Category Archives: FBI

Why is the New York Times still trying to sweep the Epstein case under the rug?

Posted on by
Reply

By Patrick Martin

Source: WSWS.org

A prominent article published in the Washington Post Thursday exposes the systematic violation of prison rules governing the detention of multimillionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein during the period immediately preceding his death on August 10.

Reporter Devlin Barrett writes: “At least eight Bureau of Prisons staffers knew that strict instructions had been given not to leave multimillionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alone in his cell, yet the order was apparently ignored in the 24 hours leading up to his death, according to people familiar with the matter.”

His report continues: “The fact that so many prison officials were aware of the directive—not just low-level correctional officers, but supervisors and managers—has alarmed investigators assessing what so far appears to be a stunning failure to follow instructions, these people said.”

This language is quite extraordinary, suggesting that Post reporters have reason to believe that the security failure has no legitimate explanation, and may have been the result of concerted action to leave Epstein exposed and vulnerable.

The report continues, “Investigators suspect that at least some of these individuals also knew Epstein had been left alone in a cell before he died, and they are working to determine the extent of such knowledge …”

In other words, numerous prison officials, including some in authority, were aware that Epstein—on suicide watch from July 23 to July 29—was alone in a cell, in violation of rules governing at-risk prisoners. (Other press accounts claim that his cellmate was granted bail on Friday, August 9, and released from custody, leaving Epstein by himself.)

Epstein was found dead in his cell the following morning, at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, August 10. During that night, the two guards assigned to check in on him every 30 minutes did not do so. Both were said to have been asleep for some or all of that night, rather than standing watch.

The two guards reportedly falsified the logs to show that they had checked on Epstein as required, but these logs were contradicted by video evidence from a surveillance camera monitoring the hallway outside his cell.

Investigators from the FBI and the inspector-general of the Department of Justice have taken possession of the videotapes, but have released no information about what they show, including whether there were any unauthorized visitors to Epstein’s cell the night he died.

The Post report suggests misconduct on a scale so staggering that it leaves little doubt that Epstein was either murdered or allowed to commit suicide, with the former far more likely. It defies belief that so many Bureau of Prisons employees, including managers and supervisors, could have each independently decided to ignore the rules for handling the most notorious prisoner then in federal custody.

Epstein had been arrested July 6 at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, and was being held on sex-trafficking charges that carried a possible sentence of 45 years in prison. The nature of the charges, combined with his vast wealth and his connections in high places—including to Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew of England, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—ensured maximum television and tabloid publicity for the case.

Many powerful people feared exposure if Epstein were brought to trial, and there is ample evidence that he was preparing an aggressive and highly publicized defense rather than attempting a plea bargain that would have swept the case under the rug. Epstein was meeting with his lawyers for as many as 12 hours a day, and they have described his demeanor as anything but downcast or suicidal. (Epstein denied that he had attempted suicide July 23, claiming he was the victim of an assault by a cellmate).

Under these circumstances, the real question is why the bulk of the American media, spearheaded by the New York Times, has chosen to swallow the claim of “suicide” and denounced any questioning of the official verdict as a “conspiracy theory.” Epstein was killed in downtown Manhattan, only a few miles from Times Square. But most of the reports exposing new evidence in the case have come in the pages of the Washington Post, while the Times has published lengthy reports—such as a front-page account in its edition of Sunday, August 19—which could be summed up as “nothing to see here, move along please.”

It is worth recalling that when Epstein was first arrested, the Times editorialized against making a political issue out of his kid-glove treatment during his first sex-crimes prosecution in 2008. The editorial urged congressional Democrats to stay away from Epstein, although the US Attorney who had recommended a token 13-month sentence in 2008—with six days out of seven on work-release to run his financial empire—was Alex Acosta, chosen by Trump as his secretary of labor.

While the Times warned Democrats that they would be making a martyr of Acosta by examining his conduct in the Epstein case, Acosta was actually forced to resign only a week after the publication of the editorial. Far from fearing that targeting Acosta was too ambitious, the Times editorial board seems rather to have feared that Epstein, followed by Acosta, would become the first two dominoes in a chain that would implicate others perhaps too close for comfort.

 

Related Articles:

Why is the media dismissing questions about Jeffrey Epstein’s death as “conspiracy theories”?
[13 August 2019]

The case of Jeffrey Epstein and the depravity of America’s financial elite
[13 July 2019]

Russiagate: The Miserable Truth

Posted on by
1

in Washington, DC on April 14, 2004. Robert Mueller named special prosecutor for Russia probe, Washington DC, USA – 17 May 2017 (Rex Features via AP Images)

By Barry Kissin

Source: OpEdNews.com

Introductory Disclaimer: I have never voted Republican for Federal office and I deplore most of what Fox News has to offer. I am currently registered Democrat in order to vote in the Presidential primary for either Bernie Sanders or Tulsi Gabbard.

Going on three years ago, on Nov. 12, 2016, my local newspaper, the Frederick News-Post, published my letter that stated: “Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate. In an effort to deflect attention from the DNC rigging of her primary contest with Bernie Sanders, she resorted to somehow blaming the Russians. This was part of a pathological pattern, whose ultimate purpose was and is to remove the main obstacle (Russia under Putin) to neo-con schemes for global domination.”

We do not want to further demonize Russia (or Iran). This is unwarranted and dangerous to human survival. Its purpose is to aggressively assert American Empire against all limitations and to justify the astronomical sums we spend on war and weapons.

Hillary touted that all of our 17 intelligence agencies concluded with “high confidence” that the Russians meddled in our election for Trump’s benefit. False. The assessor was John Brennan, then spy-in-chief, who put together a secret panel of his choices from FBI, CIA and NSA in order to produce his miserable invention of the who, how and why the Russians did their dastardly meddling.

