Category Archives: police state

Australia Continues Its Plunge Into Authoritarianism And Military Brinkmanship

Posted on by
2

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Australia has joined the US and UK in an “enhanced trilateral security partnership” called AUKUS with the unspoken-yet-obvious goal of coordinating escalations against China. Antiwar reports:

President Biden and the leaders of Australia and the UK announced a new military agreement on Wednesday aimed at countering China. The pact, known as AUKUS, will focus on the sharing of sensitive military technologies, and the first initiative will focus on getting Australia nuclear-powered submarines.

US officials speaking to CNN described the effort to share nuclear propulsion with another country as an “exceedingly rare step” due to the sensitivity of the technology. “This technology is extremely sensitive. This is, frankly, an exception to our policy in many respects,” one unnamed official said.

This deal will replace a planned $90 billion program to obtain twelve submarines designed by France, an obnoxious expenditure either way when a quarter of Australians are struggling to make ends meet during a pandemic that is four times more likely to kill Australians who are struggling financially. This is just the latest in Canberra’s continually expanding policy of feeding vast fortunes into Washington’s standoff with Beijing at the expense of its own people.

If readers are curious why Australia would simultaneously subvert its own economic interests by turning against its primary trading partner and its own security interests by feeding into dangerous and unnecessary provocations, I will refer them once again to the jarringly honest explanation by American political analyst John Mearsheimer at a debate hosted by the Australian think tank Center for Independent Studies in 2019. Mearsheimer told his audience that the US is going to do everything it can to halt China’s rise and prevent it from becoming the regional hegemon in the East, and that Australia should align with the US in that battle or else it would face the wrath of Washington.

“The question that’s on the table is what should Australia’s foreign policy be in light of the rise of China,” Mearsheimer said. “I’ll tell you what I would suggest if I were an Australian.”

Mearsheimer claimed that China is going to continue to grow economically and will convert this economic power into military power to dominate Asia “the way the US dominates the Western Hemisphere”, and explained why he thinks the US and its allies have every ability to prevent that from happening.

“Now the question is what does this all mean for Australia?” Mearsheimer said. “Well, you’re in a quandary for sure. Everybody knows what the quandary is. And by the way you’re not the only country in East Asia that’s in this quandary. You trade a lot with China, and that trade is very important for your prosperity, no question about that. Security-wise you really want to go with us. It makes just a lot more sense, right? And you understand that security is more important than prosperity, because if you don’t survive, you’re not gonna prosper.”

“Now some people say there’s an alternative: you can go with China,” said Mearsheimer. “Right you have a choice here: you can go with China rather the United States. There’s two things I’ll say about that. Number one, if you go with China you want to understand you are our enemy. You are then deciding to become an enemy of the United States. Because again, we’re talking about an intense security competition.”

“You’re either with us or against us,” he continued. “And if you’re trading extensively with China, and you’re friendly with China, you’re undermining the United States in this security competition. You’re feeding the beast, from our perspective. And that is not going to make us happy. And when we are not happy you do not want to underestimate how nasty we can be. Just ask Fidel Castro.”

Nervous laughter from the Australian think tank audience punctuated Mearsheimer’s more incendiary observations. The CIA is known to have made numerous attempts to assassinate Castro.

So there you have it. Australia is not aligned with the US to protect itself from China. Australia is aligned with the US to protect itself from the US.

This new move happens as Northern Territory Chief Minister Michael Gunner announces his government’s policy for Covid-19 restrictions once the territory’s population is 80 percent vaccinated which will include “lockouts” during outbreaks wherein people will only be allowed to work and move freely in society if they verify that they are vaccinated using check-in measures which Gunner literally calls a “freedom pass”.

“I’ll say it again and again. If you want your life to continue close to normal, get your jab,” Gunner said. “For vaccinated people, the check-in app will basically be your freedom pass. For people who make the choice to not get vaccinated, no vax means no freedom pass. We’re working with other governments now to get this technology ready.”

This is in alignment with what we’ve been told to expect as the rest of Australia prepares to roll out the use of vaccine passports.

And we continue to see other authoritarian escalations in Australia which have nothing to do with Covid as well. Authorities have been proposing new legal provisions which will allow Australian visas to be cancelled and citizenship revoked in entirely secret proceedings based on information provided by secretive government agencies. The horrifying Identify and Disrupt bill which allows Australian police to hack people’s devices, collect, delete and alter their information and log onto their social media was passed through Parliament at jaw-dropping speed last month. Neither of these escalations are Covid-related.

People who just started paying attention to Australian authoritarianism during Covid often get the impression that it’s entirely about the virus, but as we discussed previously the actual fundamental problem is that Australia is the only so-called democracy without any kind of statute or bill of rights to protect the citizenry from these kinds of abuses. This is why Australia is looked upon as so freakish by the rest of the western world right now: because, in this sense, it is. People call it a “free country”, but there has never been any reason to do so.

Covid has certainly played a major role in the exacerbation of Australian authoritarianism, but it’s a problem that was well underway long before the outbreak. Back in 2019 the CIVICUS Monitor had already downgraded Australia from an “open” country to one where civil space has “narrowed”, citing new laws to expand government surveillance, prosecution of whistleblowers, and raids on media organizations.

This slide into military brinkmanship and authoritarian dystopia shows no signs of stopping. The abuses of the powerful will continue to grow more egregious until the people open their eyes to what’s going on and begin taking action to steer us away from the existential dangers we are hurtling toward on multiple fronts. If there is any good news to be had here, it’s that if such a miracle ever occurs it will then be possible to immediately course correct and start building a healthy society together.

