Category Archives: Conspiracy

CIA: The Corrupt and Ignorant Agency

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By Wayne Madsen

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The American taxpayers have been fleeced for almost seventy years by a so-called «intelligence» agency that has systematically violated the US Constitution, broken practically every federal law on the books, and penetrated virtually every facet of American life. The Central Intelligence Agency’s creation was bemoaned by its creator, President Harry S Truman, who, in a fit of personal angst following the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy, wrote in a newspaper column, «I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations… I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment… and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere».

During a presidential election year, two of the three remaining major candidates – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – have given no indication that they will heed the words of President Truman. For example, Trump has indicated he will give the CIA authority to torture that even the CIA considers illegal.

As for Mrs Clinton, her zeal in supporting the violent overthrow and assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 only gives added impetus to the out-of-control players inside the CIA to commit similar actions in a Clinton administration. Only Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders appears to channel the beliefs of Truman when it comes to reining in the CIA.

It is not known whether Trump, who has made favorable noises to interventionist neo-conservatives within the Republican Party, will stand by his comments that the war in Libya was a mistake. But Trump was one of the cheerleaders urging US intervention in 2011. He said, «Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around. We have soldiers all over the Middle East and not bringing them to stop this horrible carnage… We don’t want to get involved and you’re going to end up with something like you’ve never seen before».

Trump, Mrs Clinton, and Obama were wrong about Libya and Gaddafi on all counts. Gaddafi was not killing «thousands of people». That was being done by the jihadist rebels supported by the CIA. The late US ambassador/weapons smuggler in Libya, Christopher Stevens, who was ironically killed by the very same jihadists with whom he was brokering deals to ship Libyan weapons to Syria, ensured that the latest NATO weaponry ended up in radical Islamist hands in Libya. It was these weapons that killed «thousands of people» – Libyan and African guest workers and their families – in a country wracked by a civil war manufactured by Mrs Clinton and CIA director General David Petraeus.

The CIA, in particular, had for decades, fantasized about overthrowing Gaddafi. Never did this most incompetent of US government agencies contemplate the effects of Gaddafi’s ouster: the spread of Saudi-financed jihadist terrorism across the Sahel region of Africa. The CIA’s fanciful notions that Gaddafi’s days were numbered were highlighted in a formerly Secret CIA report titled, «Libya: Will the Revolution Outlast Gaddafi?» Issued in June 1988, the report was obviously intended to bolster those within the Reagan administration who argued for a US military attack on Libya by taking advantage of what the CIA perceived was a weakened Gaddafi government at the end of the 1980s. The CIA, as usual, was extremely off-base in its assessment of Gaddafi’s staying power.

The CIA report states: «Gaddafi’s revolution has largely run its course, and he must rely on coercion to perpetuate his revolutionary vision». In fact, Libyans had the highest standard of living on the African continent with oil revenues being shared with the entire population. The CIA’s erroneous assessment of Libya in 1988 continued: «Just as Libya in 1969 was ripe for a change to a more nationalistic and activist regime, we believe it now ripe for a return to normality». The call for «regime change» by the CIA in 1988 was, in fact, a call for the return to the status quo ante of 1968: a Libya governed by a corrupt oligarchy led by a feeble monarch. Today, a motley crew of United Nations-selected Libyan gangsters governs the country as a «paper tiger» entity called the «Government of National Accord». Meanwhile, jihadists of Ansar al-Sharia govern Benghazi while the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) governs Sirte, Derna, and a swath of territory southeast of Tripoli, the Libyan capital.

Just as the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party and military infrastructures in Iraq following the US invasion and occupation led to the complete collapse of the Iraqi nation-state, the destruction of the four key institutions that united Libya under Gaddafi led to «failed state» status for the country. The CIA cited these key institutions in its 1988 report but no effort was made to preserve them after Gaddafi’s assassination by CIA-supported forces.

The four key institutions in Libya were, according to the CIA, the tribally-based security battalions, the regular Armed Forces, the Military Intelligence service, and the revolutionary committees. These institutions were wiped out in order that the CIA’s wish in 1988 could be realized: that Libya would return to the «normality» of 1968: government by a restored monarchy led by a pretender to the al-Senussi family’s throne once occupied by King Idris I. However, Libya became a polyglot of warring tribes and jihadists, many of the latter imported from conflict zones abroad.

Whether governed by a restored monarchy or a military-dominated successor regime, the CIA saw a post-Gaddafi government desiring «a more constructive relationship with the United States and the West». The CIA added, «Libyan successors probably would turn first to Western Europe for better economic relations and some arms. They also would be likely to seek greater US participation in the Libyan economy». However, after Gaddafi agreed to abandon his so-called «weapons of mass destruction» chemical and nuclear programs, the United States and Western Europe had a more constructive relationship with Libya and the country was wide open for Western economic investment. After Mrs Clinton, Petraeus, Obama, Britain’s David Cameron, and other Western leaders had their way with Libya, it is now a wasteland. The infrastructures of irrigation, road and air transport, social welfare, public education, health care, and employment for African guest workers lie in ruins. The clearly demented Mrs Clinton’s private e-mails show that she and her cabal of interventionists were clearly overjoyed by the misery that befell Libya and its people. When she was informed of Gaddafi’s brutal assassination, one that involved his sodomization, Clinton uttered the preamble to what may be called the «Hillary Doctrine» – «We came, we saw, he died!» She followed her declaration with her signature hideous cackling laughter.

The 1988 CIA report does not seem to care much for Gaddafi’s style of governance through some 2000 local «people’s congresses», described by the CIA as «a hybrid of a New England town meeting and a Bedouin tribal gathering». This demonstration of the «people’s will» in the Libyan «Jamahiriya» was anathema to the CIA’s goals for Libya, even Libya’s emulation of New England-style direct democracy.

A system of direct democracy in an Arab Muslim nation defied the CIA’s wish for the region, which was and remains an alliance of pro-US theocratic states governed by corrupt elites that wield power through US-equipped armed forces. The CIA report on Libya admits that initially, Gaddafi’s system of direct democracy and the exercising of the people’s will «actually worked». Only in the jaundiced view of the United States was such a system of government a threat, not only to US interests and goals, but to those of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Morocco, and other corrupt and theocratic US client states in the region.

Hillary Clinton’s war crimes are unforgivable. No real progressive could ever support her.

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By Zach Cartwright

Source: U.S. Uncut

Hillary Clinton made headlines with a speech in San Diego casting Donald Trump as unfit for the presidency due to the damage his incendiary rhetoric could cause. Simultaneously, the former Secretary of State sought to convince the California audience that she was the safer choice in foreign policy matters.

But when taking a closer look at US foreign policy under her leadership as the nation’s top diplomat, it’s obvious that Clinton could potentially be as disastrous as Trump if given the position of Commander-in-Chief.

Here are a few examples of countries where conditions are tremendously worse as a result of Hillary Clinton’s policies.

Hillary Clinton made Libya a failed state

In an April interview with Fox News, President Barack Obama, reflecting on his 7 years as Commander-in-Chief, admitted that ousting Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was the biggest mistake of his presidency. While Obama took responsibility for the failure of Libya in that interview, he relied on the input of Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State at the time.

In March of 2011, Clinton met with Mahmoud Jibril, who was leading the opposition to Gaddafi. As the New York Times reported, Clinton asked Jibril a series of questions about how his coalition planned to fill the power vacuum that would be created by Gaddafi’s ouster. And in the end, it was Clinton who convinced the White House that deposing Gaddafi was the right thing to do:

Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.

The 2011 NATO-led invasion of Libya that took place after Clinton’s visit has since allowed extremist groups to seize power in an unprecedented takeover of much of the country over the last five years.

In 2014, the US State Department shut down the US embassy in Libya and issued a travel warning urging all Americans to stay away from the country. Roughly one year ago, Libya’s central bank, the last remaining institution in the failed state, was forced to flee to a city in the Eastern region of the country due to rebel forces encroaching on the bank’s facility in Tripoli, the capital. Libya is now a haven for terrorists, with thousands of ISIS soldiers using the country as a staging ground.

In an interview on CBS, Clinton laughed about Gaddafi’s slaying, proudly exclaiming, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Hillary Clinton deserves credit for poverty and instability in Haiti

In Haiti, the first state ever founded by freed black slaves, citizens are still fighting for political and economic freedom today, largely due to the influence of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In 2011, Wikileaks published US State Department cables from 2008 and 2009 confirming that State Department officials were meeting behind closed doors with Haitian business leaders, plotting on how to stop the Haitian government from implementing a 37-cent hike in the minimum wage from $0.24 an hour to $0.61 cents an hour.

While Haitian President René Préval was initially neutral on the proposal of raising the minimum wage, he went on the record opposing the wage hike after consistent efforts from within the US Embassy in Haiti and the Haitian business lobby by July of 2009. Politifact rated the claim that Clinton’s State Department tried to suppress the wage hike as half-true, since there’s no link proving that Clinton directly played a role.

