CIA: The Corrupt and Ignorant Agency

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Reid Mukai

CIA-corruption-300x227

By Wayne Madsen

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.

Posted on June 14, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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.

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:

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.

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

Posted on June 12, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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.

The Electoral Farce: an Interview with John Stauber

Posted on June 9, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Mohsen Abdelmoumen/John Stauber

Source: Algérie Résistance

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: In your book coauthored with Sheldon Rampton “Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry”, you make a statement without concession on lobbying and democracy. In your opinion, can we evoke a democracy with a hegemony of lobbies? Do you not think that it is rather about a plutocracy?

John Stauber: That book, my first of six for the Center for Media and Democracy, is my tour de force. It exposes how modern propaganda is conducted in the United States by public relations (PR) professionals whose job is to protect the powerful and their corporate wealth from democracy.

The USA is indeed an oligarchy, a plutocracy, and the situation is much worse today than when I wrote my book in 1995. The super-rich whose interests lie with Wall Street, the global corporations, and what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, own and control both the Democrat and the Republican parties and their candidates. This shared monopoly prevents any anti-oligarchy party from emerging effectively to compete, under their rigged laws at the state level for establishing and funding national political parties.

The richest dump billions into both major Parties, their candidates and the election process, so if you are not a millionaire yourself or clearly supporting the policies of the wealthy, you have very little chance of success or of even being heard politically in the US. The corporate media is the recipient of the lions share of this money which they get for selling the TV ads that the candidates and the special interest groups run; they are not interested in deeply criticizing or reforming a lucrative process that fills their own corporate coffers. It’s a hell of a system, a total fraud on democracy, painted up to look like democracy.

In your opinion, is not the American presidential election a joke, when we know that the favourite candidate from the beginning is supported by Wall Street, Neocons, industrialists, AIPAC, etc.?

Indeed the system that chooses and elects the American president is a farce, bought and paid for by the wealthy and the interests you mention. This is why even in an election year as controversial as this one, most Americans will not vote. The majority of Americans have lost faith in what has become a charade that betrays their interests. The rise of both progressive populism via Bernie Sanders, and a nativist fascism via Trump and his takeover of the Republicans, screams loudly about just how foul and corrupt and simply weird the USA’s political system has become. There is a great, angry frustration with the political establishment, and many white voters especially are willing to cast a nihilistic vote for a racist, misogynist, narcissist who inherited his wealth and gained notoriety as a reality TV star.

Does not the election to the presidency of a militarist as Hillary Clinton constitute a threat to the world?

The election of either Clinton or Trump threatens the world simply because of the dominance of the American empire and their commitment to it. Hillary is a proven militarist, which is why so many of the GOP neocons, who led what I call the Weapons of Mass Deception campaign that lied America into attacking Iraq, are choosing her over Trump. They know she will fully fund and expand the American empire at all costs to the American taxpayers and people of the world who suffer under America’s militarism. Hillary played an important role in the Iraq propaganda campaign led by Bush, Cheney and the neocons. Before naming her Secretary of State, Obama made it clear he would not investigate or hold anyone responsible for that grand and worsening bipartisan disaster.

Those who wrote the scenario of this presidential election are they not inspired by the French election of 2002, with Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jacques Chirac, both coming from the same system, where we saw the crushing victory of Chirac? Are we going to witness Clinton’s same landslide victory against Trump?

I don’t think that the nationalists who control the USA’s two party oligarchy are looking abroad for inspiration. They are believers in American exceptionalism and empire, and write their own scripts as they go along, as the neocons did with their Project for the New American Century. The rise of Trump within the Republican Party is a shocking phenomenon, because he defeated 15 others and the entire GOP establishment to seize the party for himself and his rabid reactionary grassroots voters. No one in either party or the news media gave Trump any chance to win the nomination, but he did, while breaking about every rule thought to exist in American politics except one – have lots of money. It is very possible that the smug attitude of the Democrats and the corporate media will backfire and that Clinton, who like Trump is disliked by a majority of voters, will lose to him. It is certainly possible this year, when Trump has already accomplished the impossible.

Won’t Clinton’s victory in the presidential election be a victory of the oligarchy, the coronation of the plutocracy by democratic tools?

The oligarchy is already crowned, already firmly in control. If Trump wins, they will begrudgingly accommodate one of their own class, however ignorant, narcissistic and offensive they find him. But much of the Republican oligarchy, such as the neocons, the Koch brothers and the Bush family, have indicated they prefer Hillary. In essence, the oligarchy wins no matter which party holds office, because the super rich own both parties. That is the brilliance of the bogus two-party system, it is really one oligarchy party with two wings, and both the Democrat and Republican wings support the military empire and the expansion of corporate power.

Doesn’t Bernie Sanders serve just as a kind of “trial horse” for Hillary Clinton?

I have said since he announced as a Democrat that this is a movie we have seen many times before, where a Jesse Jackson, or a Jerry Brown, or a Howard Dean, excite the liberal base, borrow the rhetoric of revolutionary change, create a populist left momentum, and then capitulate to embrace the winning mainstream Democrat at their convention, appealing to followers to do the same. Perhaps if Bernie Sanders had understood a year ago the level of excitement and support he would generate, he would have done things differently. But ultimately he will prove a shepherd for the Democrats, a pied piper, rounding up the lost leftist sheep, and it should be especially easy this year with Trump as the Republican nominee opposed by everyone from him to the Kochs to the neocons to the Bush family. But yes, soon the Feel The Bern movement will morph into the anti-fascist Anybody But Trump coalition.

We are witnessing a very poor debate whose only stake seems to be the replacement of a black president by a woman. Is this not one more manipulation?