THEY ARE CREATING THE BIGGEST WITCH HUNT IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Posted on by
2

By Michael Snyder

Source: Waking Times

Prior to this pandemic, if you wanted to weed out all of the “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” from our society, how would you have done it?

I suppose that sending everyone a questionnaire asking them what they believe would be one way to do it, but of course a lot of people would give false answers and many others would simply ignore the questionnaire.  Social media profiles contain a wealth of information, but many “non-conformists” are not even on social media and digging through all of that data would take an extraordinary amount of time, money and energy.  Up until just recently, there just hasn’t been an easy and efficient way to identify those that are not eager servants of the system.

But now the COVID vaccines have changed everything.  These injections are the perfect litmus test, because “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” are pretty much the only ones that are refusing the shots at this point.  This makes it exceptionally easy to divide American citizens into two categories, and it also gives authorities a perfect excuse to push all of those “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” to the fringes of society.

As I discussed yesterday, I was literally sick to my stomach as I pondered the implications of Biden’s tyrannical new decrees.  Originally, Biden and other Democratic leaders were against any sort of vaccine mandates, but now I think that they have realized that mandates are a tool that they can use to fundamentally reshape our society.

If you don’t understand where I am going with this, just keep reading, because it will become extremely clear by the end of this article.

Biden’s new decrees cover almost every major institution in our society.  Just think about it.  Any “major institution” is almost certainly going to be employing more than 100 people, and all such organizations are covered by Biden’s mandates.

In addition to businesses of various sizes, we are also talking about colleges, schools, churches, non-profits, political entities, sports teams and charitable organizations.

Millions of Americans that are employed by such institutions could be forced to leave their positions if they refuse to comply with what Biden is demanding.

And the rules that the Biden administration is coming up with will require the institutions to be the enforcers of these draconian new measures.

Your bosses will be forced to make sure that you are submitting to the new rules, because if not they could be hit with massive fines.

In my last article I used the word “sickening” to describe what Biden is trying to do to all of us, but the truth is that word is not nearly strong enough.

What we are facing is a complete and total national nightmare, and it isn’t going to end any time soon.

Biden’s new mandates are even stricter for employees of the federal government.  Previously, employees of the federal government were at least given the option to undergo regular testing if they didn’t want to be vaccinated, but now that option is being taken away.

So now millions of federal employees will have to choose between their principles and their careers.

And considering the fact that so many of these people are barely providing for their families right now, a lot of really heartbreaking choices are going to have to be made.

Earlier today, I posted a video from a woman that works for the U.S. Treasury Department.  After all these years, she publicly announced on social media that she is going to leave her job because of Biden’s new mandates.

And countless others will follow her out the door.

Biden’s new decrees will also force nearly everyone in the entire healthcare industry to either get vaccinated or give up their careers.

What a horribly cruel thing to do.

Biden is essentially putting a gun to the heads of these people.  So many of them spent an enormous amount of time, energy and money to get their educations, and now Biden is telling them that they have to sacrifice everything that they have worked for if they will not comply with his demands.

As I pointed out yesterday, healthcare workers won’t just be forced out of their current jobs.  Because virtually every health care provider in the entire country accepts Medicaid and Medicare, those that refuse to comply will essentially be banned from the entire industry.

At a time when a shortage of qualified workers is causing chaos throughout our economy, Biden’s tyrannical orders could force millions of Americans to suddenly lose their jobs.  This is an incredibly foolish thing to do, and it could have very serious ramifications in the years ahead.

Sadly, it won’t just be a few people quitting their jobs.  A poll that was just conducted discovered that 72 percent of unvaccinated Americans said that they would quit their current jobs rather than be vaccinated…

Many making this argument have cited a Washington Post-ABC News poll released over the weekend. It showed that just 18 percent unvaccinated people whose employers don’t currently have mandates said they would likely get vaccinated if their employer required it. About 7 in 10 (72 percent) said that, if they couldn’t get a medical or religious exemption, they would probably quit rather than submit to the requirement.

I don’t know what is going on behind the scenes, but it is my opinion that Kamala Harris has had a lot of influence in the recent decisions that Biden has been making.

She has always had authoritarian tendencies, and if she ever becomes president that will truly be a catastrophic scenario.

Needless to say, Biden’s new mandates are going to cause great anxiety for millions upon millions of people, and a recent CNN poll found that the mood of the country was already heading in a very negative direction…

The new poll finds 69% of Americans say things in the country today are going badly, below the pandemic-era high of 77% reached in January just before President Joe Biden took office but well above the 60% who felt that way in a March CNN poll.

And 62% say that economic conditions in the US are poor, up from 45% in April and nearly as high as the pandemic-era peak of 65% reached in May 2020.

My hope is that Republican governors will fight Biden’s new decrees with everything that they have got.

Because the truth is that this is one of the most critical moments in U.S. history.

Our most basic liberties and freedoms are under full assault, and we really are descending into full-blown tyranny.

If Biden’s new mandates are not overturned by the courts, millions of Americans that love liberty and freedom could be forced from their jobs.

It would truly be a witch hunt of unprecedented size and scope, and it would represent the greatest purge of “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” that any of us have ever witnessed.

Which Is Worse, the Tech Giant Censors or the Stuff You Want Censored?

Posted on by
1

By David Swanson

Source: War is a Crime

The communications system we live in is highly complex, mostly driven by greed and profit, in part semi-public, full of filth I know we’d be better off without, and increasingly openly censored and monitored by defenders of accepted good thinking.

