Internet Free Speech All But Dead

Posted on August 2, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Unelected, unnamed censors are operating across the Internet to suppress “unapproved” content.

By Philip Giraldi

The Internet was originally promoted as a completely free and uncensored mechanism for people everywhere to exchange views and communicate, but it has been observed by many users that that is not really true anymore. Both governments and the service providers have developed a taste for controlling the product, with President Barack Obama once considering a “kill switch” that would turn off the Internet completely in the event of a “national emergency.”

President Donald Trump has also had a lot to say about fake news and is reported to be supporting limiting protections relating to the Internet. In May, a “net neutrality” bill that would have prevented service providers from manipulating Internet traffic passed in the House of Representatives, but it is reported to be “dead on arrival” in the Senate, so it will never be enacted.

Social networking sites have voluntarily employed technical fixes that restrict some content and have also hired “reviewers” who look for objectionable material and remove it. Pending European legislation, meanwhile, might require Internet search engines to eliminate access to many unacceptable old posts. YouTube has already been engaged in deleting existing old material and is working with biased “partners” like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to set up guidelines to restrict future content. Many users of Facebook will have already undoubtedly noted that some contacts have been blocked temporarily (or even permanently) and denied access to the site.

Google now automatically disables or limits searches for material that it deems to be undesirable. If Google does not approve of something it will either not appear in search results or it will be very low on the list. And what does come up will likely favor content that derives from those who pay Google to promote their products or services. Information that originates with competitors will either be very low in the search results or even blocked. Google is consequently hardly an unbiased source of information.

In May 2017 Facebook announced that it would be hiring 3,000 new censors, and my own experience of social networking censorship soon followed. I had posted an article entitled “Charlottesville Requiem” that I had written for a website. At the end of the first day, the site managers noticed that, while the article had clearly attracted a substantial Facebook readership, the “likes” for the piece were not showing up on the screen counter, i.e., were not being tabulated. It was also impossible to share the piece on Facebook, as the button to do so had been removed.

The “likes” on sites like Facebook, Yahoo! news comments, YouTube, and Google are important because they automatically determine how the piece is distributed throughout the site. If there are a lot of likes, the piece goes to the top when a search is made or when someone opens the page. Articles similarly can be sent to Coventry if they receive a lot of dislikes or negative marks, so the approvals or disapprovals can be very important in determining what kind of audience is reached or what a search will reveal.

In my case, after one day my page reverted to normal, the “likes” reappeared, and readers were again able to share the article. But it was clear that someone had been managing what I had posted, apparently because there had been disapproval of my content based on what must have been a political judgment.

A couple of days later, I learned of another example of a similar incident. The Ron Paul Institute (RPI) website posts much of its material on YouTube (owned by Google) on a site where there had been advertising that kicked back to RPI a small percentage of the money earned. Suddenly, without explanation, both the ads and rebate were eliminated after a “manual review” determined the content to be “unsuitable for all advertisers.” This was a judgment rendered apparently due to disapproval of what the institute does and says. The ability to comment on and link from the pieces was also turned off.

Dissident British former diplomat Craig Murray also noted in April 2018 the secretive manipulation of his articles that are posted on Facebook, observing that his “site’s visitor numbers [were] currently around one-third normal levels, stuck at around 20,000 unique visitors per day. The cause [was] not hard to find. Normally over half of our visitors arrive via Facebook. These last few days, virtually nothing has come from Facebook. What is especially pernicious is that Facebook deliberately imposes this censorship in a secretive way.

The primary mechanism when a block is imposed by Facebook is that my posts to Facebook are simply not sent into the timelines of the large majority of people who are friends or who follow. I am left to believe the post has been shared with them, but in fact it has only been shown to a tiny number. Then, if you are one of the few recipients and do see the post and share it, it will show to you on your timeline as shared, but in fact the vast majority of your own friends will also not receive it. Facebook is not doing what it is telling you it is doing — it shows you it is shared — and Facebook is deliberately concealing that fact from you. Twitter has a similar system known as ‘shadow banning.’ Again, it is secretive and the victim is not informed.”

More recently, pressure to censor Internet social networking and information sites has increased, coming both from government and from various interested constituencies. In late May, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss how to eliminate “hate speech” on the Internet. The two men agreed that the United States Internet model, in spite of already being heavily manipulated, is too laissez faire, and expressed an interest in exploring the French system where it is considered acceptable to ban unacceptable points of view. Zuckerberg suggested that it might serve as a good model for the entire European Union. France is reportedly considering legislation that establishes a regulator with power to fine Internet companies up to 4% of their global revenue, which can in some cases be an enormous sum, if they do not curb hateful expressions.

So unelected, unnamed censors are operating all around the Internet to control the content, which I suppose should surprise no one, and the interference will only get worse as both governments and service providers are willing to do what it takes to eliminate views that they find unacceptable — which, curiously enough, leads one to consider how “Russia-gate” came about and the current hysteria being generated in the conventional media and also online against both Venezuela and Iran. How much of the anger is essentially fake, being manipulated or even fabricated by large companies that earn mega billions of dollars by offering under false pretenses a heavily managed product that largely does what the government wants? Banning hate speech will be, unfortunately, only the first step in eliminating any and all criticisms of the status quo.

Tulsi Gabbard vs Google Goliath

Posted on July 31, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Rick Sterling

Source: Dissident Voice

Introduction

The Tulsi Gabbard presidential campaign has filed a major law suit against Google. This article outlines the main points of the law suit and evidence the the social media giant Google has quietly acquired enormous influence on public perceptions and has been actively censoring alternative viewpoints.

Tulsi Now vs Google

Tulsi Now, Inc vs Google, LLC was filed on July 25 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The attorneys demand a jury trial and seek compensation and punitive damages of “no less than $50 million”. Major points and allegations in the 36 page complaint include:

* Google has monopolistic control of online searches and related advertising.

“Google creates, operates, and controls its platform and services, including but not limited to Google Search, Google Ads, and Gmail as a public forum or its functional equivalent by intentionally and openly dedicating its platform for public use and public benefit, inviting the public to utilize Google as a forum for free speech. Google serves as a state actor by performing an exclusively and traditionally public function by regulating free speech within a public forum and helping to run elections.” (p. 22)

“Google has used its control over online political speech to silence Tulsi Gabbard, a candidate millions of Americans want to hear from. With this lawsuit, Tulsi seeks to stop Google from further intermeddling in the 2020 United States Presidential Election….. Google plays favorites, with no warning, no transparency – and no accountability (until now).” (p. 2)

* At a critical moment Google undercut the Tulsi Gabbard campaign.