You are rather certain that Hillary will follow Obama, and while that is a good bet, the bizarre, unprecedented rise of Donald Trump might surprise everyone and land him in the White House. Obama succeeded because he was anti-Bush and he was not in the Senate when Clinton cast her damaging vote to help Bush attack Iraq. That gave him his greatest electoral edge, he could campaign as having been against the war on Iraq. The fact that he was African American inspired many who were, as I was, quite happy to see that someone other than a rich white man could actually be elected president. However, Obama has proved to be a massive fraud and a disappointment. Even before his taking the oath of office, he made it clear that there would be no investigation of the propaganda and lies that led America to attack Iraq. Biden, Kerry and Clinton, key players in his Administration, helped lead America into war. Blame the neocons for it, but blame those Democrats too.

Hillary will certainly parlay being the first woman president into millions of votes, and she will be running against a misogynist. But again, most American don’t even vote, and those that do are voting against the candidate they dislike most. So all bets are off at this early stage as to whether a Black president will now give way to America’s first female president, or whether Trump will be America’s first Billionaire TV Star president.

As a writer and progressive journalist, what is the reason, in your opinion, for the powerlessness of the progressive movement in the US and in the world?

Here in the United States the progressive movement has never been able to see that the Democratic Party is the enemy and the grand co-opter and destroyer of fundamental change. Bernie Sanders says he is fighting for the soul of the Democratic Party, but it has no soul, it sold out to the super rich long ago. Bill and Hillary Clinton put the final nail into its remnant of progressivism when in the 1980s they and their pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council made their Party a model of Republicanism, opening it to corporate donations, serving corporate interests blatantly, and making it almost impossible for a candidate like Sanders to beat a rigged system and win the Democratic nomination.

I wrote a piece for CounterPunch in March, 2013, explaining how after the failure of Al Gore in 2000, a group of super rich Democrats called the Democracy Alliance arose to fund the sort of liberal front groups, lobbies and think tanks that the Republicans had developed over the previous two decades. Hillary supporter George Soros and others in the DA, including some big unions, poured money into these organizations, and they collaborated with liberal lobbyists in DC as well as with the new « netroots » online force for the Democrats, MoveOn. MoveOn played a crucial role in transforming the anti-war movement that arose during the Bush years into a movement to elect Democrats in 2006 – 2008, completely co-opting that energy and leaving the US peace movement impotent and irrelevant today.

The professional progressive movement is now wholly owned by the liberal oligarchs; its leaders are bright, young and well rewarded, and there is absolutely no real desire to do anything but co-opt grassroots progressives into choosing Democrats over Republicans every two years. The Feel The Bern movement shows that if Bernie Sanders had the courage to break with the Democrats and form a new party or run as a Green, 2016 is a rare year when he could have great success. But instead he and the rest of these professional progressives stay within the Democratic Party, thinking that one day they will control it. It’s a delusion and a failure of vision, but their own rewards and salaries are nice, and they live within their own echo chamber of liberal propaganda from The Nation to The New York Times that reinforces their failure to confront the liberal oligarchy in the name of being realistic.

You do not call for violent revolution. Do you think that it is possible to defeat the big capital, the Neocons, the military-industrial complex, with a peaceful revolution?

Nothing would please the US establishment more, or lead more quickly to a full police state supported by a majority of Americans, than some sort of left wing political violence. We saw in the 1960s and 1970s how the FBI under Nixon and Hoover encouraged violent protests, planted provocateurs, infiltrated the anti-war, Black Power and other movements with thousands of paid FBI informers, and destroyed it. The American Left never recovered and what was called the New Left died. The American people are easily frightened and quick to give up liberties if it appears that armed extremists are threatening their safety. Anyone advocating violent revolution for the United States is a lunatic or worse.

Your writings call for an awakening against lobbies and other capitalist and imperialist domination forces and we notice a derision and despair that call for a better world where all hopes are allowed. How do you explain this Gramscian dialectic?

I am not a hopeful person, I do not believe that revolution is likely, nor that a revolution would necessarily produce and sustain something better. Humanity is deeply flawed, self-destructive, and seems doomed in this century by greed to poison itself and destroy the Earth’s biosphere with its love of corporate consumerism and the resulting toxins and wastes. People everywhere show their willingness to follow nationalist or religious leaders into horrific wars with catastrophic results. The likelihood of nuclear war stays high; it’s a large miracle there has not been a nuclear attack since Nagasaki, but the access to weapons of mass destruction continues to spread. Under Obama, the US and NATO are pursuing a New Cold War against Russia and China that is insanely dangerous.

Can typical people organize together around the world from the ground up to create and sustain a revolutionary society that is just, democratic and peaceful, given the control that corporate capitalism has over our lives and minds and governments? We are completely enveloped by the corporate propaganda system from the moment of our birth on, and it allows the oligarchy to control our minds and lives from cradle to grave, in seamless invisible fashion, via marketing, advertising and public relations, reinforced by the news media. Few are able to admit and see this, which is why I organized PRWatch and CMD in 1993 and co-authored my six books.

The word “lie” often comes up in your writing. Do you think that the United States will survive to their lies, such as the war in Iraq?

The Cold War journalist Izzy Stone said, “All governments are run by liars, nothing they say should be believed.” This is also true of corporate government, the few hundred global companies that dominate the world’s economy and dictate to and through the world’s governments. The United States is very adept at failing to admit, much less confront, its lies. The myth of American Exceptionalism is embraced and promoted by the bipartisan oligarchy and the media, and so we see that there is no real examination of the horrendous crimes and blunders of the government, from the war of genocide waged on Vietnam, to the illegal and devastating attack on Iraq that has led to ISIS, to the massive economic failure of 2008 where no one was held accountable and the fundamental problems never repaired. So, no, in both the short term and certainly the longer term, these lies and self-deceptions undermine and destroy the fabric of American society. The rise of Trumpism is very much a result of the deceptions that have been foisted on Americans, but it is a reactionary and destructive response, of course, that again is based on this myth of exceptionalism and aims to make America again « great ».

You are the founder of the Center for Media and Democracy. What is the role of this center?

