Category Archives: Oligarchy

US government drops case against Max Blumenthal after jailing journalist on false charges

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As the mysterious disappearance of Secret Service records and complete absence of evidence supporting its case came to light, the US government dropped its bogus charges against journalist Max Blumenthal.

By Ben Norton

Source: Grayzone

The US government has dropped its bogus charge of “simple assault” against journalist Max Blumenthal, after having him arrested on a 5-month-old warrant and jailed for nearly two days.

The Grayzone has learned that Secret Service call logs recorded during the alleged incident were either not kept or destroyed. The mysteriously missing evidence included print documents and radio recordings that may have exposed collusion between Secret Service officers operating under the auspices of the US State Department and violent right-wing hooligans in an operation to besiege peace activists stationed inside Venezuela’s embassy in Washington, DC.

Blumenthal, who is the editor of The Grayzone, was arrested at his home on October 25 by a team of DC cops who had threatened to break down his door. He later learned that he was listed in his arrest warrant as “armed and dangerous,” a rare and completely unfounded designation that placed Blumenthal at risk of severe harm by the police.

The government’s case rested entirely on a false accusation by a right-wing Venezuelan opposition activist, Naylet Pacheco, that Blumenthal and Benjamin Rubinstein had assaulted her while they were delivering food to Venezuela’s embassy in Washington, DC in the early morning on May 8. (Rubinstein is the brother of journalist and Grayzone contributor Alexander Rubinstein, who was reporting from inside the embassy at the time.)

The Grayzone has reported extensively on the corruption of coup leader Juan Guaidó, whom Washington recognizes as “interim president” of Venezuela, as well as the scandals plaguing Guaidó’s “ambassador” to the United States, Carlos Vecchio.

Vecchio personally presided over the weeks-long siege of Venezuela’s embassy in Washington, DC, stage-managing efforts by a mob of rabid right-wing activists to prevent peace activists from receiving deliveries of food and sanitary supplies.

As The Grayzone reported, the Donald Trump administration has diverted USAID funding originally intended to assist Central American migrants to pay the salaries of Vecchio and his team in Washington.

The US Department of Justice dismissed its case against Blumenthal on December 6. On the same day, it also dropped charges against Rubinstein, who had been arrested on May 8, hours after the food delivery.

“I’m relieved the government has finally decided to drop these phony charges against me. But I’m also disgusted,” Max Blumenthal said, “because I should never have been hauled out of my house and thrown in jail for an obviously politically motivated, false allegation that the police failed to investigate.”

Disappeared Secret Service call logs ‘highly unusual’

Lawyers representing Blumenthal and Rubinstein placed multiple and highly specified discovery requests to the prosecutor for Secret Service call recordings and reports logged on May 8 at the location of the embassy food delivery. The US prosecutor was unable to satisfy the request, verbally confirming that if the documents had existed, they no longer did.

“This is highly unusual and highly notable, almost inexplicable in the ordinary course of operations that these records were not maintained and preserved,” said Carl Messineo, the counsel to Rubinstein and a co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. “Given the false nature of allegations and that they advanced a prosecution based on these it is really questionable that this information was not produced.”

Beyond the mysterious disappearance of the call logs, there was a complete dearth of evidence on the prosecution’s side.

William Moran, who served as Blumenthal’s attorney, wondered why law enforcement trusted Pacheco, an accuser with such clear credibility issues. “The local police advanced a fraudulent case against a journalist on the word of a complainant who told at least six different, increasingly exaggerated stories and made identical accusations that night about at least three other individuals,” he said.

One Venezuelan opposition member whose identity remains under a protective order provided testimony to police attempting to corroborate Pacheco’s claims about Blumenthal and Rubinstein. According to Moran, that person had been convicted for the impeachable offense of writing fraudulent checks.

“The DC police wholly failed to conduct a proper investigation before calling for the arrest and imprisonment of a dissident journalist that they labeled without any cause whatsoever as ‘armed and dangerous,’ placing him in mortal danger,” Moran stated.

A pattern of false assault allegations and police collusion

The arrest of Blumenthal was part of a wider pattern of political persecution of those who resisted the seizure of the Venezuelan embassy by a US-backed coup administration.

On November 13, police appeared at the home of Medea Benjamin to threaten her with arrest, after she too was falsely accused of assault. Benjamin, a co-founder and leader of the anti-war group CODEPINK, had been a prominent figure in the Venezuelan Embassy Protection Collective.

Benjamin was accused by members of the Venezuelan opposition of assaulting Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who had joined Carlos Vecchio for a press conference on Capitol Hill. The police eventually left without arresting Benjamin, because they did not have a warrant.

Video of the incident revealed that it was, in fact, Benjamin who was assaulted by Vecchio’s notoriously violent minions.

During the same press conference, a member of the Venezuelan opposition seized the phone of journalist Wyatt Reed. When Reed complained to a Secret Service officer on site, the officer brushed him off.

Diliana Bustillos, a Venezuelan opposition lobbyist who participated in a May 8 press conference falsely accusing peace activists of violence, threatened Reed after the incident, warning that he would “end up like [Max Blumenthal] and Ben [Rubinstein].”

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a civil liberties lawyer with the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, was present throughout much of the embassy siege. She noticed clear collusion between the right-wing opposition mob outside and the Secret Service, who were operating at the time under the watch of the State Department.

“Throughout the siege of the peace activists at the Venezuelan embassy,” Verheyden-Hillard said, “it was apparent to those on the scene that there was what looked like a facilitated effort between the government and the mob besieging the embassy.”

Mainstream media silence, demonization by regime change activists

The Washington Post reported extensively on the siege of the Venezuelan embassy, presenting the situation largely from the opposition’s perspective. The paper’s correspondent, Marissa Lang, uncritically conveyed Pacheco’s false charges, writing that “she said she was pushed against a wall and kicked by several men, then spent hours at a hospital being treated.”

However, the Washington Post did not report on Blumenthal’s arrest and imprisonment five months later or any of his public comments about the high-profile incident.

Meanwhile, an assortment of malicious regime-change cheerleaders seized on Blumenthal’s arrest to defame him with false and now-discredited claims on social media:

  • Bellingcat founder Elliot Higgins promoted a Medium post by an anonymous author who has routinely smeared Blumenthal, which featured his arrest warrant and a video of the complainant’s false testimony. He then repeatedly criticized skeptics who expressed doubts about the completely unfounded allegations against Blumenthal. Higgins’ website Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, a regime change arm of the US government, and the UK Foreign Office via the Zinc Network, among other entities.
  • Foreign Policy senior editor and anti-China hawk James Palmer declared without a scintilla of evidence that Blumenthal “assault[ed] people freely.”
  • Freelance journalist and longtime Syria regime-change activist Danny Gold claimed falsely and without proof that Blumenthal “kicked an old woman in the stomach.”
  • Idrees Ahmad, a Stirling University professor of journalism who has obsessively denigrated Blumenthal and even phoned him to threaten him against publishing a factual investigative report on the Syrian White Helmets, falsely accused Blumenthal of “manhandling an elderly woman.”
  • Istanbul-based TRT World contributor Wilson Dizard suggested that Blumenthal was guilty before being proven innocent, insisting that a Grayzone account of his arrest “does not actually provide an alternative version of events.”
  • Oz Katerji, the notorious regime change fanatic who was recently fired from the Daily Mail for denigrating its columnist Peter Hitchens on social media, declared that he would “probably buy the guys who shackled pro-Assad war crimes denier Max Blumenthal to the floor for assaulting a Venezuelan protester a beer or two.” Katerji later insisted without any basis that “there’s video evidence” to support the false charge against Blumenthal.
  • Dutch regime-change activist Thomas van Linge, who fancied himself a Syria expert before moving on to advocate for Western-backed right-wing opposition groups in Iran, Bolivia, Hong Kong, and beyond, denied that Blumenthal’s arrest was political and instead outrageously claimed he was “arrested for kicking a pregnant woman.” Even in the totally fabricated accusations against Blumenthal, no one ever claimed that the alleged victim, right-wing Venezuelan activist Naylet Pacheco, who is 58 years old, was pregnant. As of the publication of this article, van Linge still has not deleted this patently false, defamatory claim.
  • Neil Hauer, a self-described “freelance analyst” who has previously consulted for the European Union and US Marines, called journalist Jeet Heer a “moron” for publicly advocating for Blumenthal.
  • UK liberal interventionist Sunny Hundal also attacked Heer for defending Blumenthal, asserting that “given the person in question I think you should exercise some judgement before accepting his story at face value.”
  • The anonymous right-wing Reagan Battalion Twitter account falsely claimed that Blumenthal was “arrested for kicking a pregnant woman,” misrepresenting the identity of the complainant while not even bothering to frame the non-existent incident as an alleged assault. In a previous spasm of mendacity, the Reagan Battalion declared that Blumenthal “works for” foreign socialist governments and smeared him as “a puppet for every dictator around the globe.”
  • Liberal feminist Mona Eltahawy falsely smeared Blumenthal as a supposed abuser of women and a “piece of shit.”
  • Right-wing pro-Israel lobby group StopAntisemitism.org defamed Blumenthal, who is Jewish, as an “antisemite,” cheered his arrest, and falsely asserted he “assault[ed] a Venezuelan opposition figure.” This pro-Israel organization has also smeared left-wing Jewish activist Ariel Gold and Muslim American progressives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Linda Sarsour as supposed “antisemites.”
  • Joshua Holland, a liberal contributor to The Nation, publicly lashed out at media critic Joe Emersberger and implied the false, totally unsubstantiated allegations could be true.
  • Joshua Frank, an editor of the former-muckraking website CounterPunch, downplayed the attack on Blumenthal, whitewashed the state repression, and called on people “to not blow this all out of proportion, as Max is likely to do for his own gain.” Frank, who has viciously maligned journalists and activists who opposed the international proxy war on Syria, also derided this present reporter, Ben Norton, with superficial ad hominem insults.
  • Sean Davis, a co-founder of the hard-right website The Federalist and a longtime conservative activist who has worked for numerous Republican politicians, spread the fake accusations. Davis’ website The Federalist has been widely criticized for blatant racism (it once had a tag devoted specifically to “black crime“), and it published an article defending far-right Alabama judge Roy Moore after he was accused of dating teenage girls as young as 14.

