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, 2021 Updated: 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.
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
March 16th 2021
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.
Op 4
juli 2015 werd middels informatie van Edward Snowden bekend gemaakt
dat de VS de toenmalige president Dilma Rousseff en 29 leden van haar
regering bespioneerde, dit door de NSA, terwijl de FBI al werkte in
het Lava Jato onderzoek…… Het ‘Lavo Jato’* of in
Engels: ‘Car Wash’ onderzoek was een onderzoek naar corruptie en
witwasserij, waarbij hoge ambtenaren, de top van oliemaatschappij Petrobras en politici waren betrokken.
Het
smerige in dit onderzoek was wel dat men dit onderzoek ook misbruikte
met de opzet om de socialisten die middels Rousseff en Lula da
Silva aan de macht waren gekomen zo zwart te maken dat ze in de
volgende verkiezingen een overwinning konden vergeten….. Rousseff werd in feite door een straatsgreep afgezet (onder regie van de CIA en NSA)…… Onder
groot protest werd Lula da Silva gearresteerd en gevangengezet,
zodat hij niet aan de verkiezingen kon deelnemen, pas in 2019 werd
Lula vrijgelaten daar men niet anders kon dan toegeven dat hij niets
met het Lavo Jato schandaal te maken had……. Al probeert de fascistische regering Bolsonaro hem alsnog weer achter de tralies te krijgen……..
Cartoon van Carlos Latuff
Ondanks
dat de FBI haar boekje in Brazilië ver te buiten ging, heeft men dit
geheim gehouden voor de bevolking…… Eén en ander blijkt uit een
‘gelekt gesprek’ tussen openbaar aanklager Vlademir Aras en Deltan
Dallagnol, de leider van het Lava Jato onderzoek, waarbij Aras
Dallagnon voorhoudt dat men wat betreft de FBI niet verder kan gaan
dan afgesproken en juridisch toegelaten, waarop Dallagnol zegt dat ze door moeten gaan omdat
het allemaal zo lang duurt en de regering niet weet wat er gaande is,
de afgevaardigde kan niet weten wat we doen……… (uiteraard gelul, Temer in feite aangedragen door de VS als interim president nadat Rousseff was afgezet, wist natuurlijk dondersgoed wat er speelde…; Ap)
Het
voorgaande is te lezen in een interview met Bob Fernadez, een
gelauwerde journalist die veel onderzoek heeft gedaan naar de invloed
van de VS op de politiek in Brazilië en dat al een aantal decennia,
waarbij hij o.a. openbaarde hoe de CIA, FBI en DEA (en NSA) opereerden
in Brazilië (en daar de zaken naar de hand van de VS wisten te
zetten, Ap) Het is trouwens wel zeker dat de VS niet nog steeds
bezig is in Brazilië de boel naar haar hand te zetten…….
Moet je
nagaan: de VS is nu bezig westerse landen (waaronder ik ook de
Latijns-Amerikaanse landen versta) te bestoken met anti-Chinese
propaganda, daar dit land in tegenstelling tot de VS wel betaalt voor
de grondstoffen die het nodig heeft en daarvoor zelfs infrastructuur
aanlegt en niet alleen infrastructuur ten behoeve van een project
waar China baat bij heeft, terwijl de geschiedenis (ook de recente)
laat zien dat de VS vooral grondstoffen steelt door politici en
ambtenaren om te kopen en daarbij volkomen schijt heeft aan de
gevolgen voor de plaatselijke bevolkingen……..Sterker nog: als de VS wordt tergengewerkt door een regering organiseert de CIA een opstand en als de bewuste regering daar niet mee weg is te krijgen, wordt het leger van dat land gepolst voor een staatsgreep, mocht zelfs dat niet werken is de kans groot dat de VS het land binnenvalt en dat het liefst middels een false falg operatie**, die ingrijpen moet ‘rechtvaardigen…’
Lees het volgende artikel en zie hoe de VS haar klauwen uitslaat naar landen waar het niets te zoeken heeft en tegelijkertijd landen als Rusland, China en Iran van deze zaken beschuldigt, zonder daar ooit bewijs voor te kunnen leveren……. Het artikel verscheen eerst op Brasil Wire, ik nam het over van Information Clearing House, onder het artikel kan je klikken voor een ‘Dutch vertaling’:
US
Intelligence Penetration of Brazil: an Interview with Bob Fernandes
By
Brian Mier
On July 4, 2015,
Brazil learned, through Edward Snowden, that President Dilma Rousseff
and 29 members of her government were being spied on by the NSA. At
that time, FBI agents were already working inside the
Lava Jato investigation.
