Category Archives: State Crime

We Have Met the Alien and He Is Us

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By William Astore

Source: TomDispatch.com

We Are The Empire
Of U.S. Military Interventions, Alien Disaster Movies, and Star Wars
By William J. Astore

Perhaps you’ve heard the expression: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Cartoonist Walt Kelly’s famed possum, Pogo, first uttered that cry. In light of alien disaster movies like the recent sequel Independence Day: Resurgence and America’s disastrous wars of the twenty-first century, I’d like to suggest a slight change in that classic phrase: we have met the alien and he is us.

Allow me to explain. I grew up reading and watching science fiction with a fascination that bordered on passion. In my youth, I also felt great admiration for the high-tech, futuristic nature of the U.S. military. When it came time for college, I majored in mechanical engineering and joined the U.S. Air Force. On graduating, I would immediately be assigned to one of the more high-tech, sci-fi-like (not to say apocalyptic) military settings possible: Air Force Space Command’s Cheyenne Mountain.

For those of you who don’t remember the looming, end-of-everything atmosphere of the Cold War era, Cheyenne Mountain was a nuclear missile command center tunneled out of solid granite inside an actual mountain in Colorado. In those days, I saw myself as one of the good guys, protecting America from “alien” invasions and the potential nuclear obliteration of the country at the hands of godless communists from the Soviet Union. The year was 1985 and back then my idea of an “alien” invasion movie was Red Dawn, a film in which the Soviets and their Cuban allies invade the U.S., only to be turned back by a group of wolverine-like all-American teen rebels. (Think: the Vietcong, American-style, since the Vietnam War was then just a decade past.)

Strange to say, though, as I progressed through the military, I found myself growing increasingly uneasy about my good-guy stature and about who exactly was doing what to whom. Why, for example, did we invade Iraq in 2003 when that country had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11? Why were we so focused on dominating the Earth’s resources, especially its oil? Why, after declaring total victory over the “alien” commies in 1991 and putting the Cold War to bed for forever (or so it seemed then), did our military continue to strive for “global reach, global power” and what, with no sense of overreach or irony, it liked to call “full-spectrum dominance”?

Still, whatever was simmering away inside me, only when I retired from the Air Force in 2005 did I fully face what had been staring back at me all those years: I had met the alien, and he was me.

The Alien Nature of U.S. Military Interventions

The latest Independence Day movie, despite earning disastrous reviews, is probably still rumbling its way through a multiplex near you. The basic plot hasn’t changed: ruthless aliens from afar (yet again) invade, seeking to exploit our precious planet while annihilating humanity (something that, to the best of our knowledge, only we are actually capable of). But we humans, in such movies as in reality, are a resilient lot. Enough of the plucky and the lucky emerge from the rubble to organize a counterattack. Despite being outclassed by the aliens’ shockingly superior technology and awe-inspiring arsenal of firepower, humanity finds a way to save the Earth while — you won’t be surprised to know — thoroughly thrashing said aliens.

Remember the original Independence Day from two decades ago? Derivative and predictable it may have been, but it was also a campy spectacle — with Will Smith’s cigar-chomping military pilot, Bill Pullman’s kickass president in a cockpit, and the White House being blown to smithereens by those aliens. That was 1996. The Soviet Union was half-a-decade gone and the U.S. was the planet’s “sole superpower.” Still, who knew that seven years later, on the deck of an aircraft carrier, an all-too-real American president would climb out of a similar cockpit in a flight suit, having essentially just blown part of the Middle East to smithereens, and declare his very own “mission accomplished” moment?

In the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan and the “shock and awe” assault on Iraq, the never-ending destructiveness of the wars that followed, coupled with the U.S. government’s deployment of deadly robotic drones and special ops units across the globe, alien invasion movies aren’t — at least for me — the campy fun they once were, and not just because the latest of them is louder, dumber, and more cliché-ridden than ever. I suspect that there’s something else at work as well, something that’s barely risen to consciousness here: in these years, we’ve morphed into the planet’s invading aliens.

Think about it. Over the last half-century, whenever and wherever the U.S. military “deploys,” often to underdeveloped towns and villages in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq, it arrives very much in the spirit of those sci-fi aliens. After all, it brings with it dazzlingly destructive futuristic weaponry and high-tech gadgetry of all sorts (known in the military as “force-multipliers”). It then proceeds to build mothership-style bases that are often like American small towns plopped down in a new environment. Nowadays in such lands, American drones patrol the skies (think: the Terminator films), blast walls accented with razor wire and klieg lights provide “force protection” on the ground, and the usual attack helicopters, combat jets, and gunships hover overhead like so many alien craft. To designate targets to wipe out, U.S. forces even use lasers!

In the field, American military officers emerge from high-tech vehicles to bark out commands in a harsh “alien” tongue. (You know: English.) Even as American leaders offer reassuring words to the natives (and to the public in “the homeland”) about the U.S. military being a force for human liberation, the message couldn’t be more unmistakable if you happen to be living in such countries: the “aliens” are here, and they’re planning to take control, weapons loaded and ready to fire.

Other U.S. military officers have noticed this dynamic. In 2004, near Samarra in Iraq’s Salahuddin province, for instance, then-Major Guy Parmeter recalled asking a farmer if he’d “seen any foreign fighters” about. The farmer’s reply was as simple as it was telling: “Yes, you.” Parmeter noted, “You have a bunch of epiphanies over the course of your experience here [in Iraq], and it made me think: How are we perceived, who are we to them?”

Americans may see themselves as liberators, but to the Iraqis and so many other peoples Washington has targeted with its drones, jets, and high-tech weaponry, we are the invaders.

Do you recall what the aliens were after in the first Independence Day movie? Resources. In that film, they were compared to locusts, traveling from planet to planet, stripping them of their valuables while killing their inhabitants. These days, that narrative should sound a lot less alien to us. After all, would Washington have committed itself quite so fully to the Greater Middle East if it hadn’t possessed all that oil so vital to our consumption-driven way of life? That’s what the Carter Doctrine of 1980 was about: it defined the Persian Gulf as a U.S. “vital interest” precisely because, to quote former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s apt description of Iraq, it “floats on a sea of oil.”