Asked about the wave of libelous attacks spurred by his arrest on false charges, Blumenthal commented, “The outpouring of support I’ve received from around the world has been more profound and meaningful than any of the smears from the usual suspects. But that does not mean that I will let this campaign of lies go unanswered. This whole episode began with a false, defamatory accusation, and I plan to take the necessary actions to see it ends with a sense of justice.

 

Establishment media’s mass deception

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: Intrepid Report

On major geopolitical and other issues, mass deception overrides truth and full disclosure in establishment media print editions and daily broadcasts—wealth, power and privileged interests served over peace, equity and justice.

The NYT is Exhibit A. Its Friday edition featured Iran-bashing disinformation, saying the following: “Iran has used the continuing chaos in Iraq to build up a hidden arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles in Iraq [sic], part of a widening effort to try to intimidate the Middle East and assert its power [sic]”—citing unnamed US intelligence and Pentagon officials,” adding that the US built up “its military presence in the Middle East to counter emerging threats to American interests [sic], including attacks on oil tankers and facilities that intelligence officials have blamed on Iran [sic].”

Iranian missiles “pose a threat to American allies and partners in the region, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, and could endanger American troops…”

Fact: Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi debunk phony claims about IRGC missiles in Iraq, saying that the accusations are “false, meaningless and ludicrous. What has been raised and published by some infamous cells and certain media about the transfer of Iranian missiles to Iraq is a nonsensical statement and sheer lie.”

They’re all about maliciously vilifying Iran to create a nonexistent threat, wanting its Iranian relations with neighboring countries undermined.

Iranian military advisors are in Iraq and Syria at the behest of their governments, Tehran’s Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani earlier explained—adding that they’re there to help combat US-supported terrorism.

The US and its key allies are “the main creators and sponsors of takfiri terrorists,” he earlier stressed.

Fact: Iran was falsely blamed earlier for attacks on regional oil tankers and facilities it had nothing to do with—no evidence suggesting otherwise. The incidents were false flags staged to wrongfully blame Iran for what happened.

Fact: Iran threatens no other countries. Claims otherwise are bald-faced Big Lies, part of establishment media supported US propaganda.

Fact: The US and its imperial allies threaten humanity. Needing enemies to unjustifiably justify its imperial agenda, they’re invented because no real ones exist—none since WW II ended.

Fact: Iran’s nuclear program has no military component, never did in a nation abhorring these weapons, wanting them eliminated everywhere.

Fact: Iranian defense spending is solely for self-defense, its legal right under international law. It’s ruling authorities haven’t attacked another nation in centuries—what US-dominated NATO and Israel do repeatedly, their hostile actions supported by the Times and other establishment media.

Instead of reporting “all the news that’s fit to print,” Times’ editions feature managed news misinformation and disinformation.

Times and other establishment media columnists are what famed journalist George Seldes (1890 – 1995) called “prostitutes of the press.”

They’re propagandists, scam artists and charlatans—paid to lie, distort, misinform, and blame victims for US high crimes committed against them, while supporting monied interests over popular ones.

In his latest disinformation piece, Times columnist David Brooks “cheer[ed] (predatory) capitalism, now and forever,” adding, “I came to realize that capitalism is really good at doing the one thing socialism is really bad at: creating a learning process to help people figure stuff out… It has a competitive profit-driven process to motivate you to learn and innovate, every single day.”

Fact: Diogenes called education “the foundation of every state.” Horace Mann said: “The common [public] school (socialized education) is the greatest discovery ever made by man”—calling it the “great equalizer” that was “common” to all.

In 1862, the Morrill Act established land-grant public colleges and universities on a tuition-free basis.

For the next century, many US state and other public colleges and universities charged no or nominal tuition and other fees to attend—socialized higher education, affordable to millions that worked as intended.

Attending today entraps millions of students into debt bondage because of exorbitantly higher education costs—at a time when career opportunities are a shadow of what they were post-WW II

Fact: New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society program helped millions of Americans avoid poverty—social programs that worked, eroding and disappearing today.

FDR’s Great Depression social programs built or renovated 700,000 miles of roads, 7,800 bridges, 45,000 schools, 2,500 hospitals, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 1,000 airfields, and other infrastructure projects—including much of Chicago’s lakefront.

Fact: The post-WW II (GI Bill) Servicemen’s Readjustment Act provided college or vocational education for 7.8 million returning vets.

Fact: Another 2.4 million got VA-backed low-interest, no down payment home loans at a time when their average cost was under $5,000—letting millions of families afford them.

Studies later showed the GI Bill was one of America’s soundest investments. It paid for itself seven times over. It also helped millions readjust successfully to civilian life.

The State University of New York (SUNY) system, the nation’s largest, was tuition-free until 1963. The University of California system had free tuition until the 1980s.

Today, SUNY tuition, room, board and fees are around $14,000 annually. At UCLA, it’s around $34,000 annually for state residents, at UC Berkeley over $36,000, for non-state residents about $63,000 annually.

Facilitating free or low-cost higher education and home ownership in the US post-WW II with VA-backed low-interest loans helped created post-war prosperity.

In the 1940s and 50s, strong unions and well-paid factory jobs elevated millions of Americans to middle-class status, what’s fast eroding today.

The economy then grew annually at around 3.5%. By 1960, blue-collar workers were the biggest buyers of many luxury goods and services, including homes and autos.

Socialism works as intended when unobstructed by foreign interference. Under Hugo Chavez, Venezuela was Latin America’s fastest growing economy.

The country prospered until devastated by US economic terrorism, harming the nation and its people.

According to the Times’ resident neocon Bret Stephens, “NATO is full of freeloaders [sic],” falsely adding the alliance is “how we defend the free world. Europe without American protection is a continental disaster waiting to happen.”

Fact: US-dominated NATO threatens world peace and humanity’s survival. After Soviet Russia dissolved in December 1991, NATO became an alliance for aggression, not deterrence, its current US-controlled mission.

As long as NATO exists, endless US-led wars will continue, world peace and stability remaining unattainable—the ominous threat of nuclear war by accident or design possible.

Social Media Censorship Reaches New Heights as Twitter Permanently Bans Dissent

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Mnar Muhawesh speaks with journalist Daniel McAdams about being permanently banned from Twitter, social media censorship and more.

By Mnar Muhawesh

Source: Mint Press News

It’s an open secret. The deep state is working hand in hand with Silicon Valley social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google to control the flow of information. That includes suppressing, censoring and sometimes outright purging dissenting voices – all under the guise of fighting fake news and Russian propaganda.

Most recently, it was revealed that Twitter’s senior editorial executive for Europe, the Middle East and Africa is an active officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations.

In other words: he specializes in disseminating propaganda.

The news left many wondering how a member of the British Armed Forces secured such an influential job in the media.

The bombshell that one of the world’s most influential social networks is controlled in part by an active psychological warfare officer was not covered at all in the New York Times, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC or Fox News, who appear to have found the news unremarkable.

