrij, terwijl die enorme bosbranden zelf de klimaatverandering al verder aanjagen……
Het is niet de taak van de sociale media om censuur uit te oefenen, daar zijn zij niet voor in het leven geroepen, immers zij hebben te zorgen dat hun platforms functioneren voor de doorgave van berichten en meningen, hoe discutabel deze ook kunnen zijn, op z’n best mogen ze pas ingrijpen als er tot geweld wordt opgeroepen…… Het is zelfs niet de taak van politici in een zogenaamde democratie om op te roepen tot censuur, immers censuur hoort thuis in een dictatuur…… En tot slot: het is al helemaal niet de taak van de reguliere media om de politiek op te roepen censuur uit te oefenen op de sociale media, wat ze wel doen en dat bij herhaling…… Uiteraard om dat steeds meer mensen deze media volkomen terecht wantrouwen, wegens het brengen van nepnieuws (fake news) en het steunen van de inhumane neoliberale status quo die in het belang is van de eigenaren van die media, dan wel voor de subsidie gevers aan die media, zoals die voor de zogenaamd onafhankelijke zendgemachtigden als de NOS en de NTR (of neem de BBC in Groot-Brittannië)….. Deze zendgemachtigden zijn afhankelijk van de zittende regering (zoals gezegd: voor subsidie) en proberen daarom zoveel mogelijk deze opvolgende regeringen uit de wind te houden, zie hun berichtgeving over de deelname van Nederland aan de illegale door de VS begonnen oorlogen…..
Je kan er dan ook de klok op gelijkzetten dat de schreeuw om censuur in de VS ook in de EU en daarom ook in ons land steeds sterker te horen zal zijn….. Neem hare D66 kwaadaardigheid Ollongren die durfde te zeggen dat Rusland hier referenda en verkiezingen manipuleert, zonder daar ook maar 1 steekhoudend bewijs voor te leveren….. Reken maar dat ze ook voorstander is van censuur op het internet, zogenaamd tegen Russische beïnvloeding, terwijl ze uiteraard ook enorm de pest heeft aan kritiek op haar smerige politiek handelen……..
The repressive objective of the Democratic-controlled Congress is to transfer the power to police and censor political discourse from these tech giants to themselves.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Mar. 25, 2021
Over the course of five-plus hours on Thursday, a House Committee along with two subcommittees badgered three tech CEOs, repeatedly demanding that they censor more political content from their platforms and vowing legislative retaliation if they fail to comply. The hearing — convened by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Chair Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of its Subcommittees, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) — was one of the most stunning displays of the growing authoritarian effort in Congress to commandeer the control which these companies wield over political discourse for their own political interests and purposes.
As I noted when I reported last month on the scheduling of this hearing, this was “the third time in less thanfive months that the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.” The bulk of Thursday’s lengthy hearing consisted of one Democratic member after the next complaining that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have failed in their duties to censor political voices and ideological content that these elected officials regard as adversarial or harmful, accompanied by threats that legislative punishment (including possible revocation of Section 230 immunity) is imminent in order to force compliance (Section 230 is the provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that shields internet companies from liability for content posted by their users).
Republican members largely confined their grievances to the opposite concern: that these social media giants were excessively silencing conservative voices in order to promote a liberal political agenda (that complaint is only partially true: a good amount of online censorship, like growing law enforcement domestic monitoring generally, focuses on all anti-establishment ideologies, not just the right-wing variant). This editorial censoring, many Republicans insisted, rendered the tech companies’ Section 230 immunity obsolete, since they are now acting as publishers rather than mere neutral transmitters of information. Some Republicans did join with Democrats in demanding greater censorship, though typically in the name of protecting children from mental health disorders and predators rather than ideological conformity.
As they have done in prior hearings, both Zuckerberg and Pichai spoke like the super-scripted, programmed automatons that they are, eager to please their Congressional overseers (though they did periodically issue what should have been unnecessary warnings that excessive “content moderation” can cripple free political discourse). Dorsey, by contrast, seemed at the end of his line of patience and tolerance for vapid, moronic censorship demands, and — sitting in a kitchen in front of a pile of plates and glasses — he, refreshingly, barely bothered to hide that indifference. At one point, he flatly stated in response to demands that Twitter do more to remove “disinformation”: “I don’t think we should be the arbiters of truth and I don’t think the government should be either.”
Zuckerberg in particular has minimal capacity to communicate the way human beings naturally do. The Facebook CEO was obviously instructed by a team of public speaking consultants that it is customary to address members of the Committee as “Congressman” or “Congresswoman.” He thus began literally every answer he gave — even in rapid back and forth questions — with that word. He just refused to move his mouth without doing that — for five hours (though, in fairness, the questioning of Zuckerberg was often absurd and unreasonable). His brain permits no discretion to deviate from his script no matter how appropriate. For every question directed to him, he paused for several seconds, had his internal algorithms search for the relevant place in the metaphorical cassette inserted in a hidden box in his back, uttered the word “Congressman” or “Congresswoman,” stopped for several more seconds to search for the next applicable spot in the spine-cassette, and then proceeded unblinkingly to recite the words slowly transmitted into his neurons. One could practically see the gears in his head painfully churning as the cassette rewound or fast-forwarded. This tortuous ritual likely consumed roughly thirty percent of the hearing time. I’ve never seen members of Congress from across the ideological spectrum so united as they were by visceral contempt for Zuckerberg’s non-human comportment:
But it is vital not to lose sight of how truly despotic hearings like this are. It is easy to overlook because we have become so accustomed to political leaders successfully demanding that social media companies censor the internet in accordance with their whims. Recall that Parler, at the time it was the most-downloaded app in the country, was removed in January from the Apple and Google Play Stores and then denied internet service by Amazon, only after two very prominent Democratic House members publicly demanded this. At the last pro-censorship hearing convened by Congress, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) explicitly declared that the Democrats’ grievance is not that these companies are censoring too much but rather not enough. One Democrat after the next at Thursday’s hearing described all the content on the internet they want gone: or else. Many of them said this explicitly.
At one point toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX), in the context of the January 6 riot, actually suggested that the government should create a list of organizations they unilaterally deem to be “domestic terror organization” and then provide it tech companies as guidance for what discussions they should “track and remove”: in other words, treat these groups the same was as ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is: watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey. As I detailed last month, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the state violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee when they coerce private actors to censor for them — exactly the tyrannical goal to which these hearings are singularly devoted.
There are genuine problems posed by Silicon Valley monopoly power. Monopolies are a threat to both political freedom and competition, which is why economists of most ideological persuasions have long urged the need to prevent them. There is some encouraging legislation pending in Congress with bipartisan support (including in the House Antitrust Subcommittee before which I testified several weeks ago) that would make meaningful and productive strides toward diluting the unaccountable and undemocratic power these monopolies wield over our political and cultural lives. If these hearings were about substantively considering those antitrust measures, they would be meritorious.
But that is hard and difficult work and that is not what these hearings are about. They want the worst of all worlds: to maintain Silicon Valley monopoly power but transfer the immense, menacing power to police our discourse from those companies into the hands of the Democratic-controlled Congress and Executive Branch.
And as I have repeatedly documented, it is not just Democratic politicians agitating for greater political censorship but also their liberal journalistic allies, who cannot tolerate that there may be any places on the internet that they cannot control. That is the petty wannabe-despot mentality that has driven them to police the “unfettered” discussions on the relatively new conversation app Clubhouse, and escalate their attempts to have writers they disliked removed from Substack. Just today, The New York Times warns, on its front page, that there are “unfiltered” discussions taking place on Google-enabled podcasts:
New York Times front page, Mar. 26, 2021
We are taught from childhood that a defining hallmark of repressive regimes is that political officials wield power to silence ideas and people they dislike, and that, conversely, what makes the U.S. a “free” society is the guarantee that American leaders are barred from doing so. It is impossible to reconcile that claim with what happened in that House hearing room over the course of five hours on Thursday.
Zie ook: ‘Het werk van Mark Lombardi, een vijand van de staat die zich zogenaamd het leven benam‘ (als censuur geen zin heeft staan de geheime diensten nog andere middelen ter beschikking om iemand tot zwijgen te brengen, zoals moord en dan het liefst op zo’n manier dat het op suïcide lijkt, hoe onwaarschijnlijk dat ook is in verreweg de meeste gevallen, een andere beproefde manier is een auto-ongeluk veroorzaken, waarbij de dader er vandoor gaat…..)
Zal maar weer beginnen met te zeggen dat het er niet toe doet of je wel of niet gelooft in de Coronavaccinaties, daar het volgende artikel van Glenn Greenwald alles heeft te maken met die vaccinatie gecombineerd met corruptie en machtsmisbruik.
Greenwald vertelt eerst over andere gevallen waarin bestuurders hun macht misbruikten t.b.v. het virus, zoals in Brazilië waar een aantal hoge hufters uit het bedrijfsleven het bij de hoogst corrupte fascistische regering Bolsonaro voor elkaar kreeg dat ze hun eigen privé hoeveelheid aan vaccins kregen, dus ook voor hun gezinsleden en verdere familie, een schandaal dat nu fiks de aandacht zou trekken in dat land…. (overigens zoals je wellicht weet: ook hier schandalen genoeg betreffende de Coronacrisis en ook dat ‘op hoog niveau!’)
In de VS is onlangs naar buiten gekomen dat een groep jonge congresleden, terwijl er schaarste was, zich vaccins hebben laten toedienen (belangrijk als je erin gelooft, wat ik niet zou doen). Uiteraard een schandaal van jewelste als je nagaat dat er ook in de VS schaarste is aan vaccins….. (immers jongeren met een goede gezondheid hebben nauwelijks last van het virus…..)
Maar zo bont als de gouverneur van New York: Andrew Cuomo en zijn broer, CNN presentator Chris Cuomo het hebben gemaakt is echt helemaal van de gekke……. (al moet ik zeggen dat ik er fiks om heb moeten lachen, de brutaliteit waarmee deze hypocriete schoften hebben gehandeld kan je niet bedenken…….)
Hoge figuren van het departement (ministerie) van gezondheid werden door dr. Howard Zucker, het hoofd van het New York State Department of Health (NYSDH), aan het werk gezet: een deel van de familie, inclusief z’n broer Chris en vrienden van Cuomo werden getest en sommigen zelfs meerdere keren, zo ook Cuomo, terwijl er zoals gezegd een schaarste aan Coronatests was….. Het ging zover dat deze test zelfs een paar keer onder politiebegeleiding naar het laboratorium moesten worden gebracht, waar de medewerkers, die al overwerkt waren, zelfs een keer moesten overwerken…… ha! ha! ha! ha!
Dit was het nog lang niet, Greenwald noemt nog een paar ‘mooie voorbeelden’ van ronduit corrupt en ander misdadig gedrag…… De VS ten voeten uit!!!
Het meest lullige is wel dat de ‘beide heren’, dus de broers Cuomo al de hele crisis het volk voorhouden zich aan de regels te houden en er zelfs schande van te spreken als anderen zich er niet aanhielden, zelfs op CNN…. Terwijl dezelfde Chris Cuomo er NB een aantal keren zelf op is betrapt dat hij waar het verplicht was, geen mondmasker droeg…….
Ook toppunt van lulligheid was het commentaar van de top van CNN (vrij vertaald dus alvast mijn excuus):
‘We bemoeien ons normaal gesproken niet met de medische beslissingen van ons personeel, echter het is niet verrassend dat in de eerste dagen van een eens in de eeuw plaatsvindende (wereldwijd >> maar dat is dubbelop) pandemie, toen Chris symptomen van het virus vertoonde en bezorgd was voor mogelijke verspreiding, hij zich tot iedereen die hij kende richtte voor advies en hulp, zoals ieder ander mens zou doen…….’ (ha! ha! ha! ha)
Wat een zootje, en dan zou de VS het land van de vrijen en het huis van de moedigen zijn……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
Mensen er valt nog veel meer te lachen, lees het artikel van Glenn Greenwald!!
How can a media outlet credibly claim to denounce abuse of power by political officials when they defend and glorify their own anchor’s participation in it?
CNN host Chris Cuomo (l) “interviews” his brother, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), on CNN, May 6, 2021
Ever since the COVID pandemic subsumed most countries on the planet, there have been numerous scandals and controversies relating to those who corruptly obtain medical privileges and other exemptions unavailable to ordinary citizens. These scandals typically arise when someone uses their wealth, power or connections to jump in front of others for access to potentially life-saving procedures or medications or grant themselves and their friends license to ignore what everyone else must endure.