“On June 28, 2019 – at the height of Gabbard’s popularity among internet researchers in the immediate hours after the debate ended, and in the thick of the critical post-debate period… Google suspended Tulsi’s Google Ads account without warning.” (p. 3)

* Google has failed to provide a credible explanation.

The Tulsi campaign quickly sought to restore the account but “In response, the Campaign got opacity and an inconsistent series of answers from Google… To this day, Google has not provided a straight answer – let alone a credible one – as to why Tulsi’s political speech was silence right when millions of people wanted to hear from her.” (p. 4)

Google started by falsely claiming “problems with billing”. Later, as reported in the NY Times story a Google spokesperson claimed, “Google has automated systems that flag unusual activity on advertiser accounts – including large spending changes – to prevent fraud….In this case, ‘our system triggered a suspension.’ ”

* Google has a corporate profit motive to oppose Tulsi Gabbard.

“Google has sought to silence Tulsi Gabbard, a presidential candidate who has vocally called for greater regulation and oversight of (you guessed it) Google.” (p. 5)

“During her career in Congress, Gabbard has moved to limit the powers of big tech companies like Google and has fought to keep the internet open and available to all. Gabbard has co-sponsored legislation that prohibits multi-tiered pricing agreements for the privileged few, and she has spoken in favor of reinstating and expanding net neutrality to apply to Internet firms like Google.” (p. 8)

* Google’s Actions have caused significant harm to the Gabbard campaign and violate the U.S. and California constitutions and California business law.

“Through its illegal actions targeting Tulsi Gabbard, Google has caused the Campaign significant harm, both monetary (including potentially millions of dollars in forgone donations) and nonmonetary (the ability to provide Tulsi’s important message with Americans looking to hear it).” (p. 6)

“Google engages in a pattern and practice of intentional discrimination in the provision of its services, including discriminating and censoring the Campaign’s speech based not on the content of the censored speech but on the Campaign’s political identity and viewpoint.” (p. 27)

* The public has an interest in this case.

“Unless the court issues an appropriate injunction, Google’s illegal and unconstitutional behavior will continue, harming both the Campaign and the general public, which has an overwhelming interest in a fair, unmanipulated 2020 United States Election cycle. (p. 34)

Google Explanation is Not Credible

The Tulsi Gabbard Google Ads account was abruptly suspended at a crucial time. The question is why. Was it the result of “unusual activity” triggering an “automatic suspension” as claimed by Google? Or was it because someone at Google changed the software or otherwise intervened to undermine the Tulsi campaign?

Google’s explanation of an “automatic suspension” from “unusual activity” is dubious. First, the timing does not make sense. The sudden rise in searches on “Tulsi Gabbard” began the day before the suspension. Gabbard participated in the first debate, on June 26. Her presence and performance sparked interest among many viewers. Next morning, June 27, media reported that, “Tulsi Gabbard was the most searched candidate on Google after the Democratic debate in Miami“. The second debate took place in the evening of June 27. With discussion of the Democratic candidates continuing, Tulsi Gabbard continued to attract much interest. Around 9:30 pm (ET) on June 27 the Google Ads account was suddenly suspended. If the cause was “unusual activity”, the “automatic trigger” should have occurred long before.

Second, Google was fully aware of the “unusual activity”. In fact, Google was the source of the news reports on the morning of June 27. Reports said:

According to Google Trends, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was the most searched candidate heading into the debate… After the debate, Gabbard vaulted into first.

Third, it is hard to believe that Google does not have any human or more sophisticated review before suspending a major Ads account on a politically intense night. It should have been obvious that the cause of increased interest in Gabbard was the nationally televised Democratic candidates debate and media coverage.

Fourth, the changing explanation for the sudden suspension, starting with a false claim that there were “problems with billing”, raises questions about the integrity of Google’s response.

Google Secretly Manipulates Public Opinion

Unknown to most of the public, there is compelling evidence that Google has been secretly manipulating search results to steer public perception and election voting for years.

Dr. Robert Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, has been studying and reporting on this for the past six years. Recently, on June 16, 2019 he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Constitution. His testimony is titled “Why Google Poses a Serious Threat to Democracy, and How to End That Threat”.

Epstein has published 15 books and over 300 scientific and mainstream media articles on artificial intelligence and related topics. “Since 2012, some of my research and writings have focused on Google LLC, specifically on the company’s power to suppress content – the censorship problem, if you will – as well as on the massive surveillance the company conducts, and also on the company’s unprecedented ability to manipulate the thoughts and behavior of more than 2.5 billion people worldwide.”

As shown by Dr. Epstein, Google uses several techniques to manipulate public opinion. The results of an online search are biased. Search “suggestions” are skewed. Messages such as “Go Vote” are sent to some people but not to others.

Epstein’s written testimony to Congress includes links to over sixty articles documenting his research published in sites ranging from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to Huffington Post. Epstein’s testimony describes “disturbing findings” including:

“In 2016, biased search results generated by Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton”. (Epstein notes that he supported Clinton.)

“On Election Day in 2018, the ‘Go Vote’ reminder Google displayed on its home page gave one political party between 800,000 and 4.6 million more votes than it gave the other party.”

“My recent research demonstrates that Google’s ‘autocomplete’ search suggestions can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split without people’s awareness.”

“Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015. This is because many races are very close and because Google’s persuasive technologies are very powerful.”

Google is Censoring Alternative Media

In August 2017 TruePublica reported their experience and predictions in an article titled “The Truth War is Being Lost to a Global Censorship Apparatus Called Google“. The article says:

60 percent of people now get their news from search engines, not traditional human editors in the media. It is here where the new information war takes place – the algorithm. Google now takes 81.2 percent of all search engine market share globally…. Google has the ability to drive demand and set the narrative, create bias and swing opinion.