January
27, 2021 “Information
Clearing House”
– Bob
Fernandes is a veteran journalist from Bahia. During his 43 year
career he has worked at some of the most important newspapers and
magazines in Brazil, including Folha
de Sao Paulo
and Istoe,
covering issues such as the election of Bill Clinton and wars in
Angola and Somalia. In 1994 he helped found the weekly news magazine Carta
Capital
and served as its Editor in Chief until 2004. During this period, he
wrote over 100 cover stories, including an award-winning series of 8
investigative reports about CIA, FBI, and DEA operations in Brazil
and another cover story which led to the resignation of Brazilian
Federal Police Director Vicente Chelotti. For the last 15 years he
worked extensively in TV as a news anchor for GNT and TV Cultura.
Currently he hosts a show on Bahia State Public Television and
maintains a youtube
channel which has over 200,000 subscribers. In September, 2020, I
interviewed him briefly about FBI and DOJ involvement in the Lava
Jato
investigation for the Redfish Documentary, Dismantling
Brazil: Bolsonaro’s Neoliberal Agenda. The following is the
full interview transcript.
How
did the US get involved in the coup against Dilma Rousseff and the
election season political imprisonment of Lula?
On July
4, 2015, Brazil learned, through Edward Snowden, that President Dilma
Rousseff and 29 members of her government were being spied on by the
NSA. At that time, FBI agents were already working inside the Lava
Jato
investigation. They were working far beyond the agreement that
exists. There was a legal agreement, but their involvement went far
beyond that. There were 18 agents, apparently, including the FBI
Anti-corruption director for Latin America, Leslie Backschies –
just to give you an idea of the size of this. So at the same time
that Brazil learned about the NSA espionage that was being done on
Petrobras, the president of the republic and 29 members of her
government, 18 FBI agents were regularly meeting with the Lava
Jato
task force and carrying out activities far beyond what was authorized
in the partnership agreement. There is a leaked conversation between
Prosecutor Vlademir Aras from the Federal Public Prosecutors Office
with Deltan Dallagnol, who was the Lava
Jato
task force leader, in which he says, “look, we have to respect the
agreement, we can’t go beyond it”. And Dallagnol says, “no,
let’s go ahead because it will take so long – the government
can’t know about this, the Executive can’t know what we are
doing.” It is impossible to be any more clear than this.
This
information was leaked by the
Intercept
during its so-called Vaza
Jato investigation.
It leaked all the documentation that shows this. More recently, the
investigative journalism site Apublica
also published information about the presence and the amplification
of the FBI in Brazil. In 2017 there was a meeting in São Paulo that
Leslie was in, along with other FBI agents and Brazilian businessmen,
with Brazilian government representatives to discuss corruption in
Brazil and the press were barred from attending. Imagine if this had
happened in the United States or in Germany or anywhere else. So this
is the current scenario, remembering that in 2014 there was already
US wire tapping in Brazil and that Leslie Backschies started working
in Brazil in 2012.
How
long has the FBI been active in Brazil? Can you talk a bit about your
investigative work in the 1990s for Carta Capital?