Right now in Brazil, for instance, there is a burgeoning scandal from reports that a group of businesspeople with ties to the government arranged to purchase their own private stash of vaccines for use for themselves, families and friends in violation of the law. In the U.S., people were outraged when very young members of Congress were among the first to receive the vaccine (though the law permitted them to do so); those young Congressmembers justified their line-jumping on the ground that they were doing so selflessly to encourage others. Meanwhile, other members of Congress refused this privilege on the ground, as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) put it, that it is “shameful” for young lawmakers to believe they “are more important” than workers. Repeatedly in the U.S., politicians were caught exempting themselves from lockdown orders they were imposing on everyone else.
But those pale in comparison to the abuse of power by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and his brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo, as reported on Wednesday by The Albany-Times Union and The Washington Post. “High-level members of the state Department of Health were directed last year by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker to conduct prioritized coronavirus testing on the governor’s relatives as well as influential people with ties to the administration,” reported the Times-Union. “Members of Cuomo’s family including his brother, his mother and at least one of his sisters were also tested by top health department officials — some several times,” it added.
In particular, Gov. Cuomo abused state resources to ensure that his then-49-year-old brother, Chris, received fast COVID testing at a time when tests were very scarce. “The CNN anchor was swabbed by a top New York Department of Health doctor, who visited his Hamptons home to collect samples from him and his family,” The Post reported. The article also contains these damning details:
The same doctor who tested Chris Cuomo, Eleanor Adams, now a top adviser to the state health commissioner, also was enlisted to test multiple other Cuomo family members….The coronavirus test specimens were then rushed — at times driven by state police troopers — to the Wadsworth Center, a state public health lab in Albany, where they were processed immediately, the people said. At times, employees in the state health laboratory were kept past their shifts until late into the night to process results of those close to Cuomo, two people said.
All of this commandeering of state resources to provide the CNN host with very specialized medical attention occurred while “media reports were full of accounts from New Yorkers desperate to get tested — including some with symptoms and recent travel history who were turned away because of scarcity.”
For more than a year now, CNN’s promotion of “interviews” conducted by Chris Cuomo of his own brother — in which the CNN host repeatedly heaped lavish praise on Gov. Cuomo and even hyped him as a presidential contender while the Governor was corruptly and possibly criminally covering up COVID deaths — was one of the most glaring breaches of journalistic ethics imaginable. It was not cute or charming. It was corrupt. And it aggressively deceived CNN’s audience. That they knew it was corrupt was evidenced by the CNN host’s recent announcement that he would not cover his brother’s recent scandals: what conceivable framework makes it journalistically permissible for a news host to shower his own brother with praise, but then not cover his scandals?
But now Chris Cuomo is directly involved in a serious abuse of power scandal by his brother: in fact, he’s the prime beneficiary of that scandal. He sought special medical favors from his brother, depriving other sick people more in need of it than he, by exploiting the fact that his brother is Governor and thus rules the state. That’s a scandal by any measure — one involving not only the Governor but also the CNN host.
What’s even more remarkable is that on May 6 — just weeks after Gov. Cuomo provided special COVID testing and treatment for him — Chris Cuomo “interviewed” his brother and began the interviewing by noting that New York State lacks the resources to provide COVID testing to the public at large. So not only did they conceal that they had both just used state resources to get Chris that scarce testing, but they both acknowledged that there was a resource shortage to serve the general public, even as Gov. Cuomo was lavishing those resources on his own family. Just watch the first minute here:
Even worse, Cuomo spoke openly on CNN about his COVID diagnosis and what he was doing for it. But he concealed from the public the fact that the Governor of New York arranged for him to have special treatment and state-funded access to tests that were unavailable to most of the public. Indeed, Cuomo has been repeatedly caught lying over CNN’s airwaves about his COVID condition — such as when he was caught outside arguing with a cyclist while he claimed he was in quarantine with COVID, and another time when he was shaming people on air for not using masks while he was being warned by his own building that he would be fined if he continued to circulate there without a mask. But now something far worse is revealed: that he was the beneficiary of exactly the kind of abuse of power that journalists (at least in theory) exist to expose.
And yet CNN — which has spent the year relentlessly shaming anyone who is even slightly off-key when it comes to COVID — is defending and even glorifying what their host did in corruptly obtaining for himself medical care unavailable to the broader public. This is the statement the cable network provided to media outlets through its spokesman Matt Dornic:
We generally do not get involved in the medical decisions of our employees. However, it is not surprising that in the earliest days of a once-in-a-century global pandemic, when Chris was showing symptoms and was concerned about possible spread, he turned to anyone he could for advice and assistance, as any human being would.
Ponder what they are saying. It is unsurprising that someone in Chris Cuomo’s position would want special privileges. Of course it’s unsurprising: everyone has a motive for wanting special privileges for themselves. The same exact defense CNN offered here could be made if Chris Cuomo had instead bribed state officials to provide him special medical treatment unavailable to the general public, or if he had broken into the home of another sick person to steal their medication that he could not obtain for himself. It would be understandable that a person with COVID would want to do this, in the sense that it is a rational motive. But the fact that Cuomo had a rational motive for doing this does not make it less corrupt, unethical or amoral. There are all sorts of things that it may be “understandable” for us to want for ourselves that the law, morality and/or ethics nonetheless prevents us from obtaining.
CNN’s attempt to cast this as an invasion of Cuomo’s private medical decisions is insultingly dishonest. Nobody cares about this because they are interested in what took place in the intimate setting between Cuomo and his physician. The issue — obviously — is that this person who CNN presents as a “journalist” clearly abused his influence and power, along with his brother, by using state resources for his own benefit and jumping in front of a line that almost certainly deprived people more in need of getting COVID tests at a time when they were scarce. The issue is not Cuomo’s medical privacy but the abuse of power in which he participated with his brother, the Governor of New York.
The hubris here on the part of the Cuomos is tawdry but, for them, completely unsurprising. This entitlement complex is what one might expect from two boys who grew up as the children of a popular and powerful governor whose wealth and fame are due to their last name: a good reason for the taboo against nepotism and dynastic politics, which so often produces abuse of power. But CNN’s behavior is something else entirely.
How can a news outlet credibly claim to denounce and expose abuse of power by political officials when they defend the participation in such corruption by their own on-air talent? CNN is telling the public that they see nothing wrong with their rich and well-connected anchors exploiting public resources or connections to powerful politicians to corruptly obtain medical treatment at the expense of everyone else. That is as grotesque as it is damaging to CNN’s brand.
Voor meer berichten over Andrew Cuomo, Chris Cuomo, corruptie, machtsmisbruik, Coronavirus en/of vaccinatie, klik op het desbetrteffende label, direct onder dit bericht, hetzelfde geldt voor Glenn Greenwald, Bolsonaro en Ilan Omar. (Chris Cuomo komt niet veel terug in de labels, daar de ruimte beperkt is, als je alle artikelen wilt lezen waarin deze plork word genoemd, vul dan zijn naam in op het zoekvlak rechtsboven aan deze pagina, daarna kan je nog klikken voor de chronologische volgorde van de artikelen die je te zien krijgt)
Mijn excuus voor de vormgeving, krijg het niet op orde.
Gisteren schreef ik al een bericht over de nieuwe meer dan belachelijke aantijgingen van de geheime diensten in de VS als zouden Rusland, China, Iran, Venezuela en zelfs Hezbollah de verkiezingen in de VS hebben gemanipuleerd of dat hebben geprobeerd en zoals gewoonlijk zonder ook maar één nanometer aan bewijs……*
GlennGreenwald heeft een uitgebreid artikel over deze zaak gepubliceerd op zijn site, waarin hij begint met het analyseren van de leugen gebracht door geheime diensten en de reguliere (massa-) media in de VS over de het lekken van gegevens afkomstig van de laptop van Hunter Biden, die in handen kwam van de New York Post.
De New York Post publiceerde documenten van deze laptop waaruit bleek dat Hunter Biden en andere familieleden misbruik maakten van de naam Joe Biden (die immers eerder vicepresident was onder oorlogsmisdadiger Obama) om zaken te doen met Oekraïne, China en andere landen.
Voormalige hooggeplaatsten van de CIA en leden van andere geheime diensten in de VS, stelden dat het om Russische desinformatie ging….. Twitter en Facebook besloten daarop de New York Post de toegang tot hun platform te ontzeggen……. John Brennan, CIA directeur onder Obama, heeft samen met de al aangehaalde figuren uit de geheime diensten een brief opgesteld waarin men stelde dat de zaak alle kenmerken had van Russische informatie operaties….. Hoewel dezelfde figuren benadrukten dat ze niet wisten of de gepubliceerde e-mails echt waren en dat ze geen bewijs hadden van Russische manipulatie…… (moet je nagaan….)
Echter deze toevoeging was voor de media die deze leugen brachten geen reden om in te binden, integendeel men ging gewoon door en Facebook stelde zelfs een algoritme in te zetten om berichtgeving over deze zaak tegen te houden……. En dan te bedenken dat eerder een zogenaamde Russische trollenfarm zich in de VS bevond, terwijl al lang bekend is uit publikaties van de Wikileaks Vault 7 documenten dat de VS op grote schaal hackt en daarbij cyberterreur begaat en spioneert maar dat op een slimme manier kan doen lijken alsof bijvoorbeeld Rusland, China, Iran, of Noord Korea de dader is…….
Glenn Greenwald, van The Intercept, die wel over deze zaak berichtte,werd terechtgewezen door zijn meerderen die hem wilden dwingen om passages over Biden weg te laten,waarop zijn artikel niet werd geplaatst en Greenwald besloot The Intercept te verlaten.
Het is zelfs zo zot dat een redacteur van de Washington Post stelde dat ‘we de Hunter Biden lekken moeten behandelen alsof ze van een buitenlandse geheime dienst komen, zelfs als ze dat waarschijnlijk niet zijn……’ (knettergek!!) De enige keer dat de regering van de VS reageerde op deze zaak, middels de Director of National Intelligence (DNI), stelde deze dat Bidens laptop geen deel uitmaakt van een Russische desinformatie campagne……….
Ach het is een herhaling van zetten in de Russiagate leugen, ook daarvoor is totaal geen bewijs geleverd, echter men houdt gewoon driftig vol dat dit wel zo is, overigens ook in de rest van het westen, waaronder Nederland….. Gistermorgen op BNR rond 8.51 u. de meer dan belachelijke ‘buitenlanddeskundige’ Hammelburg, deze enorme flapdrol (letterlijk en figuurlijk) sprak over de uitlating van Biden dat Putin een moordenaar is. Daarbij noemde hij Sputnik de ‘roeptoeter van de Russische overheid’, gelul >> op Sputnik wordt wel degelijk kritiek geleverd op de overheid, maar zelfs als dat zo zou zijn, zie de VS, waar niet 1 of 2 mediaorganen de overheid zouden dienen als roeptoeter, maar een hele reeks, van de New York Times tot CNN en daarvoor is een dossierkast aan bewijzen te leveren…..
Volgens Biden (en Hammelburg) is Putin een moordenaar als het gaat om Navalny…… Als Putin de neonazi Navalny had willen laten vermoorden was deze bewezen misdadiger al lang en breed onder de zoden verdwenen, bovendien kan deze ploert niet zijn vergiftigd met novitsjok daar hij dan dood zou zijn, immers een vergiftiging daarmee is zonder meer dodelijk voor iedereen die er onbeschermd mee in aanraking komt!!! Hammelburg durfde NB nog te stellen dat Putin ook een moordenaar is vanwege het ontwikkelen in Rusland van biologische en chemische wapens…… ha! ha! ha! ha! (vanmorgen herhaalde Hammelburg zijn leugens op BNR waar hij nu ook de Skripals aan toevoegde….)