In 2017, the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org) reported that:

In April, under the guise of combating ‘fake news’, Google introduced new procedures that give extraordinary powers to unnamed ‘evaluators’ to demote web pages and websites. These procedures have been used to exclude the WSWS and other anti-war and oppositional sites. Over the past three months, traffic originating from Google to the WSWS has fallen by approximately 70%…. In key searches relevant to a wide range of topics the WSWS regularly covers – including the U.S. military operations and the threat of war, social conditions, inequality and even socialism – the number of search impressions …has fallen dramatically.

In essence, Google has “de-ranked” and is screening searchers from seeing alternative and progressive websites such as truepublica, globalresearch, consortiumnews, commondreams, Wikileaks, truth-out and many more. WSWS reported numerous specific examples such as this one: “Searches for the term ‘Korean war’ produced 20,932 impressions in May. In July, searches using the same words produced zero WSWS impressions.”

“The policy guiding these actions is made absolutely clear in the April 25, 2017 blog post by Google’s Vice President for Engineering, Ben Gomes, and the updated ‘Search Quality Rater Guidelines’ published at the same time. The post refers to the need to flag and demote ‘unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and conspiracy theories’ – broad and amorphous language used to exclude any oppositional content…. “The ‘lowest’ rating is also to be given to a website that ‘presents unsubstantiated conspiracy theories or hoaxes as if the information were factual.’”

Tulsi Gabbard has not only called for much stricter regulations on high tech and social media giants. She has also challenged the Democratic Party and foreign policy establishment. In late February 2016 she resigned as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee to support candidate Bernie Sanders against the establishment favorite, Hillary Clinton. Gabbard has issued sharp criticisms of US foreign policy. Recently she said:

We hear a lot of politicians say the same argument that we’ve got to stay engaged in the world otherwise we’ll be isolationists as though the only way the United States can engage with other countries is by blowing them up or strangling them with economic sanctions by smashing them and trying to overthrow their governments. This is exactly what’s wrong with this whole premise and the whole view in which too many politicians, too many leaders in this country are viewing the United States role in the world.

Conclusion

Did Google take the next step from silently censoring websites the corporation does not like to undercutting a presidential candidate the corporation does not like?

This is a David vs Goliath story. Google/Alphabet is the 37th largest corporation in the world with enormous political influence in Washington. Whether or not the law suit succeeds, it may serve the public interest by exposing Google’s immense monopolistic power and illustrate the need for much more regulation, transparency and accountability. It may also generate more interest in Gabbard’s message and campaign in the face of efforts to silence her.

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist who grew up in Canada but currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. He can be reached at rsterling1@gmail.com. Read other articles by Rick.

How Evil Wins: The Hypocritical Double Standards of Political Outrage

Posted on July 21, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.”—Kurt Vonnegut

Please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.

Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to the Trump Administration has not been paying attention.

No matter what the team colors might be at any given moment, the playbook remains the same. The leopard has not changed its spots. Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that the American police state that is continuing to wreak havoc on the rights of the people under the Trump Administration is the same police state that wreaked havoc on the rights of the people under every previous administration.

Brace yourselves.

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle, a tsunami approaches.

Case in point: in Charlottesville, Va.—home of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, champion of the Bill of Rights, and the nation’s third president—city councilors in a quest for so-called “equity” have proposed eliminating Jefferson’s birthday as a city holiday (which has been on the books since 1945) and replacing it with a day that commemorates the liberation of area slaves following the arrival of Union troops under Gen. Philip Sheridan.

In this way, while the populace wages war over past injustices, injustice in the here and now continues to trample innocent lives underfoot. In Charlottesville, as in the rest of the country, little is being done to stem the tide of the institutional racism that has resulted in disproportionate numbers of black Americans being stopped, frisked, shot at, arrested and jailed.

Just recently, in fact, Phoenix police drew their guns, shouted profanities, assaulted and threatened to shoot a black couple whose 4-year-old daughter allegedly stole a doll from a dollar store. The footage of the incident—in which the cops threaten to shoot the pregnant, young mother in the head in the presence of the couple’s 1- and 4-year-old daughters—is horrifying in every way.

Tell me again why it’s more important to spend valuable political capital debating the birthdays of dead presidents rather than proactively working to put a stop to a government mindset that teaches cops it’s okay to treat citizens of any color with brutality and a blatant disregard for their rights?

It doesn’t matter that Phoenix and Charlottesville are 2100 miles apart. The lethal practices of the American police state are the same all over.

No amount of dissembling can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America. As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.

So stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other. Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

This is how evil wins.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

This is how good, generally decent people—having allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware. Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware. And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

The world has been down this road before.

As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free:

Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’, without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.

We are no longer living the American Dream. We’re living the American Lie.

Indeed, Americans have been lied to so sincerely, so incessantly, and for so long by politicians of all stripes—who lie compulsively and without any seeming remorse—that they’ve almost come to prefer the lies trotted out by those in government over less-palatable truths.

The American people have become compulsive believers: left-leaning Americans are determined to believe that the world has become a far more dangerous place under Trump, while right-leaning Americans are equally convinced that Trump has set us on a path to prosperity and security.

Nothing has changed.

The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.

In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).

Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip, shoot and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials are no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace. Indeed, they continue to keep the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies and slaves rather than citizens.

SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families. Nationwide, SWAT teams continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activities or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own heavily armed law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties continue to rise.

The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police. Police forces continue to be transformed into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. In training police to look and act like the military and use the weapons and tactics of war against American citizens, the government continues to turn the United States into a battlefield and “we the people” into enemy combatants.

Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners. School districts continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment for childish infractions: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. In this way, the paradigm of abject compliance to the state continues to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior.

For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense. States continue to outsource prison management to private corporations out to make a profit at taxpayer expense. And how do you make a profit in the prison industry? Have the legislatures pass laws that impose harsh penalties for the slightest noncompliance in order keep the prison cells full and corporate investors happy.

Censorship hasn’t stopped. First Amendment activities continue to be pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state. The courts continue to be dominated by technicians and statists who are deferential to authority, whether government or business. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s decisions in recent years have most often been characterized by an abject deference to government authority, military and corporate interests.

Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal, while reinforcing the power of the police state and its corporate allies.

The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements. On any given day, 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 it’s your local police, a fusion center, the National Security Agency or one of the government’s many corporate partners, is still monitoring and tracking your every move.