See Washington Post, June 23, 2017: “CIA Director John Brennan first alerts the White House in early August [2016] that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered an operation to defeat or at least damage Hillary Clinton and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump” based on what Brennan claimed was some source “deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign”. Which source had supplied “Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives”? No evidence has ever been produced backing up any of this.

Enter Mueller, a “deep state” hack if there ever was one. It bears mentioning that Mueller is the grandnephew of Richard Bissel, second in command at the CIA when JFK fired him after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Mueller is married to the granddaughter of General Charles Cabell, third in command at the CIA, also fired by JFK; Mueller’s wife is also a grandniece of Earl Cabell, Mayor of Dallas when JFK was assassinated there, who was recently uncovered to have been a CIA asset. Small world.

Mueller’s career is replete with the production of disinformation and cover-ups. My community, home of Fort Detrick, got a dose of Mueller at work in the Amerithrax investigation. That investigation is the one in which Mueller framed Detrick scientist Bruce Ivins for sending the anthrax letters in order to cover up that the weaponization of the anthrax attack was a unique CIA technology.

On behalf of his current handlers, Mueller sang and danced his way into various indictments, most of which truly had nothing to do with Russiagate, but he couldn’t pull off even trying to nail Trump for collusion.

Of course, this isn’t the end of it. Pathetically, Democrats are pretending that Russiagate was nevertheless worthwhile (thus compounding the stupidity) on the basis that Trump obstructed justice, and also that we now know we have to protect our precious Presidential election from the Russians.

Obstructed what? Obstructed an investigation into the fabricated charge of collusion? Mueller just testified (on July 24) that whatever Trump did, it neither curtailed nor hindered his investigation, which after more than two years could neither find nor manufacture any evidence of collusion.

But now let’s drill down into this mantra of Russian meddling. According to the Mueller report, there were two facets: 1.) hacking of the DNC emails then sourcing to Wikileaks; and 2.) social media campaign. The social media campaign is a joke. The hacking story is more serious.

According to Mueller, it was the Russian company Internet Research Agency (IRA) that on behalf of the Russian government conducted the Facebook campaign. At page 25 of Vol. 1, Mueller informs us that this Russian company purchased 3,500 ads for a total expenditure of $100,000, which I ask you to compare to the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Trump and Clinton campaigns.

It’s sillier than that. According to Facebook’s testimony before Congress, most of the ads the IRA purchased were after the election and most said nothing about either Hillary or Trump. But they tended to promote “divisiveness” according to Mueller. Absurd!

We also now have a recently unsealed ruling by the U.S. District Court for D.C. that ordered Mueller to cease and desist from claiming that IRA was acting on behalf of the Kremlin – his linchpin claim — supported by no substantive evidence.

The most credible analyst of the hacking story has been completely (and deliberately) ignored by mainstream media. The implications of his analysis are so unsettling (dangerous) that even most alternative media avoid acknowledging him. But I believe “unsettling” is necessary to the process of waking up from the fairy tales Americans rely on, so I will lay out the truth about the stolen emails. This truth is simple and clear and unsettling.

The “most credible analyst” is named William Binney. He is a 32-year veteran of the NSA who, when he left the NSA in 2001, was the “Technical Leader” for intelligence, the senior technical analyst at the NSA. Binney resigned and blew the whistle when he discovered that his surveillance program was being used to spy on Americans without probable cause. Binney went on to co-found Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) comprised of our smartest and bravest intelligence veterans whose very first effort in Feb., 2003 was to debunk Colin Powell’s UN presentation and to warn against “a war [upon Iraq] for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

The VIPS forensic analysis of the hacking story in all of its painstaking detail can be accessed at ConsortiumNews.com. Here is a takeaway: On July 5, 2016, the intrusion into the DNC emails transferred data at an average speed of 22.7 megabytes per second, a speed that far exceeded the capability of the Internet as of July 2016. The speed of that data transfer corresponds with the speed of copying to a thumb drive (memory stick). Thus, there was no hack via the internet; it was a leak by someone with physical access to a DNC computer or server, most probably an insider.

We know who that insider was. His name, Seth Rich; a 27-year old DNC staffer who supported Bernie Sanders, and who was murdered in Washington, D.C on July 10, 2016. Two gun shots in the back. D.C. police said Rich was the victim of a “random burglary,” but nothing was taken, not his expensive watch, nor his money, nor his credit cards, nor his cell phone.

On August 9, 2016, Julian Assange was interviewed on Dutch TV in a segment available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7FkLBRpKg Without violating the Wikileaks cardinal rule of never revealing sources, Assange came as close as he could to identifying Seth Rich as the source of the DNC emails. On that same date, Wikileaks offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Rich’s killer or killers.

William Binney informs us that in response to a FOIA request seeking records of communications between Seth Rich and others including Julian Assange, the NSA revealed that it has 15 documents, 32 pages of relevant records, but that it is all classified.

Next witness, Seymour Hersh. Wikipedia: “Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered Watergate for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the US military’s mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. He has won two National Magazine Awards and five George Polk Awards. In 2004, he received the George Orwell Award. More recently, Hersh uncovered that Obama, and Trump in 2017, blamed chemical attacks in Syria on Assad as a pretext for bombing Syria when in fact the chemical attacks were staged by the “rebels” we support.

In Nov. 2016, when Hersh did not realize he was being recorded, the recording became available months later on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwMKFnzLoxQ , here’s what Hersh said: “All I know comes off an FBI report”. Paraphrasing : The D.C. police got a warrant to search Rich’s apartment. They seized his computer and turned it over to the FBI’s cyber unit. What the [FBI] report says is that sometime in late spring/early summer, [Seth Rich] makes contact with Wikileaks. That’s in his computer; [Rich]; had submitted some juicy emails from the DNC. He offered an extensive sample”, and said, “I want money; anyway Wikileaks got access.