But for those paying attention and for those who have been following ’MintPress News’ extensive coverage of social media censorship, this revelation was merely another example of the increasing closeness between the deep state and the fourth estate.

Amazon owner, and world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos was paid $600 million by the CIA to develop software and media for the agency, that’s more than twice as much as Bezos bought the Washington Post for, and a move media critics warn spells the end of journalistic independence for the Post.

Meanwhile, Google has a very close relationship with the State Department, its former CEO Eric Schmidt’s book on technological imperialism was heartily endorsed by deep state warmongers like Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair.

In their book titled, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, Eric Schmidt and fellow Google executive Jared Cohen wrote:

What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies [like Google] will be to the twenty-first.”

Another social media giant partnering with the military-industrial complex is Facebook. The California-based company announced last year it was working closely with the neoconservative think tank, The Atlantic Council, which is largely funded by Saudi Arabia, Israel and weapons manufacturers to supposedly fight foreign “fake news.”

The Atlantic Council is a NATO offshoot and its board of directors reads like a rogue’s gallery of warmongers, including the notorious Henry Kissinger, Bush-era hawks like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, James Baker, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security and author of the PATRIOT Act, Michael Chertoff, a number of former Army Generals including David Petraeus and Wesley Clark and former heads of the CIA Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta and Michael Morell.

39 percent of Americans, and similar numbers of people in other countries, get their news from Facebook, so when an organization like the Atlantic Council is controlling what the world sees in their Facebook news feeds, it can only be described as state censorship on a global level.

After working with the council, Facebook immediately began banning and removing accounts linked to media in official enemy states like Iran, Russia and Venezuela, ensuring the world would not be exposed to competing ideas and purging dissident voices under the guise of fighting “fake news” and “Russian bots.”

Meanwhile, the social media platform has been partnering with the U.S. and Israeli governments to silence Palestinian voices that show the reality of life under Israeli apartheid and occupation. The Israeli Justice Minister proudly revealed that Facebook complied with 95 percent of Israeli government requests to delete Palestinian pages. At the same time, Google deleted dozens of YouTube and blog accounts supposedly connected to the government of Iran.

In the last week alone, Twitter has purged several Palestinian news pages, including Quds News Network — without warning or explanation.

Electronic Intifada co-founder Ali Abunimah wrote, 

This alarming act of censorship is another indication of the complicity of major social media firms in Israel’s efforts to suppress news and information about its abuses of Palestinian rights.”

Alternative voices not welcome

The vast online purge of alternative voices has also been directed at internal “enemies.”

Publishers like Julian Assange and whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning are still being held in solitary confinement in conditions that international bodies and human rights groups call torture, for their crime of revealing the extent of the global surveillance network and the control over the media that Western governments have built.

As attempts to re-tighten the state and corporate grip over our means of communication increases, high-quality alternative media are being hit the hardest, as algorithm changes from the media monoliths have deranked, demoted, deleted and disincentivized outlets that question official narratives, leading to huge falls in traffic and revenue.

The message from social media giants is clear: independent and alternative voices are not welcome.

One causality in this propaganda war is Daniel McAdams, Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, a public advocacy group that argues that a non-interventionist foreign policy is crucial to securing a prosperous society at home. McAdams served as Senator Paul’s foreign affairs advisor between 2001 and 2012. Before that, he was a journalist and editor for the Budapest Sun and a human rights monitor across Eastern Europe.

McAdams, who spent much of his time on Twitter calling out the war machine supported by both parties, was recently permanently banned from the platform for so-called “hateful conduct.” His crime? Challenging Fox News anchor Sean Hannity over his hour-long segment claiming to be against the “deep state,” while simultaneously wearing a CIA lapel pin. In the exchange, McAdams called Hannity “retarded,” claiming he was becoming stupider every time he watched him.

Yes, despite that word and its derivatives having been used on Twitter over ten times in the previous minute, and often much more aggressively than McAdams used it – only McAdams fell victim to Twitter’s ban hammer. Something didn’t make sense about this ban. One only needs to read the replies under any of President Trump’s tweets to see far more hateful speech than what McAdams displayed to suspect foul play.

I spoke with McAdams about the ban and began by asking him if he accepts the premise of the ban, or if he believes something else was afoot.

Attacking The Source: The Establishment Loyalist’s Favorite Online Tactic

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

If you’re skeptical of western power structures and you’ve ever engaged in online political debate for any length of time, the following has definitely happened to you.

You find yourself going back and forth with one of those high-confidence, low-information establishment types who’s promulgating a dubious mainstream narrative, whether that be about politics, war, Julian Assange, or whatever. At some point they make an assertion which you know to be false–publicly available information invalidates the claim they’re making.

“I’ve got them now!” you think to yourself, if you’re new to this sort of thing. Then you share a link to an article or video which makes a well-sourced, independently verifiable case for the point you are trying to make.

Then, the inevitable happens.

“LMAO! That outlet!” they scoff in response. “That outlet is propaganda/fake news/conspiracy theory trash!”

Or something to that effect. You’ll encounter this tactic over and over and over again if you continually engage in online political discourse with people who don’t agree with you. It doesn’t matter if you’re literally just linking to an interview featuring some public figure saying a thing you’d claimed they said. It doesn’t matter if you’re linking to a WikiLeaks publication of a verified authentic document. Unless you’re linking to CNN/Fox News (whichever fits the preferred ideology of the establishment loyalist you’re debating), they’ll bleat “fake news!” or “propaganda!” or “Russia!” as though that in and of itself magically invalidates the point you’re trying to make.

And of course it doesn’t. What they are doing is called attacking the source, also known as an ad hominem, and it’s a very basic logical fallacy.

Most people are familiar with the term “ad hominem”, but they usually think about it in terms of merely hurling verbal insults at people. What it actually means is attacking the source of the argument rather than attacking the argument itself in a way that avoids dealing with the question of whether or not the argument itself is true. It’s a logical fallacy because it’s used to deliberately obfuscate the goal of a logical conclusion to the debate.

“An ad hominem is more than just an insult,” explains David Ferrer for The Quad. “It’s an insult used as if it were an argument or evidence in support of a conclusion. Verbally attacking people proves nothing about the truth or falsity of their claims.”

This can take the form of saying “Claim X is false because the person making it is an idiot.” But it can also take the form of “Claim X is false because the person making it is a propagandist,” or “Claim X is false because the person making it is a conspiracy theorist.”

Someone being an idiot, a propagandist or a conspiracy theorist is irrelevant to the question of whether or not what they’re saying is true. In my last article debunking a spin job on the OPCW scandal by the narrative management firm Bellingcat, I pointed out that Bellingcat is funded by imperialist regime change operations like the National Endowment for Democracy, which was worth highlighting because it shows the readers where that organization is coming from. But if I’d left my argument there it would still be an ad hominem attack, because it wouldn’t address whether or not what Bellingcat wrote about the OPCW scandal is true. It would be a logical fallacy; proving that they are propagandists doesn’t prove that what they are saying in this particular instance is false.

What I had to do in order to actually refute Bellingcat’s spin job was show that they were making a bad argument using bad logic, which I did by highlighting the way they used pedantic wordplay to make it seem as though the explosive leaks which have been emerging from the OPCW’s investigation of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria were insignificant. I had to show how Bellingcat actually never came anywhere close to addressing the actual concerns about a leaked internal OPCW email, such as extremely low chlorinated organic chemical levels on the scene and patients’ symptoms not matching up with chlorine gas poisoning, as well as the fact that the OPCW investigators plainly don’t feel as though their concerns were met since they’re blowing the whistle on the organisation now.

And, for the record, Bellingcat’s lead trainer/researcher guy responded to my arguments by saying I’m a conspiracy theorist. I personally count that as a win.

The correct response to someone who attacks the outlet or individual you’re citing instead of attacking the actual argument being made is, “You’re attacking the source instead of the argument. That’s a logical fallacy, and it’s only ever employed by people who can’t attack the argument.”

The demand that you only ever use mainstream establishment media when arguing against establishment narratives is itself an inherently contradictory position, because establishment media by their very nature do not report facts against the establishment. It’s saying “You’re only allowed to criticise establishment power using outlets which never criticize establishment power.”

Good luck finding a compilation of Trump’s dangerous escalations against Moscow like the one I wrote the other day anywhere in the mainstream media, for example. Neither mainstream liberals nor mainstream conservatives are interested in promoting that narrative, so it simply doesn’t exist in the mainstream information bubble. Every item I listed in that article is independently verifiable and sourced from separate mainstream media reports, yet if you share that article in a debate with an establishment loyalist and they know who I am, nine times out of ten they’ll say something like “LOL Caitlin Johnstone?? She’s nuts!” With “nuts” of course meaning “Says things my TV doesn’t say”.