However, Clinton’s influence on Haiti didn’t stop there. As US Uncut previously reported, the former Secretary of State took an active role in swinging Haitian’s presidential elections in favor of corporate special interests. In the first round of Haiti’s presidential elections, thousands of citizens took to the streets demanding an annulment of election results, alleging that then-Haitian president Michel Martelly committed election fraud.

Martelly, who succeeded René Préval, is a close confidant of the Clinton family. In 2011, Martelly appointed Bill Clinton to an advisory board whose stated goal was to court foreign investors.

And in one of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails made public, Clinton’s chief of staff received an email from another staffer openly boasting about using connections within the Haitian business elite to lobby for the withdrawal of Jude Célestin, Martelly’s political rival, from an upcoming runoff election. The aide, Kenneth Merten, predicted the news of the US interfering in election results would create widespread protests, and said he had called Martelly, asking him to plead with Haitians “to not pillage.”

While Martelly is no longer in power, his hand-picked successor, Jovenel Moïse, won the most recent election. However, watchdogs are calling the results fraudulent and demanding a new election. Ricardo Seitenfus, who has served as representative of the Organization of American States (OAS) for the last eight years, admitted that Haiti’s government is essentially a puppet of US interests, saying the Haitian election schedule is “subject to the U.S. schedule.” Hillary Clinton deserves to be closely scrutinized when touting her diplomacy record, as Haiti’s political instability is a result of her policies.

Honduras’ downfall resulted from a coup Clinton supported

In 2009, shortly after Obama took office and appointed Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was arrested at gunpoint by the military and forced onto a plane to Costa Rica while a new government took power. While the US State Department didn’t directly oust Zelaya, it refused to call his ouster a coup, despite calls from the U.S. ambassador to Honduras and from Congress to do so. In her interview with the New York Daily News editorial board, Clinton defended her decision to keep sending aid to Honduras despite the violent overthrow of Zelaya:

I think, in retrospect, we managed a very difficult situation, without bloodshed, without a civil war, that led to a new election. And I think that was better for the Honduran people. But we have a lot of work to do to try to help stabilize that and deal with corruption, deal with the violence and the gangs and so much else.

However, the result of the coup was a massive amount of bloodshed, as gangs and drug cartels began to take more power in the absence of a stable government. In the year following the coup, Clinton’s State Department published a list of human rights abuses prevalent in Honduras:

“…unlawful killings by police and government agents, which the government took some steps to prosecute; arbitrary and summary killings committed by vigilantes and former members of the security forces; harsh prison conditions; violence against detainees; corruption and impunity within the security forces; lengthy pretrial detention and failure to provide due process of law; politicization, corruption, and institutional weakness of the judiciary; corruption in the legislative and executive branches; government restrictions on the recognition of some civil society groups; violence and discrimination against women; child prostitution and abuse; trafficking in persons; discrimination against indigenous communities; violence and discrimination against persons based on sexual orientation; ineffective enforcement of labor laws; and child labor.”

The horrific conditions in Honduras triggered a mass exodus of migrants to the US. As Telesur reported, approximately 9,000 child refugees fled Honduras in 2015. Also in 2015, Clinton defended the deportation of children back to the Central American countries they’re fleeing in order “send a message.” However, Clinton has since walked back that statement as her Democratic presidential primary battle with Bernie Sanders became more competitive.

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This March, the violence in Honduras became a subject of international scrutiny when 44-year-old environmental activist Berta Caceres was assassinated in her home. Caceres had been an outspoken opponent of a proposed hydroelectric plant on indigenous land, and had recently gotten in an altercation with soldiers, police, and employees of a private power company while protesting the project just weeks before she was killed.

Clinton is responsible for the fall of Iraq and Syria (and the rise of ISIS)

In late 2011, after months of sustained anti-government protests inspired by the “Arab Spring” movement, Hillary Clinton called for the resignation of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Then, in April 2012, Clinton gave a speech in Turkey more forcefully calling specifically for regime change, saying, “Assad must go.” Those three words created the policies that led to both the rise of ISIS in Syria and the European refugee crisis of 2015.

One of Clinton’s last actions as Secretary of State was to call for the arming of Syrian rebels fighting Assad. As the London Telegraph reported, Clinton’s plan to give weapons to Assad’s enemies was backed by not only former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, but also by former CIA director David Petraeus and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While Obama initially rejected his Secretary of State’s plan, he eventually agreed to arm Syrian rebels in the goal of ousting Assad.

However, as ISIS began to get a foothold into Syria and Iraq, the “moderates” that received weapons from the US were eventually overtaken by ISIS fighters, who suddenly found themselves in the possession of military-grade weapons paid for with US tax dollars. In a study conducted by Conflict Armament Research, which tracks the movement of arms in war-torn regions, researchers found that ISIS has weapons and ammunition not just from the US, but also from coalition forces that are funded by the US government. The access to advanced weaponry was likely the reason for ISIS’ rapid expansion into Libya, Egypt, and elsewhere.

The consequences of destabilizing Syria and Iraq are apparent. Over one million refugees, largely from countries where the US intervened militarily, fled to Europe between 2015 and 2016, creating the world’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. In this chart compiled by Eurostat, the top three countries people are fleeing are Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq:

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Yemeni blood is on Hillary Clinton’s hands

Saudi Arabia’s invasion of Yemen, which started in 2015 and continues today, was made possible with arms purchased by the US government. Since Obama’s presidency, the US has sold approximately $46 billion in arms to the Saudis, with many of those weapons sales greenlighted by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. As US Uncut reported in April, Clinton was particularly focused on making sure the US came through for Saudi Arabia in a 2011 weapons deal. David Sirota of the International Business Times reported that Clinton argued the arms deal was “in the national interest.”

At press conferences in Washington to announce the department’s approval, an assistant secretary of state, Andrew Shapiro, declared that the deal had been “a top priority” for Clinton personally. Shapiro, a longtime aide to Clinton since her Senate days, added that the “U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army have excellent relationships in Saudi Arabia.”

Saudi Arabia is very likely using the weapons acquired from that 2011 exchange to wage brutal bombing campaigns in Yemen. In March, Foreign Policy magazine accused the US and its allies of complicity in war crimes by funding and arming the Saudi regime:

Hundreds of civilians have been killed in airstrikes while asleep in their homes, when going about their daily activities, or in the very places where they had sought refuge from the conflict. The United States, Britain, and others, meanwhile, have continued to supply a steady stream of weaponry and logistical support to Saudi Arabia and its coalition.

This week, the United Nations added the Saudi-led coalition to a blacklist of states and armed groups that violate children’s human rights during conflicts, with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon personally slamming the coalition for killing and maiming Yemeni children.

Hillary Clinton is completely right that Donald Trump is woefully unprepared to take on the responsibilities of Commander-in-Chief. But voters should also be leery of Clinton, who, despite having met with more world leaders than any presidential candidate in US history, is responsible for some of the worst foreign policy blunders of the 21st century.

 

Zach Cartwright is an activist and author from Richmond, Virginia. He enjoys writing about politics, government, and the media. Send him an email: zachcartwright88@gmail.com. 

US Law Enforcement Knew Florida Shooter BEFORE Shooting

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Did radicalization by NYPD make Omar Mateen a trigger-happy homophobe?

Recent Bloodbath Looks Almost Identical to FBI-Staged Entrapment Cases in 2015.

By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

A horrific mass shooting unfolded in Florida claiming the lives of at least 52 with scores more injured. The British Independent would report in its article, “Omar Mateen: Orlando gay club gunman identified by police,” that:

Police have identified the gunman in the mass shooting at a gay club in Florida as 29-year-old Omar Mateen, an American citizen whose parents are from Afghanistan. 

Authorities in Orlando said they were investigating the shooting as an act of terrorism, as the death toll rose to 50 with a further 53 wounded.

At face value – it appears to be another senseless tragedy perpetrated by a “terrorist” inspired by militant groups the US claims to have been fighting for now nearly two decades. However the Independent reports another fact further down in the body of its article, claiming that:

ABC News reported he had been on police’s “radar”, though not subject to an investigation.

If this sounds like a familiar narrative, that’s because virtually every high-profile “terrorist attack” carried out in North America and Europe in recent years has been done so by suspects long under investigation by US, Canadian, and European law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

CNN’s article, “50 killed in Florida nightclub, shooter pledged ISIS allegiance,” would further elaborate on Mateen’s background, stating: 

Two officials tell CNN that the FBI had investigated Mateen at some point for possibly having ties to or sympathizing with Islamic extremism. A law enforcement official said there were two cases opened involving Mateen but the probes didn’t result in enough evidence to charge him with anything.

In the past two weeks Mateen legally purchased a Glock pistol, found at the shooting scene, from a St. Lucie County area gun store, a law enforcement official said.

What CNN fails to mention is the long history the FBI has of taking “sympathizers” through a series of steps to acquire “enough evidence,” including posing as terrorists and providing suspects with weapons and plans for attacks precisely like the one that just unfolded in Florida.