During
the end of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration, during the
last few years of his government until the time Lula took power, the
Brazilian Federal Police did not have enough funding to properly
operate. At this time, we published and leaked documents that proved
that the DEA, the American anti-drug agency, paid for individual
Federal Police agents to conduct drug trafficking investigations
through direct deposits into their personal bank accounts. We
published documents proving this – legal receipts. I also published
articles, with backing documentation, that showed that the CIA was
working out of the main Federal Police station’s anti-terrorism
unit. In order to work in this unit for the Federal Police at the
time, you had to go to Washington and take lie detector tests in
hotels -not in Langley – during which they would ask things like,
‘are you corrupt? Are you a homosexual?”
At the
time we published the names of many of the agents who went there and
years later we published an internal document from the Federal Police
that proved all of this. So for you to act inside the main
interception base of the Federal Police, you had to take a lie
detector test administered by the CIA. It was part of a shared
information partnership between the Federal Police and the CIA. This
unit was built inside the Federal Police during the Sarney government
with money from the US State Department, and its first 20 automobiles
came from the CIA in Paraguay. This was all published and nobody ever
denied it there is documentation proving it. So this story about US
collaboration didn’t start with
Lava Jato
– it goes back decades. What we have now is a deepening, a
widening, it’s a free for all now. Now, with Brazil delivering the
Alcantara rocket launching base to the United States, with Embraer
sold off and then given back by the Americans, it is now something
that is much more in the open. Unfortunately, as Brazil is
continental in size and focused in on itself, there is no habit of
looking at the outside world, not even at its neighbors. Brazilians
don’t think this is important, they don’t pay attention to or
understand the meaning of this. Brazilians, in their great majority,
do not care or understand what this means. They don’t understand
what it means for the Federal Police to have an operation… Brazil
had 15 Federal Police bases which operated within the shared
information regime with the CIA. Imagine this in any other country..
But here, nobody gave it a second thought.
* Het Lavo Jato, ofwel autowasserij onderzoek werd zo genoemd daar de
smerige deals werden gemaakt in benzinestations met een autowasserij.
** Een false flag operatie: de VS organiseert een aanval op haar troepen of marine schepen, of een grote aanslag op het volk van het begeerde land en schuift deze in de schoenen van de VS onwelgevallige regering, zodat de VS een aanval kan beginnen ‘gelegitimeerd’ door die false flag operatie, voorbeelden te over…… Overigens kan de VS ook liegen over een regering, als zou deze (in het geval van Irak) massavernietigingswapens hebben, ongelofelijk dat westerse landen zich deze smerige leugens op de mouw lieten spelden en hebben meegewerkt aan de illegale oorlog tegen dat land, waarbij een enorme massaslachting werd aangericht, waarbij tot nu toe bijna 2 miljoen mensen werden vermoord…….
Een
hedgefonds dat middels shortselling het bedrijf GameStop bijna ten
onder deed gaan is zelf slachtoffer geworden, niet van een ander
hedgefonds maar van gebruikers van GameStop die middels het
nieuwsplatform Reddit gebruikers verenigden om samen aandelen van het
bedrijf in te kopen, waardoor de koers door het plafond ging (binnen 1 week met 700 %) en de
shortsellers met enorme verliezen achterlieten…… ha! ha! ha! ha!
Eindelijk een middel om bijzonder foute aandeelhouders plat op de bek te
laten gaan…..
Paniek
op Wall Street:
Gisteren
zijn de oligarchen en hun woordvoerders op CNBC en andere Wall Street
vriendelijke media de hele dag bezig geweest om hun ongenoegen uit te
spreken over de gang van zaken en hebben daarbij van de Biden administratie
stappen geëist: maatregelen nemen om een dergelijke gang van zaken
in de toekomst te verbieden, men durft dit zelfs onrecht en communisme te
noemen….. ha! ha! ha! In feite roepen ze op om hun eigen
instrumenten illegaal te maken, al gaat hun eis daar natuurlijk niet
over, shortselling moet alleen nog worden toegestaan aan ‘serieuze
aandeelhouders en hedgefondsen…….’