Er zijn 3 naties op de wereld die deze wapens vrij openlijk ontwikkelen en dat zijn de VS (o.a. in Fort Detrick), Israël en Egypte….. In juli 2019 ontsnapte er ‘een virus’ uit één van de leger laboratoria van Fort Detrick, waarop de basis werd ontruimd….. Een paar maanden later vonden de militaire wereldspelen plaats in het Chinese Wuhan en nog een paar maanden later werden de eerste gevallen van het Coronavirus gevonden in Frankrijk, hoewel men dat toen nog niet wist, een herbeoordeling van stalen bloed, afgenomen in november 2019 toonden aan dat deze mensen het… Coronavirus onder de leden hadden…. Pas meer dan een maand laten, dus eind december 2019 werd het eerste geval van Coronavirus ontdekt in China……… Ra ra hoe is het allemaal mogelijk?? Intussen is zelfs bekend geworden dat het Coronavirus al eerder werd gevonden in later opnieuw beoordeelde bloedmonsters……
Uiteraard herhaalde Hammelburg het verhaal van de geheime diensten in de VS alsof Rusland, China, Iran e.a. de verkiezingen in de VS hadden gemanipuleerd of daar een poging toe hadden ondernomen……. Zoals Hammelburg nog steeds overtuigd is dat Russiagate bewezen is….. ha! ha! ha! Ha! Deze mislukte zakkenwasser zou eens andere moeten contacteren als hij weer eens een lulpraatje vertelt voor de radio!! (hij gaf een aantal maanden gelden toe dat hij vrijwel altijd ‘deskundigen’ raadpleegt voor zijn columns en ander gekoekwaus…… Hé Hammelburg tijd voor echte deskundigen en eigen onderzoek, waarbij je eens zou moeten zoeken of er bewijzen zijn voor wat je durft te beweren, enorme hufter!!! (vorig jaar durfde hij mensen die gebruik maken van de sociale media neer te zetten als kakkerlakken, je weet wel zoals de nazi’s over minderheden spraken die ze het liefst wilden uitroeien…….)
En Hammelburg begin maar met het lezen van het artikel dat Glenn Greenwald schreef, dan lees je eindelijk een artikel van een echte deskundige!!
Eager to obtain vindication for the pre-election falsehood they spread about the Hunter Biden story, journalists falsely claim that the CIA blamed Russia for it.
Hunter Biden (L) and then-Vice President Joe Biden speak on stage at Organization of American States on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)
Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.
The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, though a long-time Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress the reporting.
The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists, led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
News outlets uncritically hyped this claim as fact even though these security state operatives themselves admitted: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Even though this claim came from trained liars who, with uncharacteristic candor, acknowledged that they did not “have evidence” for their claim, media outlets uncritically ratified this assertion.
This was a topic I discussed extensively in October when I announced my resignation from The Intercept after senior editors — for the first time in seven years — violated the contractual prohibition on editorial interference in my journalism by demanding I significantly alter my reporting about these documents by removing the sections that reflected negatively on Biden. What I found particularly galling about their pretense that they have such high-level and rigorous editorial standards — standards they claimed, for the first time ever, that my article failed to meet — was that a mere week prior to their censorship of my article, they published an article by a different journalist which, at a media outlet we created with the explicit purpose of treating government claims with skepticism, instead treated the CIA’s claims of “Russian disinformation” as fact. Even worse, when they quoted the CIA’s letter, they omitted the part where even those intelligence agents acknowledged that they had no evidence for their assertion. From The Intercept on October 21:
Their latest falsehood once again involves Biden, Ukraine, and a laptop mysteriously discovered in a computer repair shop and passed to the New York Post, thanks to Trump crony Rudy Giuliani….. The U.S. intelligence community had previously warned the White House that Giuliani has been the target of a Russian intelligence operation to disseminate disinformation about Biden, and the FBI has been investigating whether the strange story about the Biden laptop is part of a Russian disinformation campaign. This week, a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.
Oh my, marvel at those extremely rigorous editorial standards: regurgitating serious accusations from ex-CIA operatives without bothering to note that they were unaccompanied by evidence and that even those agents admitted they had none. But, as they usually do these days, The Intercept had plenty of company in the corporate media.
That those materials were “Russian disinformation” became so reflexively accepted by the U.S. media that it became the principal excuse to ignore and even censor the reporting, and it also helpfully handed the Biden campaign an easy excuse to avoid answering any questions about what the documents revealed. “I think we need to be very, very clear that what he’s doing here is amplifying Russian misinformation,” said Biden Deputy Campaign Manager Kate Bedingfield when asked about the prospect that Trump would raise the Biden emails at the debate. From the CIA’s lips to the mouths of corporate journalists into the hands of the Biden campaign.
As the U.S. media disseminated this “disinformation” tale, nobody — including the Bidens — has ever claimed let alone demonstrated that a single document was anything other than genuine — something that would be exceedingly easy to do if the documents were fraudulent. “The Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the NY Post articles,but has not disputed the authenticity of the [laptop] files upon which they were based,” acknowledgedThe New York Times. Ample evidence corroborates that the documents are genuine.
As for the claims of Russian involvement in the laptop story, there was never any evidence for it: none. The CIA operatives who invented that storyline acknowledged that. The week that tale emerged, The New York Timesreported that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation” and the paper said even the FBI has “acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop.” The Washington Post published an op-ed by Russia fanatic Thomas Rid who candidly pronounced: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.” And the only time the U.S. Government has ever spoken on this question was when the Director of National Intelligence stated: “Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”
These documents raised important questions about the presidential frontrunner’s knowledge of or participation in his family members’ attempt to profit off of their association with him, questions implicating his integrity, ethics and honesty. Yet those documents were suppressed by a gigantic fraud, perpetrated by the CIA and their media allies, which claimed that the documents were forged and that they came from Russia.
That is the critical context for the lie spread yesterday by numerous mainstream journalists. On Tuesday morning, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified a short 12-page report entitled “Foreign Threats to the U.S. 2020 Elections.”
It reviewed the actions of numerous countries with regard to the 2020 election. The intelligence community claimed — without presenting any evidence whatsoever — that “Russian President Putin authorized…influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.” The New York Times’ largely credulous article about this report contained this admission, one you would think (or, rather, hope) would matter to journalists: “The declassified report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election.”
Despite that glaring omission, media outlets predictably treated the evidence-free assertions from the security state as fact. “Vladimir Putin did it again,” trumpetedMother Jones’ David Corn without an iota of skepticism. CNN’s Marshall Cohen actually said this:
Marshall Cohen @MarshallCohen
The report confirms what was largely assumed, and barely hidden, last year: Trump and his allies publicly embraced Russia’s disinformation campaign against Biden, met with Kremlin-tied figures who were part of the effort, and promoted their conspiracies
Think about that: to a CNN reporter, evidence-free assertions from the U.S. security state are tantamount to “confirmation.” That they really do think this way is nothing short of chilling. But that is the standard liberal media posture of harboring reverence for the U.S. intelligence community and treating its every utterance as Truth without the need for any corroborating evidence. It is one of their defining attributes.
But in this case, many of them went far beyond mere regurgitation of CIA claims. Well beyond it: here, they fabricated a claim that report also demonstrated that the Hunter Biden laptop materials were — as they claimed before the election engineered by Russia. In reality, the report did not even mention the Hunter Biden laptop materials or allude to it, let alone claim that it was produced by the Kremlin, let alone supply evidence that it constituted “Russian disinformation.” But no matter: numerous journalists united to spread the false claim far and wide that the report confirmed this storyline.
The first journalist to publish the falsehood was Patrick Tucker, an editor at the journal Defense One. The tweet quickly went viral as liberals clicked “retweet” and “like” so fast that at least several of them likely suffered digital cartilage damage or at least a mild sprain:
The claim that this report corroborated Russian involvement in the Hunter laptop story picked up significant steam when MSNBC host Chris Hayes endorsed it to his 2.3 million followers:
From there, the claim was further spread by Hayes’ NBC News colleague Ben Collins, who — ironically — works in what the network calls the “disinformation unit,” combatting the spread of disinformation (by which Collins means tattling on 4Chan teenagers and Facebook boomers, while never challenging the lies of real power centers such as those from the intelligence community; those lies are ones he amplifies):
With this MSNBC host and the NBC disinformation agent on board, it was off to the races. Journalists from across the corporate media sphere spread this lie over and over. Here was CNN’s Asha Rangappa:
Perhaps the most embarrassing example was from S.V. Daté, the White House correspondent of HuffPost which, just last week, had dozens of its reporters laid off perhaps because, while they have numerous talented reporters, this is the sort of thing they routinely do, causing them to lose trust among the public. Daté did not just repeat the lie but used it to mock those who actually did the reporting on these documents (note that the section he underlined in red says nothing about the Hunter Biden documents, nor does it say anything about Russia other than it “amplified” various news stories):
S.V. Dáte @svdate
Hey, New York Post and everyone else who got suckered into the ridiculous Hunter Biden Laptop story. Take a bow.
As this false claim went massively viral, conservativejournalists — and only they — began vocally objecting that the report made no mention whatsoever of the Hunter Biden laptop, let alone supplied proof for this claim. That is because, with a few noble exceptions (such as The Washington Post’s media critic ErikWemple), liberal journalists at corporate outlets will eagerly endorse but never denounce or correct each other’s falsehoods. For that reason, if you confine yourself to the liberal corporate media bubble, and refuse to follow conservative journalists as well, you will be propagandized and deceived.
Hayes, to his credit, was one of the only journalists who helped spread this falsehood and then quickly retracted it. He first acknowledged that, upon reading the report, it did not appear that it actually made any reference to the Hunter laptop, and then announced he would delete his original tweet, conceding that the original claim was false. Note how the original false claims go mega-viral, while the tweets which subsequently acknowledge their falsity are seen by very few people:
With one of his earliest boosters having jumped ship, Tucker himself, the originator of this lie, first began backtracking while vowing he would never delete the tweet, only to then relent and delete it, acknowledging its falsity. Again compare the meager audience that learns of the backtracking and acknowledgment of falsity compared to the huge number exposed to the original false claim:
Patrick Tucker @DefTechPat
I’ve deleted a tweet that suggested that a recent ODNI report made explicit reference to the Hunter Biden laptop story. It makes reference to Andrii Derkach, a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who was trafficking information remarkably similar to what showed up in the Post report
Thanks to multiple journalists with large platforms spreading Tucker’s original false tweet, it received thousands upon thousands of likes and re-tweets. So, too, did the tweets of other journalists that false claim, such as the one from HuffPost’s White House Correspondent and this one from one of David Brock’s goons specifically claiming that the security state’s evidence-free report somehow proves that my pre-election reporting on it was wrong. Yet Tucker’s announcement that he was deleting his tweet on the ground that the report does not make “explicit reference to the Hunter Biden laptop story” has a grand total of three retweets.
Indeed, other than Hayes, it is difficult to find a journalist who acknowledged that what they spread was a lie. Both CNN’s Rangappa and NBC News’ Collins simply allowed the tweet to quietly disappear from their timeline when Tucker finally deleted his, saying nothing to the thousands or tens of thousands of people they misled. Meanwhile, the tweet from HuffPost’s Daté is still up a full twenty-four hours after the key journalists who spread this have acknowledged it was false.
Do you see how they behave? Take a look. Prior to the election, out of desperation to ensure that Biden won, they censored and maligned this reporting by mindlessly endorsing an assertion from life-long CIA operatives that never had any evidence: ignore these documents; they are Russian disinformation. They not only invoked that claim to justify ignoring the story but also to successfully agitate for its censorship by Twitter and Facebook. So they spent weeks spreading an utter lie in order to help the candidate that they favored win the election. Remember, these are journalists doing that.
Then, yesterday, the intelligence community issued a report that does not even purport to contain any evidence: just assertions. And they all jumped to treat it as gospel: no questioning of it, no skepticism, no demands to see evidence for it, not even any notation that no evidence was provided. They just instantly enshrined claims from the CIA and NSA as Truth. How can you possibly be a journalist with even minimal knowledge of what these agencies do and look in the mirror as you do this?
But so much worse, in this case, they just outright lied about what the report said — just fabricated assertions that the report did not even allude to, in order to declare their lies from last October to be vindicated. Even if this report had asserted that the Hunter Biden laptop materials were manufactured by the Kremlin, that would prove nothing. Evidence-free assertions from the U.S. intelligence community merit skepticism, not blind faith — especially from people calling themselves journalists.
But the report did not even claim that. And when some of them realized this, they did virtually nothing to rectify the severe disinformation they had spent the day spreading. These are the people who claim to be so profoundly opposed to conspiracy theories and devoted to combating “disinformation”; as usual, they are the ones who spread disinformation most recklessly and frequently.
The fact that the false tweet from HuffPost’s White House correspondent is still up is quite revealing, given that that outlet just had to lay off a significant portion of its staff. As newly arrived Substack writer Michael Tracey wrote in his first article on this platform (headlined: “Why Journalists Hate Substack”), journalists are very good at lamenting when their outlets are forced to lay off journalists but very poor at examining whether the content their outlet is producing may be part of why it is failing:
So when you see another round of layoffs, followed by another round of exasperated Twitter lamentation about how horrible the industry is, you have to wonder if these rituals ultimately function as an excuse for journalists to forgo any kind of real self-examination. For instance, why it is that the media organizations they inhabit always seem to be in a constant state of free-fall? Sure, there are economic factors at play that the journalists themselves cannot control. But it would seem to behoove these journalists to maybe spend a little bit less time complaining in the abstract about the depredations of “the industry”—as though they are its hapless, beleaguered casualties—and a little bit more time analyzing whether they have contributed to the indisputable reality that huge cross-sections of the public distrust and despise the media.