To understand the implications of yet another high-profile terror attack involving a suspect already known to law enforcement agencies, one must examine previous examples of admittedly set up attacks “foiled” at the last moment by the FBI, as well as attacks that have been carried out by individuals tracked for years and even arrested multiple times by Western police and intelligence agencies only to be let go time and time again until finally carrying out “the big one.”

ISIS Inspired? Or FBI Inspired? FBI Set Up Multiple Attacks in 2015 Almost Exactly Like the Florida Shooting

A terror suspect armed to the teeth storming a public place and killing scores is actually a very familiar script. The FBI wrote several such scripts in 2015 alone, including entrapping and arresting a mentally-ill suspect after providing him with an arsenal of deadly weapons almost identical to the arsenal recently employed in Flordia.

The Intercept would report in its article, “Another “Terror” Arrest; Another Mentally Ill Man, Armed by the FBI,” that:

U.S. law enforcement officials announced another terror arrest on Monday, after arming a mentally ill man and then charging him with having guns. 

ABC News quoted a “senior federal official briefed on the arrest” as saying: “This is a very bad person arrested before he could do very bad things.” 

But in a sting reminiscent of so many others conducted by the FBI since 9/11, Alexander Ciccolo, 23, “aka Ali Al Amriki,” was apparently a mentally ill man who was doing nothing more than ranting about violent jihad and talking (admittedly in frightening ways) about launching attacks—until he met an FBI informant. At that point, he started making shopping lists for weapons.

The Intercept would also reference the FBI’s affidavit (.pdf), stating (emphasis added):

According to the affidavit, Ciccolo first talked to the FBI informant about attacking two bars and a police station. Later, he spoke of attacking a college campus with a homemade pressure-cooker bomb like the one used in the Boston Marathon terror attack; he also talked about using guns and a lot of ammo. Ciccolo, according to the affidavit, then “ordered the firearms from a confidential human source (“CHS”) working with the FBI.”

The list of weapons provided to the mentally-ill suspect by the FBI informant is shocking. Revealed in the official FBI affidavit (.pdf), the weapons included a 9mm Glock 17, a 10mm Glock 20, a .223 Colt AR-15 rifle, (referred to by the media as an “assault rifle”), and a 556 Sig Arms SG550 rifle (also often referred to as an assault rifle). Also included in the affidavit is the same hysterical rhetoric encouraged by FBI informants now evident in the recent actions of terror suspect Omar Mateen in Florida.

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Image: The FBI literally handed these weapons to a mentally-ill man who was contemplating attacking bars, police stations, and university campuses. Two of the four weapons were Glocks, a weapon used by Mateen in the recent Florida shooting. Both the 2015 patsy and Mateen also appeared to have been in possession of improvised explosive devices.

The FBI literally provided a mentally-ill man they helped plan a terrorist attack together with, an arsenal of deadly weapons – arresting him just before he committed his crime. The only factor that prevented the 2015 entrapment of Ciccolo from becoming a live Florida shooting-style attack was the fact that the FBI arrested Ciccolo before he carried out his planned attack – while those following Mateen did not arrest him.

The role of the FBI in Mateen obtaining his weapons will never be known since Mateen is now – conveniently – dead. Even if he purchased them “legally” at a gun store, it should be noted that in other FBI entrapment cases, suspects were encouraged to purchase weapons themselves, with the FBI arresting them only after they left gun stores with their newly acquired arsenal.

Image: Another patsy set up by the FBI in 2015 was allowed to purchase two semi-automatic rifles at a gun store before being arrested upon leaving with the weapons.

Image: Another patsy set up by the FBI in 2015 was allowed to purchase two semi-automatic rifles at a gun store before being arrested upon leaving with the weapons.

NBC Cincinnati affiliate WLWT5 would report in their 2015 article, “FBI: Cincinnati man bought rifles, planned to attack U.S. Capitol,” that (emphasis added):

Agents said that on Tuesday and Wednesday Cornell met with the informant the final time to plan their trip to D.C. to execute their plan. He purchased two Armalite M-15 5.56 mm semi-automatic rifles Wednesday morning, along with 600 rounds of ammunition, and was arrested. 

Cornell bought the rifles at the Point Blank gun store on Harrison Avenue in Colerain Township. He passed a background check and paid $1,900 in cash, $700 for each rifle and about $400 for the ammunition. 

The gun store owner, John Dean, said FBI agents notified him that Cornell was going to come in to buy the guns about 10 minutes before he entered the store. 

Dean said the agents told him to allow the purchase and agents would stop Cornell after he left the store.

What if agents didn’t stop him after he left the store? He had two semi-automatic rifles and 800 rounds of ammunition – more than enough to carry out a Florida shooting-style attack. Some may be immediately tempted to conclude that the FBI would never allow an attack they played a role in planning to go “live.” However, they would be wrong.

A Notorious FBI-Staged Attack that Went Live

The FBI in fact was presiding over the terrorists who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The role of the FBI leading up to the deadly attack would most likely have gone unreported had an FBI informant not taped his conversations with FBI agents after growing suspicious during the uncover operation. The New York Times in their article, “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast,” reported:

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.

The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City’s tallest towers. The explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars.

The FBI and other US, Canadian, and European law enforcement and intelligence agencies “accidentally” failing to stop terror suspects they have long-known about and have even arrested multiple times has since become endemic. In recent years, virtually every suspect has either been known by such agencies beforehand, or has been involved in a history of crime and terrorism before carrying out their final acts of grand terrorism.

Such was the case in the various French attacks. Many from the network that carried out the French attacks were then directly involved in the Belgium attacks. To explain away the fact that virtually all the suspects had been within European security agencies’ grasp for years but were still able to carry out their deadly attacks – the Western media has attempted to cite a lack of resources.

In reality, what is playing out is an engineered strategy of tension using both the threat of terrorism and actual terrorism to create hysteria, fear, division, and ultimately obedience and capitulation across Western populations.

It should be remembered that Al Qaeda itself began as a US-Saudi joint venture to fight proxy warfare against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan where conventional Western forces could not go. It should also be pointed out that since then, Al Qaeda and its more recent affiliate, the self-proclaimed “Islamic State,” have enjoyed logistical support from the US and NATO for years in proxy wars ranging from Libya to Syria to Iraq and the frontiers of Iran, southern Russia, and western China.

More recently it has been admitted even within the Western press that the “Islamic State” is being resupplied and reinforced from NATO territory itself, with the UK Telegraph admitting in its article, “US-backed Syrian opposition forces surround Isil in key city and cut off main supply route,” that:

…Syrian opposition forces have completely surrounded the Islamic State-held stronghold of Manbij and cut off the group’s main route to the outside world….. 

The loss of Manbij will be a huge loss to the group. It had been a waypoint on an Isil supply line between the Turkish border and the extremist group’s de facto capital, Raqqa. 

Again, we see that while the US claims to fight the “Islamic State,” its NATO partner Turkey is quite literally the source of the terrorist organization’s fighting capacity, with US forces permanently stationed in Turkey for decades and Turkey having been a NATO member since the 1950s. Despite open acknowledgments that the “Islamic State” is operating out of Turkey, the US has used the presence of the terrorist organization inside Syria as a pretext for intervening in the war directly.

Were the US truly interested in stopping the “Islamic State,” it and its allies in Ankara would be easily able to wield maximum force within Turkey’s territory to cut the group off before it even reached Syrian territory.  That both Washington and Ankara are feigning an inexplicable inability to do this, and insist instead that the war must be fought inside Syria exposes the cynical nature with which the West uses – not fights – terrorism to further its geopolitical and domestic political agendas.

As special interests attempt to leverage this latest terrorist attack – all of these actual facts must be kept in mind to ground us to a reality Western politicians and media outlets will attempt to detach us from in the coming days and weeks.

 

Related Link: Zero Hedge Orlando Shooting Updates

How The Deep State’s Two-Dimensional Engineered Reality Actually Works

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By Bernie Suarez

Source: Waking Times

It is refreshing to see more and more of humanity wake up to the functional real-time political reality of the world we now live in. There are many human beings throughout the planet who now understand that corruption has taken over. They understand that criminals run the world. They understand that in America a powerful ruling elite bought out politicians and corporations to get what they want. They understand that the ruling elite operate in networks that transcend the boundaries of nation states in an agenda intended to lead to global domination using their military might.

People are understanding that government propaganda is real, and that the U.S. government has gotten away with one false flag attack on its own people after another; 9/11 being just one of them, all for the purposes of justifying endless war. People also understand that the war on terror, which was ushered in by 9/11, is a lie and that because of this phony war on terror the Pentagon and U.S. military is swimming in billions of dollars of free money to do whatever they want. But what does all of this mean? Do we really understand how they’ve done it and how all of this works?

In 1999 Directors Andy and Lana Wachowski brought us an interesting film called The Matrix which nicely depicts how two alternate realities simultaneously exist: one in which the people in it have no clue what is real and what is not because the sum of the two-dimensional parts they are exposed to seems real, even though it’s not, and another reality where you are irreversibly awakened from that fictional reality.