It’s possible to just click on all the hyperlinks in my article and share them separately to make your point, but you can also simply point out that they are committing a logical fallacy, and that they are doing so because they can’t actually attack the argument.

This will make them very upset, because for the last few years establishment loyalists have been told that it is perfectly normal and acceptable to attack the source instead of the argument. The mass hysteria about “fake news” and “Russian propaganda” has left consumers of mainstream media with the unquestioned assumption that if they ever so much as glance at an RT article their faces will begin to melt like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They’ve been trained to believe that it’s perfectly logical and acceptable to simply shriek “propaganda!” at a rational argument or well-sourced article which invalidates their position, or even to proactively go around calling people Russian agents who dissent from mainstream western power-serving narratives.

But it isn’t logical, and it isn’t acceptable. The best way to oppose their favorite logically fallacious tactic is to call it like it is, and let them deal with the cognitive dissonance that that brings up for them.

Of course some nuance is needed here. Remember that alternative media is just like anything else: there’s good and bad, even within the same outlet, so make sure what you’re sharing is solid and not just some schmuck making a baseless claim. You can’t just post a link to some Youtuber making an unsubstantiated assertion and then accuse the person you’re debating of attacking the source when they dismiss it. That which has been presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence, and if the link you’re citing consists of nothing other than unproven assertions by someone they’ve got no reason to take at their word, they can rightly dismiss it.

If however the claims in the link you’re citing are logically coherent arguments or well-documented facts presented in a way that people can independently fact-check, it doesn’t matter if you’re citing CNN or Sputnik. The only advantage to using CNN when possible would be that it allows you to skip the part where they perform the online equivalent of putting their fingers in their ears and humming.

Don’t allow those who are still sleeping bully those who are not into silence. Insist on facts, evidence, and intellectually honest arguments, and if they refuse to provide them call it what it is: an admission that they have lost the debate.

The Need for a Greater Vision: Recognizing Reality

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By Jennifer Ladd

Source: Resilience

Question Beliefs

We live in a culture that is embedded in unquestioned beliefs passing as truth. These beliefs are the source of our current crisis. We attempt to solve the problems of degradation of our environment and climate disruption, but we do not look at these core beliefs. We hold on to the idea that capitalism is the only right way to organize an economy, that democracy is essential to our freedom, that freedom itself is a core ingredient to our happiness. We believe corporate slogans such as “Progress is our most important product” (General Electric), and subscribe to the belief that technology will solve whatever problems we have, even the ones caused by technology.

Grasp the Scope of the Crisis

Most of us are unable to back away far enough to grasp the whole picture. We are like a tourist with a flashlight trying to get a view of a huge mural that covers a block-long wall. The news media can only focus our attention on a tiny fraction of the image at any one time. We read daily reports of record temperatures in the arctic, of ice sheets melting in the Antarctic, of floods, forest fires all over the world, political gridlock, and recession fears. We are deluged with information. Most of us have been touched directly by at least one aspect of the crisis. Today I am breathing the smoke of fires in British Columbia and Alaska hundreds of miles away. These are direct experiences, yet there are still those who deny that climate change is real or that it is a problem. And worse yet we do not have the political will or mechanism to respond. Many scientists clam we are beyond the tipping point. They say the damage done to the ecosystem is so great that further decline is assured, even if we drastically reduce our impact in the next 5 years.

We are confronting a confluence of issues – environmental degradation, climate disruption, political tension and economic instability – that create an unprecedented risk to future generations. Climate disruption is getting all the headlines, but talk to a fisherman anywhere on the coast and he will point to depleted fish stocks making it impossible to earn a living fishing. Some of that is due to climate, but over-fishing, water pollution and destruction of spawning grounds also play major roles. Agricultural runoff is creating large dead zones at the mouths of rivers, areas that used to be some of the most productive.

Insect populations are plummeting with some reports of 75% loss in the last 50 years1.Insects are the base of the food chain for many creatures. If they die off then we will all go. The cause is not simple but insecticides on farm land and habitat destruction are major factors.

Fresh water is another resource in critical decline. We have been pumping water from aquifers at rates that far exceed the rate of recharge. Worldwide, 40% of our food grown on irrigated land.2 Without irrigation we will face severe food shortages. In addition, much of the remaining irrigated land is dependent on snowpack that feeds reservoirs in the mountains. As the climate warms there is less snow and it melts sooner, reducing the amount of stored water available.

If we listen to the economic news we cannot help but be aware of the rapid increase in the US national debt. Politicians seem incapable of holding the debt in check, especially the Trump administration that established policies and tax cuts that have dramatically increased the debt at a time when the economy is doing relatively well and we should be reducing the debt. Despite the ignorance of some lawmakers, debt cannot continue to rise indefinitely. Many countries have tried that. In the end it leads to hyper inflation, and in extreme cases, a collapse of the government.

A more subtle and less talked about issue is that of resource depletion. True, Malthus warned the world of this 200 years ago during a time when energy resources in the form of wood were being depleted.Then we discovered coal, then oil, and the industrial revolution sparked a new level of development and environmental destruction on a level Malthus could never have foreseen. The issue is that while technology has kept the price of raw materials from increasing dramatically, metals like copper, and energy sources like oil and gas are finite. The deeper we have to mine or drill and the more complex the extraction process, the smaller the final product derived from the energy expended to get the material. When oil was first discovered it took roughly one barrel of oil’s worth of energy to extract 100 barrels. Now that one barrel might get us 10 barrels. The costs are multiplied throughout the system. In other words if it now takes 3 times as much energy to mine a ton of copper as it did 50 years ago, because the high quality and easily extracted ore are gone, and that energy is derived from oil which itself requires 10 times more energy to extract, then the two factors multiply the real cost of the copper. In our example it now “costs” the equivalent of 30 times more oil to produce a ton of copper. Again, we run into limits.

I am proposing that the solution is a radical redesign of our civilization based on a more sustainable model. To do that we need to examine the core beliefs of our society to see which ones are compatible with a new vision and which ones need to be abandoned. This requires that we face our fear of change, grieve for the losses, clear our nervous systems of intergenerational trauma that blinds us to seeing the reality of our time and open our hearts to living in connection. This cannot come about by any rational decision by a governing body. Those in power have a vested interest in keeping the current system alive as long as possible. Call it a form of corruption, but it is also simply a matter of self preservation. We can, however, make changes on a personal and local level. We can have working models established on a small scale that can replace systems on a national level as they fail. We either cling to the existing paradigm as it implodes, or we can place our attention and focus our energy on creating new systems that support life in harmony on the planet.

Look Below the Symptoms

A partial list of these beliefs was mentioned already – that our prosperity depends on capitalism, democracy, and progress through technology. Let’s go deeper to see how these structures of society evolved, and how they affect us today. The core belief that underlies our current civilization is the idea that we are separate from nature and superior to other creatures and even other races of human beings. It leads to a distrust of nature which shows up even in the fables we tell our children, which are filled with images of the dark and dangerous forest and the merciless ocean depths.

Another belief is that security consists of having enough food or money stored away to last through hard times. In itself the belief is true, but it becomes dysfunctional in a world of finite resources when each person is focused on maximizing their own resources without consideration for the whole. To justify our actions we convince ourselves that there are no limits, we can have it all and, through technology, everyone can be raised up to the lifestyle we enjoy in the USA.

We are embedded in the psychology of capitalism, and we live in a world shrouded in fear. The combination is lethal. Fear leads to contraction and thinking only of one’s own survival. Capitalism promotes the value of gathering resources for our own use and enjoyment. When capitalism is combined with the Puritan work ethic, it allows us to justify income inequality because of the unspoken belief that if we have more than our neighbor it is because we worked harder or smarter and therefore deserve the rewards. We may feel no obligation to share our good fortune because those who are less well off obviously did not work hard enough. The result is a society that is fundamentally adversarial, pitting the wealthy against the poor, those in power against those who would like to be in control.

That leads to us versus them thinking that pervades our culture and shows up on all levels, particularly in public arenas like politics. The two party system has devolved into two conflicting ideologies that feel irreconcilable. Each party has become more isolated and rigid in their doctrine to the point that many people only listen to information that supports their point of view or their party’s view. Where is the middle ground that allows for a cooperative solution? Problems that require dramatic solutions like climate disruption cannot be effectively addressed.