Fascist nutcases are spreading dangerous nonsense, while billionaire monopolists are virtually disappearing critics and protesters. It’s easy to get confused about what ought to be done. It’s difficult to find any recommendation that isn’t confused. Different people want different outrages censored and censored by different entities; what they all have in common is a failure to think through the threats they are creating to the things they don’t want censored.

A 1975 Canadian government commission recommended censoring “libel, obscenity, breach of the Official Secrets Act, matters affecting the defense of Canada, treason, sedition, or promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence.” This is a typical muddle. Half of those things were almost certainly already banned, as suggested by their identification through legal terminology. A few of those things probably should be banned, such as incitement of violence (though not promulgating information that “leads” to incitement of any crime or violence). Of course I would include as incitement of violence a speech by the Prime Minister advocating the shipping of Canadian “Peace Keepers” to Africa, but the Prime Minister (who would have more say than I) would no doubt have just identified me as commenting on a matter affecting the defense of Canada — plus, if he or she were in the mood, I’ve probably just promulgated something that will lead to inciting some crime or other, even if it’s just the crime of more people speaking on matters affecting the “defense” of Canada. (And it shouldn’t matter that I’m not Canadian, since Julian Assange is not from the United States.)

Well, what’s the solution? A simplistic and surprisingly popular one is to blame philosophers. Those idiot postmodernists said there was no such thing as truth, which allowed that great student of philosophy Donald Trump to declare news about him “fake” — which he never could have thought of doing without a bunch of leftist academics inspiring him; and the endless blatant lies about wars and economies and environmental collapse and straight-faced reporting of campaign promises can’t have anything at all to do with the ease people have in distrusting news reporting. So, now we need to swing the pendulum back in the direction of tattooing the Ten Commandments on our foreheads before morality perishes at the hands of the monster relativism. We can’t do that without censoring the numbskulls, regrettably of course.

This line of thinking is dependent on failing to appreciate the point of postmodern criticism. That the greater level of consensus that exists on chemistry or physics as opposed to on what should be banned as “obscenity” is a matter of degree, not of essential or metaphysical substance, is an interesting point for philosophy students, and a correct one, but not a guide to life for politicians or school teachers. That there is no possible basis for declaring some law of physics permanent and incapable of being replaced by a better one is not a reason for treating a law of physics as a matter of opinion or susceptible to alteration via fairy dust. If Isaac Newton not being God, and God also not being God, disturbs you and you’re mad at philosophers for saying it, you should notice what follows from it: the need for everyone to support your right to try to persuade them of their error. And what does not follow from it: the elimination of chemistry or physics because some nitwit claims he can fly or kill a hurricane with his gun. If that idiot has 100,000 followers on social media, your concern is not with philosophy but with stupidity.

The tech-giant censors’ concern is — in part — also with stupidity, but it’s not clear they have the tools to address it. For one thing, they just cannot help themselves. They have other concerns too. They are concerned with their profits. They are concerned with any challenges to power — their power and the power of those who empower them. They are concerned, therefore, with the demands and national bigotry of national governments. They are concerned — whether they know it or not — with creative thinking. Every time they censor an idea they believe crazy, they risk censoring one of those ideas that proves superior to existing ones. Their combination of interests appears to be self-defeating. Rather than persuade people of the benefits of their censorship, they persuade more and more people of the rightness of what was censored and of the arbitrary power-interests of those doing the censoring.

Our problem is not too many voices on the internet. It is too much concentration of wealth and power in too few media outlets that are too narrowly restricted to too few voices, relegating other voices to marginal and ghettoized corners of the internet. Nobody gets to find out they’re mistaken through respectful discourse. Nobody gets to show someone else they’re right. We need to prioritize that sort of exchange, before a flood of misguided good intentions drowns us all.

The “promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence” bit of that proposed law seems to have had a surprisingly good intention, namely benevolent parental concern with all the “action-filled” (violence-filled) children’s entertainment on television, the violence-normalizing enter/info-tainment programming for all ages that studies and commonsense suggest increase violence. But can we ban all that garbage, or do we have to empower people who actually give a damn to produce and select programming, and empower families to turn it all off, and schools to be more engaging than cartoons?

The difficulty of censoring such content should be clear from the fact that discussions of it tend to stray into numerous unrelated topics, including the supposed need to censor wars for the protection of, not children, but weapons dealers. Once you allow a corporation to censor damaging news — poof! — there go all negative reports on its products. Once you tell it to put warning labels over recommendations to drink bleach as medicine, it starts putting warning labels on anything related to climate collapse or originating outside the United States of Goddamn Righteousness. You can imagine whether that ends up helping or hurting the supposed target, stupidity.

Censoring news, and labeling news as “factual,” seems to me a cheap fix that doesn’t fix. It’s a bit like legalizing bribery and gerrymandering and limited ballot access and corporate airwaves domination and then declaring that you’ll institute term limits so that every rotten candidate has to be quickly replaced by an even more rotten one. It’s a lovely sounding solution until you try it. Look at the “fact-checker” sections of corporate media outlets. They’re as wrong and inconsistent as any other sections; they’re just labeled differently.

The solutions that will work are not easy, and I’m no expert on them, but they’re not new or mysterious either. We should democratize and legitimize government. We should use government to break up media monopolies. We should publicly and privately facilitate and support numerous independent media outlets. We should invest in publicly funded but independent media dedicated to allowing a wide range of people to discuss issues without the overarching control of the profit interest or the immediate interests of the government.