There are multiple potential explanations for this dynamic worth considering. Maybe it’s the tedious hyper-partisanship and weirdly outdated content aggregation tactics that much of the online media still employs. Maybe it’s the constant five-alarm-fire tone and incessant hyping of overblown threats that was characteristic of the Trump years. Maybe it’s some combination of all these and more—but you won’t see many axed journalists offering up any kind of critical introspection, because when the layoffs arrive it can never have anything to do with their own ideological myopia or other shortcomings.
Indeed, when anyone, including journalists, loses their job, it is lamentable. But when one witnesses behavior like what these journalists did yesterday, the only confounding part of the collapse of this part of the media industry is that it is not happening even more quickly and severely.
Glenn Greeenwald schrijft over het feit dat een tweede oorlog tegen terreur op til is, nu gericht tegen de binnenlandse terreur in de VS, echter gegarandeerd dat er al generaals zijn en topgraaiers van de geheime diensten, die proberen om dit om te vormen tegen de ‘buitenlandse terreur……’ (zoals de nazi’s het woord terreur al gebruikten als ze het hadden over verzetsdaden, ook in het buitenland…….) Al zal men in de nabije toekomst de wat men in de VS extreem linkse sites noemt, van het internet bannen, zoals Brasscheck TV nu al bijna geen door YouTube ‘geserveerde’ video meer kan weergeven in haar berichten of je krijgt te lezen dat men ‘dit adres niet vertrouwt’, of je nog maar even wilt kijken, echter wat je ook doet: je krijgt de video niet te zien….. (een enkele uitzondering daar gelaten)
Kortom links (althans wat men in de VS politiek ‘links’ noemt) zal worden gecensureerd en dan krijg je zo’n video bijvoorbeeld niet meer te zien en met ‘een beetje geluk’ wordt je account verwijderd dan wel geblokkeerd……. Benieuwd of men ook zo hard achter rechts aangaat en dan heb je het over extreem rechts, je weet wel de figuren die zich lieten opjutten om het Capitol te bestormen. De vraag stellen is haar beantwoorden: uiteraard worden deelnemers van die bestorming strafrechtelijke vervolgd, anders zouden er ‘South Park rellen’ uitbreken over de hele VS…. Maar reken gerust dat men na een eerste ‘opwinding’ onder het volk, extreem rechts weer snel ‘links’ zal laten liggen…… Met ‘links’ bedoel ik uiteraard niet het spreekwoordelijke links van zojuist, maar allen die uit overtuigende redenen werken aan een betere wereld, een wereld waar iedereen gelukkig kan zijn en niet alleen de kleine minderheid die de ‘zaakjes prima voor elkaar heeft’, een wereld ook waar men werkelijk probeert de klimaatverandering af te remmen en de luchtvervuiling daadwerkelijk zo snel mogelijk probeert uit te bannen…. (zo behoort de Nederlandse luchtkwaliteit tot de slechtste van de EU, waardoor jaarlijks rond de 18.000 mensen [het echte cijfer], niet maanden maar jaren eerder overlijden en dat in verreweg het grootste aantal gevallen na een akelig ziekbed….) Tja, als je je inzet voor een wereld die ook voor komende generaties leefbaar moet blijven, word je al snel als links neergezet…..
Maar terug naar het onderwerp: deze tweede oorlog tegen terreur zal naar schatting nog veel meer mensen schaden en de de dood injagen…..
In de film het verhaal van Mohemedou Slahi, een man die het slachtoffer werd in de eerste oorlog tegen terreur, hij zat 14 jaar gevangen, niet alleen in Guantanamo Bay maar ook in de geheime CIA gevangenissen over de wereld en als in Guantanamo werd hij daar vreselijk werd gemarteld…. (maar ja zijn daarin nog gradaties te ontdekken? vast wel….) Obama beloofde bij zijn aantreden de gevangenen van Guantanmo Bay vrij te laten tegen wie geen zaak was, echter zijn administratie en daarmee hijzelf ging in tegen de vrijspraak van Slahi, zodat hij nog langer moest vastzitten…. Slahi is nooit veroordeeld en toch is hij ondanks dat hij in 2016 vrij kwam nog steeds een gevangene, daar hij Mauritanië niet mag verlaten van de VS, een voorwaarde voor zijn vrijlating, daardoor kan Slahi o.a. zijn zoon niet bezoeken die in Duitsl;and woont….. Ach ja de VS, de grootste terreurentiteit ter wereld…..
Onlangs had ik nog een bericht over Ahmed Rabbani die nog steeds volkomen onterecht gevangen zit in Guantanamo Bay*, deze mensen, voor het overgrote deel niet eens veroordeeld, moeten vrijgelaten worden en liever gisteren dan vandaag, zijn ze in de VS nu helemaal gek geworden???? (nogmaals: de vraag stellen is haar beantwoorden….) Slahi heeft nog een opmerkelijke gelijkenis met Rabbani: ook hij koestert verder geen wrok tegen de VS (ik kan me dat niet voorstellen na zoveel ellende, het geeft nogmaals aan dat de VS willekeurig mensen heeft ontvoerd, niet zelden na tipgeld te hebben betaald aan schoften die zogenaamde terroristen aangaven en dat is dan weer een vergelijking met het kopgeld dat de nazi-Duitse bezetter betaalde voor het verklikken van o.a. Joden…….)
Zoals gezegd de VS is de grootste terreurentiteit ter wereld en is alleen deze eeuw al verantwoordelijk voor de moord op 5 miljoen mensen en weet je wat? Die massamoord begon met de ‘terreuraanval’ op de Twin Towers in New York en ja dat is intussen 20 jaar geleden…… Een aanval die overduidelijk is georganiseerd door de CIA, NSA en hoogstwaarschijnlijk met hulp van de Israëlische Mossad, deze torens en WTC gebouw 7 kunnen onmogelijk door hitte zijn neergegaan, zoals intussen een groot aantal deskundigen hebben verklaard, zoveel en overtuigend dat de figuren die dit af durven doen als de door de CIA uitgevonden term ‘complottheorie’, zichzelf volkomen belachelijk maken……
Lees het ontluisterende artikel hieronder, geschreven door Glenn Geenwald en zie de video’s en houd in de toekomst je ogen open en je camera of smartphone bij de hand (en zet je GPS uit!!)!! Geeft het door, voor je het weet ben jij slachtoffer van de heksenjacht 2021, of die nog een paar jaar op zich laat wachten…….. Je kent het devies: mensen die nadenken zijn uitermate lastig (voor de autoriteiten…..) en nee bij rechts zijn maar weinig mensen te vinden die echt zelf kunnen denken…… Vandaar ook het succes van fascistische partijen of bewegingen als resp. FVD en de PVV……
Imprisoned without charges for fourteen years in Guantánamo, Mohamedou Slahi is a symbol of humans’ impulse to abuse power and their capacity for redemption.
SYSTEM UPDATE interview with Mohamedou Slahi from his home in Mauritania, March 6, 2021
Mohamedou Slahi is an extraordinary person with a harrowing past and a remarkable, still-unfolding story. The interview I conducted with him on Saturday, which can be viewed below, is one I sincerely hope you will watch. He has much to say that the world should hear, and, with a new War on Terror likely to be launched in the U.S., his story is particularly timely now.
Known as the author of the best-selling Guantánamo Diary — a memoir he wrote during his fourteen years in captivity in the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo — he is now the primary character of a new Hollywood feature film about his life, The Mauritanian. The first eight years of Slahi’s imprisonment included multiple forms of abuse in four different countries and separation from everything he knew, but it afforded no charges, trials, or opportunities to refute or even learn of the accusations against him.
The film stars Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley, while Slahi is played by the French-Algerian actor Tahar Rahim. Foster last week won a Golden Globe award for her role as Nancy Hollander, Slahi’s lawyer who worked for years, for free, to secure his right simply to have a court evaluate the evidence which the U.S. Government believed justified his due-process-free, indefinite imprisonment. Cumberbatch plays Slahi’s military prosecutor whose friend died on 9/11 when the American Airlines passenger jet he was piloting was hijacked and flown into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
Slahi’s story is fascinating unto itself but, with a second War on Terror looming, bears particular relevance now. No matter your views on the post-9/11 War on Terror — ranging from “it was necessary to take the gloves off and dispense with all limits in order to win this war against an unprecedented evil and existential threat” to “the U.S. gravely overreacted and mirrored the worst abuses of what it claimed it was fighting” to anything in between — it cannot be disputed that limitless power was placed in the hands of the U.S. Government to imprison, to monitor, to surveil, to kidnap and to kill anyone it wanted, anywhere in the world, with no checks. And like most authorities vested in the state in the name of some emergency, these powers were said to be temporary but, almost twenty years later, show no signs of going anywhere. They are now embedded in the woodwork of U.S. political life.
What happened to Slahi is a vivid embodiment of how humans will inevitably abuse power when it is wielded without safeguards or limits. In November, 2001, Slahi was attending a party with his mother and other relatives in his home country of Mauritania, the U.S.-aligned nation in Northwest Africa plagued for years by dictatorships and military coups. Police arrived and told him they needed to question him. That was the last time he would ever see his mother.
After two weeks of intense interrogation about his ties to Islamic radicals, Slahi was flown in chains and shackles to Jordan, the U.S.-controlled oil monarchy where he had never visited and with which he had no ties. For the next eight months, he was interrogated on a daily basis by Jordanian and U.S. operatives, including CIA agents. The Jordanians frequently used classic torture techniques to extract information when their CIA bosses assessed that he was not being forthcoming. After eight months, the Jordanians concluded that he was not affiliated with any extremist groups and had no more information to provide, but the Americans, still reeling from the 9/11 attack, were not convinced.
He was told he would return to Mauritania but quickly realized that was a lie as he was placed in full-body shackles, chains and a jumpsuit. This time, he was flown to the notorious U.S. military base in Bagram, Afghanistan, home to thousands of prisoners detained indefinitely by the Bush and Obama administrations with no charges or human rights protections. After two weeks of brutal daily interrogations, Slahi was told that he was being taken to a U.S. military base in Guantánamo.
Because the camp had opened only after Slahi was first detained in Mauritania, he had no idea what Guantánamo was. But, he told me, he was so happy and relieved to hear he was being taken to the U.S. because “the U.S. is where you get legal rights and there is a functioning court system.” Upon hearing the news, he thought his nightmare, now almost a year long, was about to end. In fact, it was only beginning, and was about to get far darker than he could have imagined.
Flown to the floating island prison in the middle of the Caribbean, thousands of miles away from his home, Slahi, though in American custody on a U.S. military base, was in a place which the U.S. Government had decreed was not the United States at all. It was a no-man’s land, free of any law or authority other than the unconstrained will of U.S. political leaders. Shortly after his arrival, the Bush administration — guided by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft — authorized the use of multiple forms of torture that it and the U.S. press euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
It is not in dispute, because official U.S. Government documents acknowledge it, that Slahi, along with dozens of others, was subjected to these techniques over and over. They included prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings and stress positions, a mock execution, and sexual humiliation and assault.
When he arrived at the camp, he spoke Arabic, German and French, and then quickly learned English from his captors and interrogators. His refuge from his hopelessness was the book he wrote, which he authored in English. Completed in 2005, it was taken from him by camp guards and not permitted to be published until ten years later, when it became a global bestseller while Slahi was still consigned to a cage, convicted of nothing and with no idea of when, if ever, he would be freed.
Throughout his ordeal, all Slahi wanted, as any human would, was the opportunity to be told of the charges against him and presented with the evidence corroborating the accusations. But the U.S. government’s decree that Guantánamo was foreign soil and thus free of constitutional constraints enabled them to imprison people indefinitely with no due process of any kind. A bipartisan law enacted by Congress in 2006 called “the Military Commissions Act” fortified the Bush administration’s position by barring federal courts from reviewing any petitions brought by War on Terror detainees to have the validity of their imprisonment legally evaluated.
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court — by a 5-4 majority in Boumediene v. Bush — ruled that the Guantánamo military base was under U.S. sovereignty and the U.S. Constitution thus governed what the U.S. Government could and could not do there. As a result, detainees such as Slahi finally earned the right to petition federal courts for release on the ground that they were being wrongfully imprisoned, based on the constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus.