Of Cold War Memories and Imperial Storm Troopers

Whether anyone notices or not, alien invasion flicks offer a telling analogy when it comes to the destructive reality of Washington’s global ambitions; so, too, do “space operas” like Star Wars. I’m a fan of George Lucas’s original trilogy, which appeared in my formative years. When I saw them in the midst of the Cold War, I never doubted that Darth Vader’s authoritarian Empire in a galaxy far, far away was the Soviet Union. Weren’t the Soviets, whom President Ronald Reagan would dub “the evil empire,” bent on imperial domination? Didn’t they have the equivalent of storm troopers, and wasn’t it our job to “contain” that threat?

Like most young Americans then, I saw myself as a plucky rebel, a mixture of the free-wheeling, wisecracking Han Solo and the fresh-faced, idealistic Luke Skywalker. Of course, George Lucas had a darker, more complex vision in mind, one in which President Richard Nixon, not some sclerotic Soviet premier, provided a model for the power-mad emperor, while the lovable Ewoks in The Return of the Jedi — with their simple if effective weaponry and their anti-imperial insurgent tactics — were clearly meant to evoke Vietnamese resistance forces in an American war that Lucas had loathed. But few enough Americans of the Cold War-era thought in such terms. (I didn’t.) It went without question that we weren’t the heartless evil empire. We were the Jedi! And metaphorically speaking, weren’t we the ones who, in the end, blew up the Soviet Death Star and won the Cold War?

How, then, did an increasingly gargantuan Pentagon become the Death Star of our moment? We even had our own Darth Vader in Dick Cheney, a vice president who actually took pride in the comparison.

Think for a moment, dear reader, about the optics of a typical twenty-first-century U.S. military intervention. As our troops deploy to places that for most Americans might as well be in a galaxy far, far away, with all their depersonalizing body armor and high-tech weaponry, they certainly have the look of imperial storm troopers.

I’m hardly the first person to notice this. As Iraq war veteran Roy Scranton recently wrote in the New York Times, “I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.” Ouch.

American troops in that country often moved about in huge MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles) described to me by an Army battalion commander as “ungainly” and “un-soldier like.” Along with M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, those MRAPs were the American equivalents of the Imperial Walkers in Star Wars. Such vehicles, my battalion commander friend noted drolly, were “not conducive to social engagements with Iraqis.”

It’s not the fault of the individual American soldier that, in these years, he’s been outfitted like a Star Wars storm trooper. His equipment is designed to be rugged and redundant, meaning difficult to break, but it comes at a cost. In Iraq, U.S. troops were often encased in 80 to 100 pounds of equipment, including a rifle, body armor, helmet, ammunition, water, radio, batteries, and night-vision goggles. And, light as they are, let’s not forget the ominous dark sunglasses meant to dim the glare of Iraq’s foreign sun.

Now, think how that soldier appeared to ordinary Iraqis — or Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans, or almost any other non-Western people. Wouldn’t he or she seem both intimidating and foreign, indeed, hostile and “alien,” especially while pointing a rifle at you and jabbering away in a foreign tongue? Of course, in Star Wars terms, it went both ways in Iraq. A colleague told me that during her time there, she heard American troops refer to Iraqis as “sand people,” the vicious desert raiders and scavengers of Star Wars. If “they” seem like vicious aliens to us, should we be surprised that we just might seem that way to them?

Meanwhile, consider the American enemy, whether the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or any of our other opponents of this era. Typically unburdened by heavy armor and loads of equipment, they move around in small bands, improvising as they go. Such “terrorists” — or “freedom fighters,” take your pick — more closely resemble (optically, at least) the plucky human survivors of Independence Day or the ragtag yet determined rebels of Star Wars than heavy patrols of U.S. troops do.

Now, think of the typical U.S. military response to the nimbleness and speed of such “rebels.” It usually involves deploying yet more and bigger technologies. The U.S. has even sent its version of Imperial Star Destroyers (we call them B-52s) to Syria and Iraq to take out “rebels” riding their version of Star Wars “speeders” (i.e. Toyota trucks).

To navigate and negotiate the complex “human terrain” (actual U.S. Army term) of “planets” like Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. troops call on a range of space-age technologies, including direction-finding equipment, signal intercept, terrain modeling, and satellite navigation using GPS. The enemy, being part of that “human terrain,” has little need for such technology to “master” it. Since understanding alien cultures and their peculiar “human terrains” is not its forte, the U.S. military has been known to hire anthropologists to help it try to grasp the strange behaviors of the peoples of Planet Iraq and Planet Afghanistan.

Yet unlike the evil empire of Star Wars or the ruthless aliens of Independence Day, the U.S. military never claimed to be seeking total control (or destruction) of the lands it invaded, nor did it claim to desire the total annihilation of their populations (unless you count the “carpet bombing” fantasies of wannabe Sith Lord Ted Cruz). Instead, it promised to leave quickly once its liberating mission was accomplished, taking its troops, attack craft, and motherships with it.

After 15 years and counting on Planet Afghanistan and 13 on Planet Iraq, tell me again how those promises have played out.

In a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Consider it an irony of alien disaster movies that they manage to critique U.S. military ambitions vis-à-vis the “primitive” natives of far-off lands (even if none of us and few of the filmmakers know it). Like it or not, as the world’s sole superpower, dependent on advanced technology to implement its global ambitions, the U.S. provides a remarkably good model for the imperial and imperious aliens of our screen life.

We Americans, proud denizens of the land of the gun and of the only superpower left standing, don’t, of course, want to think of ourselves as aliens. Who does? We go to movies like Independence Day or Star Wars to identify with the outgunned rebels. Evidence to the contrary, we still think of ourselves as the underdogs, the rebels, the liberators. And so — I still believe — we once were, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

We need to get back to that time and that galaxy. But we don’t need a high-tech time machine or sci-fi wormhole to do so. Instead, we need to take a long hard look at ourselves. Like Pogo, we need to be willing to see the evidence of our own invasive nature. Only then can we begin to become the kind of land we say we want to be.

 

A TomDispatch regular, William Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor. He blogs at Bracing Views.

Washington’s Global Economic Wars

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By James Petras

Source: Axis of Logic

Introduction
During most of the past two decades Washington has aggressively launched military and economic wars against at least nine countries, either directly or through its military aid to regional allies and proxies.  US air and ground troops have bombed or invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.

More recently Washington has escalated its global economic war against major economic rivals as well as against weaker countries.  The US no longer confines its aggressive impulses to peripheral economic countries in the Middle East, Latin America and Southern Asia:  It has declared trade wars against world powers in Asia, Eastern and Central Europe and the Gulf states.