We should not be simplistic about banning or allowing censorship, but highly wary of opening up any new types of censorship and imagining they won’t be abused. We should stick to what is already illegal outside of communications (such as violence) and censor communications only when it is actually directly a part of those crimes (such as instigating particular violence). We should be open to some limits on the forces empowered by our choice through our public dollars to shape our communications; I’d be happy to ban militaries from having any role in producing movies and video games (if they’re going to bomb children in the name of “democracy,” well, then, that’s my vote for the use of my dollars).

At the same time, we need — through schools and outside of them — radically better education that includes education in the skills of media consumption, BS-spotting, propaganda deciphering, fact-verification, respect, civility, decency, and honesty. I hardly think it’s entirely the fault of youtube that kids get less of their education from their classrooms — part of the fault lies with the classrooms. But I hardly think the eternal project of learning, and of learning how to learn, can be restricted to classrooms.

Why Is Biden Mandating a Vaccine that Does Not Protect Against Covid?

Posted on by
2

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

The dumbshit American population sat on their butts and allowed a few Democrat gangsters to steal a presidential election and stick in the Oval Office a complete moron.

Doing his masters’ bidding, the moron is directing the Labor Department to rule that companies with 100 or more employees must require employees to be vaccinated or have weekly testing.  (The current PCR test in use is being abandoned as it produces false positives that have greatly exaggerated the number of Covid cases.)  

The moron is a puppet on a stick that gets moved around by the monied interests that rule us.  The moron has been directed to get all Americans “vaccinated” with a “vaccine” that the public health authorities themselves admit does not protect against Covid or the Delta variant or any of the other variants.  They have stated as much.  Their solution for a “vaccine’ that does not work is more of the “vaccine.”  Fauci says the population will need booster shots every 8 months forever.  The Israeli “health minister” is already pushing Israelis to have a fourth booster shot with more to come.

In other words, neither Fauci, the Israeli government, the elite controlling the narrative, nor the puppet on the stick are sufficiently intelligent to realize that what they are saying is:  If you are doubly vaccinated (until the other day “fully vaccinated” and assured of protection), today you no longer qualify as vaccinated, and you might be more vulnerable to Covid and its variants than the unvaccinated.  Moreover, as the Israeli “health minister” has said, you are not vaccinated even if you have the first booster shot, the third shot.  You must have a fourth booster.  Fauci has already said that you will have to have boosters forever.

In other words, the vaccine, whatever it is, is most certainly not a vaccine against Covid or its variants.

In view of these acknowledged facts, what is the point of the mad-hat vaccination campaign?  

Is it to maximize adverse vaccine reaction deaths and illnesses?  As of July, the combined adverse vaccine reaction databases of the US, EU, and UK reported more than 5 million adverse reactions and  40,000 deaths.  This information until recently was available on Google, but Google now hides it, and a search only pulls up Big Pharma propaganda that adverse reactions are “rare.”  In other words, the accomplices to murder at Google disavow the official adverse reaction reporting systems and suppress them for “spreading misinformation.”  

The numbers of adverse reactions and deaths associated with the Covid Vaccine are far greater than the officially reported numbers.  Many experts agree that few adverse reactions are reported.  Hospitals have financial incentives to call adverse reactions Covid cases. Vaccine advocates refuse to admit that there are adverse reactions.  Among some age groups the vaccine has done more harm than Covid.  These known facts are kept out of the media.

Then there is the other problem that is being kept secret.  The vaccine itself is the cause of the variants.  As I have previously reported, the vaccine enables the virus to escape immune response.  Thus, Covid cannot be controlled by mRNA vaccination.

The bottom line is:  The entirety of the Covid policy is, and has been, counterproductive and greatly harmful to public health, the economy, and civil liberty, and the response of the American Elite is to continue the harm.

The Covid policy of the United States is a complete and total betrayal of the American people.  It is a policy of total Evil.

Everything points to Thierry Meyssan being right today

Posted on by
3

By challenging the official version of the 9/11 attacks, Thierry Meyssan opened a worldwide debate. But the essence of his book on the subject was a political science study predicting the evolution of the United States after these crimes. The problem is not how the attacks were committed, but why the US reacted that day by violating its own Constitution, why it implemented in the following days very deep reforms of its institutions that changed its nature. Thierry Meyssan had predicted the transformation of the American Empire that we are seeing with the planning of the fall of Kabul. Everything he predicted has been confirmed over the last twenty years.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

At the end of 2001, I published a series of articles on the attacks of September 11, 2001, followed by a book in March 2002 [1]. The book was translated into 18 languages and opened a worldwide debate questioning the veracity of the official US narrative. However, the international press refused to discuss my arguments and launched a campaign accusing me of “amateurism” [2], “conspiracy theory” [3], and “denial” [4].

Above all, the US authorities and their supporters reduced my work to the first few pages of my book: the challenge to the official version of the attacks. But it is a work of political science aimed at denouncing what these false-flag attacks would make possible: the surveillance of Western populations and the endless war in the wider Middle East. In this article, I will therefore review what has been learned about these attacks over the past 20 years, but more importantly, I will check whether my predictions from 2002 were correct or not.

THE BLACK HOLE OF 9/11

If we are asked what happened on 9/11, we will all visualise the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. We have forgotten many other things, such as the insider trading in the shares of the affected airlines, the fire in the Old Eisenhower Building, or the collapse of a third tower in the World Trade Center.

What is most astonishing is that almost no one remembers that at 10am, Richard Clarke triggered the ’Continuity of Government Plan’ [5]. At that very moment, President Bush and Congress were suspended from office and placed under military protection. President Bush was taken to an air base in Nebraska where the CEOs of the upper floors of the Twin Towers had been since the previous evening [6]; and Congress to the Greenbrier megabunker. Power fell into the hands of the “Continuity Government”. It was in the Raven Rock Mountain megabunker (’Site R’) [7]. Power was not returned to the civilians until the end of the day.