Hersh goes on to say: “Brennan’s an a**hole. I’ve known all these people for years. I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He’s a very high level guy. It’s a Brennan operation. [Russiagate] was an American disinformation operation.”

Seth Rich had to be eliminated before Russiagate could be perpetrated.

Who Protected Epstein for Decades, and Why?

Posted on by
Reply

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Let’s start by stipulating that the Jeffrey Epstein story is so sordid and outlandish that it’s like a made-for-TV movie about the evil proprietor of a nightmarish enclave of private perversion and sexual exploitation, Lolita Island.

For Epstein’s victims, the nightmare was all too real.

Next, let’s stipulate that in a nation with a functioning system of justice, every individual who knew about Epstein’s degenerate empire and did nothing to stop it should be ushered into a Federal prison cell to ponder their sins against the exploited girls and against the nation.

Yes, as in treason, as in “throw them in prison and let them rot” treason. As I have explained, corruption and debauchery undermine the legitimacy of the state, and so doing nothing while Epstein et al. gratified the desires of the rich and powerful for degenerate debauchery was treasonous: the American state will collapse not from military conflict but from moral decay, and every individual who enabled (or made use of) that moral decay is guilty of treason.

Which leads us to the basic questions of the case: who protected Epstein for decades, and why? There are several explanations floating around for the why: those in power enjoyed their diabolically exploitive visits to Lolita Island and wanted to continue their criminal gratifications.

The second explanation is that Epstein was a spy for a “friendly” foreign intelligence agency and therefore off-limits. (“Friendly” is in quotes because when it comes to intelligence, one’s “friends” can do more damage than one’s worst enemies.)

Let’s say this turns out to be true. Wouldn’t the NSA, CIA and FBI know of Epstein’s activities and connections to a foreign intelligence service? Of course they would. So at a minimum, we can infer the NSA, CIA and FBI enabled Epstein’s operation to continue for some benefit, perhaps relating to “honeypot” blackmail and control of “assets,” unwilling or willing.

This narrative is the “explanation” for Epstein’s wrist-slap conviction a decade ago: he was supposedly an “asset” of US intelligence.

So exploiting vulnerable girls served the “national interests” and therefore it’s all OK. If we’re supposed to believe this is the heart of the matter, how is America any different from a corrupt developing-world kleptocracy organized to gratify a handful of oligarchs and their cronies?

Or perhaps the “he was an intelligence asset” is just a tissue-thin cover for a much more destructive reality: those at the top of the American state have no moral compass at all. That honeypots and blackmail are standard-issue tools of spycraft targeting individuals in the employee of other nations is a given, but presumably the CIA doesn’t recruit 14-year girls as bait (although nothing should surprise us at this point).

But Lolita island (a.k.a. Orgy Island) was not spycraft; it was a privately operated wholesale exploitation of underage girls for the gratification of the Western world’s male elites. That some enterprising agency recruited (or blackmailed) Jeffrey Epstein was predictable, as the treasure trove of compromising videos could yield all sorts of useful leverage on highly placed individuals.

Many of us sense an existential crisis is close at hand, and the U.S. is ill-prepared for such a crisis. Possibilities broached by others include a global war, a break-up of the U.S. into regional states, or a civil war of some sort.

My bet is on a moral and financial crisis in which the ruling elites and the federal state lose their legitimacy, i.e. the consent of the governed. As their Federal Reserve “money” loses value and the corruption of the ruling elites and the government they control reaches extremes, the citizenry will no longer heed their corrupt, self-serving “leaders.”

If America’s ruling elites will not let justice be done, then they guarantee a revolt against the elites that could track a very grim path if that is the only option left open to the citizenry.

Once again I turn to The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats for a poetic evocation of the coming crisis:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems

Posted on by
Reply

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

A new article by Forbes reports that the CEO of Crowdstrike, the extremely shady cybersecurity corporation which was foundational in the construction of the official CIA/CNN Russian hacking narrative, is now a billionaire.

George Kurtz ascended to the billionaire rankings on the back of soaring stocks immediately after the company went public, carried no doubt on the winds of the international fame it gained from its central protagonistic role in the most well-known hacking news story of all time. A loyal servant of empire well-rewarded.

Never mind that US government insiders like Hillary Clinton had been prepping for escalations against Russia well in advance of the 2016 elections, and that their preexisting agendas to shove a geostrategic obstacle off the world stage benefitted from the hacking narrative as much as George Kurtz did.

Never mind that Crowdstrike is tied to the NATO narrative management firm known as the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO, Gulf states and powerful international oligarchs. Never mind either that Crowdstrike was financed with a whopping $100 million from Google, which has had a cozy relationship with US intelligence agencies since its very inception.

Never mind that to this day the DNC servers have not been examined by the FBI, nor indeed were they examined by the Special Counsel of Robert “Iraq has WMD” Mueller, preferring instead to go with the analyses of this extremely shady outfit with extensive and well-documented ties with the oligarchic leaders of the US-centralized empire. Also never mind that the Crowdstrike analyst who led forensics on those DNC servers had in fact worked for and was promoted by Robert Mueller while the two were in the FBI.

As I never tire of saying, the real underlying currency in our world is not gold, nor bureaucratic fiat, nor even raw military might. The real underlying currency of our world is narrative, and the ability to control it.

As soon as you really grok this dynamic, you start noticing it everywhere. George Kurtz is one clear example today of narrative control’s central role in the maintenance and expansion of existing power structures, as well as an illustration of how the empire is wired to reward those who advance pro-empire narratives and punish those who damage them; just compare how he’s doing to how Julian Assange is doing, for example.