‘Geheel
toevallig’ (maar niet heus) heeft één platform de handel in
aandelen GameStop platgelegd en dat op basis van ‘hate speech’,
uiteraard een kul reden, misbruikt om de Reddit groep de wind uit de
zeilen te nemen…..
Het
liefst zou men de hele handel in aandelen van GameStop platleggen,
dit om de smerige aandeelhouders te redden van enorme verliezen, niet
om een goed lopend bedrijf te redden en daarmee de werkgelegenheid
van velen…….
Uiteraard
zal deze zaak verstrekkende gevolgen hebben en het is bijna niet
voorstelbaar dat men deze vorm van bedrijfsbescherming zal verbieden,
immers daarmee zou de hele wereld eindelijk inzien hoe smerig de
handel in aandelen in elkaar steekt……
Hoorde
e.e.a. gisteravond al van een heel
goede vriend en zag vanmorgen dat Glenn Greenwald hier gisteren een artikel over plaatste op zijn eigen website. In een begeleidende
video legt Greenwald uit wat de gevolgen zijn van deze zaak en welke
consequenties dit zal hebben, niet alleen voor Wall Street, maar ook
voor de politiek.
One
of the most interesting and potentially significant conflicts to
happen in some time — not just financially but culturally and
politically — deserves serious scrutiny.
A
GameStop store in Alhambra, California on January 27, 2021 (Photo by
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)
A
remarkable series of events culminated in at least one major
Wall Street hedge fund on the verge
of insolvency and
widespread anxiety and even panic from the titans of the financial
system. It was all initiated on a sub-group
of Reddit known
for its heterodox interest in stock markets, video games, and vaguely
populist politics.
Purposely
targeting the stock of a company that had long been written off by
Wall Street and which short sellers had decided to ravage — the
video game retailer GameStop — these small investors, many
apparently working class or debt-ridden, banded together to drive up
the stock price of that company into the stratosphere, abruptly
leaving the hedge fund short-sellers with billions of dollars in
losses.
Front page of the r/wallstreetbets sub-Reddit
Although
it may be more complex than this once all the facts are all known,
this is being treated — by those excited
by it and
those aghast — as a type of populist uprising, a David v. Goliath
tale in which ordinary people united to brilliantly beat Wall Street
at its own game, thereby transferring plutocratic wealth back to the
public. Oligarchs and their media spokespeople spent all day on CNBC
and other pro-Wall-Street outlets expressing outrage and demanding
government intervention to
protect them from what they regard as this grave injustice.
And
the sub-Reddit has
now been banned by
at least one platform, on the highly suspicious ground that it was
due to “hate speech” and not the use of this group to sabotage
Wall Street billionaires (what a remarkable coincidence of timing
that this sub-Reddit’s “hate speech” suddenly crossed a line
exactly as hedge fund managers were demanding their heads; the page
continues, however, to appear on Reddit itself).
In
the video below, I discuss what happened and what the implications
are. One note about the video: though I do discuss the amorphous and
trans-ideological politics driving both the Reddit uprising and the
reaction to it, that topic in particular merits much more
consideration. Liberal journalists and pundits love to mock the idea
that “economic anxiety” drives anything remotely adjacent to
right-wing populism — the primary drivers are racism and other
types of bigotry, they insist in unison — yet all one has to do is
spend any non-trivial amount of time in that sub-Reddit to see
genuine and significant levels of rational economic anger often quite
untethered, even hostile, to left-liberal cultural pieties and
political niceties. Given their recent noble success, everyone
now wants
to claim these
Redditors as their own, but their politics, like many people’s,
defy the clean left-right dichotomy on which the professional media
and punditry classes depend, the only prism through which they can
understand the world.