Capitalism has been the driving force behind the industrial age. It has brought us technology that was unimaginable 200 years ago.  The problem is that it is fundamentally incompatible with a sustainable world. The core precepts – private ownership of goods and land, a competitive market for labor and materials, emphasis on capital accumulation – lead to a society that is made up of a few wealthy “owners” and a large number of “workers”. The system is dependent on keeping the wages paid to labor low enough that the owners can produce products that are competitive in the market place. When labor unions were strong there was a balance of power, but the advent of free trade and multinational corporations has robbed labor unions of their bargaining power because of the availability of cheap labor in the developing world. The result is an ever increasing disparity of wealth between the owners and the workers, and an ever increasing number of workers at the lowest level of the economy. Until the last 10 years, this has been partly disguised by an overall improvement in living standards through technology, but when one compares the hours worked in 1950 to support a family, when one person’s income was adequate, compared to the present when both adults of the family have to work, it’s clear that the average working family has to work harder simply to pay for the necessities of life. Free time to enjoy life has evaporated. We do not account for that in the statistics of progress like GDP.

To facilitate the transactions of a capitalistic economy we invented money and a banking system to manage the creation of money. In our system, money is created by the banks in an equal amount to the loans they make. In other words the creation of money is dependent on the creation of debt. Debt, however, once created, tends to grow faster than the money supply because of the effect of compounding interest. Debt will tend to accumulate with those members of society that are unable to pay it off, and capital will accumulate to those who have wealth already and are free from debt. At first it works well, but as debt accumulates to the workers, they have less money to buy the goods produced by the owners and the economy goes into recession. Debt is reduced through bankruptcies and foreclosures. Capital is reduced by the downsizing and failure of businesses. Eventually a new cycle begins. Historically, the cycle often becomes extreme and outcome is revolution as the tension between the wealthy and the poor becomes intolerable.

Capitalism is a natural outgrowth of our survival instinct in disconnected world. If we do not feel supported by our fellow humans, by the natural world, and by a greater presence, then there is a level of insecurity that we continually try to appease by building protective shells around us. In modern times this translates into ownership of land, house, and enough money and other resources to allow us to feel secure. Unfortunately in the rush to acquire these items we have sold our soul to the banks which in effect own our homes and often our cars. We end up feeling even less secure because we now have even more to lose if the economy turns down and we lose our job. We crave a sense of control over our lives, but we can no longer hunt for our food or harvest it directly from the earth so even to eat we are dependent on a complex web of corporate-run systems of transportation and production that we do not control or even understand.

Healing the Wound Of Separation

In order to live in harmony with each other and with the earth we need to heal the core wound of separation from a close community, separation from the earth and the natural world, and separation from the spiritual ground from which all of this manifested world arises. Without resolving all three levels of separation we will continue to live in fear and grief, maybe depression. It is that core sense of not enough that drives the Euro-American addiction to doing, to trying to get somewhere or get something that we think will cure that sense of not enough. We invent better technology, more powerful machines to get us there faster, but the result is that we find out ever sooner that the goal we had set is not going to satisfy the sense of lack. We may accumulate more wealth at the expense of the community around us and defend that wealth with all our strength, but it does not bring us the security we seek.

In order to heal, let us acknowledge the true state of our own life and of the world. Let us fully feel the grief of the separation and fully feel the rage that lies hidden. We may have a sense of being betrayed by the society that we were taught to trust as a child. We accepted the promise of perpetual progress and came to expect that we should have a better life than our parents.

On a global level, can we feel the pain and destruction this has caused to the earth? Can we acknowledge and feel the horrors of genocide against the native population of this country and other colonized places in the world? Can we feel the full impact of enslaving millions of African natives to work our fields? The grief is immense. We have kept it suppressed for centuries, but it must be felt. Let us clear the intergenerational trauma so we can come into our hearts and truly feel the connection with the earth and with each other.

Only then, free from clinging to a failing system, in the hope of preserving the status quo, can we reconnect with source and make the leap to a new way of living. We do not have to invent better ways of living on this planet. There are models of aboriginal societies that have lived here for more than 10,000 years without destroying their environment or collapsing from internal dysfunction. They have evolved sophisticated systems of government and economic systems that allowed the wealth that was accumulated to be redistributed to those in need. They held their land in common for the benefit of the whole tribe. We have much to learn from their societies.

1. In 2017, scientists reported a decline of more than 75 percent in insect biomass across 63 nature areas in Germany between 1989 and 2016. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-insect-populations-decline-scientists-are-trying-to-understand-why/

2 .http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/infographics/Irrigated_eng.pdf

US Again Complicit in an Illegal Coup, This Time in Bolivia

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Pen and watercolor of Bolivia’s Evo Morales. (Flickr/Arturo Espinosa)

By Marjorie Cohn

Source: Consortium News

Once again, the United States is complicit in an illegal coup d’état in Latin America, this time in Bolivia. On Nov. 10, a right-wing, anti-indigenous group seized power after the Bolivian military’s removal of President Evo Morales, who had declared victory in the Oct. 20 presidential election.

The United States’ fingerprints are all over the coup. Advisers from the U.S. Southern Command have been stationed on Bolivia’s border with Argentina, Ivanka Trump made a surprising visit to an Argentine province near the Bolivian border in September, the pro-U.S. Organization of American States (OAS) cast unfounded doubt on Morales’s election victory, and the U.S.’s National Endowment for Democracy provided suspicious grants to Bolivia.

At least 32 people have been killed and hundreds injured since the coup began. Sacha Llorenti, Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations, told Democracy Now!, “We are going through not just a coup d’état, but a violent one.” Indeed, it has resulted in “the rise of a far-right regime of terror,” professor Gabriel Hetland wrote in The Washington Post.

Morales — Bolivia’s first indigenous leader in a country where 65 percent of the people are indigenous — received 10 percent more votes than Carlos Mesa, the second-place candidate who has close ties to the U.S. government. Mesa was in regular communication with U.S. officials who were trying to destabilize Morales, U.S. government cables published by WikiLeaks reveal.

The day after the election, the U.S.-funded OAS sought to delegitimize the election results. “The OAS Mission expresses its deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of the polls,” it stated.

But the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) published a comprehensive statistical analysis on Nov. 8 that found no evidence of fraud or irregularities in the election and determined that the results reflected highly similar patterns from past elections. Other research conducted by CELAG (Centro Estratégico Latinoamericano de Geopolítica) confirmed CEPR’s findings and identified insufficient evidence to support the assertions in the OAS statement.

CEPR Co-director Mark Weisbrot noted in an op-ed for Market Watch, “The OAS isn’t all that independent at the moment, with the Trump administration actively promoting this military coup, and Washington having more right-wing allies in the OAS than they did just a few years ago.”

The OAS was established during the Cold War to prevent the proliferation of leftist governments. USAID considers OAS a critical tool in “promot[ing] US interests in the Western hemisphere by countering the influence of anti-US countries” such as Bolivia.

The Nov. 10 military coup led to the forced resignation of Morales, who received asylum in Mexico. Right-wing politician Jeanine Añez declared herself interim president, and Donald Trump immediately recognized her illegitimate claim to the presidency. Añez then issued a decree immunizing the military from criminal liability “for carrying out necessary actions in their legitimate defense while performing their constitutional duties.” Morales supporters accused Añez of giving soldiers “carte blanche” to shoot demonstrators. Bolivia’s human rights ombudsman and reporters have documented widespread injuries and fatalities from gunshots.

U.S. Involvement

During Morales’s nearly 14 years in office, his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party reduced poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent. It cut unemployment by 50 percent and nearly tripled the per-capita G.D.P. “It’s indisputable that Bolivians are healthier, wealthier, better educated, living longer and more equal than at any time in this South American nation’s history,” Anthony Faiola wrote in The Washington Post.

There was discontent about Morales seeking a fourth term among some sectors in Bolivia, who thought there should be space for new leadership. But Morales had a strong record of establishing policies to help the people of Bolivia, which angered the U.S. government, Western corporations and the corporate media, “who function as ideological shock troops against leftist governments in Latin America,” Alan MacLeod wrote at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

The U.S. and Argentine governments helped to engineer the Bolivian coup, Stella Calloni reported in Resumen: Latinoamerico. She cited the presence of advisers from the U.S. Southern Command on the Argentine border with Bolivia.

Calloni also documented “the surprising trip of Ivanka Trump” to the Argentine province of Jujuy near the Bolivian border on Sept. 4-5. Accompanied by 2,500 U.S. agents and Undersecretary of State John Sullivan, Ivanka Trump was ostensibly there to “visit” a small NGO dedicated to furthering women’s rights, and she delivered an “aid” package of $400 million for “road works.” Alicia Canqui Condori, national representative of MAS, said that, “in Jujuy Donald Trump’s daughter had met with Gov. Gerardo Morales to plan what happened in Bolivia.”