Who exactly were the members of this ’Continuity Government’ and what did they do during the time they were in power? We still don’t know. The members of Congress who asked the question were not allowed to hold a session of their assembly on the subject.

Please understand that until we have clarification, the 9/11 controversy will continue. The procedure implemented on September 11 was designed by President Eisenhower at a time when nuclear war was feared. If he, the Speakers and a majority of Congress were killed, there would be no constitutional powers. The military would logically have to assume the continuity of government. But this was obviously not the case on that day. Not one elected official was dead. The transfer of power was therefore unconstitutional. It was strictly speaking a coup d’état.

THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11

In my book and afterwards, I hypothesised about what really happened on that day. But this is irrelevant to my point. The people who perpetrated this crime wanted to create a shock comparable to Pearl Harbor, as the members of the Project for a New American Century wrote earlier, so that they could change the way the United States lives and functions. So they told us a tall tale that we swallowed without flinching. But :

• To this day, there is no evidence of the 19 designated hijackers on board the hijacked planes. They were not on the lists of passengers on board the planes released by the airlines on the same day. The videos of the hijackers at the airport were not taken in New York, but at other airports where they were transiting.

• To date, there is no evidence that the 35 telephone communications between passengers on the hijacked flights and the ground existed [8]. This applies both to the conversation attributed to the brave passenger who allegedly attacked the hijackers on UA 93, and to the conversation testified to by US Solicitor General Theodore Olson with his wife on AA 77. In contrast, at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (accused of being the 20th hijacker who would not have boarded the plane), the FBI testified that none of the planes had phones in the armrests, that passengers should have used mobile phones, that cell phones at the time could not work at altitudes above 5,000 feet, and that the records provided by the phone companies did not show any of the communications mentioned – including that of Attorney General Olson.

• To date, there is no physical explanation for the collapse of three of the World Trade Center towers onto their own footprints (i.e. vertically). The Twin Towers were hit by two planes, but were not shaken. However, their fuel would have run down the vertical beams and melted them. A third tower was destabilised by the fall of the first two to its side. It too would have collapsed, not laterally, but vertically. It should be noted that no explanation was given for the lateral explosions heard by the firemen and widely filmed, nor for the vertical beams that were severed and not melted; two pieces of evidence attesting not to an accidental but to a controlled demolition. It should also be noted that no collapse of skyscrapers has ever been observed, either before or after 9/11, following a large-scale fire… and that no one has learned the lessons of this attack and therefore changed the way such buildings are constructed to prevent such a catastrophe. Finally, the photographs taken by firefighters of “pools” of molten steel and those taken by FEMA (the disaster management agency) of the melting rocks in which the foundations were built are inexplicable according to the official version.

• To date, there is no evidence that an airliner hit the Pentagon. Already the next day, the fire brigade had given a press conference at the Pentagon during which they had attested that they had not found anything suggestive of a plane. The authorities, who had issued a vengeful statement against my book, announced that they had collected many parts of the plane and reconstructed it in a hangar. Then they stopped communicating on this subject. Moreover, the families of the passengers of the plane in question, after having been scandalised by my words, changed their minds when they were given back funeral urns, claiming to have identified the bodies of their relatives thanks to their fingerprints (which would have been totally destroyed during fires at those temperatures). Some refused to sign the confidentiality agreement offered to them in exchange for large compensation payments.

WIDESPREAD SURVEILLANCE OF WESTERN POPULATIONS

In the days following the attacks, the Bush Administration had Congress vote on an anti-terrorist code, known as the USA Patriot Act. This is a very large piece of legislation that had been drafted over the previous two years by the Federalist Society (of which Solicitor General Theodor Olson and Attorney General John Ashcroft were members). It suspends the Bill of Rights in cases of terrorism.

At the time of the formation of the United States, there were two opposing groups. The first, around Alexander Hamilton, drafted the Constitution to set up a system comparable to the British monarchy, but with governors instead of nobles. The second, around Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, only accepted the Constitution after it had been amended to prevent the use of Reason of State. These 10 amendments are called the Bill of Rights. Their suspension challenges the balance on which the United States was founded. It gives power to the first group, the descendants of the ’Pilgrim Fathers’, the Puritans exiled from England. President Bush is a direct descendant of one of the 41 signatories of the “Mayfower Pact” (1620).

In order to implement the USA Patriot Act, a new department was created, the Homeland Security Department, which brings together various existing agencies. It has a political police force capable of spying on any citizen. According to the Washington Post, which revealed this in 2011, it has hired 835,000 civil servants, 112,000 of whom are secretly employed [9], making the United States the most Orwellian country on the planet. The way this department works was revealed in 2013 by Edward Snowden. Snowden not only provided information about the NSA’s foreign eavesdropping system, but also about domestic mass surveillance in the US. He now lives as a political refugee in Russia.

This system, although less documented, is gradually spreading to all Western states, through the ’Five Eyes’ [10] and Nato.

THE “ENDLESS WAR”: FROM 9/11 TO THE FALL OF KABUL

A month and a half after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Office of Force Transformation, which he entrusted to Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. The idea was to change the very function of the Armed Forces. The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine [11] is a reform as important as the creation of the Pentagon after the 1929 crisis. This time, it is about adapting to financial capitalism. From now on, the United States will no longer try to win wars, but on the contrary to make them last as long as possible; this is what President Bush’s expression “endless war” means. Their aim will be to destroy local state structures so that natural wealth can be exploited without having to endure political control; as Colonel Ralph Peters summed it up: “Stability is America’s enemy” [12].