Unlike prior prisoner of war camps, filled with uniformed soldiers arrested on a battlefield, Slahi, like so many War on Terror detainees, was arrested at home, far from any war zone, as part of a “war” that was widely recognized from the start would likely be eternal and where the “battlefield” was designated as the entire planet. Whatever one’s views of the War on Terror, indefinite imprisonment under such circumstances was fundamentally different from the traditional prisoner-of-war framework. Empowering a government to detain, kidnap and imprison anyone it wants from anywhere in the world obviously presents a whole new set of potential abuses.
In 2010 — eight full years after he was first arrested and imprisoned at the behest of the U.S. Government — Slahi was finally able to have his day in court. In a meticulous review of the allegations and evidence presented against him by the Obama DOJ, federal judge James Robertson concluded that the evidence was insufficient to warrant his ongoing detention. A major part of the ruling was the U.S. Government’s own acknowledgement that many of the statements on which it was relying were ones it extracted from Slahi under torture:
There is ample evidence in this record that Slahi was subjected to extensive and severe mistreatment at Guantanamo from mid-June 2003 to September 2003…. The government acknowledges that Slahi’s abusive treatment could diminish the reliability of some of his statements.
The huge irony of the government’s allegations that he was affiliated with al-Qaida was that much of the case against him was based on his decision to go to Afghanistan in 1990 to fight with the Mujahideen. For more than a decade — including when Slahi went — the U.S. Government was one of the prime allies and sponsors of this fighting force, using it as a proxy army against the invading Soviet army in Afghanistan and then, after the Soviet withdrawal, to topple the communist government it left in place. Underscoring this irony is that one of the first military guards at Guantánamo with whom Slahi interacted was stationed at the same Mujahideen training camp in Afghanistan where Slahi was first assigned upon his arrival there.
When he decided to join the Mujahideen, Slahi was in West Germany, where he had been given a scholarship to study engineering due to his excelling academically as a teenager in Mauritania. When I asked him what motivated him to leave his studies at the age of 21 to go fight in Afghanistan, he explained that at the time the Mujahideen was considered “cool” throughout the west, the way for young Muslim men to fight against Soviet and imperialist domination. Indeed, throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton officials, as well as right-wing members of Congress, frequently heralded the Mujahideen as heroic “freedom fighters,” and were regarded by the west as important allies.
That this association of Slahi’s from ten years earlier became the foundation of the U.S. Government’s accusation that he was an anti-American terrorist who must be imprisoned indefinitely highlighted the absurdity of U.S. foreign policy and its arbitrary ability overnight to declare freedom fighters to be terrorists, or allies to be monstrous enemies, and vice-versa (similar to how Saddam’s “gassing of his own people” became the 2002 mantra to justify regime change and war even though Saddam’s chemical assault on the Kurds occurred when he was a close U.S. ally).
Slahi terminated his relationship with the Mujahideen when he left Afghanistan in 1992, but various associations that he maintained, as well a two-month stay in Canada in 1999, were used by the U.S. Government to claim that he was still working on behalf of “jihadists.” But the court found the evidence woefully inadequate to justify the allegations:
A habeas court may not permit a man to be held indefinitely upon suspicion, or because of the government’s prediction that he may do unlawful acts in the future – any more than a habeas court may rely upon its prediction that a man will not be dangerous in the future and order his release if he was lawfully detained in the first place. The question, upon which the government had the burden of proof, was whether, at the time of his capture, Slahi was a “part of” al-Qaida. On the record before me, I cannot find that he was.
Despite that resounding 2010 judicial exoneration, Slahi did not leave Guantánamo until six years later, in 2016. In part that was because President Obama — who so flamboyantly campaigned in 2008 on the promise to close the camp — instead had his Justice Department appeal the ruling in Slahi’s favor in order to keep him encaged. The appellate court then ruled in favor of the Obama DOJ, concluding that there were flaws in the process. The court ordered a new habeas corpus review, but it never came. Instead, a Pentagon review board concluded six years later, in 2016, that he could be safely released.
Even when he finally left the camp, after fourteen years in due-process-free captivity, Slahi was not fully free. The U.S. conditioned his release on the agreement of the compliant regime in Mauritania that it would seize his passport and not permit him to travel outside the country. As a result, almost twenty years after his multi-nation nightmare began, his liberty is still radically restricted despite never having been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime. His mother died while he was imprisoned, and he has a young son in Germany who he cannot travel to see.
My interview with Slahi, who I have found to be a fascinating person since I first spoke with him several years ago, can be seen below. It is part of the SYSTEM UPDATE YouTube program I launched last year but put on hiatus while I built this platform. At the start of the video, I spent roughly fifteen minutes discussing my reaction to the discussion I had with him and the reasons I find his perspective so important, so the interview itself begins at roughly the 15:00 mark.
For reasons I cannot quite fathom, Slahi has managed to avoid a life filled with bitterness, rage and a desire for vengeance over what was done to him. He has started a family and re-created his life as a father, a novelist, and an evangelist for humanitarianism and peace in a way that is genuine, profound and inspiring: everything but banal and contrived. Judge for yourself by listening to him. Among other things, he established contact with an American guard he had seen almost every day in the early years of his Guantánamo detention and then befriended, and invited him to Mauritania where the two had an unlikely but remarkable reunion.
I believe as a general proposition that the more the world hears from Slahi, the better (you can follow him on Twitter here). But particularly now, with Democrats and their neocon allies who spawned the first War on Terror eplicitly plotting how to launch a second one, this time with a domestic focus, it is more important than ever to understand in the most visceral ways possible how arbitrary power of this kind ends up at least as dangerous and destructive as the enemy invoked to justify their adoption in the first place.
De enorme hysterie in de VS na de bestorming van Capitol Hill en het Capitol, gevoed met angst door vooral de reguliere media, is het laatste instrument voor Joe Biden en z’n psychopathische administratie om maatregelen door te voeren die een eind zullen maken aan burgerrechten als:
vrijheid van meningsuiting
het recht om te demonstreren
het recht om fout overheidsbeleid te weerleggen
het recht om jezelf te verdedigen (een omkering van bewijslast, je bent zonder meer schuldig en probeer maar te bewijzen dat dit niet zo is, althans als je die kans al krijgt…..)
het recht op verantwoording en transparantie van de overheid
het recht op privacy (al is daar al praktisch niets van over)
het recht op een onafhankelijke pers (die is al lang ter grave gedragen en de reguliere [afhankelijke] media roepen zelfs om censuur op de sociale media en de rest van het net, censuur die zelfs al wordt toegepast, óók in ons land…..)
het recht op vereniging (wat hier zwaar geweld wordt aangedaan met de Coronamaatregelen…)
het recht op lichamelijke integriteit
het recht op een representatieve volksvertegenwoordiging
Al deze zaken hadden in de VS al ‘aan glans verloren’ door het aannemen van de Patriot Act na de aanslagen van 11 september 2001 (9/11), een wet die al in 1995 werd opgesteld door de huidige president Joe Biden, onder de naam: ‘Omnibus Counterterrorism Act…..’ ‘Patriot Act II’ ofwel de: Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act (DTPA), die de Biden administratie voorbereidt, is de definitieve oorlogsverklaring, niet aan landelijke terreur, maar aan iedere VS burger en aan het laatste restje democratie in dat middels een genocide gestolen land).
Het is duidelijk dat deze nieuwe ‘War on Terror’ niet alleen een oorlog is die iedere VS burger kan treffen, maar die zoals gezegd definitief een eind zal maken aan de al meer dan waardeloze democratie is zoals de VS die nu nog kent…..
Volgens Michael McGarrity, opperhoofdsmeerpijp van de FBI afdeling van contraterrorisme, ziet de FBI ‘huiselijk terrorisme’ in de volgende 4 zaken:
raciaal gemotiveerd gewelddadig extremisme
anti regerings/autoriteit extremisme
dierenrechten en milieu extremisme
abortus extremisme
Ofwel als je gezichtspunten onderschrijft die tegengesteld zijn aan wat de regering of andere autoriteiten (als de FBI, NSA of andere geheime diensten >> de VS heeft er meer dan 25) voorstaan, kan je worden aangemerkt als een ‘binnenlandse terrorist’ en als zodanig worden behandeld (dat geldt dan bijvoorbeeld voor Black Lives Matter [BLM] activisten….)….. Moet je nagaan: dan is de VS de eerste die altijd met een beschuldigende (vieze hypocriete) vinger wijst naar landen waar men hetzelfde omgaat met deze zaken…..
De VS heeft al organisaties opgetuigd die ‘misdaden’ (‘misdaden’ als dierenactivisme) moeten voorkomen, dit gebeurt middels 78 fusion centra, die zaken verbinden op federaal niveau (FBI, justitie), regionaal en lokaal gebied, maar ook middels centra die data verzamelen, met hulp van: -gedragswetenschappers, -bedrijven, -de sociale media (Facebook, Twitter enz.) en -‘gemeenschapsorganisatoren’, dit alles ondersteund met de nieuwste technieken, uiteraard ook op het gebied van kunstmatige intelligentie, gezichtsherkenning, biometrie (identificatiemethoden op basis van unieke lichaamskenmerken) en gedragsepigenetica (met wie men kan zien welke ervaringen tijdens het leven het genetische beeld verouderen)……. Met name die nieuwe technieken vromen een groot gevaar voor alle burgerrechten, daar controle van de massa’s tegenwoordig steeds makkelijker wordt, neem alle camera’s in steden en dorpen, het ‘live scannen’ van internetverkeer en ga nog maar een half uur door…….
De Coronacrisis is als olie op het vuur van antidemocratische maatregelen en ook de rest van het westen moet oppassen niet als makke schapen achter de VS aan te lopen en maatregelen van de VS over te nemen, maatregelen die ook hier de democratie volkomen zullen uithollen (immers vergeet niet dat de andere westerse landen maar wat graag antidemocratische maatregelen uit de VS overnemen, niet in de laatste plaats daar deze het regeren [per decreet] vergemakkelijken en totale controle van het volk mogelijk maken, waarbij de reguliere media grote propagandisten zijn van dergelijke maatregelen, zoals ze ook voor censuur zijn op de sociale media en zelfs op het hele internet……
Lees het volgende uitstekende artikel van John en Nisha Whitehead, met bijdragen van o.a. Glenn Greenwald, een artikel dat ik overnam van Information Clearing House (ICH):
The Government’s War on Domestic Terrorism Is a Trap
We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.
In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, “domestic terrorism” has become the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties.
Of course, “domestic terrorist” is just the latest bull’s eye phrase, to be used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”
Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.
If this is a test of Joe Biden’s worthiness to head up the American police state, he seems ready.
As part of his inaugural address, President Biden pledged to confront and defeat “a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism.” Biden has also asked the Director of National Intelligence to work with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in carrying out a “comprehensive threat assessment” of domestic terrorism. And then to keep the parallels going, there is the proposed Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021, introduced after the Jan. 6 riots, which aims to equip the government with “the tools to identify, monitor and thwart” those who could become radicalized to violence.
Don’t blink or you’ll miss the sleight of hand.
This is the tricky part of the Deep State’s con game that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.
It follows the same pattern as every other convenient “crisis” used by the government as an excuse to expand its powers at the citizenry’s expense and at the expense of our freedoms.
As investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald warns:
“The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’ that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This New War on Terror—one that is domestic in name from the start and carries the explicit purpose of fighting ‘extremists’ and ‘domestic terrorists’ among American citizens on U.S. soil—presents the whole slew of historically familiar dangers when governments, exploiting media-generated fear and dangers, arm themselves with the power to control information, debate, opinion, activism and protests.”
Greenwald is referring to the USA Patriot Act, passed almost 20 years ago, which paved the way for the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.
Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since Sept. 11, 2001.
Some members of Congress get it.
In a letter opposing expansion of national security powers, a handful congressional representatives urged their colleagues not to repeat the mistakes of the past:
“While many may find comfort in increased national security powers in the wake of this attack, we must emphasize that we have been here before and we have seen where that road leads. Our history is littered with examples of initiatives sold as being necessary to fight extremism that quickly devolve into tools used for the mass violation of the human and civil rights of the American people… To expand the government’s national security powers once again at the expense of the human and civil rights of the American people would only serve to further undermine our democracy, not protect it.”
Cue the Emergency State, the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.
So you see, the issue is not whether Donald Trump or Roger Stone or MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell deserve to be banned from Twitter, even if they’re believed to be spouting misinformation, hateful ideas, or fomenting discontent.
This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose.
The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
Yet where many go wrong is in assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or challenging the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.
Eventually, all you will really need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.
The groundwork has already been laid.
The trap is set.
All that is needed is the right bait.
With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents have been busily spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.
It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.