But you see examples pop up every day:

  • The US State Department just got busted using a $1.5 million troll farm to manipulate public discourse on social media about Iran.
  • Video footage has just surfaced of the OPCW Director General admitting that the OPCW did indeed deliberately omit any mention in its official findings of a report from its own investigation which contradicts the establishment narrative about a chemical strike in Douma, Syria, an admission which answers controversial questions asked by critics of western imperialism like myself, and which the mainstream media have not so much as touched.
  • Mintpress News broke a story the other day about a new narrative management operation known as “The Trust Project”, a coordinated campaign by establishment-friendly mass media outlets for “gaming search-engine and social-media algorithms in collusion with major tech companies like Google and Twitter.”
  • In a new interview with The Canary, UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer explicitly named the mass media as largely responsible for Assange’s psychological torture, excoriating them for the way that they “have shown a remarkable lack of critical independence and have contributed significantly to spreading abusive and deliberately distorted narratives about Mr Assange.”
  • In a new essay called “Freeing Julian Assange“, journalist Suzie Dawson reports that “Countless articles appear to have been obliterated from the internet” about Assange and WikiLeaks, amounting to some 90 percent of the links Dawson examined which were shared in tweets by or about WikiLeaks and Assange since 2010.
  • I just finished reading this excellent Swiss Propaganda Research essay about the little-known fact that “most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.”

Any one of these could have a full-length Caitlin Johnstone essay written about it. I write about this stuff for a living, and even I don’t have the time or energy to write full articles about every single narrative control tool that the US-centralized empire has been implementing into its arsenal. There are too damn many of them emerging too damn fast, because they’re just that damn crucial for maintaining existing power structures.

Because whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

Power used to be much easier to identify in our society: just look for the fellow with the sparkly hat made of gold sitting in a really big chair and bossing everyone around. As our society advanced philosophically, however, people began to tire of having every aspect of their society determined by some schmuck in a golden hat, and started fighting for ideals called “freedom” and “democracy” in their respective nations. And, as far as our parents and teachers have taught us, freedom and democracy are exactly what we have now.

Except that’s all crap. Freedom and democracy only exist within the western empire to the extent that it keeps up appearances. Because the trouble with democracy, it turns out, is that human minds are very hackable, as long as you’ve got the resources. Wealthy and powerful people do have the resources, which means that it’s very possible for wealthy and powerful people to manipulate the masses into voting in a way that consistently benefits the wealthy and powerful. This is why billionaires and narrative control consistently go hand-in-hand.

This dynamic has allowed for western power structures to operate in a way that western democracy was explicitly designed to prevent: for the benefit of the powerful instead of for the benefit of the voting populace. So now we’ve got people in so-called liberal democracies voting to maintain governments which advance wars which don’t benefit them, to advance intrusive surveillance and police state policies which oppress them, to advance austerity policies which harm them, to advance labor policies which exploit them, and to maintain ecocidal environmental policies which threaten the very survival of our species. All because the wealthy and powerful are able to use their wealth and power to manipulate the way people think and vote.

This is why I pay far more attention in my work to narrative control than to politics. Politics is downstream from narrative control, which is why the 2020 US presidential race is already a contest to see what level of Democratic corporatist warmonger will be running against the incumbent Republican corporatist warmonger. The narrative-controlling class does its level best to hide the fact that anything’s fundamentally wrong with the system, then when people notice it’s deeply broken they encourage them to use completely impotent tools to fix it. “Don’t like how things are run? Here, vote for our other puppet!”

The root of all our problems right now is the fact that human minds are very hackable with enough resources, combined with the fact that war, oppression, exploitation and ecocide are highly profitable. This dynamic has caused human collective consciousness to generally dead-end into a kind of propagandized, zombified state in which all our knowledge and all our thinking moves in alignment with the agendas of existing power structures. It’s much easier to continue believing the official narratives than to sort through everything you’ve been told about your society, your nation and your world since grade school and work out what’s true and what’s false. Many don’t have the time. Many more don’t have the courage.

We will remain in this collective dead-end, hurtling toward either Orwellian dystopia or extinction via climate collapse or nuclear armageddon, until we find a way out of it. It won’t come from the tools our rulers have given us, and it won’t come from repeating any of the old patterns which got us here. In order to escape from the increasingly adept narrative control matrix that is being built around our collective mind by the powerful, we’re going to have to change our relationship with narrative altogether. We will either pass this great test or we will fail it, and we absolutely have the freedom to go either way.

The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell’s 1984 Is No Longer Fiction

Posted on by
1

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

It’s been 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm—depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.

Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

Our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell

The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security business was booming to such an extent that it eclipsed mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in the near future.

The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives. At three times the size of the CIA, constituting one third of the intelligence budget and with its own global spy network to boot, the NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, whether or not it has always had the authorization to do so.

Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.

Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs. As Orwell explains:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ― George Orwell

How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.

And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

All three—Bradbury, Huxley and Orwell—had an uncanny knack for realizing the future, yet it is Orwell who best understood the power of language to manipulate the masses. Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary. To give a single example, as psychologist Erich Fromm illustrates in his afterword to 1984:

The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free,” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed as concepts….

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell

Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. In fact, the addiction to screen devices—especially cell phones—has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking one’s every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, “Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.

We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government. In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us—the proverbial “needle in a haystack,” as one official termed it—the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity and credit card transactions. Much of this data is being fed through fusion centersacross the country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children. These are state and regional intelligence centers that collect data on you.

“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.

The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.

Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any “threatening” words are detected—no matter how inane or silly—the record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.

In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” ― George Orwell

Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

Say hello to the new Thought Police.

Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA is now designing an artificial intelligence system that is designed to anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA will feed vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer can then use to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.

Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, “citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.”

Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”—Orwell

So where does that leave us?

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.

Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.

So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?

We’re running out of options.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.

Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited: “Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”

Mueller Report Ends a Shameful Period for the Press

Posted on by
Reply

By Chris Hedges

Source: Truthdig

The Mueller report’s categorical statement that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia ends one of the most shameful periods in modern American journalism, one that rivals the mindless cheerleading for the Iraq War by most of the press. It further erodes and may prove fatal to the credibility of a press that has steadfastly rendered most of the country invisible and functions as little more than an array of gossiping courtiers to the elites.

“ ‘[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,’ ” the report by special counsel Robert Mueller says, according to a direct quotation given in an official letter by U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

The charge that Russia stole the 2016 presidential election, that Vladimir Putin has secret “pee tapes” of Trump cavorting in a Moscow hotel with prostitutes or that Trump has been a longtime “Kremlin agent,” repeated by reporters whose work I admired in the past, is demagoguery as pernicious as the vile taunts and racist tropes that come out of the White House. The press endlessly repeated such allegations while ignoring the expanding social inequality and suffering of a country where half the population lives in poverty, as well as the collapse of our democratic institutions. These facts, not Russian manipulation, saw enraged American voters elect a demagogue who at least belittles the elites, including those in the press, who sold them out. The charge that Trump was a tool of Russia is entertaining. It attracts billions in advertising dollars. It allows the press to posture as a moral crusader. But over the past three years this obsession blotted out most of the real crimes committed by this administration and the reality most Americans endure.

The mainstream press, owned by the corporations that have extinguished the democratic state and are fleecing the public, as well as destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life, does not hold its employers to account. The empty chatter about Russia, including in The New York Times, exposes the bankruptcy of the U.S. media. MSNBC and CNN, which long ago abandoned journalism for entertainment, have breathlessly clogged the airwaves with ridiculous conspiracy theories and fantasies and used them to justify a faux crusade.

Don’t expect any of this to change. Rachael Maddow, like Jack Tapper or any other fatuous news celebrity, will not be held to account for slogging through this fiction night after night. Maddow will still collect her $10-million-a-year salary. And the handful of reporters who exhibited journalistic integrity—Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Maté, Robert Scheer, Max Blumenthal and Katrina vanden Heuvel—will continue to remain on the margins of the media landscape. The press is an arm of the corporate-funded burlesque that has replaced the country’s political life and turned civic debate into a vast reality show.

The more the big news outlets try to spin this report, arguing that they need to see the full report rather than the attorney general’s summary, or that Jared Kushner sought to use the communications systems of Russian diplomats, the more credibility they will lose. And they do not have much credibility left. The lurid details of the president’s alleged sexual relations with a porn star and a Playboy bunny, and of “Russiagate,” have replaced journalism. These stories have nothing to do with the lives of most Americans. This descent into the inane and the tawdry gives immunity to Trump. In attacking the press he attacks an institution most Americans loath. And with good reason. The press, unwittingly, enhances a president it seeks to destroy. And its decline, accelerated by its collaboration with liberal Democratic elites who scapegoat Russia to avoid confronting their responsibility for trashing the country in the service of corporate oligarchs, will get worse. Little the press says about Trump will now be believed.

There was, of course, massive interference in our election by a foreign power—Israel. But try saying this naked truth out loud and you will suffer the character assassination, chanted by the unified chorus in the press and the political hierarchy of both parties, that was unleashed on Rep. Ilhan Omar. The engine driving our animosity toward Russia comes from the arms industry, which with the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s border—despite assurances given upon the unification of Germany that this would not happen—is making billions of dollars selling weapons to countries in Eastern Europe. The situation is also exacerbating tensions between two of the world’s biggest nuclear powers. But this is just one more suppressed truth.

The Trump administration has carried out policies that, rather than serve Russian interests, have further antagonized our relationship with Moscow. It has imposed sanctions. It is openly attempting to overthrow the government of a country that Russia supports, Venezuela. It is attempting to block the sale of Russian natural gas to Europe. It has sold weapons to Ukraine, a foe of the Kremlin. It has armed insurgents in Syria and carried out airstrikes, even as Russian troops seek to prop up the Syrian regime. It has withdrawn from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. But facts matter little to Russian-conspiracy theorists.

It is not only Trump who has obliterated the line between fact and fiction. It is the press. It hyped and reported allegations it never investigated or confirmed. And by doing this, repeating failures of the kind that appeared in its coverage of the invasion of Iraq, it has committed suicide. A nation that lacks a functioning press becomes a tyranny. This is not Trump’s fault, but our own.

Mueller’s Sideshow Closes – But it has Served its Purpose

Posted on by
Reply

in Washington, DC on April 14, 2004. Robert Mueller named special prosecutor for Russia probe, Washington DC, USA – 17 May 2017 (Rex Features via AP Images)

By Kit Knightly

Source: Off Guardian

To state my position clearly – I never believed, for a second, that the Mueller investigation would find any evidence of “Russian collusion”. And not simply because there isn’t any. I mean, let’s be honest, the powers that be “find evidence” of things that never happened all the time.

They “found” photos of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle, and they “found” Satam al-Suqami’s passport in the rubble of the World Trade Center. They produced “evidence” the Russians shot down MH17 and poisoned the Skripals. There is “evidence” Assad gassed his own people. There was “evidence” Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be here in 45 minutes. (Mueller himself testified to that).

The Deep State have made it more than clear that objective fact does not matter to them. When the CIA, the FBI or the Pentagon want the evidence, they invent find it.

No, I was sure they wouldn’t find Russian collusion, because they didn’t really want to.