This is exactly what has just happened in Afghanistan. The war started there just after 9/11. It was only supposed to last a few weeks, but it never stopped. The Taliban victory that we have just witnessed was organised by the United States itself in order to make the conflict last even longer. That is why President Biden has just said that the US did not go into Afghanistan to build a state, as it did in Germany and Japan after the Second World War. Joe Biden had, during his meeting in Geneva with Vladimir Putin, rejected the endless war. However, he has just relaunched it, aligning himself with the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine like Barack Obama.

None of the conflicts that began after 9/11 have ended. On the contrary, instability has taken hold in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. One can of course call these conflicts “civil wars” and accuse their leaders of being “dictators”, or explain nothing at all, but the fact remains that they were stable before Western intervention and that Gaddafi’s Libya and Aoun’s Lebanon were US allies when their misfortunes began.

Vice President Cheney had set up a secret group in the White House to design the development of the National Energy Policy. He was convinced that oil would run out in the medium term. This is why the United States destroyed states in order to be able to exploit their oil in the long term, but not now. Moreover, the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine states that one should not fight globalised powers such as Russia and China. On the contrary, they should be given access to the natural resources they have conquered, but they should be forced to pay royalties to the US in order to exploit them.

By publishing a number of internal US military reports, Julian Assange has not revealed any sensitive information. But all these documents show that the Pentagon has never been interested in winning the post-9/11 wars. Assange was persecuted to the point of insanity.

To wage these wars, the Pentagon secretly created clandestine Special Forces: 60,000 soldiers without uniforms [13]. They are capable of assassinating anyone in any country without leaving any trace. Bob Woodward revealed the “Global Attack Matrix” operation, decided three days after the attacks [14]. Wayne Madsen published the names of the first victims in Papua, Nigeria, Indonesia and Lebanon [15].

CONCLUSION

All my predictions have been verified over the last 20 years. Unfortunately, few people have seen how the world has changed. Most refuse to make the connection between the revelations of one side and those of the other and to see the responsibility of the Western democracies for the crimes committed in the wider Middle East.

The problem remains the same: we cannot admit that the criminal is close to us.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] L’Effroyable imposture, Thierry Meyssan, Carnot (2002). Second edition, revised and corrected L’Effroyable imposture suivie du Pentagate prefaced by General Leonid Ivashov (who was acting chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces on September 11, 2001), Demi-Lune, 2006. English Version : The Big Lie. Version en español : La Gran Impostura.

[2] According to my detractors, I had not been at the scene, as a ” true journalist ” would have had to. But the United States had banned access to the three “crime scenes” for reasons of ” national security ” and for years no journalist, from absolutely no media, had access to them. So the reproach of ” amateurism ” would have to apply not only to me but also to all the journalists who repeated the official version.

[3] The adjective ” conspiratorial ” began to be used in the 1960s to designate those who questioned the official thesis of the lone sniper who supposedly assassinated President Kennedy and denounced that what he did was a conspiracy. possible that assassination.

[4] Indeed, I deny the official version of the attacks of September 11, 2001. But the term ” denialism ” actually alludes to an extreme right-wing current – whose ideas I have always fought – that denies the will of the Nazis to perpetrate the genocide of the Jews in Europe.

[5] Against All Enemies, Inside America’s War on Terror, Richard Clarke, Free Press, 2004.

[6] Like every year, Warren Buffet – who was then the richest man in the world – gave a charity dinner in Nebraska. But, something that had never happened before, that day the annual dinner was not organized in a large hotel but … in a military base. The invited company bosses had given their New York employees the day off, which explains the relatively low death toll in the collapse of the Twin Towers.

[7] A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the abuse of America’s intelligence agencies, James Bamford, Anchor Books (2004).

[8] «¿Quién inventó las falsas llamadas telefónicas desde los aviones secuestrados el 11 de Septiembre?», por Giulietto Chiesa, Megachip-Globalist (Italia) , Red Voltaire , 28 de julio de 2013.

[9] Top Secret America : The Rise of the New American Security State, Dana Priest & William M. Arkin, Little, Brown and Company (2011).

[10] The “Five Eyes” or Five Eyes is the name of the alliance of services for eavesdropping and interception of global communications in which Australia, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom participate. in 1941 by the Atlantic Charter.

[11] “The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 25 May 2021.

[12] “Stabiliy American’s Ennemy”, col. Ralph Peters, Parameters #31-4 (winter 2001).

[13] “Exclusive : Inside the Military’s Secret Undercover Army”, William M. Arkin, Newsweek, May 17, 2021.

[14] Saturday, September 15, At Camp David, Advise and Dissent, Bob Woodward & Dan Balz, Washington Post, January 31, 2002.

[15] «J’accuse – Bush’s Death Squads», Wayne Madsen, Makingnews.com, January 31, 2002.

20 Years of Government-Sponsored Tyranny: The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19

Posted on by
Reply

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”—Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNN

What a strange and harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.

Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

What began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act  has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation has been locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, police violence and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

The rights embodied in the Constitution, if not already eviscerated, are on life support.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since 9/11.

Indeed, since the towers fell on 9/11, the U.S. government has posed a greater threat to our freedoms than any terrorist, extremist or foreign entity ever could.

While nearly 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and its agents have easily killed at least ten times that number of civilians in the U.S. and abroad since 9/11 through its police shootings, SWAT team raids, drone strikes and profit-driven efforts to police the globe, sell weapons to foreign nations (which too often fall into the hands of terrorists), and foment civil unrest in order to keep the security industrial complex gainfully employed.