The targets of the US economic aggression include economic powerhouses like Russia, China, Germany, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba and the Donbas region of Ukraine.

There is an increasingly thinner distinction between military and economic warfare, as the US has frequently moved from one to the other, particularly when economic aggression has not resulted in ‘regime change’ – as in the case of the sanctions campaign against Iraq leading up to the devastating invasion and destruction.

In this essay, we propose to examine the strategies and tactics underlying Washington’s economic warfare, their successes and failures, and the political and economic consequences to target nations and to world stability.

Washington’s Economic Warfare and Global Power
The US has used different tactical weapons as it pursues its economic campaigns against targeted adversaries and even against its long-time allies.

Two supposed allies, Germany and Saudi Arabia, have been attacked by the Obama Administration and US Congress via ‘legal’ manipulations aimed at their financial systems and overseas holdings.  This level of aggression against sovereign powers is remarkable and reckless.  In 2016 the US Justice Department slapped a $14 billion dollar penalty on Germany’s leading international bank, Deutsche Bank, throwing the German stock market into chaos, driving the bank’s shares down 40% and destabilizing  Germany’s financial system.  This unprecedented attack on an ally’s major bank was in direct retaliation for Germany’s support of the European Commission’s $13 billion tax levy against the US-tax evading Apple Corporation for its notorious financial shenanigans in Ireland.  German political and business leaders immediately dismissed Washington’s legalistic rhetoric for what it was: the Obama Administration’s retaliation in order to protect America’s tax evading and money laundering multinationals.

The chairman of the German parliament’s economic committee stated that the gross US attempt to extort Deutsche Bank had  all the elements of an economic war.   He noted that Washington had a “long tradition of using every available opportunity to wage what amounted to a  trade war if it benefits their own economy” and the “extortionate damages claim” against Deutsche Bank were a punitive example.  US economic sanctions against some of Germany’s major trade partners, like Russia, China and Iran, constitute another tactic to undermine Germany’s huge export economy.  Ironically, Germany is still considered “a valued ally” when it comes to the US wars against Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, which have driven millions of refugees to Europe creating havoc with Germany’s political, economic and social system and threatening to overthrow the government of ‘ally’ Angela Merkel.

The US Congress launched an economic-judicial war against its closest ally in the Gulf region when it approved legislation granting US victims of Islamist terrorism, especially related to the attacks on September 11, 2001, the right  to sue the government of Saudi Arabia and seize its overseas assets.  This included the Kingdom’s immense ‘sovereign funds’ and constitutes an arbitrary and blatant violation of Saudi sovereignty.  This opens the Pandora’s Box of economic warfare by allowing victims to sue any government for sponsoring terrorism, including the United States!   Saudi leaders immediately reacted by threatening to withdraw billions of dollars of assets in US Treasuries and investments.

The US economic sanctions against Russia are designed to strengthen its stranglehold on the economies of Europe which rely on trade with Russia.  These have especially weakened German and Polish trade relations with Russia, a major market for German industrial exports and Polish agriculture products.   Originally, the US-imposed economic sanctions against Moscow were supposed to harm Russian consumers, provoke political unrest and lead to ‘regime change’.   In reality, the unrest it provoked has been mainly among European exporters, whose contracts with Russia were shredded and billions of Euros were lost.  Furthermore, the political and diplomatic climate between Europe and Russia has deteriorated while Washington has ‘pivoted’ toward a more militaristic approach.

Results in Asia have been even more questionable:  Washington’s economic campaign against China has moved awkwardly in two directions:  Prejudicial trade deals with Asian-Pacific countries and a growing US military encirclement of China’s maritime trade routes.

The Obama regime dispatched Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to promote the Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP) among a dozen regional governments, which would blatantly exclude China, Asia’s largest economic power.   In a slap to the outgoing Obama Administration, the US Congress rejected his showpiece economic weapon against China, the TPP.

Meanwhile, Obama ‘encouraged’ his erstwhile ‘allies’ in the Philippines and Vietnam to sue China for maritime violations over the disputed ‘Spratly Islands’ before the Permanent Court of Arbitration.   Japan and Australia signed military pacts and base agreements with the Pentagon aimed at disrupting China’s trade routes.  Obama’s so-called ‘Pivot to Asia’ is a transparent campaign to block China from its markets and trading partners in Southeast Asia and Pacific countries of Latin American.  Washington’s flagrant economic warfare resulted in slapping harsh import tariffs on Chinese industrial exports, especially steel and tires.  The US also sent a ‘beefed up’ air and sea armada for ‘joint exercises’ along China’s regional trade routes and its access to critical Persian Gulf oil, setting off a ‘war of tension’.

In response to Washington’s ham-fisted aggression, the Chinese government deftly rolled out the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) with over fifty countries eagerly signing on for lucrative trade and investment deals with Beijing.  The AIIB’s startling success does not bode well for Obama’s ‘Pivot to Pacific Hegemony’.

The so-called US-EU-Iran accord did not end Washington’s trade war against Teheran.  Despite Iran’s agreement to dismantle its peaceful uranium enrichment and nuclear research programs, Washington has blocked  investors and tried to undermine trade relations, while still holding billions of dollars of Iranian state assets, frozen since the overthrow of the Shah in  1979.  Nevertheless, a German trade mission signed on a three billion trade agreement with Iran in early October 2016 and called on the US to fulfill its side of the agreement with Teheran – so far to no avail.

The US stands alone in sending its nuclear naval armada to the Persian Gulf and threatens commercial relations. Even the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the longstanding enemy of the Iranian Islamic Republic, has agreed to a cooperative oil production arrangement at a recent OPEC meeting.

Washington’s declaration of economic warfare against two of its most strategic powerful allies, Germany and Saudi Arabia and three rising competitor world powers, has eroded US economic competitiveness, undermined its access to lucrative markets and increased its reliance on aggressive military strategies over diplomacy.

What is striking and perplexing about Washington’s style of economic warfare is how costly this has been for the US economy and for US allies, with so little concrete benefit.

US oil companies have lost billions in joint exploitation deals with Russia because of Obama’s sanctions.  US bankers, agro-exporters, high-tech companies are missing out on lucrative sales just to ‘punish’ Russia over the incredibly corrupt and bankrupt US coup regime in Ukraine.