Firstly, it’s dangerous. However mad many of the leaders of the US deep state are, there are some who recognise that going to war with Russia is a bad idea. Publicly stating that Russia performed a coup in your country could lead to an international incident, a civil war, or even a nuclear holocaust. That’s not good for business.

Secondly, it’s an admission of weakness. The bedrock of Imperial power has always been an unwillingness to admit its own limitations. Finding that Russia had installed Trump would be admitting to a major defeat. They can’t afford to lose that much face.

Thirdly, and most importantly, they can’t take down one of their own. Trump might be crude, unpredictable, politically incorrect and lacking class…but at the end of the day he’s a billionaire son of a millionaire. He has been mixing with the elites all his life. He’s one of them, and sending down a member of the in crowd for corruption (or anything else) sets too dangerous a precedent. Trump has to be exonerated, it’s simply a matter of the system’s immune response protecting itself. (Not to mention he’s been President of the United States for over two years now, you take him to trial and who knows what he might start saying).

No, Trump was never going to be charged, let alone convicted. Mueller’s investigation has ended the way it was always intended to end – with a whimper, not a bang.

Do NOT make the mistake of thinking this makes it a failure.

Think about how our reality has been shaped by this investigation.

One, it has established as a “certain fact” in the mainstream media, that “Russian interference” is a thing that happened, even though to this date there is NOT A SINGLE PIECE of publicly available evidence to support this. The often cited “Russian troll factory”, the Internet Research Agency, is a small viral marketing firm that published anti-Trump ads. The “experts” tracking Russian “influence operations” are small-time paranoiacs with nothing but homemade infographics to back up their theories. The “research fellows” of the Atlantic Council are reduced to pointing to real people – be they retirees from England or internationally renowned concert pianists – and claiming they are “Russian bots”, because they cannot find any real ones.

The idea that Russia “hacked” the election, or launched a “campaign in support of Trump” is not even close to being proven, but if we embrace the Mueller report, then we are tricked into accepting that version of reality.

Two, there is the very idea of “collusion”. “Collusion” has no meaning under US law. It simply is not a thing, and yet we’ve all been talking about it for years. Letting “collusion” stand as a concept is a big victory for the establishment. It has no meaning, which means it can have any meaning they want it to have. Tulsi Gabbard can have “colluded” with Assad or Modi by defending them on US TV. Jill Stein can commit “collusion” with Russia by attending a meeting. They have invented an imaginary crime, that can be used to tar anti-establishment figures whenever they want.

If we embrace the Mueller report, we hand the corporate media more power to smear any political candidate, independent journalist or an ordinary citizen.

Three, if we accept Mueller, then we accept the concomitant affirmation of the idea that US institutions are trustworthy, that the FBI is inherently honest, that “Gary Cooper types” like Robert Mueller are the beating heart of US democracy. The narrative is running now that an accusation was made, a special counsel investigated and got to the bottom of it.

If we embrace the Mueller report, we lend credibility to a US system that deserves none. We put our trust in a body that has betrayed the public trust a thousand different times, and we accept the lie that the system is working as intended.

Four, Mueller has been a tremendous distraction. Don’t underestimate the value of that. Most of you will be familiar with the Karl Rove quote: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”, but just as important is the less well-known end to that thought: “And while you’re studying that reality —judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating other new realities.”.

“Russiagate” has consumed hundreds of hours of television, thousands of column inches. It has cost millions and returned nothing but sound and fury. It’s a chew toy, a scratching post. Something to get our claws and teeth into while our owners are busy.

And how busy they have been.

Think about all the issues knocked off the front-pages by “Russiagate” rumours and totally fictitious “smoking guns”. Venezuela inches closer to destruction every day. France is a couple of street clashes away from a second 1789. Trump has slashed infrastructure and welfare budgets, and increased military spending. Again. While every anchor in the country was talking about “the walls closing in”, the US has pulled out of an arms treaty and announced they have already built the weapons that the treaty banned. While the media hammer out the propaganda message that Trump is in Putin’s pocket, the US deep state has been winding the Doomsday clock up to 1 minute before midnight.

Finally, much like the “antisemitism crisis” in the Labour party, “Russian collusion” now exists as a concept that keeps everyone in check. Trump now can’t afford to meet with Putin, not without a chorus of “AHA!” from the punditry. Other political figures, those on the actual fringe (not the fake Trump fringe), have even more to lose. There’s no doubt that “Russian collusion”, or the like, will be used to file down a crowded Democrat primary field. Gabbard, Sanders, maybe even Warren, will doubtless face charges of being “soft on Putin” in one form or other. These McCarthyite smears force the Overton window closed. They control what people feel comfortable saying, even thinking.

All in all, Mueller has been very, very useful to the status quo. He’s a controlled reaction, like in a nuclear power plant, keeping public anger available as an energy to harness, whilst making sure it never boils over into a chaotic meltdown.

There is an understandable feeling of glee throughout the alternative media, emotions are high and “We told you so” always feels good to say. Those of us who have been dismissed as bots, Putin-apologists, useful idiots and “Trumptards” have been officially vindicated.

…but do we want vindication from a corrupt establishment? Should we take any value at all in an admission of “truth” from institutions who been shown to hold the very concept of truth in contempt?

The Mueller distraction has run its course, to the only the end it was ever going to reach. The Liberal cheerleaders who thought that OrangeManBad would be dragged out of the White House in chains might be tearful and angry, and in some ways that feels like a victory, but it’s only on the surface. Maddow and Harding et al might be temporarily humiliated, but their bosses are perfectly fine.

Every step of the way Mueller has been an exercise in narrative control, and every step of the way it has worked. And it is still working now.