Over the past 17+ years since the release of The Matrix film many people have awakened to the political reality we live in. For many people it is not difficult to see the parallels between the world we live in and the world depicted in The Matrix. We can see that there is an artificial reality in play that looks and feels real, but it is not. It’s a system designed to keep you enslaved, keep you disempowered, keep you in fear and keep you dependent on big government for survival. Most importantly it’s a system designed to keep itself in power and to preserve whatever agenda it has. Ultimately, this artificial reality is tending towards a global order where the ruling elite hope to absolutely control humanity forever in a way that is absolutely and uncompromisingly in line with their wishes.

The question we should be asking is, How does this matrix work and how does it relate to the three-dimensional physical reality we live in? To answer that, the concept of the “Deep State” was originally proposed to describe the political corruption in Turkey as a secret state acting within a state.

Though we had been warned about these ruling elite, banksters and shadow government by previous presidents going back 200+ years, following the post 9/11 period more and more people began wrapping this concept around their heads. To many, the idea of a group of elite running the world, deemed for years by the U.S. mainstream media and propaganda machine as lunatic “conspiracy theories”, suddenly didn’t seem so crazy after all. Today the concept of a “Deep State,” perhaps because of its roots in Turkey, is much more believable and is seen as more plausible.

In an interview for his book The Road to 9/11, author Peter Dale Scott describes the “Deep State” saying:

It refers to a parallel secret government, organized by the intelligence and security apparatus, financed by drugs, and engaging in illicit violence, to protect the status and interests of the military against threats from intellectuals, religious groups, and occasionally the constitutional government. In this book, I adapt the term somewhat to refer to the wider interface in America between the public, the constitutionally established state, and the deep forces behind it of wealth, power, and violence outside the government. You might call it the back door of the Public state, giving access to dark forces outside the law.

Since the publishing of Scott’s book, the term “Deep State” has gained increased attention and now serves as a practical model to describe how the shadow government operates.

And as humanity continues to awaken to the political reality that surrounds us, the concept of the Deep State becomes more a reality and much less fictional than the idea of the “matrix”, though these two are very intricately related as we’ll see.

The Matrix refers to the illusory engineered pseudo-reality that many people live in. The Deep State is the apparatus that allows that engineered and artificial two-dimension reality to be put out by the control system for daily consumption by the masses.

In order to appreciate this relationship consider the quote from former CIA director William Casey in 1981 when he said that:

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

This is an example of how the Deep State, which is led by Intelligence and their control and manipulation of news, is at the root of the creation of the false engineered world of lies that many people live in. As we can see by the Casey comment, the goal is not to tell a few lies but to actually create an entire reality based on those lies (think Sandy Hook, Bin Laden death hoax, etc).

Manufacturing the 2-Dimensional Reality

What many people don’t realize is that this false world of lies and deceit which is presented to the masses as “reality” is nothing more than a series of two-dimensional items strung together by the controlled media to create an artificial reality. Like the individual frames in a movie reel, each frame seems insignificant until you look at all the frames in a timed sequence. The sequential frames then present an artificial perceived reality.

This is the reason why every time the controllers pull off a staged crisis actor event or a false flag attack like 9/11, those defending the event including the media never seem to think it’s important to provide actual evidence for their claims. That’s because the three-dimensional evidence that truth seekers ask for always conflicts with the two-dimensional presentation they are putting out. The organic presentation of the truth itself, however, is never two-dimensional. It is actual, concrete, multi-dimensional truth which can be reasonably, logically and scientifically verified in real-time on multiple levels and reproduced endlessly without government interference due to its realistic and often simplistic nature.

This is why the demand for “proof” of government and mainstream media claims surrounding false flags and staged events always tends to become the thing that gets truth seekers demonized, attacked, accused, and even profiled as a “harassers” and criminals.

I recently wrote about the attack on Truth that we are seeing today and how it’s not just Truth that is under attack but the very search for Truth. That’s because today, searching for truth is a direct threat to the Deep State, it’s hypnotic control of the masses and its web of lies that make up the matrix, which in turn is keeping people enslaved.

The last thing the ruling oligarchs want is for people to wake up from the matrix of lies which the Deep State has put in place. Thus identifying the Deep State then logically becomes the first step in all of this. Most people in the U.S. don’t realize the degree to which the CIA and the Pentagon are secretly controlling the illusion of government. Even in an election year like 2016, Americans continue to believe the illusion of choice and Democracy which is actually one of the most important features to the operation of the Deep State.

As I’ve written about recently, in 2016 too many Americans are going in circles, like Groundhog Day, believing the same exact lies and promises told to them by the puppet politicians who are running for president, not realizing that this is precisely how the Deep State works. They put out their puppets and pseudo-promises, they ratchet up the campaign hoopla, and they have the candidates tell you anything you want to hear before they select their next puppet president mouthpiece.

Though most Americans know full well that to repeatedly do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results constitutes insanity, they do this very thing each time a presidential election year comes around. These same Americans witness this process with their own eyes every 4 years; another election, another president, the same results.

The result every time is more war, billions of dollars to the Pentagon slush fund, more false flags to justify more wars, more corruption and less accountability from government officials who get caught lying and committing crimes, more lies and propaganda sold to us by CIA’s mainstream media, more police state and tyranny against the people, less freedoms, more staged mass shootings, more globalization and illegal trade agreements, more medical and scientific fraud and false claims to feed the pockets of the pharmaceutical industries and vaccine industries, and, among other things, bigger steps to get us closer and closer to the permanent establishment of a new world order to be sold as United Nations’ “sustainable” living and “global peace and prosperity.”

It is incredible to think that at the smallest level, all of this is possible because unaware and naive Americans continue to believe the phony, artificial and engineered two-dimensional reality presented to them every day by mainstream media and Hollywood. They continue to misconstrue fiction for reality.

That simple inability to discern two-dimensional proof of a claim (a picture, a video, an empty claim by mainstream media or politicians) from three-dimensional proof (all the factors that make a story true including the full collection of physical, and scientific easily reproducible proof, real non-crisis actor eyewitnesses, real blood, real logical spontaneously captured sequences of events, open investigations, etc.) now threatens the survival of the human race and is dooming humanity to a potentially very dark future. This is a future which only those who are awakened to the difference between the presented two-dimensional reality and the actual three-dimensional reality, can potentially save humanity from.

Because this is so, those who realize the reality of the Deep State are therefore the greatest threat to the plans of the ruling elite who run the Deep State. This is why so many online trolls and shills are actually paid to spread State propaganda, lies, create division, insert doubt about topics and post State-sponsored “rebuttals” to key arguments on blog sites and social media. This is why they are fighting so hard to control the Internet, to criminalize activists, and to profile them as “domestic extremists”. This is also why sports fans are mesmerized with pro-military propaganda commercials and fake military worship pre-game ceremonies. This is why so many video games have pro-military and pro-war components to them. This is also why America is always told to “honor” the military. That’s because the military and the Intelligence is the enforcement arm of this evil Deep State. But they do know that as long as they deliver you entertainment, laughter and fun times, you’ll never question what or who the Deep State is. To the blind sheep it’s not something worth interrupting their life to believe, to try to recognize or to find answers for.

In the end, you can call it whatever you want but it’s still the matrix of lies we live in. It operates simultaneously with reality. It looks, feels and tastes real even though it is not. Can you taste it? Can you feel it? It’s all around us as we speak, but whether you see it for what it is, is entirely up to you.

Gurus of the progressive community . . . Chomsky and Goodman

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By Dave Alpert

Source: Intrepid Report

There was a time when I, like tens of thousands of my progressive partners, held Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman in awe. After all, Amy informed us and Noam spoke for us, coherently explaining the issues. However, as I became more aware and more informed, I realized that there were great differences between their thinking and mine.

In many instances, our gurus spoke with forked tongue. Although Amy’s program Democracy Now! was informative, there were many areas of reporting that were out of bounds and were not reported on.

One could legitimately claim that reporters cannot report on everything and they would be right. But let us be honest. When 9/11 occurred, it was an historical event and an event that changed the course of history. Where was Amy? Relatively silent. She invited David Ray Griffin, who has written several books illustrating the lies and misdirections of the government’s narrative about that day, to Democracy Now! which one could claim was a significant journalistic move.

However, instead of interviewing him so that he could reveal to her listening audience the facts that he had accumulated that put into question the government’s explanations of that day, she paired him with a pro-government guest who spent the hour attacking Griffin personally and ignoring any of the data Griffin produced. It became a three-ring circus and helped sabotage any impetus the Truth Movement might have gained within the progressive community. Was that her goal? I’m not sure I can answer that but it was a successful strategy, progressives seemed reluctant to support the Truth Movement. The Movement was being portrayed as one in which there were marginal “conspiracy nuts” leading the charge and should be avoided.

Where was Noam Chomsky on this issue? Despite the significance of 9/11, Chomsky has remained relatively passive concerning this event.