I founded CMD in 1993 to publish my news magazine PRWatch revealing how the business of public relations functions to thwart democracy and maintain the power and control of the rich and their corporations. I also wanted to show how western governments use PR to control their citizens, and how corporate media is an echo chamber for both corporate and government propaganda. I ran CMD until 2009, but then stepped down, feeling that I had taken its mission as far as I could after co-authoring six books through the Center. I am now pursuing more personal interests neglected for all my decades as an activist and author. I am no longer writing books or running an organization, and glad of it. CMD continues under new leadership, but it has become much like other US progressive think tanks, part of the Democratic Party’s liberal echo chamber. It has done some important work since I left in confronting and exposing ALEC, a brilliant rightwing operation that allows corporations to draft and write laws at the state level in the United States. CMD’s web address is www.PRWatch.org.

Keep Fear Alive

Posted on May 31, 2016 by Reid Mukai

The bald-eagle boondoggle of the terror wars

By Kade Crockford

Source: The Baffler

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

—Thomas Fuentes, former assistant director, FBI Office of International Operations

Can we imagine a free and peaceful country? A civil society that recognizes rights and security as complementary forces, rather than polar opposites? Terrorist attacks frighten us, as they are designed to. But when terrorism strikes the United States, we’re never urged to ponder the most enduring fallout from any such attack: our own government’s prosecution of the Terror Wars.

This failure generates all sorts of accompanying moral confusion. We cast ourselves as good, but our actions show that we are not. We rack up a numbing litany of decidedly uncivil abuses of basic human rights: global kidnapping and torture operations, gulags in which teenagers have grown into adulthood under “indefinite detention,” the overthrow of the Iraqi and Libyan governments, borderless execution-by-drone campaigns, discriminatory domestic police practices, dragnet surveillance, and countless other acts of state impunity.

The way we process the potential cognitive dissonance between our professed ideals and our actual behavior under the banner of freedom’s supposed defense is simply to ignore things as they really are. They hate us for our freedom, screech the bald-eagle memes, and so we must solemnly fight on. But what, beneath the official rhetoric of permanent fear, explains the collective inability of the national security overlords to imagine a future of peace?

Incentives, for one thing. In a perverse but now familiar pattern, what we have come to call “intelligence failures” produce zero humility, and no promise of future remedies, among those charged with guarding us. Instead, a new array of national security demands circulate, which are always rapidly met. In America, the gray-haired representatives of the permanent security state say their number one responsibility is to protect us, but when they fail to do so, they go on television and growl. To take but one recent example, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared before the morally bankrupt pundit panel on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to explain that intractable ethnic, tribal, and religious conflict has riven the Middle East for more than a century—the United States, and the West at large, were mere hapless bystanders in this long-running saga of civilizational decay. This sniveling performance came, mind you, just days after Politico reported that, while choreographing the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld had quietly buried a report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff indicating that military intelligence officials had almost no persuasive evidence that Saddam Hussein was maintaining a serious WMD program. Even after being forced to resign in embarrassment over the botched Iraq invasion a decade ago, Rumsfeld continues to cast himself as an earnestly outmanned casualty of Oriental cunning and backbiting while an indulgent clutch of cable talking heads nods just as earnestly along.

And the same refrain echoes throughout the echelons of the national security state. Self-assured and aloof as the affluenza boy, the FBI, CIA, and NSA fuck up, and then immediately apply for a frenzied transfer of ever more money, power, and data in order to do more of what they’re already doing. Nearly fifteen years after the “Global War on Terror” began, the national security state is a trillion-dollar business. And with the latest, greatest, worst-ever terrorist threat always on the horizon, business is sure to keep booming.

The paradox produces a deep-state ouroboros: Successful terrorist attacks against the West do not provoke accountability reviews or congressional investigations designed to truly understand or correct the errors of the secret state. On the contrary, arrogant spies and fearful politicians exploit the attacks to cement and expand their authority. This permits them, in turn, to continue encroaching on the liberties they profess to defend. We hear solemn pledges to collect yet more information, to develop “back doors” to decrypt private communications, to keep better track of Muslims on visas, send more weapons to unnamed “rebel groups,” drop more cluster bombs. Habeas corpus, due process, equal protection, freedom of speech, and human rights be damned. And nearly all the leaders in both major political parties play along, like obliging extras on a Morning Joe panel. The only real disagreement between Republican and Democratic politicians on the national stage is how quickly we should dispose of our civil liberties. Do we torch the Bill of Rights à la Donald Trump and Dick Cheney, or apply a scalpel, Obama-style?

Safety Last

Both Democrats and Republicans justify Terror War abuses by telling the public, either directly or indirectly, that our national security hangs in the balance. But national security is not the same as public safety. And more: the things the government has done in the name of preserving national security—from invading Iraq to putting every man named Mohammed on a special list—actually undermine our public safety.

That’s because, as David Talbot demonstrates in The Devil’s Chessboard, his revelatory Allen Dulles biography and devastating portrait of a CIA run amok, national security centers on “national interests,” which translates, in the brand of Cold War realpolitik that Dulles pioneered, into the preferred policy agendas of powerful corporations.

Public safety, on the other hand, is concerned with whether you live or die, and how. Any serious effort at public safety requires a harm-reduction approach acknowledging straight out that no government program can foreclose the possibility of terroristic violence. The national security apparatus, by contrast, grows powerful in direct proportion to the perceived strength of the terrorist (or in yesterday’s language, the Communist) threat—and requires that you fear this threat so hysterically that you release your grip on reason. Reason tells you government cannot protect us from every bad thing that happens. But the endlessly repeated national security meme pretends otherwise, though the world consistently proves it wrong.