US multi-national corporations, especially those involved in Pacific Coast transport and shipyards, Silicon Valley high tech industry and Washington State’s agro-export producers are threatened by the US trade agreements that exclude China.

Iran’s billion dollar market is looking for everything from commercial airplanes to mining machinery.  Huge trade deals have has been lost to US companies because Obama continues to impose de facto sanctions.  Meanwhile, European and Asian competitors are signing contracts.

Despite Washington’s dependence on German technical knowhow and Saudi petro-dollar investments as key to its global ambitions, Obama’s irrational policies continue to undermine US trade.

Washington has engaged in economic warfare against ‘lesser economic powers’ that nevertheless play significant political roles in their regions.  The US retains the economic boycott of Cuba; it wages economic aggression against Venezuela and imposes economic sanctions against Syria, Yemen and the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.  While these countries are not costly in terms of economic loss to US business interests, they exercise significant political and ideological influence in their regions, which undermine US ambitions.

Conclusion
Washington’s resort to economic warfare complements its military fueled empire building.

But economic and military warfare are losing propositions.  While the US may extract a few billion dollars from Deutsch Bank, it will have lost much more in long-term, large-scale relations with German industrialists, politicians and financiers.  This is critical because Germany plays the key role in shaping economic policy in the European Union.  The practice of US multi-national corporations seeking off-shore tax havens in the EU may come to a grinding halt when the European Commission finishes its current investigations.  The Germans may not be too sympathetic to their American competitors.

Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has not only collapse, it has compelled China to open new avenues for trade and cooperation with Asian-Pacific nations – exactly the opposite of its original goal of isolating Beijing.  China’s Asia Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) has attracted 4 time more participants than Washington’s TPP and massive infrastructure projects are being financed to further bind ASEAN countries to China.  China’s economic growth at 6.7% more than three times that of the US at 2%.  Worse, for the Obama Administration, Washington has alienated its historically most reliable allies, as China, deepens economic ties and cooperation agreements with Thailand, Philippines, Pakistan, Cambodia and Laos.

Iran, despite US sanctions, is gaining markets and trade with Germany, Russia, China and the EU.

The Saudi-US conflict has yet to play-out but any escalation of law suits against the kingdom will result in the flight of hundreds of billions of investment dollars from the US.

In effect, Obama’s campaign of economic warfare may lead to the infinitely more costly military warfare and the massive loss of jobs and profits for the US economy.   Washington is increasingly isolated. The only allies supporting its campaign of economic sanctions are second and third rate powers, like Poland and current corrupt parasites in Ukraine.  As long as the Poles and Ukrainians can ‘mooch’ off of the IMF and grab EU and US ‘loans’, they will cheerlead Obama’s charge against Russia.  Israel, as long as it can gobble up an additional $38 billion dollars in ‘aid’ from Washington, remains  the biggest advocate for war against Iran.

Washington spends billions of US tax-payer dollars on its military bases in Japan, Philippines and Australia to maintain its hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region.   Its allies, though, are salivating at the prospect for greater trade and infrastructure investment  deals with China.

Economic warfare doesn’t work for the Washington because the US economy cannot compete, especially when it attacks its own allies and traditional partners.  Its regional allies are keen to join the ‘forbidden’ markets and share in major investment projects funded by China.  Asian leaders increasingly view Washington, with its ‘pivot to militarism’ as politically unreliable, unstable and dangerous.  After the Philippine government economic mission to China, expect more to ‘jump ship’.

Economic warfare against declared adversaries can only succeed if the US is committed to free trade with its allies, ends punitive sanctions and stops pushing for exclusive trade treaties that undermine its allies’ economies.   Furthermore, Washington should stop catering to the whims of special domestic interests.  Absent these changes, its losing campaign of economic warfare can only turn into military warfare – a prospect devastating to the US economy and to world peace.

 

Please note James Petras’s new collection of essays with Clarity Press:
THE END OF THE REPUBLIC AND THE DELUSION OF EMPIRE

ISBN: 978-0-9972870-5-9
$24.95 / 252 pp. / 2016

The Titanic Sails at Dawn: Warning Signs Point to Danger Ahead in 2017

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: A Government of Wolves

“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Despite our best efforts, we in the American police state seem to be stuck on repeat, reliving the same set of circumstances over and over and over again: egregious surveillance, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, censorship, retaliatory arrests, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, indefinite detentions, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, etc.

Unfortunately, as a nation we’ve become so desensitized to the government’s acts of violence, so accustomed to reports of government corruption, and so anesthetized to the sights and sounds of Corporate America marching in lockstep with the police state that few seem to pay heed to the warning signs blaring out the message: Danger Ahead.

Remember, the Titanic received at least four warnings from other ships about the presence of icebergs in its path, with the last warning issued an hour before disaster struck. All four warnings were ignored.

Like the Titanic, we’re plowing full steam ahead into a future riddled with hidden and not-so-hidden dangers. We too have been given ample warnings, only to have them drowned out by a carefully choreographed cacophony of political noise, cultural distractions and entertainment news—what the Romans termed “bread and circuses”—aimed at keeping the American people polarized, pacified and easily manipulated.

However, there is still danger ahead. The peril to our republic remains the same.

As long as a permanent, unelected bureaucracy—a.k.a. the shadow government— continues to call the shots in the halls of power and the reach of the police state continues to expand, the crisis has not been averted.

Here’s a glimpse of some of the nefarious government programs we’ll be encountering on our journey through the treacherous waters of 2017.

Mandatory quarantines without due process or informed consent: Under a new rule proposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, government agents will be empowered to indefinitely detain any traveler they suspect of posing a medical risk to others without providing an explanation, subject them to medical tests without their consent, and carry out such detentions and quarantines without any kind of due process or judicial review.

Mental health assessments by non-medical personnel: As a result of a nationwide push to train a broad spectrum of so-called gatekeepers such as pastors, teachers, hair stylists, bartenders, police officers and EMTs in mental health first-aid training, more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported by non-medical personnel and detained for having mental health issues.

Tracking chips for citizens: Momentum is building for the government to be able to track citizens, whether through the use of RFID chips embedded in a national ID card or through microscopic chips embedded in one’s skin. In December 2016, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation allowing police to track individuals suffering from some form of mental disability such as Alzheimer’s or autism by way of implanted chips.