During an interview on Democracy Now!, Noam Chomsky stated that he believes Osama bin Laden was probably behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. The statement was curious because in earlier interviews Chomsky described the evidence against bin Laden as thin to nonexistent, which was accurate and, no doubt, explains why the US Department of Justice never indicted bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks.

In two peer-reviewed papers published in 2008–2009, independent scientists reported finding residues of nanothermite, an incendiary, military level explosive which is capable of cutting through steel, in dust samples from the collapsed World Trade Center. The scientists also found tiny flakes of unexploded nanothermite.

How did this explosive material get into the dust at the WTC? Certainly, one could conclude that the explosives were used to bring down all three towers (WTC #7 collapsed later that day in free fall time despite the fact a plane never touched it).

This evidence of explosives coupled with the testimony of many New York City firemen, who claimed they heard a continuing series of explosions before the towers collapsed, and the testimony of Willie Rodriquez, a maintenance worker in the towers, who stated that there was an explosion in the sub-basement before any planes flew into the towers, make it clear that it was the explosives, not the planes that brought the towers down. The question now is, who planted these explosives in the three buildings that collapsed? It takes time to set up a controlled demolition which means the explosives had been placed in the buildings prior to 9/11. Does this sound like a conspiracy to anyone?

In response to a question at the University of Florida recently, Noam Chomsky claimed that there were only “a minuscule number of architects and engineers” who felt that the official account of WTC Building 7 should be treated with skepticism. Chomsky followed-up by saying, “a tiny number—a couple of them—are perfectly serious.” The reality is that close to 2,500 architects and engineers have expressed their doubts about the government’s explanation of how and why the towers fell. It doesn’t matter how many professionals or intellectuals are willing to admit it. The facts remain that the U.S. government’s account for the destruction of the WTC on 9/11 is purely false. There is no science behind the government’s explanation for WTC 7 or for the Twin Towers and everyone, including the government, admits that WTC Building 7 experienced free fall on 9/11. There is no explanation for that other than the use of explosives.

Also, Chomsky’s assumption that only a small number of architects and engineers have expressed support for the notion that the towers fell because of explosives planted in the buildings and that a much larger majority of architects and engineers have remained silent, is the argument of the absurd. It is equivalent to implying that if 10,000 New Yorkers claim the schools are substandard, because the rest of New Yorkers remain silent, the schools cannot be considered substandard.

Chomsky and Goodman are bright, knowledgeable, intelligent people. What has influenced them to avoid confronting the government regarding the events of 9/11?

The fact that 9/11 investigators had already presented substantial documented evidence for: prior warnings, Air Force stand-down, anomalous insider trading connected to the CIA, withdrawal of most of the U.S. fighter planes from the east coast to participate in military exercises on that particular day, cover-up of the domestic anthrax attacks, inconsistencies in identities and timelines of “hijackers” did not appear to influence either Amy or Noam.

Their influence on people who view themselves as progressive cannot be over estimated. When I began questioning the government’s role regarding 9/11, several of my friends responded to me negatively and said specifically that if my suspicions had any legitimacy, Chomsky and Goodman would be speaking out.

Ever since the events of 9/11, the American Left and even ultra-Left have been downright fanatical in combating notions that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks or at least had foreknowledge of the events.

This kind of response from Chomsky regarding possible government conspiracies is not new. He still insists that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas. Anyone who still supports the Warren Commission hoax after 50 years of countering proofs is either ill-informed, dumb, gullible, afraid to speak truths to power or a disinformation agent.

Michael Morrissey stated, in one of his articles, “Rethinking Chomsky,” in 1994, “we should be clear about the stand that ‘America’s leading intellectual dissident,’ as he is often called, has taken on the assassination. It is not significantly different from that of the Warren Commission or the majority of Establishment journalists and government apologists, and diametrically opposed to the view ‘widely held in the grassroots movements and among left intellectuals’ and in fact to the view of the majority of the population.”

Michael Parenti states, “Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history.”

However, the word conspiracy is often used by those in power, who have participated in a conspiracy to advance their own power and/or wealth, as a label to marginalize and neutralize those who seek to reveal the conspiracy. Thus we, as a society, have developed what Parenti calls conspiracy phobia.

The behavior of both Chomsky and Goodman have led me to conclude that they hesitate to see the conspiracies for fear that such acknowledgment would compromise their reputations. Either that or they are controlled by powerful people who censor their behavior. We cannot afford to accept what they say at face value.

Chomsky’s questionable political positioning is still evident today. On May 17, Chomsky appeared on Democracy Now! and was asked by Amy Goodman to speak on the Syrian crisis. Chomsky is a linguist and words are very meaningful to him. So what he said and how he said it is significant.

“It’s necessary to cut off the flow of arms, as much as possible, to everyone. That means to the vicious and brutal Assad regime, primarily Russia and Iran, to the monstrous ISIS, which has been getting support tacitly through Turkey, through—to the al-Nusra Front, which is hardly different, has just the—the al-Qaeda affiliate, technically broke from it, but actually the al-Qaeda affiliate, which is now planning its own—some sort of emirate, getting arms from our allies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Our own—the CIA is arming them.”

I found it particularly informative that he describes Assad’s regime as vicious and brutal and places Russia and Iran right alongside ISIS.

If Assad’s government is really brutal and vicious, why did 86% of the Syrian people vote for him in the last election. Also, let it be clear that it was Russian’s entrance into the conflict last September that led to the retreat of ISIS from many cities and villages, a success that the U.S. had avoided for a year. Syrians who were freed from ISIS rule were openly happy to welcome Assad’s “brutal” army into their villages. Many Syrian refugees began returning to their homes.

Chomsky also managed to portray the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as terrorists in their conflict with Britain. He conveniently omitted the context for their behavior . . . the brutality of British rule against the Irish Catholics for hundreds of years.

Both Amy and Noam are extremely influential and have attained a degree of power amongst progressives. It is crucial that we remain aware of what they are telling us, how they are framing it, and what it is they are not telling us. Both seem to have provided, and continue to provide today, a cover from the left for the U.S.’s imperialist agenda.

Chomsky is called upon to address various issues periodically. Amy, on the other hand, is viewed every week, Monday through Friday. It is easy to identify her evolution into someone slightly to the left of MSNBC.

With the world collapsing around her, she offers relative silence on issues such as the U.S. supported takeover of the Ukrainian government by neo-Nazis, the surrounding of Russia by U.S. and NATO military forces, the threat of WW3 which would likely be a nuclear war, the Syrian crisis and the U.S. desire to overthrow Assad’s government, the humanitarian crisis in Libya, the coup to oust Dilma Rousseff from office in Brazil, the ongoing collapse of the Venezuelan economy and the threat to the Madero government (please note: both Rousseff and Madero are progressive thinkers—is the U.S. behind the collapse of their governments?). She does not address the continuous wars sponsored by the U.S. and NATO countries in their imperialistic ventures.

Instead, most of her time is spent covering the election and interviewing guests who have recently published books. Her program has mellowed. Most of her guests are establishment people, people MSNBC would not hesitate to have on. The radical view, the view that challenges the establishment, is no longer part of her coverage.

Amy’s audience expects to get the news coverage and the variety of views the MSM does not provide. Today’s Democracy Now! no longer provides that.

 

Dave Alpert has masters degrees in social work, educational administration, and psychology. He spent his career working with troubled inner city adolescents.

 

Mad About Rigged Elections? Mainstream Media Says YOU Are the Problem

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By Claire Bernish

Source: AntiMedia

Mainstream headlines constantly decry Bernie Sanders supporters for disrupting events in outrage, as if their protests and demonstrations somehow illustrate the devolution of the elections. But that focus by the corporate media utterly negates the consistent and continual reports of fraud and disenfranchisement fueling their ire.

And it’s getting ridiculous.

Newsweek, though far from alone, offered a prime example of the obfuscation of the election fraud and questionable campaign tactics by Hillary Clinton in its skewering of Sanders’ supporters.

“Get Control, Senator Sanders, or Get Out,” Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald titled his op-ed — which thoroughly blasts the Vermont senator — as if he were somehow responsible for both the electoral chaos and the actions of an irate voting public.

“So, Senator Sanders,” Eichenwald writes [with emphasis added], “either get control of what is becoming your increasingly unhinged cult, or get out of the race. Whatever respect sane liberals had for you is rapidly dwindling, and the damage being inflicted on your reputation may be unfixable. If you can’t even manage the vicious thugs who act in your name, you can’t be trusted to run a convenience store, much less the country.”

Really?

Because what Eichenwald obviates most readily in his attack is the inability to understand why those protests might be occurring in the first place. Judging by the timing of his article, it’s likely Eichenwald wrote it after chaos broke out at the Nevada Democratic Convention on Saturday — chaos that transpired after the party took it upon itself to ignore thousands who rightly believed Sanders delegates had been excluded unfairly from the caucus proceedings.