When it comes to state action, the most important distinction between what’s good for public safety (i.e., your health) and what’s good for national security (i.e., the health of the empire, markets, and prominent corporations) resides in the concept of the criminal predicate. This means, simply, that an agent of the government must have some reasonable cause to believe you are involved with a crime before launching an investigation into your life. When the criminal predicate forms the basis for state action, police and spies are required to focus on people they have reason to believe are up to no good. Without the criminal predicate, police and spies are free to monitor whomever they want. Police action that bypasses criminal predicates focuses on threats to people and communities that threaten power—regardless of whether those threats to power are fully legal and legitimate.

Nearly fifteen years after the “Global War on Terror” began, the national security state is a trillion-dollar business.

We can see the results of this neglect everywhere the national security state has set up shop. Across the United States right now, government actors and private contractors paid with public funds are monitoring the activities of dissidents organizing to end police brutality and the war on drugs, Israeli apartheid and colonization in Palestine, U.S. wars in the Middle East, and Big Oil’s assault on our physical environment. In the name of fighting terrorism, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, which gave state and local law enforcement billions of dollars to integrate police departments into the national intelligence architecture. As a result, we now have nearly a million cops acting as surrogates for the FBI. But as countless studies have shown, the “fusion centers” and intelligence operations that have metastasized under post-9/11 authorities do nothing to avert the terror threat. Instead, they’ve targeted dissidents for surveillance, obsessive documentation, and even covert infiltration. When government actors charged with protecting us use their substantial power and resources to track and disrupt Black Lives Matter and Earth First! activists, they are not securing our liberties; they’re putting them in mortal peril.

Things weren’t always like this. Once upon a time, America’s power structure was stripped naked. When the nation saw the grotesque security cancer that had besieged the body politic in the decades after World War II (just as Harry Truman had warned it would) the country’s elected leadership reasserted control, placing handcuffs on the wrists of the security agencies. This democratic counterattack on the national security state not only erected a set of explicit protocols to shield Americans from unconstitutional domestic political policing, but also advanced public safety.

Mission Creeps

As late as the 1970s, the FBI was still universally thought to be a reputable organization in mainstream America. The dominant narrative held that J. Edgar Hoover’s capable agents, who had to meet his strict height, weight, and dress code requirements, were clean-cut, straight-laced men who followed the rules. Of course, anyone involved with the social movements of that age—anti-war, Communist, Black Power, American Indian, Puerto Rican Independence—knew a very different FBI, but they had no evidence to prove what they could see and feel all around them. And since this was the madcap 1970s, the disparity between the FBI’s glossy reputation as honest crusaders and its actual dirty fixation on criminalizing the exercise of domestic liberties drove a Pennsylvania college physics professor and anti-war activist named William Davidon to take an extraordinary action. On the night of the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier fight of March 8, 1971, Davidon and some friends broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. They stole every paper file they could get their hands on. In communiqués to the press, to which they attached some of the most explosive of the Hoover files, they called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.

Not one of the costly post-9/11 surveillance programs based on suspicionless, warrantless monitoring stopped Tsarnaev from blowing up the marathon.

When Davidon and his merry band of robbers broke into the FBI office, they blew the lid off of decades of secret—and sometimes deadly—police activity that targeted Black and Brown liberation organizers in the name of fighting the Soviet red menace. According to Noam Chomsky, the Citizens’ Commission concluded that the vast majority of the files at the FBI’s Media, Pennsylvania, office concerned political spying rather than criminal matters. Of the investigative files, only 16 percent dealt with crimes. The rest described FBI surveillance of political organizations and activists—overwhelmingly of the left-leaning variety—and Vietnam War draft resisters. As Chomsky wrote, “in the case of a secret terrorist organization such as the FBI,” it was impossible to know whether these Pennsylvania figures were representative of the FBI’s national mandate. But for Bill Davidon and millions of Americans—including many in Congress who were none too pleased with the disclosures—these files shattered Hoover’s image as a just-the-facts G-man. They proved that the FBI was not a decent organization dedicated to upholding the rule of law and protecting the United States from foreign communist threats, but rather a domestic political police primarily concerned with preserving the racist, sexist, imperialist status quo.

In a cascade of subsequent transparency efforts, journalists, activists, and members of Congress all probed the darker areas of the national security state, uncovering assassination plots against foreign leaders, dragnet surveillance programs, and political espionage targeting American dissidents under the secret counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO. Not since the birth of the U.S. deep state, with the 1947 passage of the National Security Act, had the activities of the CIA, FBI, or NSA been so publicly or thoroughly examined and contested.

Subsequent reforms included the implementation of new attorney general’s guidelines for domestic investigations, which, for the first time in U.S. history, required FBI agents to suspect someone of a crime before investigating them. Under the 1976 Levi guidelines, named for their author, Nixon attorney general Edward Levi, the FBI could open a full domestic security investigation against someone only if its agents had “specific and articulable facts giving reason to believe that an individual or group is or may be engaged in activities which involve the use of force or violence.” The criminal predicate was now engraved in the foundations of the American security state—and the Levi rules prompted a democratic revolution in law enforcement and intelligence circles. It would take decades and three thousand dead Americans for the spies to win back their old Hoover-era sense of indomitable mission—and their investigative MO of boundless impunity.

False Flags

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began Hoovering up our private records in powerful, secret dragnets. When we finally learned about the warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, it was a national scandal. But just as important, and much less discussed, was the abolition of Levi’s assertion of the criminal predicate. So-called domestic terrorism investigations would be treated principally as intelligence or espionage cases—not criminal ones. This shift has had profound, if almost universally ignored, implications.

Michael German, an FBI agent for sixteen years working undercover in white supremacist organizations to identify and arrest terrorists, saw firsthand what the undoing of the 1970s intelligence reforms meant for the FBI. And German argues, persuasively, that the eradication of the criminal predicate didn’t just put Americans at risk of COINTELPRO 2.0. It also threatened public safety. The First and Fourth Amendments, which protect, respectively, our rights to speech and association and our right to privacy, don’t just create the conditions for political freedom; they also help law enforcement focus, laser-like, on people who have the intent, the means, and the plans to harm the rest of us.