Military training to deal with anti-establishment movements in megacities: The future, according to a Pentagon training video, will be militaristic, dystopian and far from friendly to freedom. Indeed, if this government propaganda-piece that is being used to train special forces is to be believed, the only thing that can save the world from outright anarchy—in the eyes of the government, at least—is the military working in conjunction with local police. The video confirms what I’ve been warning about for so long: in the eyes of the U.S. government and its henchmen, the battlefield of the future is the American home front.

Government censorship of anything it classifies as disinformation: This year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which allocates $619 billion for war and military spending, not only allows the military to indefinitely detain American citizens by placing them beyond the reach of the Constitution, but it also directs the State Department to establish a national anti-propaganda center to “counter disinformation and propaganda.” Translation: the government plans to crack down on anyone attempting to exercise their First Amendment rights by exposing government wrongdoing, while persisting in peddling its own brand of fake news.

Threat assessments: Government agents—with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software—are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state. It’s the American police state rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

War on cash: The government and its corporate partners are engaged in a concerted campaign to do away with large bills such as $20s, $50s, $100s and shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. As economist Steve Forbes concludes, “The real reason for this war on cash—start with the big bills and then work your way down—is an ugly power grab by Big Government. People will have less privacy: Electronic commerce makes it easier for Big Brother to see what we’re doing, thereby making it simpler to bar activities it doesn’t like, such as purchasing salt, sugar, big bottles of soda and Big Macs.”

Expansive surveillance: Whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, will still be listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers who work with the government to monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. In such an environment, we are all suspects to be spied on, searched, scanned, frisked, monitored, tracked and treated as if we’re potentially guilty of some wrongdoing or other.

Militarized police: Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts, complete with tanks, weaponry, and other equipment designed for the battlefield. Now, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are preparing to turn the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.

Police shootings of unarmed citizens: Owing in large part to the militarization of local law enforcement agencies, not a week goes by without more reports of hair-raising incidents by police imbued with a take-no-prisoners attitude and a battlefield approach to the communities in which they serve. Indeed, as a special report by The Washington Post reveals, despite heightened awareness of police misconduct, the number of fatal shootings by officers in 2016 remained virtually unchanged from the year before.

False flags and terrorist attacks: Despite the government’s endless propaganda about the threat of terrorism, statistics show that you are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack. You are 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane. You are 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack. You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack. And you are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.

Endless wars to keep America’s military’s empire employed: The military industrial complex that has advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, is the very entity that will continue to profit the most from America’s expanding military empire. The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s largest employer, with more than 3.2 million employees. Thus far, the U.S. taxpayer has been made to shell out more than $1.6 trillion to wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. When you add in military efforts in Pakistan, as well as the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt, that cost rises to $4.4 trillion.

Attempts by the government to identify, target and punish so-called domestic “extremists”: The government’s anti-extremism program will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist. To this end, police will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist before they can become actual threats. This is pre-crime on an ideological scale.

SWAT team raids: More than 80% of American communities have their own SWAT teams, with more than 80,000 of these paramilitary raids are carried out every year. That translates to more than 200 SWAT team raids every day in which police crash through doors, damage private property, kill citizens, terrorize adults and children alike, kill family pets, assault or shoot anyone that is perceived as threatening—and most often in the pursuit of someone merely suspected of a crime, usually some small amount of drugs.

Erosions of private property: Private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

Overcriminalization: The government’s tendency towards militarization and overcriminalization, in which routine, everyday behaviors become targets of regulation and prohibition, has resulted in Americans getting arrested for making and selling unpasteurized goat cheese, cultivating certain types of orchids, feeding a whale, holding Bible studies in their homes, and picking their kids up from school.

Strip searches and the denigration of bodily integrity: Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip search us, and probe us intimately. Accounts are on the rise of individuals—men and women alike—being subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops.

Drones: As corporations and government agencies alike prepare for their part in the coming drone invasion—it is expected that at least 30,000 drones will occupy U.S. airspace by 2020, ushering in a $30 billion per year industry—it won’t be long before American citizens find themselves to be the target of these devices. Drones—unmanned aerial vehicles—will come in all shapes and sizes, from nano-sized drones as small as a grain of sand that can do everything from conducting surveillance to detonating explosive charges, to middle-sized copter drones that can deliver pizzas to massive “hunter/killer” Predator warships that unleash firepower from on high.

Prisons: America’s prisons, housing the largest number of inmates in the world and still growing, have become money-making enterprises for private corporations that manage the prisons in exchange for the states agreeing to maintain a 90% occupancy rate for at least 20 years. And how do you keep the prisons full? By passing laws aimed at increasing the prison population, including the imposition of life sentences on people who commit minor or nonviolent crimes such as siphoning gasoline.

Censorship: First Amendment activities are being pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. Free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core freedoms. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

Fascism: As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. With Big Business and Big Government having fused into a corporate state, the president and his state counterparts—the governors—have become little more than CEOs of the Corporate State, which day by day is assuming more government control over our lives. Never before have average Americans had so little say in the workings of their government and even less access to their so-called representatives.

James Madison, the father of the Constitution, put it best when he warned: “Take alarm at the first experiment with liberties.” Anyone with even a casual knowledge about current events knows that the first experiment on our freedoms happened long ago.

We are fast moving past the point of no return when it comes to restoring our freedoms. Worse, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we can barely see the old America with its revolutionary principles and value for independence in the rear view mirror. The only reality emerging generations will know is the one constructed for them by the powers-that-be, and you can rest assured that it will not be a reality that favors individuality, liberty or anything or anyone who challenges the status quo.

As a senior advisor to George W. Bush observed, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

In other words, the government has been operating ten steps ahead for quite some time now, and we have yet to catch up, let alone catch our breath as the tides of change swirl around us.

You’d better tighten your seatbelts, folks, because we could be in for a rough ride in 2017.

 

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at http://www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

Psychologists Explain Why People Refuse to Question the Official Version of 9/11

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By Alex Pietrowski

Source: Waking Times

September 11th is the most polarizing event in modern world history. After looking at the aggregate of the accumulated facts and analysis that has emerged since the day itself in 2001, many people find it impossible to believe the official version of events, and since no serious government investigation is considering new evidence or professional analysis, people are left to decide for themselves if there is more to the story.