The American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.

In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, pandemic lockdowns and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the U.S. government—the government that was supposed to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”—has become the enemy of the people.

Consider that the government’s answer to every problem has been more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty.

Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic.

Viewed in this light, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. Or, to put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

This is how the emergency state operates, after all, and we should know: after all, we have spent the past 20 years in a state of emergency.

From 9/11 to COVID-19, “we the people” have acted the part of the helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In turn, the government has been all too accommodating and eager while also expanding its power and authority in the so-called name of national security.

This is a government that has grown so corrupt, greedy, power-hungry and tyrannical over the course of the past 240-plus years that our constitutional republic has since given way to idiocracy, and representative government has given way to a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

What this really amounts to is a war on the American people, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield.

Indeed, the government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before. According to the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, since 9/11, the United States has spent $21 trillion on “militarization, surveillance, and repression.”

Clearly, this is not a government that is a friend to freedom.

Rather, this is a government that, in conjunction with its corporate partners, views the citizenry as consumers and bits of data to be bought, sold and traded.

This is a government that spies on and treats its people as if they have no right to privacy, especially in their own homes while the freedom to be human is being erased.

This is a government that is laying the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data as a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors. Incredibly, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.

This is a government that routinely engages in taxation without representation, whose elected officials lobby for our votes only to ignore us once elected.

This is a government comprised of petty bureaucrats, vigilantes masquerading as cops, and faceless technicians.

This is a government that railroads taxpayers into financing government programs whose only purpose is to increase the power and wealth of the corporate elite.

This is a government—a warring empire—that forces its taxpayers to pay for wars abroad that serve no other purpose except to expand the reach of the military industrial complex.

This is a government that subjects its people to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes.

This is a government that uses fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, to track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.

This is a government whose wall-to-wall surveillance has given rise to a suspect society in which the burden of proof has been reversed such that Americans are now assumed guilty until or unless they can prove their innocence.

This is a government that treats its people like second-class citizens who have no rights, and is working overtime to stigmatize and dehumanize any and all who do not fit with the government’s plans for this country.

This is a government that uses free speech zones, roving bubble zones and trespass laws to silence, censor and marginalize Americans and restrict their First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

This is a government that persists in renewing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely based on the say-so of the government.

This is a government that saddled us with the Patriot Act, which opened the door to all manner of government abuses and intrusions on our privacy.

This is a government that, in direct opposition to the dire warnings of those who founded our country, has allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish a standing army by way of programs that transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police.

This is a government that has militarized American’s domestic police, equipping them with military weapons such as “tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; a million hollow-point bullets; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft,” in addition to armored vehicles, sound cannons and the like.

This is a government that has provided cover to police when they shoot and kill unarmed individuals just for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

This is a government that has created a Constitution-free zone within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

This is a government that treats public school students as if they were prison inmates, enforcing zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, and indoctrinating them with teaching that emphasizes rote memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and critical thinking.

This is a government that is operating in the negative on every front: it’s spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad. Meanwhile, the nation’s sorely neglected infrastructure—railroads, water pipelines, ports, dams, bridges, airports and roads—is rapidly deteriorating.

This is a government that has empowered police departments to make a profit at the expense of those they have sworn to protect through the use of asset forfeiture laws, speed traps, and red light cameras.

This is a government whose gun violence—inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later—poses a greater threat to the safety and security of the nation than any mass shooter. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines.

This is a government that has allowed the presidency to become a dictatorship operating above and beyond the law, regardless of which party is in power.

This is a government that treats dissidents, whistleblowers and freedom fighters as enemies of the state.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

This is a government that allows its agents to break laws with immunity while average Americans get the book thrown at them.

This is a government that speaks in a language of force. What is this language of force? Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.

This is a government that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security, national crises and national emergencies.

This is a government that exports violence worldwide, with one of this country’s most profitable exports being weapons. Indeed, the United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world in order to prop up the military industrial complex and maintain its endless wars abroad.

This is a government that is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

This is a government that routinely undermines the Constitution and rides roughshod over the rights of the citizenry, eviscerating individual freedoms so that its own powers can be expanded.

This is a government that believes it has the authority to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation, the Constitution be damned.

In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is not a government that believes in, let alone upholds, freedom.

Bring All the Troops Home: Stop Policing the Globe and Put an End to Endless Wars

Posted on by
2

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate

It’s time to bring all our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

It’s not enough to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, America’s longest, bloodiest and most expensive war to date.

It’s time that we stop policing the globe, stop occupying other countries, and stop waging endless wars.

That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda, though.

America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.

In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people. The latest drone strike reportedly killed seven children, ages 2 to 10, in Afghanistan.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, there’s not much time left before we reach the zero hour.

It’s time to stop policing the globe, end these wars-without-end, and bring the troops home.

COVID-19 Vaccine Passports Are Here – But Who Benefits Most From Them?

Posted on by
Reply
c

By David Helfrich

Source: The Pulse

Whether it’s a restaurant in Quebec or a hotel in Portugal, you will now need to furnish a Covid-19 vaccine passport verifying vaccination status prior to entering these spaces. Proponents of the vaccine passports argue that these health passes allow businesses to re-open in key economic sectors while encouraging vaccination that will benefit public health. Critics of these passports – which are often utilized in the form of a digital health pass – argue that there are considerable ethical, technical, and scientific challenges that render Covid-19 vaccine passports both impracticable and unequitable.

Covid-19 vaccine passports raise serious questions about the commitment society has for fundamental rights surrounding bodily autonomy and integrity: the concept that each human being has autonomy and self-determination over their own body.