Moreover, according to Calloni, Bolivian Gen. Williams Kaliman, who “suggested” that Morales resign after the election, traveled to the United States 72 hours after the coup began and he received $1 million from the U.S. embassy in Bolivia. Like many Latin American strongmen over the years, at least six of the top military leaders involved in the coup, including Kaliman, were trained at the notorious U.S. Army School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) in Fort Benning, Georgia.

Months before the coup, Bolivia concluded a $2.3 billion deal with a Chinese consortium to mine lithium. Bolivia has 70 percent of the world’s supply of lithium, which is used in car batteries, electronic devices and weapons systems. “The idea that there might be a new social compact for the lithium was unacceptable to the main transnational mining companies,” Vijay Prashad wrote. U.S. and Canadian companies sought to make a lithium agreement with Bolivia but they could not meet Morales’s conditions. “Morales himself was a direct impediment to the takeover of the lithium fields by the non-Chinese transnational firms,” according to Prashad. “He had to go.”

Meddling in Latin America

U.S. complicity in the Bolivian coup follows in a sordid tradition of meddling in the political and economic affairs of Latin American countries. “For many years, the US government has provided overt financial support to opposition political parties and civic groups, including to many of the groups that have been engaged in violent insurrections and coup plotting since at least 2008,” Thomas Field wrote in Jacobin.

One key vehicle that the U.S. government uses as a cover for its imperialist policies is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). After disturbing revelations of covert CIA operations in the second half of the 1970s, NED was established under President Ronald Reagan. “The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities,” William Blum wrote in 2005. NED co-founder Allen Weinstein concurred, stating in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” Although ostensibly a private, nonprofit organization, NED is largely funded by the United States. “In effect,” Blum noted, “the CIA has been laundering money through NED.”

Peter Haberfeld, a retired lawyer and labor organizer who has studied the “Pink Tide” governments in Latin America, documented NED grants in Bolivia. He told Truthout that “between 2016 and 2019, NED gave grants to over 30 organizations for ‘democracy promotion’ in Bolivia. The grants total $3,209,887.”

Haberfeld said the grants were officially earmarked for “lofty objectives such as expanding participation by women, youth, media and entrepreneurs in a vibrant political process, particularly in connection with elections,” but cautioned “it is wise to be suspicious.” Haberfeld cited author Neil A. Burron, who wrote in “The New Democracy Wars: The Politics of North American Democracy Promotion in the Americas,” that “democracy promotion is typically formulated to advance commercial, geopolitical and security objectives that conflict with a genuine commitment to democracy development.” Burron noted, “For the U.S., the political manipulation of democracy promotion in support of a North American-led regional order is a continuation of long-standing forms of intervention [that have been] used as a license to meddle in the domestic affairs of others.”

NED was complicit in the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, manipulated the 1990 Nicaraguan elections, heavily funded the 2002 failed coup attempt against socialist President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and supported the opposition to progressive President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in the 1990s. Between 1990 and 1992, NED donated a quarter-million dollars to the Cuban-American National Foundation, the violent anti-Castro group based in Miami.

In 2018, under the guise of “democracy,” “human rights” and “entrepreneurship,” NED funneled more than $23 million to opposition groups in Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia.

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton called Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua the “Troika of Tyranny” in November 2018. A few months later, in April 2019, the U.S. government orchestrated another unsuccessful coup in Venezuela. Juan Guaidó, Washington’s chosen puppet to seize power from President Nicolás Maduro, was funded by NED.

Trump not only took aim at the progress President Barack Obama had made toward normalization of relations with Cuba, he has escalated the U.S. economic war on Cuba and unleashed untold numbers of lawsuits that threaten to destroy the fragile Cuban economy.

The Obama administration, led by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, supported the 2009 coup in Honduras. The fraudulent election following the coup was financed by NED and the State Department, ushering in a repressive and militarized regime. Conditions deteriorated, leading to the exodus of thousands of Honduran children fleeing north.

U.S. Complicity Is Illegal

U.S. complicity in the coup in Bolivia is illegal under both U.S. and international law. The United Nations Charter prohibits the use of or threat to use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another nation. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantees the right to self-determination.

The Charter of the Organization of American States, to which the U.S. is a party, forbids any country from intervening in the internal or external affairs of another country. The OAS charter declares that, “Every State has the right to choose, without external interference, its political, economic, and social system and to organize itself in the way best suited to it, and has the duty to abstain from intervening in the affairs of another State.”

The Foreign Assistance Act forbids the United States from assisting a country “whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.”

There has been global condemnation of the coup. Sixty-four organizations of jurists, lawyers, NGOs, social movements and trade unions from around the world, including the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the National Lawyers Guild, sent a letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, urging her to strongly condemn the human rights violations resulting from the coup.

Fourteen members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying they were “deeply concerned” about the contribution of the Trump administration to the “escalating political and human rights crisis” in Bolivia.

Over 800 scholars, activists and public figures published an open letter demanding that the United States and the international community halt all support to the right-wing, anti-indigenous regime that took power after the military coup.

Veterans For Peace condemned the racist coup in Bolivia and demanded an end to U.S. intervention in Latin America:

Veterans For Peace stands in solidarity with the Indigenous majority in Bolivia who are resisting the racist, right-wing takeover of their democracy. We demand that the coup be stopped and democracy restored in Bolivia. As military veterans who have been used and abused in too many unjust wars, we demand an end to 200 years of U.S. intervention in Latin America.

The situation in Bolivia is volatile and there is danger it could devolve into civil war. This is the time to urge senators and Congress members to end all U.S. support for the illegitimate regime, demand free and fair elections with all political parties represented, and insist that fundamental human rights of all Bolivians are protected.

Impeachment hearing opens with Democratic Party blast against Russia

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By Patrick Martin

Source: WSWS.org

The House Judiciary Committee opened its first formal hearing on the impeachment of President Trump Wednesday with a statement by committee chairman Jerrold Nadler that confirmed the right-wing character of the Democratic campaign.

Nadler openly declared that the effort to impeach Trump for withholding military aid from Ukraine was a continuation of the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections in support of Trump.

He first recounted Trump’s withholding of military aid to browbeat Ukraine into opening an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, an action that Trump hoped would benefit him in the 2020 election. Nadler then said, “Of course, this is not the first time that President Trump has engaged in this pattern of conduct.”

He continued: “In 2016, the Russian government engaged in a sweeping and systematic campaign of interference in our elections. In the words of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, ‘the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome.’ The President welcomed that interference.”

In invoking the bogus claims of massive Russian intervention in the 2016 elections—and raising the even less credible suggestion that Ukraine’s actions could play a major role in the 2020 elections—Nadler revealed the essential falsehood that underlies the entire Democratic impeachment campaign over Ukraine.

The United States is not the victim of global efforts to subvert its electoral processes. The reality is just the opposite. The US government is the most active and aggressive saboteur and manipulator of democratic processes all over the world, routinely intervening to ensure that pro-American regimes are placed in power. Its intelligence agencies regularly organize political overturns, up to and including bloody military coups, in those cases where the people of a targeted country vote the “wrong” way, from the perspective of Washington.

Ukraine is one of the most prominent recent examples of this, as the CIA and State Department backed a right-wing coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, viewed as too sympathetic to Moscow. US agencies financed and mobilized ultra-right and neo-Nazi forces who spearheaded the uprising that drove Yanukovych into exile in 2014. Since then, the US and its NATO allies have been preparing feverishly for a war with Russia in which Ukraine would serve as a key battlefront, even though such a conflict would bring with it the danger of nuclear conflict.

The Judiciary Committee’s opening hearing took testimony from a panel of four law school professors on the legal and constitutional requirements for a legitimate impeachment proceeding. This was an effort to mimic the initial hearings that began impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon in 1973-74 and Bill Clinton in 1998-99.

The three professors chosen by the Democratic majority all testified that Trump’s actions constituted impeachable offenses. Each cited historical instances to demonstrate that those who drafted the US Constitution were deeply concerned about the possibility of foreign intervention into US elections, particularly as it related to the election of the president, the chief executive of the new government.

Citing these 230-year-old concerns of a small and newly independent country, in a world dominated by powerful foreign empires, only underscores the contradiction with today’s power realities. The United States is the most powerful imperialist nation. It is Ukraine that has been the target of a two-decades-long campaign of subversion and manipulation by Washington, aimed at transforming the country into a base of operations directed against Russia.