Think of it like this, German told me: You’re an FBI agent tasked with infiltrating a radical organization that promotes violence as a means of achieving its political goals—the Ku Klux Klan, for example. KKK members say horrible and disgusting things. But saying disgusting things isn’t against the law; nor, as numerous studies have shown, is it a reliable predictor of whether the speaker will commit an act of political violence. When surrounded by white supremacists constantly spouting hate speech, a law enforcement officer has to block it out. If he investigates people based on their rhetoric, his investigations will lead nowhere. After all, almost no white supremacist seriously intending to carry out a terrorist attack is all that likely to broadcast that intent in public. (Besides, have you noticed how many Americans routinely say disgusting things?)

Today, more than a decade after it shrugged off the Levi guidelines, the FBI conducts mass surveillance directed at the domestic population. But dragnet surveillance, however much it protects “national security,” doesn’t increase public safety, as two blue-ribbon presidential studies have in recent years concluded. Indeed, the Boston bombings, the Paris attacks, and the San Bernardino and Planned Parenthood shootings have all made the same basic point in the cold language of death. The national security state has an eye on everyone, including the people FBI director James Comey refers to as “the bad guys.” But despite its seeming omniscience, the Bureau does not stop those people from killing the rest of us in places where we are vulnerable.

The curious case of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev demonstrates the strange consequences of sidelining criminal investigations for national security needs. In 2011, about eighteen months before the bombings, Tsarnaev’s best friend and two other men were murdered in a grisly suburban scene in Waltham, Massachusetts—their throats slashed, marijuana sprinkled on their mutilated corpses. These murders were never solved. But days after the marathon bombings, law enforcement leaked that they had forensic and cellphone location evidence tying Tamerlan Tsarnaev to those unsolved crimes. Not one of the costly post-9/11 surveillance programs based on suspicionless, warrantless monitoring stopped Tsarnaev from blowing up the marathon. But if the police leaks were correct in assigning him responsibility for the 2011 murders, plain old detective work likely would have.

If security agencies truly want to stop terrorism, they should eliminate all domestic monitoring that targets people who are not suspected of crimes. This would allow agents to redirect space and resources now devoted to targeting Muslims and dissidents into serious investigations of people actually known to be dangerous. It’s the only reasonable answer to the befuddling question: Why is it that so many of these terrorists succeed in killing people even though their names are on government lists of dangerous men?

After the terrorist attacks in November, the French government obtained greater emergency powers in the name of protecting a fearful public. Besides using those powers to round up hundreds of Muslims without evidence or judicial oversight, French authorities also put at least twenty-four climate activists on house arrest ahead of the Paris Climate Change Conference—an approach to squashing dissent that didn’t exactly scream liberté, and had nothing to do with political violence. As with the Boston Marathon and countless other attacks on Western targets, the men who attacked the Bataclan were known to intelligence agencies. In May 2015, months before the attacks in Paris, French authorities gained sweeping new surveillance powers authorizing them to monitor the private communications of suspected terrorists without judicial approval. The expanded surveillance didn’t protect the people of Paris. In France, as in the United States, the devolution of democratic law enforcement practice has opened up space that’s filled with political spying and methods of dragnet monitoring that enable social and political control. This is not only a boondoggle for unaccountable administrators of mass surveillance; it also obstructs the kind of painstaking detective work that might have prevented the attacks on the Bataclan and the marathon.

Our imperial government won’t ever admit this, but we must recognize that the best method for stopping terrorism before it strikes is to stop engaging in it on a grand scale. Terrorist attacks are the price we pay for maintaining a global empire—for killing a million Iraqis in a war based on lies, for which we have never apologized or made reparations, and for continuing to flood the Middle East with weapons. No biometrics program, no database, no algorithm, no airport security system will protect us from ourselves.

Wake Up Humanity: The Divide Of The Uninformed

Posted on May 22, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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

Welcome to 1984

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Hedges

Source: truthdig

The artifice of corporate totalitarianism has been exposed. The citizens, disgusted by the lies and manipulation, have turned on the political establishment. But the game is not over. Corporate power has within its arsenal potent forms of control. It will use them. As the pretense of democracy is unmasked, the naked fist of state repression takes its place. America is about—unless we act quickly—to get ugly.

“Our political system is decaying,” said Ralph Nader when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It’s on the way to gangrene. It’s reaching a critical mass of citizen revolt.”

This moment in American history is what Antonio Gramsci called the “interregnum”—the period when a discredited regime is collapsing but a new one has yet to take its place. There is no guarantee that what comes next will be better. But this space, which will close soon, offers citizens the final chance to embrace a new vision and a new direction.

This vision will only be obtained through mass acts of civic mobilization and civil disobedience across the country. Nader, who sees this period in American history as crucial, perhaps the last opportunity to save us from tyranny, is planning to rally the left for three days, from May 23 to May 26 at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., in what he is calling “Breaking Through Power” or “Citizen’s Revolutionary Week.” He is bringing to the capital scores of activists and community leaders to speak, organize and attempt to mobilize to halt our slide into despotism.

“The two parties can implode politically,” Nader said. “They can be divided by different candidates and super PACs. But this doesn’t implode their paymasters.”

“Elections have become off-limits to democracy,” he went on. “They have become off-limits to democracy’s fundamental civil community or civil society. When that happens, the very roots shrivel and dry up. Politics is now a sideshow. Politics does not bother corporate power. Whoever wins, they win. Both parties represent Wall Street over Main Street. Wall Street is embedded in the federal government.”

Donald Trump, like Hillary Clinton, has no plans to disrupt the corporate machinery, although Wall Street has rallied around Clinton because of her predictability and long service to the financial and military elites. What Trump has done, Nader points out, is channel “the racist, right-wing militants” within the electorate, embodied in large part by the white working poor, into the election process, perhaps for one last time.