They have reinforced convenient myths, stoked controversies from non-stories. Put “evidence” out into the public domain that was nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

They have shown that they have total control over the vast majority of public discourse. They can set the agenda. They can dictate terms. They can invent concepts, scenarios, even entire events, and we’ll happily argue over the details of something that never even happened.

“We’re an Empire now, and we act we create reality”. When we accept the Mueller report we are letting them create reality, we shouldn’t be tempted down that path because it feels like we scored some points for the little guy. If we buy into the hype around the announcement, if we let the myth survive that the US government has any interest in objective truth, then we’re playing their game.

I called the Mueller report a sideshow, and that’s just what it is. A fixed ring-toss game, with prizes that seem attainable but are always kept just out of reach. Hustlers always let you win the first one, to make the game look fair. Don’t fall for it. Pick up your money and walk away from the table.

It might FEEL like the good guys won, but that’s only because they let us. Next time they might not. The only real way to win is not to play.

First Amendment Under Attack: What You Need to Know about Big Tech’s Assault on Alex Jones

Posted on by
Reply

By Sander Hicks

Candidate for US Congress

Special Report for the New York Megaphone.

Around August 6, 2018 independent journalist Alex Jones was kicked off Facebook, YouTube, Google, Spotify and Apple, in a coordinated, late-night purge, due to Jones’ criticisms and “threats” against Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Jones has also taken unpopular, iconclastic positions on Jeffrey Epstein, 9/11, Sandy Hook, and President Trump, so mainstream public opinion was swift to condemn him. Even the ACLU has been silent on this case, refusing to consider a defense of the First Amendment. No one seems willing to consider the controversial content of Jones’ complaint against Mueller.

It’s true that Jones is beyond politically incorrect. This article is not a defense of his anti-Muslim, anti-gay, or anti-transgender statements. Those things should be roundly condemned. And CNN’s Olivery Darcy hands in a pretty good summary of those here.

The problem however, is that Jones sometimes gets things right. These things are never acknowledged by the CNN reporters, or the decision-makers who pulled the plug on him. Alex Jones has a valid claim: that Special Counsel Mueller is a do-nothing who is criminally negligent. Jones’ accusations deserve First Amendment protection, because while they may be unpopular now, they could lead to an indictment someday against Mueller. This whole situation shows clear media bias in favor of the powerful, against outsiders who know too much and speak facts too loud.

Robert Mueller is a textbook example of a “Deep State” operative, with a track record of multiple cover-ups. And even if you hate Alex Jones’ politics, they need to be separated from this question: how can we save our country, when we silence and censor a maverick journalist who points out the hypocrisy of Special Counsel Robert Mueller?

Robert Mueller presided as head of FBI for 12 years, where he stoically observed the carnage of 9/11 and the Anthrax attacks, neither of which Mueller managed to explain, or seriously investigate. In fact, he helped to cover up these two great crimes, and helped turn them into a justification for the Iraq War.

Time Magazine Person of the Year, the FBI’s own Coleen Rowley, named Mueller as an agent of the 9/11 “cover-up.” On May 21, 2002 she said that Mueller “and others at the highest levels of FBI management” were guilty of a “delicate and subtle shading/skewing of the facts” when it came to 9/11. When Senator Bob Graham wanted to subpoena the FBI about why an FBI informant lived in San Diego with two of the key 9/11 hijackers, the FBI agent fled the Senate office, rather than accept the subpoena. 9/11 widow and key member of the “Jersey Girls” Kristen Breitweiser said, “Mueller and other FBI officials had purposely tried to keep any incriminating information specifically surrounding the Saudis out of the Inquiry’s investigative hands.”

Speaking of the Saudis, earlier in his career, Mueller hid the crimes of their Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). He stymied the US Senate investigation into this criminal, sleazy, narcotics and prostitution bank. Both Senator John Kerry and NY Attorney General Robert Morgenthau had their investigations into BCCI blocked, by Mueller, when he was head of the Criminal Division of the US DOJ. Morgenthau told the Wall Street Journal, regarding Mueller, “documents were withheld, and attempts were made to block other federal agencies from cooperating.” BCCI was controlled by the richest Saudis, and CIA/Deep State operatives, and operated to benefit Bush and Bin Laden Families, Wall Street Democrats, and the Iran/Contra cabal. Mueller helped protect them, while over 16 independent investigators and journalists were murdered.

This same Mueller is called a “demon” by Alex Jones. Perhaps the term “demon” sounds too Biblical for a cynical New York attitude. But this reporter recalls what attorney Bill Veale once said, in court, as he sued Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for 9/11. “Evil exists. And it’s attracted to power.”

According to recently released FBI documents, available online, Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein benefited greatly from Mueller’s FBI. Epstein ran a “sex slave island” on his own land in the Caribbean, and flew powerful celebrities and Democrats there on a private plane dubbed the “Lolita Express.” Just like BCCI, Epstein’s operation involved the rich and powerful, it included Bill Clinton, and numerous under-age girls for sale. Could it get any worse? Sure it can. This FBI document seems to indicate that Epstein was also some kind of FBI informant. Mueller’s FBI only gave him a slap on the wrist. And Epstein’s immunity from prosecution is what enraged Alex Jones.

A moral response would be to investigate Jones’ claims, not kill the messenger. Jones can seem histrionic at times, yes, but his sense of mission inflames him. Alex Jones, discussing Epstein, child-sex, and Mueller, called Mueller a “a demon I will take down, or I’ll die trying…we’re going to walk out in the square, politically, at high noon….” Jones said this as he mimed a gunfight with a pistol in his hand. Sure, the cowboy routine is a bit much, but remember, Jones did qualify the shoot-out vision as something that he was imagining could happen “politically.”

BIG MEDIA MYTH: Censorship is Necessary because There Is No Alternative.