Due to the sheer volume of information that defies the government’s explanation of events, to believe the official story it now requires some sort of trick of the mind, or some sort of subconscious unwillingness to even entertain a contrary possibility. Regarding 9/11 truth, people will say the most absurdly illogical things, such as:

“I wouldn’t believe what you’re telling me, even if it were true.”
“I don’t need to look at the evidence.”
“I don’t want to know the truth, or I’d become too negative.”
“If that were true, someone would have leaked it by now.”
“That’s ridiculous, there is no way our government would harm us.”
“What makes you think we even deserve to know the truth?”

So, why is it that people have such a hard time even questioning the official version, and why is it difficult for them to even look at alternative information about the events of 9/11?

“At this point we have nine years of hard scientific evidence that disproves the government theory about what happened on September 11th, and yet people continue to be either oblivious to the fact that this information exists, or completely resistant to looking at this information. So the question becomes, why? Why is it that people have so much trouble hearing this information?

From my work  I think we would be remiss not to look at the impact of trauma.” – Marti Hopper, Ph.D.

Trauma Based Mind Control Works

Firstly, it is critical to bring attention to the severity of trauma incurred when witnessing and processing an event of this magnitude. The nation, and much of the world, is still suffering from mass, collective PTSD, and as time goes by, our exposure to more acts of terror only amplify our attempts to bury this trauma within the psyche.

The darker and more horrifying the affront to our humanity, the more effective we are at burying it. The shock and awe theory of consciousness.

“Many people respond to these truths in a very deep way. Some have a visceral reaction, like they’ve been punched in the stomach. To begin to accept the possibility that the government was involved is like opening pandoras box. If you open the lid and peek in a little bit, it’s going to challenge some of your fundamental beliefs about the world.” – Robert Hopper, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist

Protecting Worldview Home

Psychologists highlight how the human mind has a tendency to look out for its own security, protecting itself from ideas that challenge core beliefs. When your worldview comes into serious doubt, it can feel like everything is crashing down, and that you’re being thrown into the great wide open with no security. Much as the body shifts into fight or flight mode when danger is clear and present, so too, the mind has tools of evasion from harm.

“When we hear information that contradicts our worldview, social psychologists call the resulting insecurity, ‘cognitive dissonance.’” – Frances Shure, M.A.

The mind tries to survive by allowing conflicting information to exist simultaneously, unconsciously choosing to bury that which causes the most disruption to the comfort of held beliefs.

In the case of 9/11, and other events where the media plays a critical role in creating a narrative of what happened, one cognition is always the official narrative which typically supports presently held beliefs about society, and the other cognition can be based on fact and evidence, but since it challenges to undermine the safety of such illusions, it is thusly over ridden.

“9/11 truth challenges the beliefs that our country protects us and keeps up safe, and that America is the good guy. When your beliefs are challenged, fear and anxiety are created. In response to that, our psychological defenses kick in, and they protect us from these emotions. Denial, which is probably the most primitive psychological defense is the one most likely to kick in when our beliefs are challenged.” – Robert Hopper, Ph.D

The result is disharmony, the collapse of a very important worldview and a source of psychological protection. What is left in its place is insecurity, vulnerability, and confusion, triggering a survival mechanism.

Cognitive-dissonance

Final Thoughts

9/11 is a crime and a public trauma so grand, that for one to look deeply into it will require them to change or adjust at least some of their fundamental beliefs about the world. Cognitive dissonance, which can lead to the most bizarre reactions to controversially true information, is the mind’s way of hunkering down and weathering the storm in self-protection.

“The terror associated with our unstoppable annihilation creates a subconscious conflict or anxiety called cognitive dissonance. We try to cope with having to accept two contrary ideas. – Gary Vey

This is why the 9/11 issue is so important in our collective awakening. It is so big, and so well-documented that it can lead to a complete reevaluation of our entire worldview and social systems, and a huge leap forward in consciousness and awareness.

If we can think of our world view as being sort of our mental and emotional home, I think all of us would do just about anythign to defend our homes, defend our families…” – Dorothy Loring, M.A., Counseling Psychologist

Take a look at the following presentation looking at why our minds tend to shut down when confronted with the alternate view of 9/11:

 

Alex Pietrowski is an artist and writer concerned with preserving good health and the basic freedom to enjoy a healthy lifestyle. He is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and Offgrid Outpost, a provider of storable food and emergency kits. Alex is an avid student of Yoga and life.

And the Beat Goes On: Mega-rich get richer. Society Crumbles

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By Robert De Filippis

(OpEdNews.com)

While most of us have been taking our kids to Little League games, betting on the Super Bowl, taking an occasional vacation and waiting for the American Dream to become a reality, we haven’t noticed something important happening all around us. Society has been crumbling at the edges for the last several decades.

This is not to say that lots of human beings haven’t already experienced the early stages of this societal disintegration. But they tend to be the people at the margins. People without a voice. People whose interests are not understood, let alone represented in the great debates of our times.

Think of the Mideast. Think ISIS here. Think of terrorism. Terrorists don’t attack us because of our freedoms. They attack out of desperation. Out of a frustration that comes with no future, and a feeling of impotence in the face of the continued economic violence committed in the name of corporate profits and greed. Corporations protected by the most powerful military in the history of the world. Ours!

Is it any mystery why we have over six hundred military installations in other countries around the world? We’re not under threat from anyone, but our corporation’s interests in those countries must be protected while they rape them of their labor and natural resources.

History is written by the victors and the popular public narratives are circumscribed by those whose interests they serve and not those who suffer. At the core of this phenomenon is complicity. A subconscious complicity made up of an ultra-resistant trifecta of human thinking — greed, ignorance, and certainty.

Greed now normalized has made the great American dream indistinguishable from having basic financial security to making everyone a billionaire-in-waiting. An inability to distinguish fact from opinion leads the wave of ignorance that engulfs us. Our arrogance disguised as fervent patriotism defends our ignorance and allows us to reject the knowledge we need to save ourselves.

Our generalized confusion of what constitutes a fact allows an individual’s certainty to form a resistance similar to the bacterial infections that threaten to make modern antibiotics useless. It continues to evolve. “If I can’t figure out who’s lying, I’ll believe the one who confirms my point of view. Of that I’m certain.”

Until we learn that having our beliefs validated by a media being paid to manipulate us for political gain, society will continue to disintegrate for larger and larger groups of people.