Much of the left, Nader argues, especially with the Democratic Party’s blatant rigging of the primaries to deny Bernie Sanders the nomination, grasps that change will come only by building mass movements. This gives the left, at least until these protofascist forces also give up on the political process, a window of opportunity. If we do not seize it, he warns, we may be doomed.

He despairs over the collapse of the commercial media, now governed by the primacy of corporate profit.

“Trump’s campaign has enormous appeal to the commercial mass media,” Nader said. “He brought huge ratings during the debates. He taunted the networks. He said, ‘I’m boycotting this debate. It’s going to cost you profit.’ Has this ever happened before in American history? It shows you the decay, the commercialization of public elections.”

The impoverished national discourse, fostered by a commercial mass media that does not see serious political debate as profitable and focuses on the trivial, the salacious and the inane, has empowered showmen and con artists such as Trump.

“Trump speaks in a very plain language, at the third-grade level, according to some linguists,” Nader said. “He speaks like a father figure. He says, ‘I’ll get you jobs. I’ll bring back industry. I’ll bring back manufacturing. I’ll protect you from immigrants.’ The media never challenges him. He is not asked, ‘How are we going do all of this? What is step one? Step two? Is the White House going to ignore the Congress and the courts?’ He astonishes his audience. He amazes them with his bullying, his lying, his insults, like ‘Little Marco,’ the wall Mexico is going to pay for, no more entry in the country by Muslims—a quarter of the human race—until we figure it out. The media never catches up with him. He is always on the offensive. He is always news. The commercial media wants the circus. It gives them high ratings and high profit.”

The focus on info-entertainment has left not only left the public uninformed and easily manipulated but has locked out the voices that advocate genuine reform and change.

“The commercial media does not have time for citizen groups and citizen leaders who are really trying to make America great, whether by advancing health safety or economic well-being,” Nader bemoaned. “These groups are overwhelmed. They’re marginalized. They’re kept from nourishing the contents of national, state and local elections. Look at the Sunday news shows. No one can get on to demonstrate that the majority of the people want full Medicare for all with the free choice of doctors and hospitals, not only more efficient but more life-saving. There was a major press conference a few days ago at the National Press Club. The leading advocates of full Medicare for all, or single-payer, were there, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the heads of Physicians for a National Health Program. This is a group with about 15,000 physicians on board. Nobody came. There was a stringer for an indie media outlet and the corporate crime reporter. There are all kinds of major demonstrations, 1,300 arrests outside the Congress protesting the corruption of money in politics. Again no coverage, except a little on NPR and on ‘Democracy Now!’ ”

“The system is gamed,” he said. “The only way out of it is to mobilize the civil society.

“We are organizing the greatest gathering of accomplished citizen advocacy groups on the greatest number of redirections and reforms ever brought together in American history under one roof,” he said of his upcoming event. “The first day is called Breaking Through Power, How it Happens. We have 18 groups who have demonstrated it with tiny budgets for over three decades on issues such as road safety, removing hundreds of hazardous or ineffective pharmaceuticals from the market, changing food habits from junk food to nutrition and rescuing people from death row who were falsely convicted of homicides. What if we tripled the budgets and the staffs of these groups? Eighteen of these groups have a total budget that is less than what one of dozens of CEOs make in a year.”

Nader called on Sanders to join in the building of a nationwide civic mobilization. He said that while Clinton may borrow some of his rhetoric, she and the Democratic Party establishment would not incorporate Sander’s populist appeals against Wall Street into the party platform. If Sanders does not join a civic mobilization, Nader warned, there would be “a complete disintegration of his movement.”

Nader also said he was worried that Clinton’s high negativity ratings, along with potential scandals, including the possible release of her highly paid speeches to corporations such as Goldman Sachs, could see Trump win the presidency.

“I have her lecture contract with the Harry Walker lecture agency,” he said. “She had a clause in the contract with these business sponsors, which basically said the doors will be closed. There will be no press. You will pay $1,000 for a stenographer to give me, for my exclusive use, a stenographic record of what I said. You will pay me $5,000 a minute. She has it all. She can’t say, ‘We will look into it or we’ll see if we can find it.’ She has been dissembling. And her latest rant is, ‘I’ll release the transcripts if everyone else does.’ ‘Who is everybody else?’ as Bernie Sanders rebutted. He doesn’t give highly paid speeches behind closed doors to Wall Street firms, business executives or business trade groups. Trump doesn’t give quarter-of-a-million-dollar speeches behind closed doors to business. So by saying ‘I will release all of my transcripts if everyone else does,’ she makes a null and void assertion. This is characteristic of the Clintons’ dissembling and slipperiness. It’s transcripts for Hillary. It’s tax returns for Trump.”

While Nader supports the building of third parties, he cautions that these parties—he singles out the Green Party and the Libertarian Party—will go nowhere without mass mobilization to pressure the centers of power. He called on the left to reach out to the right in a joint campaign to dismantle the corporate state. Sanders could play a large role in this mobilization, Nader said, because “he is in the eye of the mass media. He is building this rumble from the people.”

“What does he have to lose?” Nader asked of Sanders. “He’s 74. He can lead this massive movement. I don’t think he wants to let go. His campaign has exceeded his expectations. He is enormously energized. If he leads the civic mobilization before the election, whom is he going to help? He’s going to help the Democratic Party, without having to go around being a one-line toady expressing his loyalty to Hillary. He is going to be undermining the Republican Party. He is going to be saying to the Democratic Party, ‘You better face up to the majoritarian crowds and their agenda, or you’re going to continue losing in these gerrymandered districts to the Republicans in Congress.’ These gerrymandered districts can be overcome with a shift of 10 percent of the vote. Once the rumble from the people gets underway, nothing can stop it. No one person can, of course, lead this. There has to be a groundswell, although Sanders can provide a focal point”

Nader said that a Clinton presidency would further enflame the right wing and push larger segments of the country toward extremism.