For a look at the kind of censorship that Jones got in response, take a look at this article by

VOX’s Zack Beauchamp. It’s over the top. When Twitter was the only major online platform not to censor Alex Jones, Beauchamp attacked Twitter. His approach is similar to CNN’s Oliver Darcy who reports that he persistently pestered Twitter and showed them reasons to remove Alex Jones. Twitter declined to do so.

Beauchamp doesn’t even think to look at the content of Jones’ claims, about Epstein or Mueller. His arch tone is arrogant, nasty, biased, and smug. And he gets his facts wrong, to boot.

“Conspiracy theories, once they spread, create hermetically sealed communities that are impervious to correction,” he claims. It’s a false claim, and it’s not a justification for censorship. When you take on something as enormous as BCCI, or the 9/11 cover-up, you kind of have to be humble, and be open to correction. It takes years to get a sense of the big picture. Even the brash Alex Jones has amended his earlier claims about Sandy Hook.

Beauchamp is wrong, because even though some truthers are a passionate lot, the ones in it for the long haul do change. Look at how alternative historians of the 9/11 event have evolved. Using collaborative tools like conferences, internet and social media, the 9/11 truth movement has developed, and improved over 17 years. It has grown from marginal conspiracy theorists, into a serious intellectual force with organized opposition. Over 3,000 licensed architects and engineers reject the theory that two planes could have brought down three steel skyscrapers. And in 2018, the Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry filed a petition for a Special Grand Jury, regarding the buildings’ collapses. The movement effectively helped to create the term “Deep State” which is now used in mainstream media to describe a level of federal government corruption which is alarming, almost beyond reform, and out of control. A recent ABC poll showed that half of the USA believes there is a “Deep State” and of that half, 58% call it a “serious problem.”

The same Senator Bob Graham who attempted to subpoena Mueller’s FBI was on 60 Minutes a couple years ago, advocating for the release of the 28 Pages (documents Bush censored from Congress’s 9/11 report). Once these were released by Congress, the world changed. Despite Obama’s veto, Congress passed legislation that acted on what we all saw in the 28 Pages (those of us who read them, despite Big Media falsely claiming there was nothing there.) The 28 Pages make it plain: the US Deep State, Prince Bandar, and Saudis clearly were backing the key 9/11 hijackers. This is the story of the century. The Zack Beauchamps of the world don’t dare to comment. They avert their eyes. But Alex Jones has done 17 years of investigating, interviews, and commentary. His work has millions of followers. Our “free” society is grossly guilty of hypocrisy and censorship. We can’t even find a way to talk to each other. Censorship only makes everyone angrier.

Zack Beauchamp wants Alex Jones’ media platforms to be strangled and asphyxiated:  “Jones was spreading dangerous lies, and….journalists simply couldn’t debunk them. The only way to stop these ideas was to deprive them of oxygen, to prevent people from being exposed to them in the first place.”

No, Zack. The media should not get to decide what people can “be exposed to.” The spirit of First Amendment says that they should be allowed to a diversity of information, and that the powers that be should not restrain freedom of the press. And no, don’t tell me that Facebook is not subject to the First Amendment. Recent case law says that even privately owned corporations can create spaces that can be termed a “public forum” that are thus subject to First Amendment protection.

At the end of the day, Authoritarian denunciations from government or media beg the question: What are you afraid of? Why can’t these topics be discussed? And who are you working for?

Beauchamp in his Vox article often quotes Harvard professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, regarding their article about the 9/11 truth movement. But a deeper look at that article shows that there’s a sinister violation of Constitutional Rights there. Those authors urge that, “government operatives, whether anonymous or otherwise, should infiltrate and disrupt” the 9/11 truth movement. They wrote, “Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.”

As author Kevin Ryan wrote on his blog, “In retrospect, it is comforting to know that so much effort at disruption was needed to prevent 9/11 questions from taking over the national discussion. It means that many people were informed to some degree and that citizen groups working for the truth were seen as a threat to a corrupt system.”

 

IN SUM

The election of President Trump showed a desperate decision to break with status quo corruption and career politicians like Hillary Clinton. The people just don’t trust the system.  With the murder of Seth Rich, the uninvestigated pedophilic crimes exposed by the DNC emails, the major revelations about the 9/11 cover-up going unprosecuted, it’s no surprise the that corporate media has such low approval ratings in public opinion polls.

But the bottom line is that, with Alex Jones, cooler heads will prevail. The truth about Epstein and 9/11 will eventually win out. That’s what the soul of the First Amendment says. If you allow for a diversity of opinion, eventually the truth will prevail.

A group of over 70 attorneys has taken action recently, based on the 17 years of independent research into 9/11. The Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry in April filed a petition for a Special Grand Jury into the collapse of the World Trade Towers, in US Federal Court. Of course, US Attorney Geoffrey Berman ignored the petition, and ignored his legal duty to convene a Grand Jury, despite the 57 categories of evidence. So, on the 10th of September this year, the Lawyers will escalate and file a Mandamus suit.

Alex Jones’ work on 9/11 Truth, is probably the most important of all his work on controversial topics. In some ways, the national 9/11 Truth movement has received a great gift here. Nothing unites a movement like the feeling of being attacked, especially on the verge of the 17th Anniversary of 9/11, in an eventful year for work against the Deep State. The censorship of Alex Jones shows that our work is relevant, and that the struggle is escalating. We have hard facts. If they can’t debate us, they will try to silence us. It won’t work. The First Amendment is on our side.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sander Hicks is an independent progressive candidate for US Congress, in NYC’s 12th Congressional District. He has been a guest on Alex Jones’ show, and has debated CNN’s Oliver Darcy on the Comedy Central video podcast. He is author of two books about the War on Terror. Please learn more about his campaign, and consider a donation, at www.hicksforcongress.com