While it is true that vaccine mandates have been around for quite some time, and have been administered as requirements for children to attend public school and are sometimes required to travel to parts of the world where viruses like diphtheria and yellow fever are prevalent, mandating Covid-19 vaccines as a universal requirement for travel, employment and/or access to broader public services and benefits is breaking new ground with regards to removing choice by compelling one to take a vaccine in order to participate in the broader economy and access opportunity.

Regardless of one’s personal view on the Covid-19 vaccines (I personally chose to get vaccinated to mitigate the chance of infection and transmission to more vulnerable populations), this is an area where our principles are challenged. Do we really stand for the concept of “my body; my choice” – or do we only rally for this principle when it appeals to our politics/personal beliefs?

Ironically, many who do not recognize the right for a woman to exercise autonomy over her reproductive choices are now claiming the right to exercise bodily autonomy to make their own medical decisions. Conversely, many pro-choice activists are now mocking those who refuse the vaccine by claiming that they don’t have the right to bodily autonomy in this instance because their decision affects other people — which is exactly the argument pro-life activists rely upon (claiming that a pregnant woman is making a decision that affects the unborn) in their attempts to deny a woman’s right to choose.

While the more efficacious vaccines have proven to be instrumental in both mitigating infection rates as well as severe disease should a breakthrough infection occur, not all vaccines are created equal. The current Covid-19 vaccines in use around the world vary significantly with regards to efficacy, durability, and their respective capacity to protect against emergent strains.

Presumably, a passenger from the United States vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine and a second passenger from Chile vaccinated with the Sinopharm vaccine may be considered “fully vaccinated” – depending on one’s definition – despite the fact that the latter vaccine features efficacy that is but a fraction of the former’s.

Access to the more efficacious vaccines remains scarce and is driven by economic, political, and geographic factors creating a special luxury travel class for vaccinated travelers hailing from high-income countries, while disadvantaging travelers from low-income countries and/or regions with little or no access to effective vaccines. This creates a glaring disparity that limits one’s ability to move about the world, access opportunity, and visit loved ones, exacerbating global inequities that disproportionately affect communities that have already been ravaged by the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, particularly in the Global South.

Before any vaccine passport system can be equitably rolled out, the problem of universal access must be solved. Even in high-income countries where an inordinate amount of resources have been thrown at vaccine rollout efforts to ensure wide access, alarming health disparities based on race continues to persist. In the US, Black and Brown communities continue to have lower SARS-CoV-2 vaccine rates compared to the overall population, and their historic (and often well-founded) distrust of the for-profit health system should not prevent them from enjoying basic rights, accessing opportunity, and engaging in much needed social activity after over a year of isolation and lockdowns that have taken a toll on our collective physical/mental health and well-being.

Additionally, vaccine passports pose significant privacy concerns and raise a myriad of complex problems and moral conundrums as it pertains to civil liberties, surveillance, and mobility that aren’t easily resolved. From Verizon’s attempt to deploy thermal cameras to detect fevers in football stadiums to New York’s IBM “Excelsior Pass” app that leverages blockchain technology to prove that you’ve been vaccinated, tech companies are scrambling to cash out on innovative ways to peer into our private lives while undermining our civil liberties. Without a strong commitment to legal protections for privacy, the data that will be collected by big tech companies every time our vaccine passport credentials are shared will inevitably be sold for commercial purposes and even shared with law enforcement, which would lead to further burdens on over-policed communities. The prospect of being tracked in this manner would not only further isolate communities that should be encouraged to access public benefits and spaces, but could also presumably further undermine public confidence in even getting the vaccine to begin with.

There is historical precedent for how a crisis has been used to curtail civil liberties and basic freedoms. Just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Congress took advantage of the widespread fear and panic to pass the Patriot Act, expanding its authority to spy on its own citizens. Despite the Patriot Act being touted as an essential tool to combat terrorism, the Department of Justice itself admitted (in 2015) that the Patriot Act failed to help solve any major terrorism cases whatsoever. Despite this, it has taken immense efforts to try and salvage even a fraction of the civil liberties that the Patriot Act sought to undermine. Once such liberties are curtailed, it can become exceedingly difficult to reclaim them.

Without famed whistleblower Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures revealing the scope and scale of mass government surveillance, we may still be in the dark about how these immense government powers have been abused. Now, Snowden (along with many other civil liberties experts) warn that pandemic powers seized during this global health health crisis will be used to build a new “architecture of oppression” that could see liberal democracies transformed into autocratic countries imposing social credit scores, widescale restrictions on movement, and draconian censorship on free speech and expression.

When we ponder the real-world utility of implementing a Covid-19 Vaccine Passport — the question must be asked: Who will benefit most from this immensely complicated and inequitable proposition? Will it be the public health and civil liberty of the global population? Will it be Big Tech companies leveraging new surveillance technology? Will it be governments infringing upon data privacy rights? There are always unintended (and intended) consequences to such measures that must be thoroughly scrutinized, debated, and considered prior to enactment.

Particularly in the United States, vaccination status has become yet another tribal rift in a society replete with identity divisions and divergent opinion as it pertains to just about everything. Regardless of one’s view on how best to achieve the expeditious end to this global pandemic, perhaps a universal rallying call delivering a message to world governments to respect civil liberties and address global inequities would be a unique area where the tapestry of humanity can coalesce to stand for both the rights of the individual and the collective, rebuking those over-reaching forces that aim to exploit a crisis by curtailing hard-fought civil liberty gains at every turn.

Dive deeper with this conversation: The Glaring Issues With Vaccine Passports