“We will get more quagmires abroad, more blowback, more slaughter around the world and more training of fighters against us who will be more skilled to bring their fight here,” he said of a Clinton presidency. “Budgets will be more screwed against civilian necessities. There will be more Wall Street speculation. She will be a handmaiden of the corporatists and the military industrial complex. There comes a time, in any society, where the rubber band snaps, where society can’t take it anymore.”

Neocons and Neolibs: How Dead Ideas Kill

Posted on May 16, 2016 by Reid Mukai

hillary-aipac

By Robert Parry

Source: Consortium News

For centuries hereditary monarchy was the dominant way to select national leaders, evolving into an intricate system that sustained itself through power and propaganda even as its ideological roots shriveled amid the Age of Reason. Yet, as monarchy became a dead idea, it still killed millions in its death throes.

Today, the dangerous “dead ideas” are neoconservatism and its close ally, neoliberalism. These are concepts that have organized American foreign policy and economics, respectively, over the past several decades – and they have failed miserably, at least from the perspective of average Americans and people of the nations on the receiving end of these ideologies.

Neither approach has benefited mankind; both have led to untold death and destruction; yet the twin “neos” have built such a powerful propaganda and political apparatus, especially in Official Washington, that they will surely continue to wreak havoc for years to come. They are zombie ideas and they kill.

Yet, the Democratic Party is poised to nominate an adherent to both “neos” in the person of Hillary Clinton. Rather than move forward from President Barack Obama’s unease with what he calls the Washington “playbook,” the Democrats are retreating into its perceived safety.

After all, the Washington Establishment remains enthralled to both “neos,” favoring the “regime change” interventionism of neoconservatism and the “free trade” globalism of neoliberalism. So, Clinton has emerged as the clear favorite of the elites, at least since the field of alternatives has narrowed to populist billionaire Donald Trump and democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.

Democratic Party insiders appear to be counting on the mainstream news media and prominent opinion-leaders to marginalize Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, and to finish off Sanders, who faces long odds against Clinton’s delegate lead for the Democratic nomination, especially among the party regulars known as “super-delegates.”

But the Democratic hierarchy is placing this bet on Clinton in a year when much of the American electorate has risen up against the twin “neos,” exhausted by the perpetual wars demanded by the neoconservatives and impoverished by the export of decent-paying manufacturing jobs driven by the neoliberals.

Though much of the popular resistance to the “neos” remains poorly defined in the minds of rebellious voters, the common denominator of the contrasting appeals of Trump and Sanders is that millions of Americans are rejecting the “neos” and repudiating the establishment institutions that insist on sustaining these ideologies.

The Pressing Question

Thus, the pressing question for Campaign 2016 is whether America will escape from the zombies of the twin “neos” or spend the next four years surrounded by these undead ideas as the world lurches closer to an existential crisis.

The main thing that the zombie “neos” have going for them is that the vast majority of Very Important People in Official Washington have embraced these concepts and have achieved money and fame as a result. These VIPs are no more likely to renounce their fat salaries and overblown influence than the favored courtiers of a King or Queen would side with the unwashed rabble.

The “neo” adherents are also very skilled at framing issues to their benefit, made easier by the fact that they face almost no opposition or resistance from the mainstream media or the major think tanks.

The neoconservatives have become Washington’s foreign policy establishment, driving the old-time “realists” who favored more judicious use of American power to the sidelines.

Meanwhile, the neoliberals dominate economic policy debates, treating the “markets” as some new-age god and “privatization” of public assets as scripture. They have pushed aside the old New Dealers who called for a robust government role to protect the people from the excesses of capitalism and to build public infrastructure to benefit the nation as a whole.

The absence of any strong resistance to the now dominant “neo” ideologies is why we saw the catastrophic “group think” over Iraq’s WMD in 2003 and why for many years no one of great significance dared question the benefits of “free trade.”

After all, both strategies benefited the elites. Neoconservative warmongering diverted trillions of dollars into the Military-Industrial Complex and neoliberal job outsourcing has made billions of dollars for individual corporate executives and stock investors on Wall Street.

Those interests have, in turn, kicked back a share of the proceeds to fund Washington think tanks, to finance news outlets, and to lavish campaign donations and speaking fees on friendly politicians. So, for the insiders, this game has been a case of win-win.

The Losers

Not so much for the “losers,” those average citizens who have seen the Great American Middle Class hollowed out over the past few decades, watched America’s public infrastructure decay, and worried about their sons and daughters being sent off to fight unnecessary, perpetual and futile wars.

But inundated with clever propaganda – and scrambling to make ends meet – most Americans see the reality as if through a glass darkly. Many of them, as Barack Obama indelicately said during the 2008 campaign, “cling to guns or religion.” They have little else – and many are killing themselves with opiates that dull their pain or with those guns that they see as their last link to “freedom.”

What is clear, however, is that large numbers don’t trust – and don’t want – Hillary Clinton, who had a net 24-point unfavorable rating in one recent poll. It turns out that another indelicate Obama comment from Campaign 2008 may not have been true, when he vouched that “you’re likable enough, Hillary.” For many Americans, that’s not the case (although Trump trumped Clinton with a 41-point net negative).

If the Democrats do nominate Hillary Clinton, they will be hoping that the neocon/neolib establishment can so demonize Donald Trump that a plurality of Americans will vote for the former Secretary of State out of abject fear over what crazy things the narcissistic billionaire might do in the White House.

Trump’s policy prescriptions have been all over the place – and it is hard to know what reflects his actual thinking (or his genuine ignorance) as opposed to what constitutes his skillful showmanship that made him the “survivor” in the real-life reality TV competition for the Republican nomination.

Does Trump really believe that global warming is a hoax or is he just pandering to the know-nothing element of the Republican Party? Does he actually consider Obama’s Iran nuclear deal to be a disaster or is he just playing to the hate-Obama crowd on the Right?