Seems like a stretch, I know. But think about how we’ve become polarized. How we are so sure of our positions that we just can’t have a conversation with those from the other side. The very conversation we need to have to figure out how we’re being duped. Then think about how our politicians use the greed, ignorance and certainty on both sides to work us up into an emotional lather. And finally, how they ignore our interests while they do the bidding of their owners keeping us distracted with our petty differences with each other.

This will come to an end. There will either be a major social revolution at the least or outright raw violence at the worst. As the authority structures lose the willing conformance of the masses, all that’s left to police them is force. And at some point – like is beginning now — the response will be violence in return. Think of the proliferation of guns in America. Think of people shooting police.

It doesn’t take much discernment to see that corporate structures are highly sophisticated mechanisms for funneling money upwards. That government collusion protects the interests of the owners of capital at the expense of the employees, customers, the general public. And the military protects their international interests.

The largest wealth producer in the world is the financial industry that simply makes money from money and produces nothing. It serves no interests but its own. Yes, some of us fortunate to have salvaged what’s left of our life savings after repeated financial crashes still enjoy the crumbs from the tables of the elite. I do mean crumbs.

Do the math. At the current rate of the upward movement of wealth, there is no other outcome but final disaster. The top 1/10th of 1 percent — not 1 percent — but 1/10th of 1 percent in America owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent in America, and it gets worse as you leave our shores.

At this rate, the world will eventually consist of gated enclaves of the mega-wealthy guarded by elite corps of paid mercenaries surrounded by billions of impoverished people.

This trajectory has increased dramatically for the last several decades. More and more of the world’s wealth is pouring into the coffers of the mega-rich. This is a zero sum game. When the masses have no wealth left, the game will be over. No matter how powerful the wealthy are, no matter how much wealth they possess, the game will be over.

How the Government is Manipulating America’s Youth

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By Ryan Christian

Source: Waking Times

Few would disagree that this country’s school system is, at best, behind the times; at worst, stifling unique perspectives and creativity, and effectively the future. With all that we have discovered about the way the mind works, and how each child learns in their own specific way, in their own time, it should be clear to all that each child has a special unique way of seeing the world that should be celebrated instead of suppressed or controlled. Yet our school system continues to use standardized testing and conformation techniques designed to mold each distinct and thriving individual into yet another perfectly conformed subservient consumer.

To some, this may seem outlandish, because why would the government desire to stifle the growing minds of its people and force what could be the next Einstein, the next Michelangelo or Bob Dylan to see the world their way; the next outside the box thinker who breaks the mold and leads this struggling society toward salvation? Why would they desire to take that potential “mold-breaker” and place them squarely back inside the box, destined for life in retail sales, or something else as benign and in service of the Empire’s “greater good?”

There are many answers that could be given to that question, yet the ultimate end-goal is always control. A docile, unified populace, all conformed and aligned in their perspectives, is much easier to manipulate toward a specific agenda than those such as independent journalists or other critical thinkers who will question the choices of the nation’s leaders, as was the hope of the founding fathers when envisioning the American republic that never came to pass. The success of the nation is something no doubt desired by the majority of Americans, but not at the deceptive and forceful expense of our children’s creativity; their future.

Make no mistake, true innovation has always come from those pushing the boundaries; those widely considered “crazy” by the masses, until it is realized that they were trailblazers, creators, true pioneers of the human mind and what it could be capable of. Sadly, this realization all to often happens after one is long dead, and those who once chose to cast stones, now enjoy the fruits of their struggles.

Today’s school system effectively puts an end to any such “unauthorized” thinking. It dictates how each child thinks, acts and sees the world, and it is very much by design. The government has made no secret about the fact that they consider one of their largest problems to be “conspiracy theorists” or what some are actively attempting to label the “Alt-Right” despite the fact that much of the alternative media no longer identifies with any of their faux political parties. It has even gone as far as to label “bloggers” or independent journalists such as Luke Rudkowski from We Are Change, as “domestic terrorists,” for simply exercising his constitutional rights, and providing the American people with the Truth about this country’s less than honorable foreign policy.

Even if one disagrees with his perspective of the truth, it is still his right as an American to speak out. Yet in today’s police state, the Truth can be a very dangerous thing, and that is made all the more clear with every attempt to cast doubt on what the rest of the world now knows to be true; to cast doubt on anyone spreading that Truth. Those choosing to seek answers for the people in this society of questions, should be the embodiment of what this country used to stand for, and what is now a word that has been so diluted and overused that is has largely lost its meaning in today’s America: freedom.

It is all too easy to put the issue of our failing school system on the back-burner, while this country ‘s news feed is dominated with police shootings, the US government’s ISIS boogeyman, and a circus of an election that has become a world-wide laughingstock. Yet it is important to realize that this is the next generation of Americans that are being carefully constructed like some kind of “build-your-own-American” program. Much of what is seen in the news could very well be designed to keep everyone focused elsewhere while the nation’s youth is programmed to compliance.

As unsettling as it might be to consider that one’s government might be conducting such a sinister operation, two things must be considered: First, is that this country has a very clearly documented history of conducting exactly this type of mind-altering control experimentation on those willing and unwilling alike; it’s just that we like to think that the worst of our checkered past is somehow from a different America that we have grown away from. Yet sadly, deep down, most know that is not the case. Secondly, many of those conducting such invasive experiments, to some degree, have convinced themselves that what they are doing is for the greater good of the American people. The question we all must ask ourselves, is at what point did this arbitrary idea of the “greater good” begin to supersede our rights as Americans, and as human beings?

 

Ryan Cristian is the author of website, The Last American Vagabond.

Foxes Guard Facebook Henhouse

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By F. William Engdahl

Source: New Eastern Outlook

The latest mantra of CIA-linked media since the “Pizzagate” leaks of data alleging that Hillary Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta and other highly influential political persons in Washington were connected to an unusual pizza place near the White House run by a 41-year old James Achilles Alefantis called Comet Ping Pong, is the need to crack down (i.e. censorship) on what is being called “Fake News.” The latest step in this internet censorship drive is a decision by the murky social media organization called Facebook to hire special organizations to determine if Facebook messages are pushing Fake News or not. Now it comes out that the “fact check” private organizations used by Facebook are tied to the CIA and CIA-related NGO’s including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

In the last weeks of the US Presidential campaign, Wikileaks released a huge number of emails linked to Clinton Campaign Manager, John Podesta. The contents of thousands of emails revealed detailed exchanges between Podesta and the oddly-influential Comet Ping Pong pizza place owner, Alefantis, as well as the Clinton campaign, which held fundraisers at Comet Ping Pong.