The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers. Under the pretext of protecting the nation’s infrastructure (roads, mass transit systems, water and power supplies, telecommunications systems and so on) against criminal or terrorist attacks, TSA task forces (comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams) continue to do random security sweeps of nexuses of transportation, including ports, railway and bus stations, airports, ferries and subways, as well as political conventions, baseball games and music concerts. Sweep tactics include the use of x-ray technology, pat-downs and drug-sniffing dogs, among other things.

Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the NDAA. These laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional rights of American citizens, continue to re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law, our U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.” Indeed, this is the agency that is notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.

The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad. America’s expanding military empire continues to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.

The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government continues to be the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our so-called representatives. It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.

And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep. In fact, many Americans have been so carried away by their blind rank-and-file partisan devotion to their respective political gods that they have lost sight of the one thing that has remained constant in recent years: our freedoms are steadily declining. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm, because the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government.

So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past 50 years, it will be just another lie.

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. As historian Robert Gellately points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who wanted to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the campaigns of discrimination and persecutions need only read the newspapers.”

The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . . [T]here is no getting away from the fact that at that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German people backed him.’”

Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian, neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined: “[O]n the whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . . . We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”

In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor, life was good.

Life is good in America, too.

Life is good in America as long as you’re not one of the hundreds of migrant children (including infants, toddlers, preschoolers) being detained in unsanitary conditions by U.S. Border Patrol without proper access to food and water, made to sleep on concrete floors, go without a shower for weeks on end, and only allowed to brush your teeth once every 10 days.

Life is good in America as long as you don’t have to come face to face with a trigger-happy cop hyped up on the power of the badge, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and disposed to view people of color as a suspect class.

Life is good in America as long as you’re able to keep sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.

Life is good in America as long as you’ve got enough money to spare that you don’t mind being made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the 99%.

Life is good in America for the privileged few, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

When the Journalists Ganged Up on Assange They Ganged Up on Themselves

Posted on July 8, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

Journalists did not appreciate the implications for themselves of the contrived and false indictment of Julian Assange by a corrupt US government. It was obvious to a few of us that the indictment by the US government, a government constrained by the First Amendment, of a foreign national for publishing leaked material, an action never before regarded as espionage or a crime, was the beginning of the end of any Western government ever again being held accountable by a free press.

Not that the Western World has a free press. It has a collection of presstitutes that serve as a Ministry of Propaganda for the ruling oligarchies.

Still, in principle it was possible that governments could be held accountable. But that possibility ended with Assange’s false indictment.

First of all, no honest government would have spent years trying to invent a way to indict a journalist for practicing journalism.

Second, no intelligent grand jurors with an ounce of integrity would have been putty in the hands of a corrupt US prosecutor and enable a prosecution that ensures the destruction of accountable government.

Third, it was obvious that once America led the way in shutting down the principle of a free press, governments of other “Western democracies” would follow as soon as they could.

And follow they did. Assange’s indictment led to raids by the Australian Gestapo on the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst and on the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corp. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/06/05/more-police-raids-as-war-on-journalism-escalates-worldwide/ The Australian government is angry about an investigative report about war crimes committed in Afghanistan by Australian participants in Washington’s war against the Taliban. What Australian troops are doing in Afghanistan remains an unexplained mystery. How much is the Australian government being paid by Washington for Australian mercenaries to die for the American Empire?

The Gestapo raids soon spread to other Australian journalists, including one whose sin was to report on “asylum seekers.”

Assange’s contrived and false indictment has also encouraged the French police to arrest journalists covering the ongoing “Yellow Vest” protests. The French government is desperate to blank out the protest against the American puppet government in Paris.

Even the San Francisco police, who tolerate massive homelessness on the streets and the associated crimes have been inspired by Assange’s indictment. The front door of Journalist Bryan Carmody, who reported on the sudden death of a public defender, who apparently was in the way of successful police frameups, was broken down by police wielding sledgehammers.

Rather than knock on the door, the police break in. This not only costs the occupant large sums of money for repairs, but also serves to intimidate and to create a story that there was resistance that had to be overcome by breaking down the door. This creates the necessary story for killing the occupants and the dog.

Listening to the fairy tales yesterday by Trump in Normandy about all the freedom Americans created by defeating Hitler, I wondered whose freedom he was talking about. He was talking about the freedom of the oligarchs to rule without hindrance from the people or the First Amendment.

Not only journalists have lost First Amendment protection, but also citizens in encounters with police. John Whitehead explains how a citizen’s exercise of constitutional rights is grounds for arrest. https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/on_the_front_lines/u.s._supreme_court_upholds_arrest_over_contempt_of_cop_charge_limits_right_to_challenge_police_use_of_retaliatory_arrests_to_punish_speech

Communication monopolies such as Youtube, Twitter, and Google continue the censureship that teaches Americans to hold their tongues about an increasing array of subjects. The same lesson is taught in schools and universities as speech codes gradually erase the First Amendment. Each generation that is born is born into a country with less free speech. As time passes, people will forget that once government and police could be held accountable. Without free speech there is tyranny, and the road to tyranny is the road the United States and its Western vassals are on.

Facebook Insider Confesses All

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Posted on July 5, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Source: American Intelligence Media

The Zuckerberg Dossier

Mark Zuckerberg is a Fraud Used by the CIA

The following anonymous document claims to be written by a Facebook insider who was Mark Zuckerberg’s lover from their freshman year at Harvard. Mark’s continuing indiscretions with his ongoing government contract keep getting him in trouble to this day. Mark was supposed to simply be the fake “boy genius” of Larry Summers’ (Harvard’s president) social media project funded by DARPA/In-Q-Tel (CIA)/IBM and the secretive international “public-private” group called The Highlands Group organized with the DoD Office of Net Assessment.

It was Summers and a group of government officials who fabricated, produced and directed Mark throughout the entire fraudulent creation of the Facebook propaganda story at Harvard. These claims are explosive and allege that the entire fraudulent social media network called Facebook was always controlled by the government through the people who were at Harvard directing Mark. The anonymous author of the letter below, who we will call “John”, also points out why Facebook was created, how Mark was controlled by Eric Schmidt, James Beyer, Larry Summers, Sheryl Sandberg and the evil intellectual property thief Professor James Chandler.