Despite the call for a recount, party officials refused to follow necessary procedure and abruptly adjourned the convention, leaving thousands of voters in the lurch — and hotel security and local law enforcement to deal with the aftermath. When things seem suspicious, apparently Eichenwald feels voters should not only have no recourse, they should be happy about it.

“Sanders has increasingly signaled that he is in this race for Sanders,” he continues, “and day after day shows himself to be a whining crybaby with little interest in a broader movement.”

It would be nice if Eichenwald’s hit piece were as much a joke as it comes across, but clearly he’s missed the point — and the vast movement supporting not only Sanders, but electoral justice. Worse, he didn’t stop there:

“Signs are emerging that the Sanders campaign is transmogrifying into the type of movement through which tyrants are born.

“The ugly was on display” at the aforementioned Nevada convention, Eichenwald adds, “where Hillary Clinton won more delegates than Sanders.”

No kidding. That would be precisely the issue that “cult” expressed fury about — Clinton managed to put yet another state under her belt under highly questionable circumstances. In fact, suspect happenings at nearly every primary and caucus so far oddly favor the former secretary of state — and Nevada stood as further testament to why voters are practically up in arms over what appears to be electoral favoritism.

But Eichenwald wasn’t alone in overlooking those concerns — or in blatantly mischaracterizing both that bias and its consequential thwarting of the wishes of a hefty segment of the voting public.

In the New York Times, Alan Rappeport also took the chance to strike at Sanders’ followers by citing Roberta Lange, Nevada State Democratic Party Chairwoman, who adjourned the convention early — earning the wrath of Nevada’s voters.

“‘It’s been vile,’ said Ms. Lange, who riled Sanders supporters by refusing their requests for rule changes at the event in Las Vegas,” Rappeport notes, adding, “The vicious response comes as millions of new voters, many of whom felt excluded by establishment politicians, have flocked to the insurgent campaigns of Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump.”

Though he at least presented that aspect of the elections fairly, his description of what Lange actually did in Nevada misses the mark — that rules change had originally occurred prior to the convention, and Lange’s hasty and subjective decision on a contentious voice vote to permanently install the change arguably created the eruption of anger. But a number of Times staff have contributed sizeable amounts to Hillary’s campaign — and a Clinton family organization also donated $100,000 to the Times’ charitable organization the same year it endorsed her. Funny how bias thus peppers its reporting.

But the media roasting of Sanders and his supporters also appeared in the Sacramento Bee — where the editorial board also called the senator to task for the Nevada incident in lieu of calling out the controversial elections. According to the Bee,

“The episode had the reek of Trump rallies, where threats, insults, and sucker punches to defend the presumptive Republican nominee have been common. Yet looking back at the hundreds of Sanders supporters who descended on a Clinton rally in East Los Angeles earlier this month to intimidate her supporters, making one little girl cry, it now seems inevitable that the same kind of violent eruption would afflict those ‘feeling the Bern.’”

Seriously?

While the protest in L.A. certainly rattled Clinton supporters, violence didn’t pepper the event. One Sanders supporter — sporting a Free Hugs tee-shirt, no less — even assisted Clinton-supporting families with teary-eyed children in tow navigate through the crowd. While reports that someone ripped apart a young girl’s pro-Hillary sign might be valid, it would stand as the exception to what amounted to a boisterous demonstration over justifiable grievances. And, again, this obfuscation forgets entirely the need for demonstrations, which Hillary Clinton — in repeated lies, controversial policy proposals, and a campaign replete with fraud complaints — has clearly helped create.

Perhaps corporate, mainstream media — instead of targeting the symptom — should attempt to report its root cause.

Perhaps enormous swaths of voters being dropped from the rolls in New York; Clinton’s inexplicably astronomical luck in coin tosses in Iowa; inexcusably untrained elections volunteers and their equally inexcusable tendency allowing Clinton supporters to participate in caucuses without first being registered; or any number of other examples from the mountain of ever-growing evidence the elections are, indeed, rigged, are infinitely more deserving of headlines than hit pieces against those protesting such affronts to the American electoral process.

Or perhaps we should all just do as Eichenwald suggests — swallow our pride and our desire for a less corrupt and fairer system — and turn tail.

Or not. Because this system is rigged — and the corporate media helps pull the strings. But as long as independent media reports what the mainstream refuses, and as long as fraud inundates the 2016 election, there will be protests — regardless of whether or not Newsweek and the Times and the rest of their ilk ever grasp accuracy in reporting.

Clinton Does Best Where Voting Machines Flunk Hacking Tests: Hillary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders Election Fraud Allegations

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By Doug Johnson Hatlem

Source: CounterPunch

At the end of the climactic scene (8 minutes) in HBO’s Emmy nominated Hacking Democracy (2006), a Leon County, Florida Election official breaks down in tears. “There are people out there who are giving their lives just to try to make our elections secure,” she says. “And these vendors are lying and saying everything is alright.” Hundreds of jurisdictions throughout the United States are using voting machines or vote tabulators that have flunked security tests. Those jurisdictions by and large are where former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is substantially outperforming the first full wave of exit polling in her contest against Senator Bernie Sanders.

CounterPunch has interviewed hackers, academics, exit pollsters, and elections officials and workers in multiple states for this series taking election fraud allegations seriously. The tearful breakdown in Hacking Democracy is not surprising. There is a well-beyond remarkable gap between what security experts and academics say about the vulnerability of voting machines and the confidence elections experts and academics, media outlets, and elections officials place in those same machines.

In Leon County, Bev Harris’ Black Box Voting team had just demonstrated a simple hack of an AccuVote tabulator for bubble-marked paper ballots. Ion Sancho, Leon County’s Supervisor of Elections, also fights back tears in the Hacking Democracy clip: “I would have certified this election as a true and accurate result of a vote.” Sancho adds, “The vendors are driving the process of voting technology in the United States.”

In 2010, and this reminder will pain those of you who can remember when Nate Silver’s outfit did real data journalism rather than primarily yay-Clinton boo-Trump punditry, a FiveThirtyEight column argued that hacking was one of two possibilities for statistical anomalies in a Democratic Senate primary in South Carolina: “B. Somebody with access to software and machines engineered a very devious manipulation of the vote returns.”

Joshua Holland’s column in The Nation “debunking” claims of election fraud benefiting Clinton rests its case on a simple proposition: why would Clinton need to cheat when she was winning anyway? Apparently, Mr. Holland has never heard of an obscure American politician named Richard Nixon.

More importantly, entering the South Carolina primary, the pledged delegate count was 52-51. CNN’s poll two weeks out projected an 18 point Clinton win. Ann Selzer, the best pollster in the United States, projected a 22 point Clinton win. RealClearPolitics’ polling average projected a 27.5% win. FiveThirtyEight was much bolder in projecting a 38.3% Clinton win. The early full exit poll said Clinton had won by 36%, pretty close to FiveThirtyEight’s call. Tellingly, white people in that exit poll went for Sanders 58-42. But the final results said Clinton won by 47.5%, an 11.5% exit polling miss. And the exit polls had to adjust their initial figures to a 53-47 Clinton win with white Democrats in South Carolina.

Three days after South Carolina’s primary, Clinton seriously outperformed her exit polling projections again in a bunch of states on Super Tuesday, including Massachusetts where she went from a projected 6.6% loss to a 1.4% win. Super Tuesday set the narrative that Sanders had no chance of beating Clinton in pledged delegates.

Correlating Exit Polling Misses and Bad Machines

Let’s be clear: yes, correlation does not equal causality. What strong correlation does do, however, is set the agenda for reasonable investigation. Mocking fraud claims where there is a strong correlative case and actual evidence of potential vote tampering in places like Arizona, New York, and Chicago is precisely the kind of thing that has seen confidence in media outlets plummet to an all-time low. Just 6% of people in the U.S., about the same number as for Congress, have high confidence that media are unbiased and accurate.

Meanwhile, according to a September 2015 study (.pdf) by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law, South Carolina uses all machines more than ten years old. In fact, drawing on the source of the Brennan Center report over at Verified Voting, South Carolina uses provably hackable voting machines without a verified paper trail. Virtually all counties in South Carolina use two machines in particular – Electronic Systems and Software’s (ES&S) iVotronic, a touch screen voting machine without a paper trail, and ES&S’s Model 100, used to tabulate absentee and provisional ballots.

Kim Zetter, the best reporter on hacking and computer security at Wired Magazine, delved into the Brennan Center report with an article entitled “The Dismal State of America’s Decade-Old Voting Machines.” Zetter noted that in 2002, after the Bush v. Gore disaster, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) with billions of dollars available for counties throughout the U.S. to upgrade to new voting machines. Zetter then hits the critical point for discussion of election fraud allegations in the Democratic presidential primary:

But many of the machines installed then, which are still in use today, were never properly vetted—the initial voting standards and testing processes turned out to be highly flawed—and ultimately introduced new problems in the form of insecure software code and design.