What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate. Computers by way of AI (artificial intelligence) now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
In other words, the burden of proof is reversed: you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.
Dig beneath the surface of this kind of surveillance/police state, however, and you will find that the real purpose of pre-crime is not safety but control.
Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.
Again, where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.
In fact, U.S. police agencies have been working to identify and manage potential extremist “threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual threats for some time now.
In much the same way that the USA Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect, the government’s anti-extremism program renders otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.
Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.
You will be tracked wherever you go.
You will be flagged as a potential threat and dealt with accordingly.
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
The government has been building its pre-crime, surveillance network in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the corporate sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
If you’re not scared yet, you should be.
Connect the dots.
Start with the powers amassed by the government under the USA Patriot Act, note the government’s ever-broadening definition of what it considers to be an “extremist,” then add in the government’s detention powers under NDAA*, the National Security Agency’s far-reaching surveillance networks, and fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies.
To that, add tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones and balloons that are beginning to blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that will identify and track you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to complete the picture, toss in the real-time crime centers being deployed in cities across the country, which will be attempting to “predict” crimes and identify so-called criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.
Hopefully you’re starting to understand how easy we’ve made it for the government to identify, label, target, defuse and detain anyone it views as a potential threat for a variety of reasons that run the gamut from mental illness to having a military background to challenging its authority to just being on the government’s list of persona non grata.
There’s always a price to pay for standing up to the powers-that-be.
Jonathan Cook heeft een flink artikel geschreven op Information Clearing House, waarin hij betoogt dat we de planeet moeten redden (voor zover dat nog mogelijk is*) en dat de weg daartoe bestaat uit het stoppen van de westerse oorlogsmachine, die vooral draait om de inhumane neoliberale kapitalistische status quo te handhaven.
Het kapitalisme houdt geen rekening met de gevolgen van het plunderen van de planeet plus het vervuilen van lucht, water, bodem en ondergrond door productieprocessen en om deze processen draaiende te houden. De kosten die nu al worden gemaakt door de klimaatverandering, zijn niet meer in een getal te vatten, je moet denken aan ‘duizenden miljarden’, terwijl de mensenlevens die door dit proces verloren zijn gegaan al helemaal niet in geld zijn uit te drukken…… (het kapitalisme heeft daar totaal geen moeite mee….) Zoals Cook terecht opmerkt, die kosten worden op ons afgewenteld, terwijl de grote bedrijven doorgaan met het naar de gallemiezen helpen van de planeet……**
Om e.e.a. vol te kunnen houden zijn de media nodig, die weliswaar niet langer kunnen schrijven dat er geen sprake is van een klimaatverandering en dat deze een normaal verschijnsel is (de klimaatverandering gaat sneller dan ooit eerder gezien sinds de ‘moderne’ mens op aarde rondloopt, alleen met een meteoor als die van 65 miljoen jaar geleden kan het sneller). De media kunnen niet langer ontkennen dat er enorme kosten zijn verbonden aan de klimaatverandering, vandaar dat men zwijgt over deze kosten, logisch daar de plutocratische eigenaars van die media er alle belang bij hebben dat de winsten van de grote bedrijven blijven bestaan, immers daarvan zijn zij de grootaandeelhouders……. Ja toen Greta Thunberg van zich liet horen gaf het grootste deel van die media complimenten aan haar en de jeugd die haar volgde, echter niet voor lange duur….. Nu wordt ze in veel mediaorganen afgeschilderd als een psychiatrisch patiënt………
Cook stelt verder dat het voorheen de religieuzen waren die werden beloond door de vorsten, daar ze deze figuren hebben gepromoot bij het volk met het dogma dat ze door god werden gezonden, zodat het plebs gehoorzaam hun taak vervulde zonder vragen te stellen. Nu doen de media in feite hetzelfde: men hersenspoelt het volk dat het kapitalisme de enige ware weg is naar een beter leven, echter degenen die het meest profiteren is maar een beperkte groep aangeduid als de 1% (al is dat wat mij betreft al te simpel, het is minstens 10% van de mensheid die ongelofelijk profiteert van vernietiging en onderdrukking), terwijl daarvoor de wereld zoals wij die kennen wordt vernietigd…..
De westerse oorlogsmachine, het leger van de VS en andere NAVO-lidstaten (de NAVO altijd onder militair opperbevel van de VS!!), zorgt ervoor dat de grondstoffen en productiecentra ten behoeve van het westen veilig blijven voor exploratie en productie, dan wel daarvoor veilig worden gesteld…… Uiteraard met grote steun van de grote bedrijven als oliemaatschappijen en de geheime diensten, waar die diensten van de VS de hand niet omdraaien voor het organiseren van een opstand en een coup tegen een onwillig land……..
Cook heeft een uitgebreid artikel geschreven op Information Clearing House dat de moeite van het lezen meer dan de moeite waard is!! (onder het artikel kan je klikken voor een ‘Dutch vertaling’)
The Planet Cannot Heal until We Rip the Mask off the West’s War Machine
By Jonathan Cook
December 01, 2020 “Information Clearing House” – Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state is not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic rights and values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.
In a recent post, I wrote about “externalities” – the ability of companies to offset the true costs inherent in the production process. The burden of these costs are covertly shifted on to wider society: that is, on to you and me. Or on to those far from view, in foreign lands. Or on to future generations. Externalising costs means that profits can be maximised for the wealth elite in the here and now.
My latest: The increasingly desperate task of capitalism’s perception managers is to dissociate our economic system from the emerging environmental crisis – to break our understanding of the causal link between the two
Capitalism is double-billing us: we pay from our wallets only for our future to be stolen from us
Our own societies must deal with the externalised costs of industries ranging from tobacco and alcohol to chemicals and vehicles. Societies abroad must deal with the costs of the bombs dropped by our “defence” industries. And future generations will have to deal with the lethal costs incurred by corporations that for decades have been allowed to pump out their waste products into every corner of the globe.
Divine Right to Rule
In the past, the job of the corporate media was to shield those externalities from public view. More recently, as the costs have become impossible to ignore, especially with the climate crisis looming, the media’s role has changed. Its central task now is to obscure corporate responsibility for these externalities. That is hardly surprising. After all, the corporate media’s profits depend on externalising costs too, as well as hiding the externalised costs of their parent companies, their billionaire owners and their advertisers.
Once, monarchs rewarded the clerical class for persuading, through the doctrine of divine right, their subjects to passively submit to exploitation. Today, “mainstream” media are there to persuade us that capitalism, the profit motive, the accumulation of ever greater wealth by elites, and externalities destroying the planet are the natural order of things, that this is the best economic model imaginable.
Most of us are now so propagandised by the media that we can barely imagine a functioning world without capitalism. Our minds are primed to imagine, in the absence of capitalism, an immediate lurch back to Soviet-style bread queues or an evolutionary reversal to cave-dwelling. Those thoughts paralyse us, making us unable to contemplate what might be wrong or inherently unsustainable about how we live right now, or to imagine the suicidal future we are hurtling towards.
Lifeblood of Empire
There is a reason that, as we rush lemming-like towards the cliff-edge, urged on by a capitalism that cannot operate at the level of sustainability or even of sanity, the push towards intensified war grows. Wars are the lifeblood of the corporate empire headquartered in the United States.
My latest: The new documentary on Greta Thunberg – I Am Greta – isn’t about climate change. It’s about something even more important: the elusiveness of sanity in an insane world
US imperialism is no different from earlier imperialisms in its aims or methods. But in late-stage capitalism, wealth and power are hugely concentrated. Technologies have reached a pinnacle of advancement. Disinformation and propaganda are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree. Surveillance is intrusive and aggressive, if well concealed. Capitalism’s destructive potential is unlimited. But even so, war’s appeal is not diminished.
As ever, wars allow for the capture and control of resources. Fossil fuels promise future growth, even if of the short-term, unsustainable kind.
Wars require the state to invest its money in the horrendously expensive and destructive products of the “defence” industries, from fighter planes to bombs, justifying the transfer of yet more public resources into private hands.
The lobbies associated with these “defence” industries have every incentive to push for aggressive foreign (and domestic) policies to justify more investment, greater expansion of “defensive” capabilities, and the use of weapons on the battlefield so that they need replenishing.
Whether public or covert, wars provide an opportunity to remake poorly defended, resistant societies – such as Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria – in ways that allow for resources to be seized, markets to be expanded and the reach of the corporate elite to be extended.
War is the ultimate growth industry, limited only by our ability to be persuaded of new enemies and new threats.
Fog of War
For the political class, the benefits of war are not simply economic. In a time of environmental collapse, war offers a temporary “Get out of jail” card. During wars, the public is encouraged to assent to new, ever greater sacrifices that allow public wealth to be transferred to the elite. War is the corporate world’s ultimate Ponzi scheme.
The “fog of war” does not just describe the difficulty of knowing what is happening in the immediate heat of battle. It is also the fear, generated by claims of an existential threat, that sets aside normal thinking, normal caution, normal scepticism. It is the invoking of a phantasmagorical enemy towards which public resentments can be directed, shielding from view the real culprits – the corporations and their political cronies at home.
The “fog of war” engineers the disruption of established systems of control and protocol to cope with the national emergency, shrouding and rationalising the accumulation by corporations of more wealth and power and the further capture of organs of the state. It is the license provided for “exceptional” changes to the rules that quickly become normalized. It is the disinformation that passes for national responsibility and patriotism.
Permanent Austerity
All of which explains why Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, has just pledged an extra £16.5 billion in “defense” spending at a time when the UK is struggling to control a pandemic and when, faced by disease, Brexit and a new round of winter floods, the British economy is facing “systemic crisis”, according to a new Cabinet Office report. Figures released last week show the biggest economic contraction in the UK in three centuries.
If the British public is to stomach yet more cuts, to surrender to permanent austerity as the economy tanks, Johnson, ever the populist, knows he needs a good cover story. And that will involve further embellishment of existing, fearmongering narratives about Russia, Iran and China.
To make those narratives plausible, Johnson has to act as if the threats are real, which means massive spending on “defence”. Such expenditure, wholly counter-productive when the current challenge is sustainability, will line the pockets of the very corporations that help Johnson and his pals stay in power, not least by cheerleading him via their media arms.
New Salesman Needed
The cynical way this works was underscored in a classified 2010 CIA memorandum, known as “Red Cell”, leaked to Wikileaks, as the journalist Glenn Greenwald reminded us last week. The CIA memo addressed the fear in Washington that European publics were demonstrating little appetite for the US-led “war on terror” that followed 9/11. That, in turn, risked limiting the ability of European allies to support the US as it exercised its divine right to wage war.
The memo notes that European support for US wars after 9/11 had chiefly relied on “public apathy” – the fact that Europeans were kept largely ignorant by their own media of what those wars entailed. But with a rising tide of anti-war sentiment, the concern was that this might change. There was an urgent need to further manipulate public opinion more decisively in favour of war.
The US intelligence agency decided its wars needed a facelift. George W Bush, with his Texan, cowboy swagger, had proved a poor salesman. So the CIA turned to identity politics and faux “humanitarianism”, which they believed would play better with European publics.
Part of the solution was to accentuate the suffering of Afghan women to justify war. But the other part was to use President Barack Obama as the face of a new, “caring” approach to war. He had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – even though he had done nothing for peace, and would go on to expand US wars – very possibly as part of this same effort to reinvent the “war on terror”. Polls showed support for existing wars increased markedly among Europeans when they were reminded that Obama backed these wars.
“Obama’s most important value was in prettifying, marketing and prolonging wars, not ending them. They saw him for what U.S. Presidents really are: instruments to create a brand and image about the U.S. role in the world that can be effectively peddled to both the domestic population in the U.S. and then on the global stage, and specifically to pretend that endless barbaric U.S. wars are really humanitarian projects benevolently designed to help people — the pretext used to justify every war by every country in history.”
Obama-style Facelift
Once the state is understood as a vehicle for entrenching elite power – and war its most trusted tool for concentrating power – the world becomes far more intelligible. Western economies never stopped being colonial economies, but they were given an Obama-style facelift. War and plunder – even when they masquerade as “defence”, or peace – are still the core western mission.
That is why Britons, believing days of empire are long behind them, might have been shocked to learn last week that the UK still operates 145 military bases in 42 countries around the globe, meaning it runs the second largest network of such bases after the US.
Such information is not made available in the UK “mainstream” media, of course. It has to be provided by an “alternative” investigative site, Declassified UK. In that way the vast majority of the British public are left clueless about how their taxes are being used at a time when they are told further belt-tightening is essential.