Opposing the ‘Neos’

But Trump is not a fan of the “neos.” He forthrightly takes on the neocons over the Iraq War and excoriates ex-Secretary of State Clinton for her key role in another “regime change” disaster in Libya. Further, Trump calls for cooperation with Russia and China rather than the neocon-preferred escalation of tensions.

In his April 27 foreign policy speech, Trump called for “a new foreign policy direction for our country – one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace. …It’s time to invite new voices and new visions into the fold. …

“My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else. That will be the foundation of every decision that I will make. America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.”

Such comments – suggesting that “new voices” are needed and that “ideology” should be cast aside – were fighting words for the neocons, since it is their voices that have drowned out all others and their ideology that has dominated U.S. foreign policy in recent years.

To make matters worse, Trump outlined an “America First” strategy in contrast to neocon demands that the U.S. military be dispatched abroad to advance the interests of Israel and other “allies.” Trump is not interested in staging “regime changes” to eliminate leaders who are deemed troublesome to Israel.

The real estate tycoon also has made criticism of “free trade” deals a centerpiece of his campaign, arguing that those agreements have sold out American workers by forcing them to compete with foreign workers receiving a fraction of the pay.

Sen. Sanders has struck similar themes in his insurgent Democratic campaign, criticizing Hillary Clinton’s longtime support for “free trade” and her enthusiasm for “regime change” wars, such as those in Iraq and Libya.

Examining her long record in public life, there can be little doubt that Clinton is a neocon on foreign policy and a neolib on economic strategies. She stands firmly with the consensus of Official Washington’s establishment, which is why she has enjoyed its warm embrace.

She has followed Wall Street’s beloved neoliberal attitude toward “free trade,” which has been very good for multinational corporations as they shipped millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries. (She has only cooled her ardor for trade deals to stanch the flow of Democratic voters to Bernie Sanders.)

Wars and More Wars

On foreign policy, Clinton has consistently supported neoconservative wars, although she might shy from the neocon label per se, preferring its less noxious synonym “liberal interventionist.”

But as arch-neocon Robert Kagan, who has recast himself as a “liberal interventionist,” told The New York Times in 2014, “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Summing up the feeling of thinkers like Kagan, the Times reported that Clinton “remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes.”

In February 2016, distraught over the rise of Trump, Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century wrote the blueprint for George W. Bush’s Iraq War, openly threw his support to Clinton, announcing his decision in a Washington Post op-ed.

And Kagan is not mistaken when he views Hillary Clinton as a fellow-traveler. She has often marched in lock step with the neocons as they have implemented their aggressive “regime change” schemes against governments and political movements that don’t toe Washington’s line or that deviate from Israel’s goals in the Middle East.

She has backed coups, such as in Honduras (2009) and Ukraine (2014); invasions, such as Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011); and subversions such as Syria (from 2011 to the present) all with various degrees of disastrous results. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon” and “Would a Clinton Win Mean More Wars?”]

Seeking ‘Coercion’

A glimpse of what a Clinton-45 presidency might do could be seen in a recent Politico commentary by Dennis Ross, a former special adviser to Secretary of State Clinton now working at the staunchly pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

In the article, Ross painted a surreal world in which the problems of the Middle East have been caused by President Obama’s hesitancy to engage militarily more aggressively across the region, not by the neocon-driven decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and the similar schemes to overthrow secular governments in Libya and Syria in 2011, leaving those two countries in ruin.

Channeling the desires of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Ross called for the United States to yoke itself to the regional interests of Israel, Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in their rivalry against Shiite-led Iran.

Ross wrote: “Obama believes in the use of force only in circumstances where our security and homeland might be directly threatened. His mindset justifies pre-emptive action against terrorists and doing more to fight the Islamic State. But it frames U.S. interests and the use of force to support them in very narrow terms. …

“The Saudis acted in [invading] Yemen in no small part because they feared the United States would impose no limits on Iranian expansion in the area, and they felt the need to draw their own lines.”

To counter Obama’s hesitancy to apply military force, Ross calls for a reassertion of a muscular U.S. policy in the Middle East, much along the lines that the neocon establishment and Hillary Clinton also favor, including:

–Threatening Iran with “blunt, explicit language on employing force, not sanctions” if Iran deviates from the Obama-negotiated agreement to constrain its nuclear program (the bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran zombie lives!);

–“Contingency planning with GCC states and Israel … to generate specific options for countering Iran’s growing use of Shiite militias to undermine regimes in the region”;

–A readiness to arm Sunni tribes in Iraq if Iraq’s prime minister doesn’t;

–Establish “safe havens with no-fly zones” inside Syria if Russian President Vladimir Putin does not force Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down.

Employing the classic tough talk of the neocons, Ross concludes, “Putin and Middle Eastern leaders understand the logic of coercion. It is time for us to reapply it.”

One might note the many logical inconsistencies of Ross’s arguments, including his failure to note that much of Iran’s supposed meddling in the Middle East has involved aiding the Syrian and Iraqi governments in their battle against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. Or that Russia’s intervention in Syria also has been to support the internationally recognized government in its fight against Sunni extremists and terrorists.

But the significance of Ross’s prescription to “reapply” U.S. “coercion” across the region is that he is outlining what the world can expect from a Clinton-45 presidency.

Clinton made many of the same points in her speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and in debates with Bernie Sanders. If she stays on that track as president, there would be at least a partial U.S. military invasion of Syria, a very strong likelihood of war with Iran, and an escalation of tensions (and possible war) with nuclear-armed Russia.

The logic of how all that is supposed to improve matters is lost amid the classic neocon growling about showing toughness or reapplying “coercion.”

So, the Democratic Party seems to be betting that Hillary Clinton’s flood of ugly TV ads against Trump can frighten the American people enough to give the neocons and the neolibs one more lease on the White House – and four more years to wreak their zombie havoc on the world.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

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Neocons and Neolibs: How Dead Ideas Kill