Admittedly, this Zuckerberg “Dossier” has enough information in it to put Mark Zuckerberg behind bars, and therefore would not be touched by the Main Stream Media – according to the person who hand-delivered this letter to a member of the Anonymous Patriot’s Conclave a few days ago.

American Intelligence Media has been able to quickly verify that many of the claims insinuated in this “Zuckerberg Dossier” are true and this leads us to conclude that the document is authentic and exactly what it appears to be. The true authorship of this Zuckerberg Dossier is evident to members of the Conclave, but that supposition is speculation and the Conclave does not deal in speculation. Though, if one were to listen carefully to the admission of guilt by Sean Parker (a long-time executive of Facebook) which he made repeatedly before the press, you will hear that Sean knew all about the true creation of the social media giant and its evil intents and fingers the culprits.

Therefore, it is not hard at all to figure out who may have written this expose on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook evil. You can even see the true motivation for writing this “tell all” about Zuckerberg at this time in history, just as Facebook is facing all kinds of charges, including anti-trust violations.

Any person well-educated on the continuing scandals surrounding the creation of Facebook might have been able to piece together the many divergent claimants to the authorship of the source programming code used to make social media “scalable” – which was the universal problem of all of the major tech companies at the time, including the NSA’s “LifeLog” project. Somehow, genius Mark Zuckerberg “solved” the problem that no one else in the world could. Oh yes, and Mark did it “between a week and two weeks or so” while studying for finals and hosting a beer “kegger” for his friends. [1]

The author of this expose offers a quite different story and for the first time tells of the involvement of high-level government players who made a fortune off of the sky-rocketing overnight growth of Facebook stock on NASDAQ. The players mentioned by “John” (anonymous author) check out to be the people who made enormous amounts of money from Facebook stock. These insider traders then took their Facebook winnings and started other social media companies that, coincidentally, sky-rocketed beyond most companies in history.

Hmmm…do you own any Facebook stock? Might be cash-out time!

American Intelligence Media does not claim that the Zuckerberg Dossier is 100% correct, but we can state with absolute confidence that the source is real. We also believe that their may be other installments of what we are calling the Zuckerberg Dossier and will probably not be the last time we hear from this source as the trouble that Mark is having in the news keeps mounting.

The most convincing aspect of this “scorned lover tell-all” is found in what the author outlines as Mark’s true nature and what he believes is happening to Facebook right now in America. It was shocking to read these remarks and we found them to be, after much reflection, probably true and certainly not what we might have imagined to be the reality with the U. S. government’s threat to act against Facebook.

Also, interesting is the major British intervention in Facebook through the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Nick Clegg, taking over the “face” of Facebook which Baron Richard Allen (another UK agent) had failed to do properly.

At this point, Facebook seems to be “dead in the water” unless the British Crown Agents, Clegg and Allen, can save Mark from his horrible mis-management.

Again, we do not claim that this anonymous “confession” and “indictment” is true in all its parts. But certainly, any intelligent reader will acknowledge that this version of Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to fame and fortune is much more likely that the nonsense stories we have been told by Mark since the early 2000’s when he first popped up Larry Summers’ Harvard.

Please circulate this wide and far. We need to turn the weapon that Zuckerberg is aiming at us – social media … back on him.

[1] Tr. 41:7, Mark Zuckerberg Deposition, April 25, 2006, ConnectU LLC v. Zuckerberg et al, 1:04-cv-11923-DPW (D. Mass. 2004).

Mark’s diary where he proclaims “let the hacking begin” was also provided to us and is available in the link below as a PDF. We did not convert it to a Word file for obvious reasons. Also note that we formatted the author’s letter below in a way that you can easily read it, instead of how it was sent with tiny font and packed paragraphs. We did not correct grammar or spelling.

Zuckerberg-Let-Hacking_Begin-28-Oct-2003

To Every Facebook User,

Mark Zuckerberg, and all of us who were there from the beginning, are lying to you and using your personal life as a government-controlled experiment in brain-washing and mind-control – basically a weaponized system of the military (CIA especially) that got out of control. At this point, Mark Zuckerberg has lost control of a company that he never really owned or operated. Truly, anyone who has ever worked with Mark knows that his mind is a blank and that he is nothing more than a parrot for the government handlers who created him. Mark is incapable of running a McDonald’s, let alone one of the most powerful companies in the world. Not even his name is real and his identity has always been covered up. Mark was chosen as child for a CIA training program because his relatives were some of the people creating the program.

I am not making excuses for Mark, but his choices have not been his own. Yes, he has become an evil sociopath who once believed in his heart-of-heart that if he decided he wanted to be president, all he had to do is say he wanted the job and “Facebook” would deliver the election to him. This is the level of brain-washing Mark is at – he is not in contact with reality.

You might think that a madman who could think he could become president – because he “said so” – would be discovered and accused as a fraud. Well, that has happened repeatedly with the other three teams that were working at Harvard, under Harvard president Larry Summers, to create what DARPA and In-Q-Tel wanted the most – a cyber-weapon that could control the minds of anyone that could be lured into it. Facebook was always a military weapon – just like Eric Schmidt’s Google which was incubated in the same fashion that Facebook was. Mark was a patsy, but a ruthless, heartless, cold-blooded non-human patsy. He became this way through the brain-washing he received in his High School years by a DARPA program called TIA that needed a “boy-genius” to be the front man. This scam would make Mark into a global model of the young, cool, irreverent computer geniuses that “rule the world” and lead everyone to a cyber-god of artificial intelligence. Mark was just an unwitting puppet at first – I felt sorry for him.

I remember when I first became room-mates with Mark in our sophomore year at Harvard. We were in Kirkland House, on JFK Street and had to endure Dustin and Andrew. Mark hated them because they prevented us from sleeping together, even though we were in the same room. It was frustrating and kept our relationship secret. Little did I know that the thing that drew me to Mark, a certain openness for listening to anyone, also made him extremely promiscuous with both sexes.