The Pizzagate scandal exploded in the final weeks of the US campaign as teams of private researchers documented and posted Facebook, Instagram and other data suggesting that Alefantis and Comet Ping Pong were at the heart of a pedophilia ring that implicated some of the most prominent politicians in Washington and beyond.

The New York Times and Washington Post moved swiftly to assert that the Pizzagate revelations were Fake News, quoting “anonymous sources” who supposedly said the CIA “believed” Russia was behind hackers who exposed emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. Former NSA senior intelligence expert William Binney claimed the Podesta and Clinton campaign data were leaked, not hacked. The NSA, he pointed out, would immediately identify a hack, especially a foreign hack, and they have remained silent.

The uncovering and release to Wikileaks of the Podesta emails were immediately blamed on Russian intelligence by the CIA, and now by the US President, with not a shred of proof, and despite the fact that NSA. Wikipedia, whose content is often manipulated by US intelligence agencies, rapidly posted a page with the curious title, “Pizzagate (Conspiracy Theory).”

To make certain the neutral interested reader gets the message, the first line reads, “Pizzagate is a debunked conspiracy theory which emerged during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle, alleging that John Podesta’s emails, which were leaked by WikiLeaks, contain coded messages referring to human trafficking, and connecting a number of pizzerias in Washington, D.C. and members of the Democratic Party to a child-sex ring.”

‘Fake News’ Mantra Begins

My purpose in mentioning Pizzagate details is not to demonstrate the authenticity of the Pizzagate allegations. That others are doing with far more resources. Rather, it is to point out the time synchronicity of the explosive Pizzagate email releases by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks web blog, with the launch of a massive mainstream media and political campaign against what is now being called “Fake News.”

The cited New York Times article that Wikipedia cites as “debunking” the Pizzagate allegations states, “None of it was true. While Mr. Alefantis has some prominent Democratic friends in Washington and was a supporter of Mrs. Clinton, he has never met her, does not sell or abuse children, and is not being investigated by law enforcement for any of these claims. He and his 40 employees had unwittingly become real people caught in the middle of a storm of fake news.” The article contains not one concrete proof that the allegations are false, merely quoting Alefantis as the poor victim of malicious Fake News.

That New York Times story was accompanied by a series of articles such as “How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study.” Another headline reads, “Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News.” Then on November 19, strong Clinton supporter, Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is quoted in a prominent article titled, “Facebook Considering Ways to Combat Fake News, Mark Zuckerberg Says.”

Facebook uses CIA Censors

Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of the world-leading social media site, Facebook.com, the world’s 5th wealthiest man at an estimated $50 billion, has now established a network of “Third Party Fact Checkers” whose job is to red flag any Facebook message of the estimated one billion people using the site, with a prominent warning that reads, “Disputed by Third-Party Fact Checkers.”

Facebook has announced that it is taking its censorship ques from something called The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). This IFCN, a new creation, has drafted a code of five principles for news websites to accept, and Facebook will work with “third-party fact checking organizations” that are signatories to that code of principles.

If we search under the name International Fact-Checking Network, we find ourselves at the homepage of something called the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida.

OK. If we look a bit deeper we find that the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network in turn, as its website states, gets money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Foundations of George Soros.

Oh my, oh my! Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who partners with Soros in numerous nasty projects such as convincing African countries to accept Genetically Modified or GMO seeds? Google, whose origins date back to funding by the CIA and NSA as what intelligence researcher Nafeez Ahmed describes as a “plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority‘ “?

The Omidyar Foundation is the foundation of eBay founder and multi billionaire, Pierre Omidyar, which finances among other projects the online digital publication, The Intercept, launched in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.

And the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Government-financed “private” NGO behind every Color Revolution CIA regime change from the Ukraine Color Revolutions to the Arab Spring? The NED was a CIA project created in the 1980’s during the Reagan Administration as part of privatizing US intelligence dirty operations, to do, as Allen Weinstein, who drafted the Congressional legislation to establish the NED, noted in a candid 1991 Washington Post interview, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

And if we dig even deeper we find, lo and behold, the name George Soros, convicted hedge fund insider trader, tax-exempt philanthropist and giga-billionaire who seems to fund not only Hillary Clinton and virtually every CIA and US State Department Color Revolution from Russia to China to Iran through his network of Open Society Foundations including the 1990’s Jeffrey Sachs Shock Therapy plunder of Russia and most of former Communist East Europe.

Another one of the media working with Zuckerberg’s Facebook censorship of Fake News is the Washington Post, today owned by Amazon billionaire founder Jeff Bezos. Bezos is a major media business partner of….The US Central Intelligence Agency, a fact he omitted to inform about after taking over ownership of the most important newspaper in Washington.

Bezos’ Washington Post recently published a bizarre list of 200 websites it claimed generated Fake News. It refused to identify who gave them the list. Veteran Washington investigative reporter, Wayne Madsen, exposed the source of the McCarthy-style taboo list of so-called Fake News. It was a “website called PropOrNot.com that has links to the CIA and George Soros.”

It’s not merely the Pizzagate revelations that have triggered such a massive attack on independent Internet websites. It seems that back in January 2014 at the Davos World Economic Forum control of information on the Internet was a top item of discussion. At the time, Madsen noted, “With the impending demise of World Wide Web ‘net neutrality,’ which has afforded equal access for website operators to the Internet, the one percent of billionaire investors are busy positioning themselves to take over total control of news reporting on the Internet.”

It’s not even the foxes who are guarding the Internet Henhouse. It’s the werewolves of CIA and US Government censorship. Whether the explosive Pizzagate Podesta revelations merely triggered a dramatic acceleration in the timetable for the CIA’s planned “Fake News” operation as the successor to their 1980’s “Conspiracy Theory” linguistic discrediting operation, it’s clear this is no unbiased, objective, transparent public service to protect the Internet public from harmful content.

And, besides, who are they to tell me or you what you are allowed to read, digest and form your independent ideas about? This is a 21st Century reincarnation of the Spanish Inquisition, one by the real fake newsmakers–Washington Post, AP, ABCNews, Snopes.com, FactCheck.org, the CIA and friends. I would say it’s an alarming development of cyber warfare, not by Russia, but by those CIA-run networks that are fomenting Fake News to demonize any and everyone who opposes Washington intelligence propaganda.

 

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”