This
is one of the most interesting and potentially significant events —
not just financially but culturally and politically — to happen in
some time, and I try here to explain the key components and highlight
some of the most consequential implications [note that this video was
filmed late last night before the banning of the sub-Reddit by
Discord on obviously specious grounds and, far worse, the corrupted
banning
this morning by major trading platforms, including RobinHood, of any
attempts to buy GameStop and other targeted stocks while still
allowing them to be sold: the ultimate expression of what should be
illegal market manipulation to protect hedge funds):
De idee
van internet was een plek te scheppen waar burgers konden
communiceren en zich organiseren zonder controle van overheid en het
grote bedrijfsleven, nu blijkt dat dit idee ver achter ons ligt niet
alleen qua tijd, maar juist ook wat betreft de vrijheid van
communicatie…….
De NSA
rapportage van Edward Snowden uit 2013, die hij als klokkenluider
openbaarde, wordt door velen gezien als een schending van het recht op
privacy, echter de openbaringen gingen over veel meer schendingen van
een aantal andere vrijheden, zoals het recht op vrije meningsuiting,
een vrije pers en de noodzaak van transparantie van
overheidsinstanties en vooral die van de altijd op de loer liggende
veiligheidsstaat, plus de gevaren van het mogelijk maken dat
regeringen belangrijke beslissingen stiekem nemen zonder
democratische overeenstemming of verantwoordelijkheid……. (daar hebben we hier tijdens de Coronacrisis meermaals mee te maken gehad)
Dat het
internet aanvankelijk werd gezien als vrijplaats voor een ieder,
zonder overheidsbemoeienis dan wel bemoeienis van wie dan ook was de
oorzaak dat Snowden de klok luidde, immers hij kwam erachter dat er
nog maar weinig over was van de vrijheden, vrije communicatie, enz,
die hij eerder zag als belangrijk voor het internet…… Kortom de
idee dat het internet de mens zou bevrijden van elke overheids
bemoeienis en die van de grote bedrijven, was een vroege dood
gestorven……
Zie hoe
Facebook, YouTube en Google zaken censureren, als zouden we leven in
de eerste beste dictatuur, een zaak waaraan ook de reguliere media
schuldig zijn, al lang niet meer onafhankelijk schreeuwen de vertegenwoordigers van deze media (‘journalisten’) dat het internet moet worden gecensureerd……
Niet voor niets daar deze media maar al te vaak aan de paal worden
genageld op het internet vanwege het bewaren en bewaken van de
bestaande status quo (in het belang van de spuugrijke eigenaren van
die media) dit door ronduit fake news (nepnieuws) te brengen en het op andere
manieren manipuleren van de gebruikers….. Neem de illegale oorlogen
die de VS deze eeuw is begonnen, allen gebaseerd op smerige leugens
die deze media maar al te graag hebben overgenomen van geheime diensten en deze hebben uitgedragen, zonder enig
onderzoek of ook maar ‘één letter van kritiek…….’ Ondanks dat
deze media weten dat ze leugens hebben verkondigd, hebben ze niet één
rectificatie geplaatst, nee sterker nog men blijft deze leugens
alsnog herhalen en verdedigen…..
Zeker tijdens
de almaar voortdurende Coronacrisis staan die media aan de kant van
de overheid, ach ja men wijst wel eens op het tegenstrijdige beleid,
maar verder moet je niet proberen ook maar enige kritiek te leveren
op bijvoorbeeld de testen die worden gebruikt, of figuren als Fauci
ter discussie te stellen**, ook al heeft deze figuur een heel duister
verleden…. Nee kritiek wordt neergesabeld als complotdenken, alsof
er alleen maar imbecielen zijn die commentaar hebben op de veel te snel
gemaakte vaccins, waar men bij lange na niet weet wat gevolgen op de
lange duur zijn…..* Deze media gebruiken dezelfde wetenschappers die de overheid gebruikt
als legitimatie van wanbeleid, wetenschappers die maar al te vaak
door de mand vallen als sufferds dan wel als lobbyisten van
farmaceuten….. Dat de Coronacrisis wordt misbruikt om diverse vrijheden in te perken en andere burgerrechten te slopen, zal eenieder intussen wel duidelijk zijn……. (klik daarvoor bijvoorbeeld op de labels: burgerrechten, censuur en privacy, de labels vind je direct onder dit bericht)
Lees het
volgende Information Clearing House artikel en zie de video, een
interview van Glenn Greenwald met Edward Snowden, die gelukkig nog
steeds een mogelijkheid ziet voor een werkelijk vrij internet (onder het artikel kan je klikken voor een ‘Dutch vertaling’, dit neemt wel enkele tientallen seconden tijd in beslag):
Interview
with Edward Snowden on Silicon Valley Censorship, Biden, and Lurking
Press Freedom Dangers
How
did we travel so far from the original vision of the internet as the
one place humans could communicate and organize free of state and
corporate control?