Mark had no morals, conscience, or shame. He also chased women on Craig’s List and would sometimes just disappear to rendezvous with them. He was like a blank slate that simply echoes whatever was happening in his environment. I loved and hated this aspect of his personality but later found out that he, and his brother and cousin, were all the same way due to the brain-washing programs they were subjected to during high school. If certain people spoke to Mark in person or on the phone, he would drop everything and do whatever they told him to do. Certain people had more power and effect over him. I eventually found out, from Mark breaking down and crying, that the brain-washing was permanent and was all part of the “position” these people had promised to create for Mark. He didn’t even know what this “position” was or entailed.

But one thing Mark was sure of, he was only “placed” at Harvard “for a while” until his “position” became available to him. Mark was certain that this promise of a position included a great deal of money and power—aphrodisiacs to an incurable narcissist

I must admit that I came under the power of Mark’s surety that he didn’t need Harvard, a degree, or good grades. Mark eventually dropped out of Harvard at the end of our sophomore year and did become filthy rich and more powerful than he could have imagined. I also admit that I road on Mark’s success to become quite wealthy myself. All four of the members of the club Mark eventually named – “The Fellowship” – became wealthy by no means of our own – we simply knew Mark’s secrets.

You see, Mark could never be faithful to anyone but he loved men more than women. He actually used to hate all women. So, Mark cheated and would want to bring the new “boy” home to me to join in. I was never into that like Mark was. He was abusive but would never admit it, especially to young boys. Eventually, there were three of us that remained lovers with Mark.

Mark always had panic attacks and would break down frequently due to the brain-washing – according to Mark. He would cry about his mother and the “torture” she let “them” do to him. At those times, Mark’s mouth ran on open and he would tell his bed-partners about all the pain and horrible plans these “evil people” did to him. Early on, his doubts and fears almost consumed him at night and he could hardly sleep due to nightmares. Once Mark became filthy rich, he simply used drugs to mask these fears. But if you get him upset by asking about the creation of Facebook, Mark will freak out and have a panic attack because he always messes up the story and looks like an idiot. He can’t stand questions about “how he made Facebook” – because he didn’t. I had to laugh as one of his stupid answers: “I saw that Harvard didn’t have a Facebook, so I made one”, or something close to that. The journalist let him get away with that lie, like they always have.

Mark Greenberg (Zuckerberg) did not write one single line of programming source code for Facebook. Those are lies and propaganda generated by his government, military handlers. Everyone knows that the Winkelvoss twins (Aaron and Cameron) won a $65 million dollar lawsuit settlement against Mark because they knew that their little HarvardConnection (HC) piece was just adjunct code attached to the original stolen source code – which was given to Mark by Professor James Chandler and IBM. That $65 million bit of dirty knowledge was pretty profitable for a couple of cute Harvard Crew rower jocks with no interest in me.

Mark simply had others adjust the code into what was a government-sponsored military weaponization of a cyber-warfare project directed by the President of Harvard, Larry Summers. Even Summer’s himself had his own budding student and staff directory being developed by the Harvard computer staff called “Facebook.” Mark didn’t even create the name!

The Winkelvoss twins had developed their own version in the competition for the government contract, HC, that they changed to ConnectU. Aaron Greenspan was developing HOUSE System, and Paul Ceglia was working with Mark to modify his StreetFax software into a Facebook too. Mark developed nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even the famous “hacking” of the Harvard systems was not done by Mark himself. Mark was the middleman for those who were the overseers of the “big project”, as it was called.

From the president of Harvard, to the “PayPal Mafia”, National Venture Capital Association, In-Q-Tel, DARPA, NSA, CIA, DIA, to the worst patent thieves in America: James Chandler, Hillary Clinton, David Kappos, Robert Mueller and the rest of the Big-Tech group. Mark is just like the other fake front-men chosen to represent the numerous other social media companies.

Eric Schmidt was the poster child for the Silicon Valley geniuses who ran corporations that are basically exempt from prosecution as the facade for military-weaponized companies that are always funded by the same evil bankers—Fidelity Investment, Vanguard, T. Rowe Price, BlackRock, JPMorgan, HSBC, Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins and the rest of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who always make a killing from companies who get no-bid government contracts. These companies, like Facebook, are just an excuse for black-ops experiments to control the enemy – and Mark doesn’t know who the enemy is. Mark’s lack of a moral compass made him the perfect patsy for the new “military experiments on U. S. citizens.”

I believe now, since Mark was well-aware of the evil intentions of the government, that he has committed crimes of many types with the clear, pre-meditated intention of harming every user of Facebook. That is why Mark let Facebook be used to manipulate elections, he has no moral core. I personally saw the “template” that Hillary ordered that uses Facebook to manipulate voters to win elections for her. Given the amount of election interference by Big-Tech in 2016, I became a reluctant believer in miracles.

I have seen the truth concerning the supposed “Russian Interference” and can tell you that it was all made up and, in fact, was the exact opposite of what the media reported. I have seen so many illegal actions of Facebook that I am indeed complicit with the crimes. That is one of the reasons I must remain anonymous. But I assure you, if I testified, Mark and I would be locked up along with the other members of the Fellowship as well as many, many other Facebook employees.

It is due to the truth that is currently coming out in the media that I feel I can reveal what I witnessed so that Mark and the “U. S. and British military controlled” Facebook can be charged with criminal activity instead of simply being hit with anti-trust charges that will only split Facebook into many subsidiaries – which would simply make Mark even more rich.

Then, the poor suckers who believed in Facebook will be left holding the bag – an empty bag of a gutted Facebook worth little or nothing. Mark will simply rebrand and go on with multiple companies that will be just as big as Facebook. He will escape unscathed, protected again by his military handlers who, by the way, were insider traders from the beginning of Facebook and will be allowed to buy into the new companies from the beginning also.

Once again, the use of taxpayer dollars goes to private corporations run by stooges and controlled by non-Americans. Yes, I just called Mark a stooge because he actually has no clue what he is doing – at all. Just ask him to write a simple program in any code he would like – he can’t, he is a fraud and always was.

Though I will not tell you who the members of Mark Zuckerberg’s “Fellowship” group were, I can point out that all of the original members of Facebook knew from the beginning that it was a military project for cyber warfare mind-control. Everything done from the beginning was an experiment to see just how far a social media platform could go to “conquer the enemy” through behavioral manipulation with electronic warfare. The idea that Mark wanted to connect all college students in America was a novel idea that was far from the true intention of mind-control of every user in the world.