As several witnesses in the previous round of hearings held by the House Intelligence Committee asserted—and as reiterated in the Democrats’ 300-page impeachment report released Tuesday—the United States’ client regime in Kiev is already engaged in a “hot war” with Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.

The campaign to transform Ukraine into a US subject state and military staging ground against Russia, on which the CIA, State Department and Pentagon have expended more than $10 billion, was threatened by Trump’s withholding of military aid. It was this action that sparked the retaliatory “whistleblower” complaint by a CIA officer formerly assigned to the White House, which then became the pretext for the launching of the impeachment inquiry.

Again and again, throughout the eight-hour hearing, Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee returned to the theme of alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections and the ongoing US military-diplomatic operations directed against Moscow.

Eric Swalwell of California, for example, declared, “We’re here because of this photo,” while having a photograph displayed on a huge television screen showing President Volodymyr Zelensky dressed in combat gear in eastern Ukraine, where he stood on the “front line against Russia.” Swalwell added that the US was aiding Zelensky to fight Russia “so that we don’t have to fight them here,” as though Russian soldiers were about to parachute onto the streets of Washington DC.

The anti-Russian hysteria was combined with claims that Trump’s conduct in relation to Ukraine bore comparison to Watergate. One of the legal witnesses, Noah Feldman of Harvard University Law School, flatly stated, “Richard Nixon sent burglars to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. This president just made a direct phone call to the president of a foreign country asking for his intervention in our election.”

Another witness, Michael Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina Law School, went even further, declaring in his opening statement that Trump’s conduct was far worse than Nixon’s in Watergate—because Nixon used American operatives against his political rivals, while Trump resorted to foreign ones.

These comparisons collapse as soon as one considers the stark difference between the current political crisis and the situation that led to Nixon’s resignation in Watergate, as well as the crisis that shook the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s. In both these cases, the president engaged in criminal conduct in order to pursue unpopular and illegal wars—in Nixon’s case, the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos; in Reagan’s case, the “contra” war against Nicaragua.

It was the massive popular opposition to these imperialist wars that led the president in each case to resort to criminal actions. Nixon approved the formation of the “plumbers” unit of ex-CIA agents to spy on his political opponents and collect information by illegal methods, including, ultimately, the burglarizing of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex.

Reagan authorized his National Security Council, with Lt. Col. Oliver North taking the lead, to organize the sale of weapons to Iran to obtain funds that could be routed to the “contra” forces engaged in CIA-backed terrorist attacks in Nicaragua, in direct violation of the Boland Amendment, which prohibited such aid.

In the case of Ukraine, it is not Trump but his Democratic opponents who are demanding a more aggressive pursuit of illegal and militaristic foreign policy objectives, including the arming of the regime set up in the Ukraine by the CIA-backed “Maidan Revolution” of 2014. In this, the Democrats are acting as political attorneys for the CIA, Pentagon and State Department, as was made clear in the parade of national-security officials who defied Trump’s orders and testified before the House Intelligence Committee.

This embrace of the CIA-backed overthrow of an elected government in Ukraine makes nonsense of the Democrats’ claims that their concern in bringing charges against Trump is to defend democracy in America.

There would be no lack of grounds for a legitimate political indictment of Trump on charges of anti-democratic criminal actions: the forced separation of parents and children by his border Gestapo, the illegal diversion of congressionally appropriated funds to build the border wall, the “Muslim ban” on travelers from targeted countries, or Trump’s incessant appeals to racist and fascist forces.

The Democrats choose not to raise these issues because their invocations of democracy are entirely false and hypocritical. Trump’s drive towards fascism cannot and will not be fought by appealing to the CIA and State Department. These are merely two different roads to the same end: the establishment of an authoritarian regime in America.

The hypocrisy of the Democrats is demonstrated in the choice of the witness who led off the impeachment hearing. Professor Noah Feldman is not just a Harvard Law School professor. He has a long and noxious record as an apologist for American imperialist intervention, most notably serving in 2003 as a political adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council, the provisional administration set up after the US invasion.

After helping the Bush administration set up its puppet regime in Iraq at the onset of an imperialist war that has cost the lives of more than a million people and set in train a series of catastrophes in the Middle East, Feldman is hardly in a position to posture as an expert on the defense of democratic rights and constitutional processes.

Similarly, Pamela Karlan from Stanford University Law School, the second legal expert to testify, served in the Obama administration’s Department of Justice in 2014-2015, at a time when this agency was spearheading the attack on Edward Snowden and Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes and mass surveillance, and when Chelsea Manning was serving a 35-year prison term for her leaks of classified information detailing these crimes.

The Tech Giants Are a Conduit for Fascism

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

A second former Amazon employee would spark more controversy. Deap Ubhi, a former AWS employee who worked for Lynch, was tasked with gathering marketing information to make the case for a single cloud inside the DOD. Around the same time that he started working on JEDI, Ubhi began talking with AWS about rejoining the company. As his work on JEDI deepened, so did his job negotiations. Six days after he received a formal offer from Amazon, Ubhi recused himself from JEDI, fabricating a story that Amazon had expressed an interest in buying a startup company he owned. A contracting officer who investigated found enough evidence that Ubhi’s conduct violated conflict of interest rules to refer the matter to the inspector general, but concluded that his conduct did not corrupt the process. (Ubhi, who now works in AWS’ commercial division, declined comment through a company spokesperson.)

Ubhi worsened the impression by making ill-advised public statements while still employed by the DOD. In a tweet, he described himself as “once an Amazonian, always an Amazonian.”

– From the must read ProPublica expose: How Amazon and Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon

That U.S. tech giants are willing participants in facilitating mass government surveillance has been widely known for a while, particularly since whistleblower Edward Snowden risked his life and liberty to tell us about it six years ago. We also know what happens to executives who don’t play ball.

Perhaps the most high profile example relates to Joseph Nacchio, CEO of telecom company Qwest in the aftermath of 9/11. Courageously, he was the only executive who pushed back against government attempts to violate the civil liberties of his customers. A few years later, he was thrown in jail for insider trading and stayed locked up for four years. He claimed his incarceration was retaliation for not bending the knee to government, which seems likely.

Charges his defense team claimed were U.S. government retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the National Security Agency in February, 2001. This defense was not admissible in court because the U.S. Department of Justice filed an in limine motion, which is often used in national security cases, to exclude information which may reveal state secrets. Information from the Classified Information Procedures Act hearings in Nacchio’s case was likewise ruled inadmissible

Fast forward to today, and the tech giants have willingly and enthusiastically transformed themselves into compliant organs of the national security state. Big tech executives have by and large embraced this extremely lucrative and powerful role rather than push back against it. There’s simply too much money at stake, and nobody wants to go to the big house like Joe Nacchio. There is no resistance.

Just yesterday, we learned that Twitter’s executive for the Middle East is an actual British Army ‘psyops’ soldier. Unfortunately, this is not a joke.

As reported by Middle East Eye:

The senior Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East is also a part-time officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare unit, Middle East Eye has established.

Gordon MacMillan, who joined the social media company’s UK office six years ago, has for several years also served with the 77th Brigade, a unit formed in 2015 in order to develop “non-lethal” ways of waging war.

The 77th Brigade uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as podcasts, data analysis and audience research to wage what the head of the UK military, General Nick Carter, describes as “information warfare”.

Here’s how Twitter responded to the revelation…

Twitter would say only that “we actively encourage all our employees to pursue external interests.”

They don’t even care.

While that’s troubling enough, I want to focus your attention on a brilliant and extremely important piece published a couple of months ago at ProPublica, which many of you may have missed. It details the troubling and incestuous relationship between Amazon and Google executives with the Department of Defense. A relationship which virtually guarantees these CEOs immunity as long as they play ball. It’s impossible to read this piece and come away thinking these are “just private companies.” They demonstrably are not.

In the case of Amazon, a Pentagon whistleblower named Roma Laster grew uncomfortable with the cozy relationship Jeff Bezos had with DOD leaders.

We learn:

On Aug. 8, 2017, Roma Laster, a Pentagon employee responsible for policing conflicts of interest, emailed an urgent warning to the chief of staff of then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Several department employees had arranged for Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, to be sworn into an influential Pentagon advisory board despite the fact that, in the year since he’d been nominated, Bezos had never completed a required background check to obtain a security clearance.