By
Glenn Greenwald
November
27, 2020 “Information
Clearing House”
– The NSA reporting of 2013, enabled by the heroic
whistleblowing of Edward Snowden, was widely perceived at the time
time to be about violations of the right to privacy. It was, of
course, about that, but the revelations implicated numerous other
vital liberties, include the NSA reporting of 2013, enabled by the
heroic whistleblowing of Edward Snowden, was widely perceived at the
time time to be about violations of the right to privacy. It was, of
course, about that, but the revelations implicated numerous other
vital liberties, including free speech, a free press, the need for
transparency over state actors and especially the always-lurking
security state, and the dangers of allowing governments to make the
most consequential decisions in the dark, with no democratic consent
or accountability.
But the
overarching cause uniting all of those specific concerns was a belief
in and defense of internet freedom. In one of the earliest interviews
we conducted with Snowden in Hong Kong, he explained that he was
driven in large part by the central, vital role which the early
version of the internet played in his life: one that was free of
corporate and state control, that permitted anonymity and exploration
free of monitoring, and, most of all, fostered unrestrained
communication and dissemination of information by and among citizens
of the world without corporate and state overlords regulating and
controlling what they were saying.
It was that Wild
West vision of the internet that led so many to herald it at its
inception as one of the greatest and most potent innovations in
modern history for fostering individual freedom, human liberation,
empowerment of ordinary citizens, and the ability of people to
organize and communicate without having to depend on corporate giants
and the governments they fund and control. In many ways, that vision
is a faint memory — submersed in the mass surveillance Snowden
exposed but which still persists, the corporatization of the most
influential online venues and, increasingly, the control over the
flow of speech and information by unseen oligarchical overlords whose
decrees require no identifiable rationale and afford no appeal. The
power of these unseen discourse-regulators is final, arbitrary and
absolute.
It does not have to be
this way. A free internet is still worth fighting for and is still
salvageable. But it faces growing threats: from corporate
media outlets eager to suffocate anything that threatens their
discourse-monopoly by ginning up pressure on Silicon Valley to censor
various dissidents and independent voices even more so than they are
now; from political parties and politicians who wield great influence
with tech giants and know they can exploit
that influence to silence their critics and adversaries; and the
increasing concentration of power over the internet in the hand of a
few monopolies whose power and wealth makes it irresistible for
power centers to try to harness to suffocate dissent.
On Monday I spoke with
Snowden for a special episode of SYSTEM UPDATE, for roughly 40
minutes about the growing dangers of Silicon Valley censorship, why a
tech industry that never wanted the power or responsibility to
regulate discourse has had that obligation foisted upon them by
politicians and journalists, the lurking dangers to press freedoms,
and how a Biden/Harris administration may make all of this worse:
Glenn Greenwald is
a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York
Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book,
“No Place to Hide,” is about the U.S. surveillance state and his
experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world.
Prior to co-founding The Intercept, Greenwald’s column was featured
in The Guardian and Salon.Glenn.
Glenn is
one of the three co-founding editors of The Intercept. He left The
Intercept in October 2020. https://greenwald.substack.com/
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
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……)
FBI headquarters in Washington on Feb. 2, 2018. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
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