Free platforms like Google, Gmail, Facebook, and the rest were confidence tricks to get users to experiment on. My old buddy, Sean Parker, an early member of Facebook has “confessed all” to the media and specifically told the truth that Facebook was meant as a cyber-drug to create and control addicts – digital addicts. As Sean said, we knew from the beginning it was harming every user and that is why we never let our friends or our children use these systems – it harms them tremendously and was the original intent of the media. Mark and I were told by representatives of DARPA that that was the intent of Facebook from its inception.

The U. S. Patriot Act allows the military to consider every American a possible terrorist or enemy warfighter until proven otherwise. Every person on the Internet, which was also created by DARPA, is considered a cyber-terrorist and the military sees it as their job to create systems to surveil, target, disarm, and aggressively remote control the user. I hated the idea from the first time I heard of it. Personally, I have never used Facebook and don’t let anyone I love use it.

Mark would use patriot arguments, like the ones mentioned above, to justify his participation in this black-ops CIA operation to the Fellowship. We argued with him, but to no avail. Mark basically believed anything his “controllers” told him. We would sometimes convince him that the project was “dead wrong”, but all it took was one phone call from “above” and Mark went back to his scheming. It was truly pathetic to see that Mark had no freedom but was told what to do. He was also so poorly organized and such a muddled thinker that he couldn’t get anything done: homework, schoolwork, project work, nothing. So, there was always clean up to be done after Mark, especially when the company got big. Clean-up would include stupid stuff like paying others millions for “stealing” their code, making stupid statements every time he opened his mouth, or the lack of attention he gave to the running of the company.

Mark was always a mess and the Fellowship, as well as Larry Summers’ squeeze Sheryl Sandberg—those soul-less megalomaniacs deserve each other—helped the handlers control Mark, were always picking up the broken pieces and trying to glue them back together. But this time, Facebook and Mark cannot be fixed.

Many of the original Facebook players and the Fellowship have been paid off in huge bribes to keep us quiet. CIA secrecy agreements grow on every plant at Facebook, but the Facebook insiders are turning against Mark anyway for many good reasons. The board of directors wants him fired. Mark’s British controllers sent Baron Richard Allen to rein Mark in, but he failed miserably. Even Sir Nick Clegg, x-deputy prime minister of Britain was sent to shut Mark up, but to no avail. Even the second-in-charge of Britain couldn’t stop Mark and his non-stop stupidity. Mark opens his mouth, it cost the company billions. Mark testifies, and everyone finds out that he doesn’t know a single thing about “his” company.

Mark knows nothing because he doesn’t do anything and hasn’t really shown up for work since the beginning. Mark seems to be allergic to work and can’t stand meetings unless he is “announcing” something. He is the worse manager in history, and everyone will tell you the same if asked. We all “play” like Mark runs the company, but that is not true. Mark can’t run himself effectively, let alone Facebook. That is why he was failing at Harvard and was going to be kicked out for bad grades, even after I did much of his work for him.

I can honestly say that, at this point, there are no “insiders” who have any faith in Mark to run the company, or to even speak in public. We believe that even after Larry Summers, the father of Facebook, who planted Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook to shut Mark up and stop revealing that Facebook is the tool of the Democrat agenda for globalism, cannot fix the company. This is one of the points I am most angry about. Mark has become, over the years, no friend of America. In fact, he hates America and rants on about how proud he is to avoid U. S. taxes and to cheat the American people – whom he considers to be animals.

Mark believes he is a higher being – above human beings. He now believes it was all his work that made Facebook. He is completely deluded by his own propaganda, which is nothing but lies. It is because Mark is now a danger to himself and the world that I must tell the true story of how Facebook and social media have become the enemies of Americans and the world.

Mark was shocked when he received an acceptance letter from Harvard, before he had applied. No test scores, interviews, or pre-requisites were required. His government “programming” had made his acceptance a given. Harvard wanted Mark, and Mark did what he was told. So, when the president of Harvard, Larry Summers, called Mark into his office early in his freshman year, Mark was not so surprised. He knew he would have to pay the piper. Summers asked Mark to start a group to work on the social media project – a supposed competition among teachers and students to win a government contract.

The ostensible goal was to create a social directory and Harvard where people could share in small groups. The real intent was to create a social network to manipulate the world. Mark liked the idea but was too lazy to do anything about it. He stuck his nose into the others’ camps to see what they were doing, but he himself just talked about it with good programmers and made them promises—thus, numerous lawsuits ensued from those promises.

Larry Summers continued to call Mark into his office for updates, so Mark just lied. Occasionally, others would be in the office with Larry Summers, but one person stood out and showed up at many more meetings in the future. This man was obviously the person in charge of this project. His name was a former Harvard Law Professor James Chandler. He boasted that he was one of the top idea people for DARPA and that he had actually developed lower level programming languages for the Army. He pretended to be interested in me, but I could tell that was a political act. Guys like me can just sense these things.

Over time, it came out that Summers and Chandler had much bigger plans for the social media project and had some outside sources of help to complete the project. Mark found it odd that Summers, Chandler, and eventually Sheryl Sandberg did not put much pressure on Mark to produce but were interested in everything Mark was learning from spying on the other groups for almost two years.

One day, Mark was called to Summers office in Massachusetts Hall to meet a most unusual man. His name was Andrew Marshall and he was the head of the Naval Intelligence Net Assessment Office. Mark was terrified of Marshall from the beginning. Marshall had Mark sign a government secrecy agreement, and other security agreements before he told Mark the ultimate military nature of what the Harvard Facebook project entailed. Mark, and Harvard, were simply being used as incubation think tanks as a cover for a military project that needed a corporate face. Professor Chandler said he had discovered the source code that would accomplish the seemingly impossible task of making a social directory “scalable” to billions of people.

Chandler droned on as Harvard professors like to do about how Harvard academic elites were the best choices to do the early testing because of their superior intellects. He explained that this scalability dilemma was not being solved by the military’s usual Microsoft, IBM and Oracle go-to military intelligence suppliers for reasons that were over my head. He said they had found a company who had solved the problem but was not willing to be used by the military as a black-ops project against Americans and the rest of the world.