Things are dismal, yes, but they are not evenly so. As this map from the Brennan Center report shows, there are just a few states that are as bad off as South Carolina (all machines ten years old or greater). But there are also just as few states that are relatively well off with all machines newer than ten years old.

state-by-state-10-year-old-voting-machines

Of the nine places where the exit polling has missed by more than 7% (South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Ohio, New York), two-thirds are states where all or the majority of election jurisdictions are using machines ten years old or greater. For these six states the average initial exit polling miss is a whopping 9.98%. From my column on exit polling misses last week, the average exit polling miss in Clinton’s favor is 5.1%. For the three states (Oklahoma, New York, Maryland) for which there is polling and for which all election jurisdictions use machines less than ten years old (gray in the map), the average is just a 1.67% miss in Clinton’s favor. Now take note, this 1.67% average includes New York with its huge miss in Clinton’s favor. Alabama is also worth looking at, with a minority of jurisdictions having machines more than ten years old, because I have been using an “Alabama Test” to see whether theories for the exit polling misses make sense.

I put figures like this to exit pollster and Executive Vice President of Edison Research Joe Lenski for question 10, which I’d previously left out of the published version of the interview I completed with him. I wanted to know whether the gap in exit polling misses raised any red flags. Here was Lenski’s reply:

The reliability of vote equipment is a true concern but I don’t see any evidence how the concentration of older voting machines in certain states would have affected either candidate more than the other.  There are many examples of vote count errors.  Here is a link reporting a recent vote count error in the Michigan primary that inflated Ted Cruz’s vote by 3000 votes  http://uselectionatlas.org/WEBLOGS/dave/ .  These types of errors are discovered all the time but there is no evidence that these are anything more than mistakes by local election officials – not a systematic attempt to affect a single candidate’s vote totals.  This reminds me of theories after the 2008 New Hampshire Democratic Primary based upon the fact that Hillary Clinton did better in towns with voting machines while Barack Obama did better in towns that voted on paper.  That was simply an artifact of the demographics in New Hampshire of the towns that had voting machines versus those that voted on paper.  Again the states with older voting machines in 2016 may just be the same states with demographics that favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.

But again, as I argued last Wednesday, the demographics by state and other proposed reasons for exit polling misses do not actually add up. Big misses have happened in the South, in Massachusetts, and also in Ohio where Sanders otherwise did quite well in the Midwest. Nor do age or early voting patterns predict exit polling misses. Still, what is most remarkable about Lenski’s statement is that he is one of the few non-tech experts we spoke with who recognized that the “reliability of voting equipment is a true concern.”

None of the three elections academics I spoke with for last Wednesday’s piece appeared to be familiar with the Brennan Center report on aging and vulnerable machines, and Antonio Gonzalez, an exit polling expert and Latino voter registration guru who called for parties not to seat Arizona’s delegations in last Thursday’s piece, seemed a bit floored when I presented him with question ten from my interview with Lenski. “Oh,” he said, “I thought Congress was supposed to have taken care of that with HAVA.” HAVA, as noted earlier, offered money from 2002 to 2006 for states to upgrade to the then latest and greatest voting technology.

At this point we should take a look at the proven flaws in four very old and hackable machines in particular. These machines or similar elderly and vulnerable machines are in use in almost all places where Clinton outperforms exit polling most substantially. Because I am taking evidence and counter-evidence seriously, we will also look at the machines used in New York City, which are not quite so old (about six or seven years). While those machines, ES&S’s DS200, have had several problems over the years of the type suggested by Lenski, they also have not verifiably flunked independent security tests, so far as I know.

AccuVote (TS, OS, TSX models)

AccuVote technology is among the worst of the worst. This is the Diebold technology hacked in the Hacking Democracy clip. It is more than ten years old, can be hacked in such a way that even those models (OS, TSX) with a paper trail can be tricked, and it is in use throughout Georgia (12.2% miss) and in more than 300 counties or other election jurisdictions in more than 20 states.

AVC Edge and Edge II  (from my column on Chicago Friday)

The AVC Edge and Edge II (with paper trail) were provably hacked by a “Red Team” from UC Santa Barbara hired by the State of California in 2008. Jim Allen, spokesman for the Chicago Board of Elections, called and emailed to complain after my article last Friday. He dismissed the suggestion that Edge II could be hacked because of the paper trail. Not only is this laughable since his team engaged in a wildly inaccurate audit of the paper trail from the Chicago Democratic primary, but Allen apparently failed to click on the linkregarding the UCSB Red Team test that I included in the article. The first paragraph of that article notes that Edge machines, “even those with a so-called Voter Verified Paper Trail” can be successfully hacked by a single person. AVC Edge machines are in use without a paper trail throughout Louisiana (where there were no exit polls but where Clinton seriously outperformed her pre-election day polling average) and in more than 130 counties in various other states.

Model 100 (from ES&S)

Model 100 also badly flunked (.pdf) the California “Red Team” test in 2008. Like the other machines in this list, it is hackable in a way that spreads virally to other machines in the same network. Hundreds of jurisdictions still use Model 100 to tabulate votes, including especially Wayne County (Detroit), 27 counties in Ohio, 9 counties in Tennessee, 78 counties in Texas, and many more that match very well with where Clinton has outperformed exit polls.

iVotronic (ES&S)

iVotronic machines are touchscreen voting machines, many without a paper trail. iVotronic machines flunked a University of Pennsylvania test in 2007 and are the precise machines in question in the previous suspicious Democratic primary results in South Carolina in 2010. They continue to be used throughout South Carolina (no paper trail) and in hundreds of counties in states where Clinton has suspiciously overperformed exit polling.

DS200

DS200 machines have had a wide variety of malfunctioning problems, particularly in New York City, but those problems can and mostly have been addressed in places like New York City by retraining poll workers to check immediately whether each voters’ vote was counted and then offering a new chance to vote if necessary. As stated, the DS200 has not been provably hacked so far as I know. Newer machines of this sort were put into use just this year in Maryland where the overall exit polling missed in Sanders favor, for once, but by just 0.6 points. Still, the votes in Baltimore County have now been decertifiedbecause, among other things, there were more votes than voters who checked in at the polls. In Maryland, the DS200 machines are all networked to a statewide system for tabulating votes quickly. Networking, however, is not required, and my best information suggests that networking is not how the DS200 is used in New York City. Instead, precinct workers pull the results off the machine at the end of the voting day and relay them to county headquarters, according to my discussions with a poll worker from Brooklyn.

What About the Exceptions to This Correlation?

But we also would have to deal with where there are exceptions to this strong correlation between hackable machines and Clinton beating the exit polling badly. Here’s where my conversation with a particular veteran hacker comes into play. I chatted securely with a long-time member of Anonymous whom I’ll call the King of SciAm (not the handle they use publicly or privately). The King of SciAm has long worked with the Telecommix branch of Anonymous. Telecommix rose to fame when Hosni Mubarak cut off internet access in Egypt during the Arab Spring uprising. Telecommix found work-arounds via dial-up internet to keep information from activists on the ground flowing out of Egypt. As a general rule, Telecommix does not take part in Anonymous leaks or website shutdowns and defacements, but they made an exception to that rule early in this campaign cycle. Telecommix members defaced Donald Trump’s website with a tribute to Jon Stewart upon his retirement. The New Yorker’s Alex Koppleman called it the “classiest website hack ever,” a compliment the King of SciAm relishes.

The King of SciAm emphasized to me that, if hired to hack an election (which they would never do), the first thing they would do would be to figure out the best way to leave no trace: “we’d target the network packets or their headwater.” The key idea being for “a hack to survive the security audit trail after the vote is certified.” Furthermore, “we would likely try to target the thing most likely to get it’s logs wiped first – so – whatever it plugs into to move the data. Are the voting machines in use network connected?”

The King of SciAm told me that targeting old, provably hackable machines is “not an unfair theory,” but “you asked how (if we did these sort of things) we would do them.” The problem, they noted, “is that any change to the voting machine operating system or driver stack will likely be found in the security auditor’s rotation pretty quickly. This is because once the machines are down (end of election day) – they are no longer accessible to revert any source code changes or wipe any logs that said you were there, unless you’ve written STUXnet – in which case you wouldn’t be targeting the booth machines either.”

The King of SciAm was not at all surprised that sloppy hackers may be targeting older machines in places like South Carolina and Chicago, nor that elections officials were cluelessly trusting those machines and not even properly following procedures that could catch a less sophisticated hack.

So if, instead of targeting the DS200 in New York, hackers had targeted further upstream in the voting ecosystem, how would you catch it? The King of SciAm noted that you would have to use some procedure to “match 100% of the data, not 5%,” as in Chicago.

To do this, you would need to use a methodology much more like that used in the FiveThirtyEight article on irregularities in the South Carolina 2010 primary election. There, FiveThirtyEight referred to a Benford’s law test on precinct level results. That test showed an “unusual, non-random pattern in the precinct-level results suggest[ing] tampering, or at least machine malfunction, perhaps at the highest level.”