The UK’s network of bases, many of them in the Middle East, close to the world’s largest oil reserves, are what the much-vaunted “special relationship” with the US amounts to. Those bases are the reason the UK – whoever is prime minister – is never going to say “no” to a demand that Britain join Washington in waging war, as it did in attacking Iraq in 2003, or in aiding attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen. The UK is not only a satellite of the US empire, it is a lynchpin of the western imperial war economy.
Ideological Alchemy
Once that point is appreciated, the need for external enemies – for our own Eurasias and Eastasias – becomes clearer.
Some of those enemies, the minor ones, come and go, as demand dictates. Iraq dominated western attention for two decades. Now it has served its purpose, its killing fields and “terrorist” recruiting grounds have reverted to a mere footnote in the daily news. Likewise, the Libyan bogeyman Muammar Gaddafi was constantly paraded across news pages until he was bayonetted to death. Now the horror story that is today’s chaotic Libya, a corridor for arms-running and people-trafficking, can be safely ignored. For a decade, the entirely unexceptional Arab dictator Bashar Assad, of Syria, has been elevated to the status of a new Hitler, and he will continue to serve in that role for as long as it suits the needs of the western war economy.
Notably, Israel, another lynchpin of the US empire and one that serves as a kind of offshored weapons testing laboratory for the military-industrial complex, has played a vital role in rationalising these wars. Just as saving Afghan women from Middle Eastern patriarchy makes killing Afghans – men, women and children – more palatable to Europeans, so destroying Arab states can be presented as a humanitarian gesture if at the same time it crushes Israel’s enemies, and by extension, through a strange, implied ideological alchemy, the enemies of all Jews.
Quite how opportunistic – and divorced from reality – the western discourse about Israel and the Middle East has become is obvious the moment the relentless concerns about Syria’s Assad are weighed against the casual indifference towards the head-chopping rulers of Saudi Arabia, who for decades have been financing terror groups across the Middle East, including the jihadists in Syria.
During that time, Israel has covertly allied with oil-rich Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, because all of them are safely ensconced within the US war machine. Now, with the Palestinians completely sidelined diplomatically, and with all international solidarity with Palestinians browbeaten into silence by antisemitism smears, Israel and the Saudis are gradually going public with their alliance, like a pair of shy lovers. That included the convenient leak this week of a secret meeting between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.
Israel’s likely reward is contained in a new bill in Congress for even more military aid than the record $3.8 billion Israel currently receives annually from the US – at a time when the US economy, like the UK one, is in dire straits.
My latest: Pompeo’s declaration that criticism of Israel and the peaceful movement urging a boycott of its settlements are ‘antisemitic’ marks the logical endpoint of a foreign policy consensus rapidly taking shape in the US and Europe
The west also needs bigger, more menacing and more permanent enemies than Iraq or Syria. Helpfully one kind – nebulous “terrorism” – is the inevitable reaction to western war-making. The more brown people we kill, the more brown people we can justify killing because they carry out, or support, “terrorism” against us. Their hatred for our bombs is an irrationality, a primitivism we must keep stamping out with more bombs.
But concrete, identifiable enemies are needed too. Russia, Iran and China give superficial credence to the war machine’s presentation of itself as a “defence” industry. The UK’s bases around the globe and Boris Johnson’s £16.5 billion rise in spending on the UK’s war industries only make sense if Britain is under a constant, existential threat. Not just someone with a suspicious backpack on the London Tube, but a sophisticated, fiendish enemy that threatens to invade our lands, to steal resources to which we claim exclusive rights, to destroy our way of life through its masterful manipulation of the internet.
Voor de rest van het artikel zie het origineel en lees verder bij het ‘hoofdstuk’ getiteld: ‘Crushed or Tamed‘
* De klimaatverandering is niet meer te stoppen, hoe vaak de politiek en de media je ook vertellen dat ‘we’ dat voor elkaar kunnen krijgen en dat we de temperatuurstijging kunnen stoppen op 1,5 graad Celsius tegen het eind van deze eeuw. Er zijn meerdere cumulatieve effecten gaande, die de klimaatverandering steeds verder aanjagen. ‘We’ mogen blij zijn als tegen het eind van de eeuw de temperatuur met niet meer dan 5 graden C. zal zijn gestegen en dat betekent dat een fiks deel van Nederland tegen die tijd onbewoonbaar zal zijn geworden, door een enorme stijging van de zeespiegel…….
** Hetzelfde is in feite aan de hand met het Crononavirus: terwijl de wereld ‘vecht’ tegen het Coronavirus waarbij de economie wordt vernietiged en velen in diepe ellende werden en worden gestort, gaan de militaire laboratoria door met het ontwikkelen van dodelijk besmettelijke ziekten als wapen voor oorlogsvoering…… In Fort Detrick in de VS staat zo’n (groot) militair laboratorium, dat werd vorig jaar zomer in grote paniek gesloten daar een gevaarlijk virus was ontsnapt….. (het Coronavirus???) Nu draait dat laboratorium weer als ‘vanouds….’ (hoe is ‘t mogelijk??!!!) Overigens is het wel bijzonder vreemd dat men zoveel maatregelen treft voor het Coronavirus als je nagaat dat alleen in ons land ieder jaar rond de 18.000 mensen vroegtijdig overlijden ten gevolge van langdurige auto-uitstoot inademing…… (en dat na een akelig ziekbed) Waarom worden daarvoor niet ongelofelijk veel maatregelen getroffen om dit binnen1 of 2 jaar te stoppen?? (Hetzelfde geldt voor alcoholgebruik, ook door deze harddrug vallen jaarlijks vele duizenden doden……)
Tijdens de gehele Democratische Conventie van 17 t/m 20 augustus, viel letterlijk niet één keer het woord ‘Russiagate’, terwijl de Democraten het de laatste 4 jaar wel 1.000 keer werd uitgespuugd door de hypocriete politici van die partij. Logisch dat men er nu maar mee is gestopt, immers het is bewezen flauwekul en alleen door de partij in stelling gebracht om Hillary Clinton uit de wind te houden, die op een smerige manier de voorverkiezingen van de Democraten in 2016 heeft gewonnen, ofwel: zij heeft destijds de voorverkiezingen gestolen ten koste van Bernie Sanders……
Een lid van Clintons verkiezingsteam, Seth Rich was zo pissig over de handelswijze van Clinton en de top van dat team, dat hij een enorme stapel mails van Clinton doorspeelde naar Wikileaks…… Een paar weken later werd Rich vermoord op straat gevonden, volgens de politie een roofmoord, hoe vreemd dan dat er werkelijk niets was gestolen van Rich, terwijl hij ook opzichtig dure sieraden droeg……. (bovendien waarom zou je iemand 2 maal in de rug schieten als je deze wilt ontdoen van diens kostbaarheden en geld??)
Nee, i.p.v. een Russische agent, bleek Trump de figuur die een enorme legermacht heeft samengetrokken langs delen van de Russische westgrens, waarbij hij nu ook nog de beschikking heeft over een raketschild ‘tegen Iran’ maar waarvan de raketten in een mum van tijd kunnen worden voorzien van meerdere kernkoppen en dat op raketten die tot 5.000 kilometer kunnen vliegen, waardoor steden als Moskou en Sint-Petersburg vanaf de voordeur van Rusland kunnen worden geraakt met kernraketten….
Met dat schild heeft de Trump administratie het INF-verdrag geschonden, iets waarvan de VS en haar oorlogshond NAVO Rusland volkomen ten onrechte beschuldigden……. (Rusland zou nieuwe raketten hebben die volgens de VS onder dat verdrag vallen, echter op meerdere uitnodigingen van het Kremlin om te komen inspecteren ging de VS niet in, daar de duivelse Trump administratie dondersgoed wist en weet dat Rusland de waarheid sprak……)
Lees het volgende artikel van Caitlin Johnstone die dieper op deze zaak ingaat en onder andere de stelling van Max Blumenthal steunt dat Russiagate een manier was om Trump zo onder druk te zetten dat hij wapens leverde aan Oekraïne (ben het daar deels mee eens, zeker daar ook wordt gesteld dat Obama Oekraïne niet wilde bewapenen, terwijl zijn minister van BuZa Joe Biden dat land onder druk zette het strafrechtelijk onderzoek tegen zijn corrupte zoon te stoppen, daar men anders een levering van wapens uit de VS kon vergeten):
Dem Convention Made No Mention Of Russiagate Or Impeachment, Because They Were Fake
Caitlin Johnstone
The only interesting thing about either of the conventions held by America’s two mainstream political parties this month was not anything that was said by the interminable parade of vapid speakers, but rather what those speakers did not say.
Despite their dominating mainstream news cycles for years on end, at no time during the four-day Democratic National Convention was the word “impeachment” ever uttered, nor was any mention made of the Mueller investigation into allegations of collusion between Trump and the Russian government.
Eight months after Democrats mounted a historic effort to remove Donald Trump from office, not a single speaker uttered the word “impeachment” during their four-day convention.
…
For Democrats to completely omit impeachment from their convention was once unthinkable. Democrats had mounted a case that Trump had abused his power to blackmail Ukraine into investigating his political adversaries, including Biden. And they made an existential argument that without removing him from office, Trump’s behavior would get worse and democracy itself would be at risk.
…
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia — which Democrats once thought could topple Trump for obstruction of justice — also went unmentioned, even as it was a defining feature of Trump’s nearly four years in office.
At DNC, “the word ‘impeachment’ [was] entirely left out over the course of the 4-night event. Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia… also went unmentioned, even as it was a defining feature of Trump’s nearly 4 years in office.” https://t.co/Dgt9WQ3LeApic.twitter.com/q8EvEthwZq
“The fact that Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to even mention Russiagate or Ukrainegate (the first-ever sequel to a flop?) at their convention should maybe hasten some reflection for those who made these issues the ‘defining feature of Trump’s nearly four years in office,'” quipped incisive Russiagate skeptic Aaron Maté of the omission on Twitter.
“Next on Unsolved Mysteries: Democrats and media allies accused Donald Trump of being a Russian agent for four years,” Maté added. “They chanted ‘All Roads Lead to Putin’ and ‘The Walls Are Closing In.’ But at their political convention, they forgot all about it. Did Russia give them amnesia?”
“I personally feel like if the President of the US seeking re-election is beholden to and controlled by an adversarial foreign power, the opposition party should find a few seconds to squeeze in a mention of it if, you know, it wasn’t utter bullshit,” tweetedThe Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald.
And, of course, it was utter bullshit. And that is indeed why the Democrats saw no need to mention it at their own four-day convention despite dominating news cycles with it for years. Russiagate and Ukrainegate were never the cataclysmic scandals that the Democrats and their allied media factions portrayed them as. They weren’t even actually about getting rid of Trump.
In an extremely strange and confounding development, the Democrats *never once* mentioned what this NYT columnist calls “the biggest lie in American politics” at their Convention.
Anyone with an ear to the ground knew that Russiagate would fizzle, and anyone capable of counting Senate seats knew impeachment would fail to remove Trump. The drivers of these attention-monopolizing narratives knew this also.
If there’d been any solid evidence to find that the Kremlin was blackmailing Trump, or that his campaign had conspired with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election, the US intelligence community would have found some of it and leaked it to The Washington Post long before Trump took office. The Russiagate narrative has been completely dismantled from the very beginning by journalists like the late Robert Parry, and then Maté after Parry’s death. There was never any real evidence for it, and the people pushing Russiagate from the beginning knew there was never any real evidence for it.
All you really need to know about Russiagate was that it was started by unsubstantiated claims by the US intelligence community, and in the end it facilitated pre-existing plans by the US intelligence community. Everything else in between those two points is just empty narrative fluff.
In 2017 Parry documented how the original assessment that Russia meddled in the US election in the first place was put forward without proof by just a couple dozen officers from three intelligence agencies hand-picked by the notoriously Russophobic then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Maté has documented that this allegation remains just as suspicious and porous as the day it was first made. Despite having sweeping investigative powers Mueller indicted not one single American for conspiracy with the Russian government. The recent evidence-free Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report did nothing to change the flimsy nature of the entire Russiagate narrative.
So the whole thing has been plainly bogus from the beginning, with the foundation laid by secretive and unaccountable intelligence agencies who have an extensive history of lying about exactly this sort of thing. And it just so happens to have paved the way for operations against a longtime geostrategic foe that were being unfolded well before Trump’s arrival in
the White House.
This is an excerpt from an article by legendary Australian journalist John Pilger from March 2016:
In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.
Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.
This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.
In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.
This was all happening during the Obama administration. But he was still more doveish than the spooks and cold warriors who drive US foreign policy would prefer, resisting for example loud calls from the warmongers to arm Ukraine against Moscow and forcibly install a no-fly zone in Russia’s ally Syria.