Mattis was about to fly to the West Coast, where he would personally swear Bezos in at Amazon’s headquarters before moving on to meetings with executives from Google and Apple. Soon phone calls and emails began bouncing around the Pentagon. Security clearances are no trivial matter to defense officials; they exist to ensure that people with access to sensitive information aren’t, say, vulnerable to blackmail and don’t have conflicts of interest. Laster also contended that it was a “noteworthy exception” for Mattis to perform the ceremony. Secretaries of defense, she wrote, don’t hold swearing-in events…

The swearing-in was canceled only hours before it was scheduled to occur.

Bezos would’ve certainly been sworn into that board had Laster not had the courage to speak up. She later received her reward.

Laster did her best to enforce the rules. She would challenge the Pentagon’s cozy relationship not only with Bezos, but with Google’s Eric Schmidt, the chairman of the defense board that Bezos sought to join. The ultimate resolution? Laster was shunted aside. She was removed from the innovation board in November 2017 (but remains at the Defense Department). “Roma was removed because she insisted on them following the rules,” said a former DOD official knowledgeable about her situation.

Real whistleblowers are never celebrated by mass media and are always punished. That’s how you distinguish a real whistleblower from a fraud.

As mentioned above, Laster also called out and angered Eric Schmidt who, as chairman of Alphabet (Google, Youtube, etc), was trying to sell services to the Pentagon while at the same time serving as Chairman of the Department of Defense’s Innovation Board. That’s about as incestuous and corrupt as it gets.

Schmidt, the chairman of the innovation board, embraced the mission. In the spring and summer of 2016, he embarked, with fellow board members, on a series of visits to Pentagon operations around the world. Schmidt visited a submarine base in San Diego, an aircraft carrier off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and Creech Air Force Base, located deep in the Nevada desert near Area 51.

Inside the drone operations center at Creech, according to three people familiar with the trip, Schmidt observed video as a truck in a contested zone somewhere was surveilled by a Predator drone and annihilated. It was a mesmerizing display of the U.S. military’s lethal reach…

A little more than a year after Schmidt’s visit, Google won a $17 million subcontract in a project called Maven to help the military use image recognition software to identify drone targets — exactly the kind of function that Schmidt witnessed at Creech…

Schmidt’s influence, already strong under Carter, only grew when Mattis arrived as defense secretary. Schmidt’s travel privileges at the DOD, which required painstaking approval from the agency’s chief of staff for each stop of every trip, were suddenly unfettered after Schmidt requested carte blanche, according to three sources knowledgeable about the matter. Mattis granted him and the board permission to travel anywhere they wanted and to talk to anyone at the DOD on all but the most secret programs.

Such access is unheard-of for executives or directors of companies that sell to the government, say three current and former DOD officials, both to prevent opportunities for bribery or improper influence and to ensure that one company does not get advantages over others. “Mattis changed the rules of engagement and the muscularity of the innovation board went from zero to 60,” said a person who has served on Pentagon advisory boards. “There’s a lot of opportunity for mischief”…

Over the next months, Schmidt and two other board members with Google ties would continue flying all over the country, visiting Pentagon installations and meeting with DOD officials, sessions that no other company could attend. It’s hard to reconstruct what occurred in many of those meetings, since they were private. On one occasion, Schmidt quizzed a briefer about which cloud service provider was being used for a data project, according to a memo that Laster prepared after the briefing. When the briefer told him that Amazon handled the business, Schmidt asked if they’d considered other cloud providers. Laster’s memo flagged Schmidt’s inquiry as a “point of concern,” given that he was the chairman of a major cloud provider.

The DOD became unusually deferential to Schmidt. He preferred to travel on his personal jet, and he would ferry fellow board members with him. But that created a problem for his handlers: DOD employees are not permitted to ride on private planes. Still, the staff at the board didn’t want to inconvenience Schmidt by making him wait for his department support team to arrive on commercial flights. So, according to a source knowledgeable about the board’s spending, on at least one occasion the department requisitioned military aircraft at a cost of $25,000 an hour to transport its employees to meet Schmidt on his tour. (The DOD’s spokesperson said employees did this because “there were no commercial flights available.”)

Similar to the situation with Bezos, Roma Laster started asking questions, which angered master of the tech and military-industrial-complex universe Eric Schmidt.

Schmidt responded by threatening to go over her head to Mattis, according to her grievance. She was told to stand down and never again speak to Schmidt. According to the grievance, her boss told her, “Mr. Schmidt was a billionaire and would never accept pushback, warnings or limits.”

There’s so much more in this excellent article, but the key takeaway is the troubling extent of the existing merger between tech giants and the national security state. Disturbingly, this appears to have become even worse in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, and the reasons why are clear. First, there are billions upon billions of dollars to be made. Second, nobody from the private sector ever gets punished for violating the civil liberties of the American public on behalf of the government and intelligence agencies. On the contrary, the only people who ever lose their freedoms and livelihoods are those who blow the whistle on government criminality (Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, just to name a few).

Which brings up a very uncomfortable, yet fundamental question. How dangerous are tech giants that have near monopoly level power in core areas such as communications and online retail and also enjoy state sponsorship and the total immunity that comes with it? Add to the equation the enormous amount of money up for grabs provided you play ball with the national security state and you have a very precarious situation. This isn’t a hypothetical future dystopian scenario. It’s where we stand today. 

Facebook and Google are two companies with known ties to the national security state that together have enormous control over who, for all practical purposes, gets to speak in the modern online public square. Then consider that the tech giants represent a perfect vehicle for the national security state to censor or disappear from the conversation those deemed problematic to imperial narratives.

The U.S. government cannot explicitly restrict most kinds of speech, but tech giants can do whatever they please and don’t even need to provide a reasonable justification. This means any relationship between companies with this sort of online speech-policing power and the national security state is extremely dangerous. It’s a conduit for fascism.

Then there’s Amazon. A company that has a $600 million contract with the CIA, has used questionable practices in attempts to secure a $10 billion JEDI cloud deal with Pentagon, is aggressively marketing its facial recognition software to police departments across the country, and is coaching cops on how to obtain surveillance footage from its Ring doorbell camera without a warrant. But it gets even worse.

In light of recent public concerns around facial recognition, Bezos and his company are actively writing legislation for Congress on the issue.

We learn:

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says his company is developing a set of laws to regulate facial recognition technology that it plans to share with federal lawmakers.

In February, the company, which has faced escalating scrutiny over its controversial facial recognition tech, called Amazon Rekognition, published guidelines it said it hoped lawmakers would consider enacting. Now Amazon is taking another step, Bezos told reporters in a surprise appearance following Amazon’s annual Alexa gadget event in Seattle on Wednesday.

“Our public policy team is actually working on facial recognition regulations; it makes a lot of sense to regulate that,” Bezos said in response to a reporter’s question.

The idea is that Amazon will write its own draft of what it thinks federal legislation should look like, and it will then pitch lawmakers to adopt as much of it as possible…

In a statement, ACLU Northern CA Attorney Jacob Snow said:

“It’s a welcome sign that Amazon is finally acknowledging the dangers of face surveillance. But we’ve seen this playbook before. Once companies realize that people are demanding strong privacy protections, they sweep in, pushing weak rules that won’t protect consumer privacy and rights. Cities across the country are voting to ban face surveillance, while Amazon is pushing its surveillance tech deeper into communities.”

Meanwhile, Amazon is now using mafia tactics to pressure retailers who feel forced to use the platform given its dominance in online retail, to pay for advertising. It’s not just small brands under the gun, even large companies with high name recognition like Samsonite are being twisted via increasingly unethical practices.

Via Vox:

As Recode’s Jason Del Rey explored in his Land of the Giants podcast about the rise of Amazon, companies that sell on Amazon are increasingly having to pay to show up in search results — even when people are searching for their specific brands.

Case in point: the luggage brand Samsonite, which has to pay for sponsored ads in order to be the top result when you search “Samsonite” on Amazon.

As Samsonite’s Chief E-commerce Officer Charlie Cole told Del Rey, “Amazon is making money off your products, making money off your data by creating brands, and Amazon is making money off the privilege of being on their platform by selling you advertising to protect your brand.”

“It’s been a tough relationship,” he added.

Think about how completely insane that is, yet it’s also exactly what you’d expect to happen when one company comes to completely dominate a space as fundamental to the modern economy as online shopping.

Naturally, there’s more. It’s been well documented how Amazon uses its knowledge of product sales on its platform to then rip off existing brands by copying them and making its own version.

The more connected these tech giants are to the national security state, the more dangerous and unassailable they become. A destructive process which is already very much underway.

Centralized and unaccountable government power is alway an existential threat to human liberty, but centralized and unaccountable government power exercised via tech behemoths which aren’t restrained by the Constitution is even worse. This is the world being built around us, and we’d be wise to address it soon.