Intriguingly, after I began this series on election fraud allegations, a reader who would like to remain anonymous, emailed to point out similar irregularities in New York’s Democratic primary this year:

Results for Kings County and Bronx county [show] deviation from perfect 60-40 and 70-30 results was the same 0.035% The increase in votes in Kings (Brooklyn) from 2008 is incredible, almost a perfect 10%. Not only that but that’s where over a 100,000 voters lost their right to vote. Another 20,000 votes in Kings would mean almost a 20% increase which would be amazing compared to other counties that experienced decreases or mild increases. 

Furthermore, the overall results in New York, as announced on election night, deviated from a perfect 58-42 split “by 0.005345%. That’s 97 votes out of over 1.8 million.” Will FiveThirtyEight apply a Benford’s law test to 2016 primary results? Not a chance. They have boosted Clinton throughout and are already quite embarrassed by how badly they missed on the GOP side with Donald Trump.

But what about our test? The “Alabama Test.” What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Alabama only has a minority of jurisdictions using old, provably hackable machines. Is that a weak correlation for the theory that in most places sloppy hackers targeted old, provably vulnerable machines while apparently more sophisticated hackers would have had to have been involved with targeting New York’s results as well as registration switching operations in a wide variety of states?

Taking a look at Alabama on a county level gives us a fairly strong answer. Most of Alabama’s counties also use hand cast ballots tabulated by the DS200, but a minority use Model 100, one of our flunked election machines. Three of the flunked Model 100 counties, however, are three of the four biggest counties in Alabama (Jefferson, Mobile, and Montgomery) and accounted for around 40% of the vote for Democrats in Alabama. Clinton won by a 64.2% spread in Jefferson, by 66.5% in Mobile, and by a stunning 73.4% in Montgomery. What happened in Madison, the one county of the top four by population that votes using the DS200 model? Clinton won by just a 38.5% spread! In fact, Clinton did not make it to 80% of the vote in any of the top twelve counties by population except for those three counties using Model 100 to tabulate votes.

And controlling for factors like African American voters or wealth does not account for this phenomenon. Take for instance Mobile where the population is 35.3% black versus a 24.6% black population in Madison County. A 10% difference in black population does not account for a 28% difference in the Clinton-Sanders spread. What’s more, if you compare Mobile to a very similar county in North Carolina (where the exit polls did not really miss), you see something similarly telling.

Cumberland County, NC is very comparative to Mobile, Alabama. They have similar populations, similar numbers of black residents (with Cumberland slightly higher at 37.6% African American), very similar per capita income figures, and both counties had about 35,000 Democratic voters. Clinton won Cumberland by 32.8%, very close to the Madison County (DS200 model) results and about half the percentage spread Clinton saw in Mobile (Model 100).

Of the theories we have so far for why exit polling missed in Alabama by a huge 14%, the only theory that provides a reasonable explanation is vote tabulating machine tampering. Now, perhaps someone else will come up with a non-fraudulent exit polling miss theory that passes the Alabama Test and explains other states as well. Such a theory cannot be about early voting (Alabama had none) and over-projecting young voters (there were very few according to exit polls of Alabama).

Until someone comes up with such a workable theory, election fraud benefiting Hillary Clinton to the tune of a 120 to 150 pledged delegate difference, is the best explanation we have. People wanting to prove this theory should be suing for a technologically sophisticated and independent review of results and the voting results’ entire computer ecosystems in places like Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama, Boston, Chicago, New York, and many others.

Part 1: Taking Election Fraud Allegations Seriously
Part 2: Debunking Some Election Fraud Allegations
Part 3: In-depth Report on Exit Polling and Election Fraud Allegations
An Interview With Lead Edison Exit Pollster Joe Lenski
Part 4: Purged, Hacked, Switched
Part 5: Chicago Election Official Admits “Numbers Didn’t Match”

Doug Johnson Hatlem is best known for his work as a street pastor and advocate with Toronto’s homeless population from 2005-2013. He is now a film producer and free-lance writer based in Chicago.

Wake Up Humanity: The Divide Of The Uninformed

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By Ryan Cristian

Source: Collective Evolution

As the American people begin to closely examine the shroud that has been pulled over their eyes–seeing the veneer of misinformation that has been cast over the country’s exponential and perpetual profiteering and war-mongering–the people slowly awaken to the prospect that, in its simplest terms, they have been lied to.

The Choice To Follow Their Lead

This country is in the midst of a massive awakening, and the average person is being confronted with a choice: address the looming dark realization that their reality is not what it seems, or double down on the comforting lie and brace for the consequences. With the level of information being thrown at the public in today’s battle for the American mind, it is no wonder many have chosen the latter.

It is a far easier path to stick with what’s familiar, however sinister it might be. As Aldous Huxley predicted, people are being overwhelmed with so many conflicting narratives that most are choosing to stick with what they knew. Despite the pressing feeling that they are being misinformed, at least they can feel good about themselves, or so they are told to believe. It has almost become another form of religion: memorize these talking points, spread the talking points, and have faith that you are on the right side.

What this has produced is an entire class of Americans who have been convinced that they are “informed”; who’s attention, prior to this election cycle, was scarcely directed at much other than the latest reality TV scandal. In essence, that is what this election has been turned into, a crazy reality show. This was wildly ingenious, as those caught by the similarities of the two are slowly being turned on to the new reality show: American Politics. This has awakened a dumb sleeping giant, waiting to be pointed in the right direction. These are the very same individuals screaming at rallies and speaking about how we need to “Make America Great Again,” as if those that have been politically active, prior to the new shiny political show, have been just sitting on their hands waiting for this amazing slogan to come along and give Americans the insight they have been waiting for!

In reality they are simply parroting what they saw on their chosen pulpit and aggressively defending these falsehoods with no real understanding of the surrounding dynamics, or why they have the position they are claiming to hold. When confronted with contrasting information, even while attempting to have a civil discussion, these are the individuals who quickly get agitated and lash out, throwing out terms like “un-American” or a “conspiracy theorist” — the preconditioned responses to any idea that even slightly contradicts their treasured gospel of Truth.

The Divide

The current election cycle, with its supposed “anti-establishment candidates,” has completely changed what was previously a political insider’s game. With the increasing support for candidates such as Trump and Sanders, the country has witnessed a rise of the previously voiceless and currently uninformed. What is being witnessed is not only the sudden arrival of the silent 40%, who chose not to grace the nation with their opinions in previous years (by opting out of the voting process), but the staunch divide between who they have risen in defense of.

Whether these anti-establishment presidential potentials are genuine in their intentions or just more Manchurian candidates with designs to continue business as usual, a clear divide has arisen. This has invigorated a previously nonexistent “middle-class” (if there is still such a thing) to come out in droves to cast their vote for whoever their favorite show told them they were smart for already thinking about picking; nothing more than intentional validation of preexisting, preconceived ideas; no real critical thinking involved. This is by design.

Some feel that the intention is to syphon enough votes away from the other potential candidates, using Trump and Sanders, to allow for the clear establishment hopeful, Hillary Clinton, to easily fall into office as the obvious lesser of two evils. Yet, despite the legitimacy of that claim, no one actually informed can call Clinton the lesser of any evil, let alone the best choice. That can no doubt be argued, but all hinges on whether one feels the scandals surrounding Clinton are political hype, or legitimate crime.

It would seem the laughable idea of literally choosing the lesser of two evils to represent the American people and stand as commander-in-chief of the largest military force on the planet has become this country’s only option. As supposed free individuals, it is hard to address this fact and not come away feeling cheated. So, most ignore it, taking solace in the fact that at least they get to choose between the two; but do they?

Time and time again it has been shown in this country that the electoral college (the system that is used to dole out votes after they have been cast) is anything but democratic. Currently in 24 states, the electoral college does not even have to vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote; they can literally vote for whoever they want, despite what the people have chosen. Take that into account with gerrymandering and super delegates, and it becomes clear that this system is cleverly disguised as a democracy, but quite far from being one.

Some feel that this invigoration and divide of the previously uninvolved was created in order to garner the type of violence and unrest being witnessed in all political arenas at the current stage. The end goal being a push into “an obvious need for more control, more government, more more more,” and ultimately, the big aversion for most of the uninformed, the New World Order, or a one world government; which has been openly discussed and is a genuine agenda.

Whether one chooses to listen to the obviously biased mainstream media or an independent source, not following up that observance with research of one’s own is equal to not truly being informed. It is just taking another’s word for it. Should one really bank their future and the future of this country on the thoughts and potential ulterior motives of another?

The only way to truly be informed is for one to take it upon themselves to not only research a topic they wish to understand, but to actually understand the topic, and not just repeat what was last heard as one’s personal opinion.

Do not be another manufactured tool of those pulling the strings. Do not allow yourself to be distracted and beguiled by the proverbial bells and whistles of the current political theatre. Take it upon yourself to understand the true inner workings of the US government and know when action must be taken and when it is in the best interest of the American people for that action to be avoided.

 

SOURCES

http://www.thenation.com/article/figuring-out-why-93-million-people-didnt-vote/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-steven-friedman/antidemocratic-electoral-college_b_1744138.html