We suddenly found ourselves bombarded with narratives from the US intelligence community and its mass media stenographers about Russian election meddling and Trump playing some mysterious role in it. These narratives were pushed with steadily increasing frequency and shrillness, with the help of a humiliated Democratic Party that stood everything to gain by participating, until those of us who expressed any skepticism of them at all were being accused on a daily basis by MSM-brainwashed dupes of running psyops for the Russian government.
We were never at any time presented with any proof of these claims which rose anywhere near the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world, but we were hammered with them anyway, day in and day out, year after year.
This ended up putting a lot of political pressure on Trump to keep existing sanctions and military tensions with Russia, and he ended up adding dozens more new cold war escalations including further sanctions, shredded nuclear treaties, NATO expansionism and more. He even armed Ukraine due to these pressures, just like the anointed queen was scheduled to do.
The cold warriors wanted their escalations, and they got them. From beginning to the end, that’s all this was ever about. They pushed the narratives, the media joined in because it was great for ratings, and the Democrats joined in because it took the focus off their 2016 scandals and gave them a kayfabe phantom to punch instead of pushing for actual progressive changes.
And now the slow motion third world war between the US-centralized power alliance and the loose collective of unabsorbed governments is right on schedule, with Biden all set and ready to carry the omnicidal torch forward. The 2016 scandals are well enough forgotten, no progressive changes have been made, and there is no need to talk about Russiagate or impeachment at the Democratic National Convention.
Because everyone already got what they wanted. Everyone except ordinary people, of course.
____________________
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 at my website or on Substack, 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, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and 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, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Een ‘veteraan’ die meewerkte aan het drone moord programma, heeft zich tegen zijn voormalige werk en werkgever gekeerd en feiten over het drone programma aan de grote klok gehangen, vooral het enorme aantal slachtoffers die als ‘collateral damage’ (bijkomende schade) worden aangeduid, was voor Hale de reden om ‘de klok te luiden’.
De VS overheid laat Daniel Hale vervolgen op grond van de meer dan belachelijke en inhumane Espionage Act, alleen omdat hij duidelijk maakte wat men eigenlijk doet met dit programma…. Duizenden mensen zouden al het slachtoffer zijn van drone-aanvallen, waarbij niet moet worden vergeten dat zoals gezegd het overgrote deel van de slachtoffers, meer dan 90% (!!), niet eens werd verdacht van enige misdaad (veelal vrouwen en kinderen…)….
Het gaat recht tegen internationale verdragen in om mensen zonder vorm van proces te vermoorden en je kan dan ook stellen dat deze moorden ingaan tegen de mensenrechten, het internationaal oorlogsrecht en kan zonder meer aangeduid worden als een misdaad tegen de menselijkheid!!
Hale loopt de kans te worden veroordeeld tot 50 jaar gevangenisstraf…… Het klokkenluiden door Hale is in het belang van de hele wereld, immers als de VS jouw land als ongehoorzaam aan haar doctrine acht, is de kans levensgroot dat de VS ook daar met drone aanvallen zelfs tegenstanders van de VS buitenlandpolitiek zal vermoorden……..
Zet je in voor Hale, die volkomen terecht de klok luidde over deze barbaarse en schunnige moorden, lees en teken de petitie ajb en geeft het door!!
Stop the prosecution of a drone whistleblower
RootsAction DIY info@rootsaction.org
The prosecution of drone whistleblower Daniel Hale is currently scheduled to proceed in March.
A former veteran of the drone assassination program who became an outspoken activist and critic of it, Hale is being prosecuted under the draconian Espionage Act because he dared shine a light into a very dark corner.
Hundreds of journalists, whistleblowers, and free press advocates have signed onto a demand that this prosecution be dropped. We hope you’ll stand with us and do the same.
Hale faces a sentence of up to 50 years in prison. As in other Espionage Act cases, Hale’s defense will have its hands significantly tied at trial — he and his attorneys have been barred from even uttering the words “whistleblower” or “good motive” in the courtroom.
These prosecutions are unfair, unjust, and undemocratic. It is unconscionable to use a law, supposedly aimed at actual spies and saboteurs, against individuals who act in good faith to bring government misconduct to the attention of the public.
This petition was created by WHISPeR – Whistleblower & Source Protection Program. Create your own here.
After signing the petition,
please use the tools on the next webpage to share it with your friends.
This work is only possible with your financial support.
P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others.Background: >>
Je zou wellicht denken dat onze reguliere media bij tijd en wijle knettergek zijn met het herhalen van bijvoorbeeld aantoonbare VS leugens, maar zelfs dat kan men bij de makers van die leugens, dus de VS, altijd nog veel beter.
Het volgende uiterst humoristische en sarcastische artikel, geschreven door Caitlin Johnstone en afgelopen donderdag gepubliceerd, moet je lezen, maar let op: het gevaar bestaat dat je in een lachstuip blijft!
Whales, Crickets, And Other Fearsome Russian Doomsday Weapons
Caitlin Johnstone
Headlines were blaring the word “Russian” again the other day because the mass media narrative managers found yet another reason for westerners to feel terrified of the icy potato patch that we’d barely ever thought about prior to 2016. I’d like to talk about the Kremlin’s latest horrifying horrific addition to its fearsome doomsday artillery, and recap a few of the other incredibly frightening and terrifying tactics that those strange Cyrillic-scribbling demons of the East are employing to undermine truth, justice, and the American way. Just to make sure we’re all good and scared like we’re supposed to be.
Gather the kids, clutch your pearls and sign off on hundreds of billions of dollars of extra military spending, my patriotic brethren! Here are five super scary ways the Red Menace is trying to destroy you and everything you hold dear:
Headlines and TV news segments from virtually all mainstream outlets were falling all over themselves the other day to report the fact that some Norwegians found a tame beluga whale with a harness on it, and “experts” attest that the animal may have been part of a covert espionage program for the Russian navy.
While there is no indication that this spying cetacean has been trained in the arts of sonar election meddling or shooting novichok from its blowhole, the Guardian helpfully informs us that the harness was labeled “Equipment of St. Petersburg”, and was equipped to hold “a camera or weapon”.
“Marine experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white whale that was trained by the Russian navy as part of a programme to use underwater mammals as a special ops force,” the Guardian reports.
The Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang, which picked up on the discovery well before the breathless English headlines began gracing us with their presence, is a teensy bit less Ian Flemingesque in its reporting on the matter: the harness is equipped for a GoPro camera. The words “Equipment of St. Petersburg” are written in English.
Why is the Russian military writing “Equipment of St. Petersburg” in English on the garments of its aquatic special ops forces, you may ask? If there were indeed a secret beluga espionage squad assembled by Russian intelligence services, would they not perhaps avoid writing the home address of the whales on their harnesses altogether, and maybe, you know, not let them run free in the wild?
And to that I would say, stop asking so many questions. That’s just what Putin wants.
NBC and MSNBC Blamed Russia for Using “Sophisticated Microwaves” to Cause “Brain Injuries” in U.S….
We now have what might be the most vivid, reckless and dangerous illustration yet of how NBC functions.
theintercept.com
A report seeded throughout the mainstream media by anonymous intelligence officials last September claimed that US government workers in Cuba had suffered concussion-like brain damage after hearing strange noises in homes and hotels with the most likely culprit being “sophisticated microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon” from Russia. A recording of one such highly sophisticated attack was analyzed by scientists and turned out to be the mating call of the male indies short-tailed cricket. Neurologists and other brain specialists have challenged the claim that any US government workers suffered any neurological damage of any kind, saying test results on the alleged victims were
misinterpreted.
The actual story, when stripped of hyperventilating Russia panic, is that some government workers once heard some horny crickets in Cuba.
Ye gads, is is nothing sacred? Is there any weapon these monsters won’t use to transform the west into a giant, globe-spanning Mordor?
That’s right, in 2017 puppies became one of the many, many things we’ve been instructed to fear in the hands of our vodka-swilling enemy to the east, with mass media outlets reporting that a Facebook group for animal lovers was one of the sinister, diabolical tactics employed by St. Petersburg’s notorious Internet Research Agency. As the Moon of Alabama blog has explained, the only evidence we’ve seen so far actually indicates that the Internet Research Agency’s operations in America served no purpose other than to attract eyeballs for money. As journalist Aaron Maté wrote of the highly publicized Russian Facebook meddling, “Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.”
The late, great Robert Parry, one of the earliest and most outspoken critics of the Russiagate narrative, covered this one for Consortium Newsin an article he authored a few months before his untimely passing:
“As Mike Isaac and Scott Shane of The New York Times reported in Tuesday’s editions, “The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook last year tried on quite an array of disguises. … There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.”
Now, there are a lot of controversial issues in America, but I don’t think any of us would put puppies near the top of the list. Isaac and Shane reported that there were also supposedly Russia-linked groups advocating gay rights, gun rights and black civil rights, although precisely how these divergent groups were “linked” to Russia or the Kremlin was never fully explained. (Facebook declined to offer details.)
At this point, a professional journalist might begin to pose some very hard questions to the sources, who presumably include many partisan Democrats and their political allies hyping the evil-Russia narrative. It would be time for some lectures to the sources about the consequences for taking reporters on a wild ride in conspiracy land.
Yet, instead of starting to question the overall premise of this “scandal,” journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, etc. keep making excuses for the nuttiness. The explanation for the puppy ads was that the nefarious Russians might be probing to discover Americans who might later be susceptible to propaganda.
“The goal of the dog lovers’ page was more obscure,” Isaac and Shane acknowledged. “But some analysts suggested a possible motive: to build a large following before gradually introducing political content. Without viewing the entire feed from the page, now closed by Facebook, it is impossible to say whether the Russian operators tried such tactics.”
This Russia hysteria has been a long, wild ride, and sometimes it’s honestly felt like they’re just experimenting on us. Like they’ve been testing the limits of how ridiculous they can make this thing and still get mainstream Americans to swallow it. Like the establishment propagandists are all sitting around in a room smoking blunts and making bets with each other all,
“I’m telling you, we can sell a Pokémon Go Kremlin conspiracy.”
“Do it!”
“No way. There’s no way they’ll go for it.”
“Yeah well you said that about the puppy dogs!”
And then they release their latest experiment in social manipulation and place bets on how many disgruntled Hillary voters they can get retweeting it saying “God dammit, I knew that jigglypuff looked suspicious!”
The October 2017 CNN report which sparked off a full day of shrieking “OMG THEY’RE EVEN USING PIKACHU TO ATTACK OUR DEMOCRACY” headlines was titled “Exclusive: Even Pokémon Go used by extensive Russian-linked meddling effort”, and it reported that Russia had extended its “tentacles” into the popular video game for the purpose of election meddling. Apparently the Internet Research Agency attempted to hold a contest using the game to highlight police brutality against unarmed Black men, which of course is something that only an evil autocracy would ever do.
Not until the fifteenth paragraph of the article did we see the information which undercut all the frantic arm flailing about Russians destroying democracy and warping our children’s fragile little minds:
“CNN has not found any evidence that any Pokémon Go users attempted to enter the contest, or whether any of the Amazon Gift Cards that were promised were ever awarded — or, indeed, whether the people who designed the contest ever had any intention of awarding the prizes.”
Russia’s government wants people to have a laugh – as long as it’s at its opponents’ expense, and not Mr Putin’s.
bbc.co.uk
Late last year the BBC published an article titled “How Putin’s Russia turned humour into a weapon” about yet another addition to the Kremlin’s horrifying deadly hybrid warfare arsenal: comedy. The article’s author, ironically titled “Senior Journalist (Disinformation)” by the BBC, argues that Russia has suddenly discovered laughter as a way to “deliberately lower the level of discussion”.
“Russia’s move towards using humour to influence its campaigns is a relatively recent phenomenon,” the article explained, without speculating as to why Russians might have suddenly begun laughing at their western accusers.
Is it perhaps possible that Russian media have begun mocking the west a lot more because westerners have made themselves much easier to make fun of? Could it perhaps be the fact that western mass media have been doing absolutely insane things like constantly selling us the idea that the Kremlin could be lurking behind anything in our world, even really innocuous-looking things like puppy dogs, Pokémon and whales? Could we perhaps be finding ourselves at the butt end of jokes now because in 2016 our society went bat shit, pants-on-head, screaming-at-passing-motor-vehicles insane?
Nahhh. Couldn’t be. It’s the Russians who’ve gone mad.
Everyone has my unconditional permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me onFacebook, following my antics onTwitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon orPaypal, 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. 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. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
FBI headquarters in Washington on Feb. 2, 2018. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images) 