Chandler and Summers had selected Mark as their front-man to lie and claim that he had written the source code for scalability. Chandler explained that the government had seized the source code from an inventor and his company for use in the DARPA Harvard Facebook project. He explained in very flowery intellectual property theft language that Mark may get sued by the inventor, but that DARPA would shield him. Mark told them he was willing to take that chance.

Mark knew full-well that the people who had brain-washed him had a big plan and his part was simply to do as they told him to do. But now, Mark was getting scarred because James Chandler was a member of the president’s National Security Team, a top national security and patent lawyer, and a truly mean, ugly and frightening black man who could easily turn on you like a pit bull.

Larry Summers had those same elitist bully traits, and was the president of Harvard and an economic world leader. Mark felt he was being groomed and protected by some very powerful people. But it was Andrew Marshall, the one they called “Yoda”, who scared the pants off Mark. After Mark had been “read into” the plan by Summers and Chandler, their boss wanted to meet Mark to make sure that he could be trusted to be part of this overarching evil plan to manipulate all of cyber space as if it were a war arena.

Andrew Marshall did not like Mark at all. I witnessed it myself when I was asked to attend one of Andrew Marshall’s Highland Group forums as a major executive for Facebook, along with Mark. Every time Mark opened his mouth, Marshall would stare at him until Mark would shut up. Marshall indicated in this meeting that Mark himself was the biggest problem with the Facebook operation. Mark was so happy when Andrew Marshall died not long ago. Mark now takes his orders from Marshall understudies Dick O’Neil and James Baker who run Highlands Group. Chandler also worked for Highlands Group and directed numerous operations working directly with Andrew Marshall and James Baker.

The Facebook operation also coordinated their activities with Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the group that gathered around Hillary Clinton’s patent thefts. Every Facebook insider, who was there from the beginning, know these things to be true but would never speak of it for fear of retaliation and possible death. We are speaking about a theft of literally many trillions of dollars in intellectual property, trade secrets, patents, designs and stolen programming source code.

Mark bragged for two years about being able to write the source code for the Facebook platform, but he did not produce a single line of code. For two years, all the Fellowship heard were promises of a break-through at any moment. We heard one excuse right after the other. We learned later it was because the inventor had run into some R&D roadblocks that needed sorted out first. Mark continued to spy on the other groups working on the Harvard Facebook student and staff directories, made many promises to everyone involved, but did not follow through. Mark kept promising he was going to just “sit down and write the code”, as if it was no big deal.

His meetings with Summers, Chandler, Marshall and others continued and Mark always came back encouraged. Then, one day Mark got terribly excited about hacking a fellow student at Harvard because he had some part of the Facebook program. The particular student was an upper classman named Max McKibben who lived next door in Winthrop House, literally 100 feet from our Kirkland House front door. Mark got the best hacker to come to our room and use a special “school” computer to hack into McKibben’s personal Harvard email account to steal several white papers on an invention just like the one Chandler had described. This white paper described EXACTLY what Mark had been talking about for two years and now a Harvard student had a full description of a program that could do the same thing.

It was on October 28, 2003 that Mark returned from Summers’ office and announced: “Let the hacking begin.” That hacking stole the white paper that had been sent to the son of Michael McKibben, the owner of Leader Technologies and the real inventor of scalable social media. Michael had sent his son Max the white papers written to describe the new invention. When Mark learned that Chandler was Michael’s patent attorney, the theft finally put a name to the target Chandler had talked about in vague terms.

Chandler had requested that Michael write up a detailed explanation of the system and how it worked. Once Mark showed the stolen white papers to Chandler, Chandler confessed that he already had a complete evaluation copy of the source code as Michael’s patent attorney, that he was using a spy tactic called “strategic deception” in pretending to help Michael and Leader Technologies file patents, while he was secretly providing Michael’s invention code to DARPA’s IBM Eclipse Foundation cyber-warfare partners.

Chandler told Mark that IBM Eclipse was preparing Michael’s program, as they spoke, to give to Mark for the Facebook launch at EclipseCON ’04 in San Fancisco right after the Harvard January Reading Period. He said the plan was to transfer all of the NSA’s LifeLog data as soon as possible to the Facebook platform as well. He also told Mark that he would be moving to Silicon Valley after the term was over, and that the next phase of the plan for him would happen in California. Dustin and I went with him that summer, but I decided to return to Boston and graduate. That was a sad separation, but I was happy he got rid of his Craig’s List girls. The few that I actually saw looked like sad street urchins.

Chandler had not seen Michael’s white papers yet and was eager to have them. Mark sent him the hacked copies. Chandler said with the inventor’s first-ever public write-up, and the source code, the Highlands Group and the IBM Eclipse Foundation now had what they needed to prepare the platform for Mark to launch thefacebook, later shortened to Facebook, at EclipseCON ‘04 in February.

I now realize that Chandler took the stolen source code from Michael McKibben and Leader Technologies and gave it to the IBM Eclipse Foundation who turned around gave it out as “open source”, the most lucrative intellectual property in history, to all of the social media giants as open source code without charging a penny.

What I am telling you now is a composite understanding of what I knew early on in the Fellowship group of Mark Zuckerberg and what I have learned up to this time as a core insider of Facebook to this very day. It is not only Mark who needs to pay for his crimes, but many others also. IBM Eclipse Foundation plays like they are moral, honest, and philanthropically gave away intellectual property to other companies who essentially became monopolies with the stolen programming source code. This is laughable and I told Mark when he was being told this information by his handlers that the plan would never work because anyone can see through such stupidity. But to this day, beside Facebook insiders and the Fellowship group, no one has ever told me that they suspected the IBM Eclipse Foundation or the Highlands Forum are corrupt.

The bigger the lie, the easier it is to get people to believe it.

Mark Greenberg (Zuckerberg) did not create Facebook. Facebook is a governmental monopoly doing the most advanced virtual behavioral modification on the planet with stolen and modified patents, intellectual property (IP), and trade secrets from inventors who were not remunerated for their inventions. I personally knew this, even when it was happening. I felt sick about the whole thing and this led to many, many arguments between Mark and me. The other members of the Fellowship felt the same way I did. Eventually, Mark had to buy all of us off with large sums of money over the years.

We have not spoken up before now, but I personally cannot hold my silence any longer. I must speak out openly about the criminal surveillance Mark does through Facebook because it gets worse every day. Mark’s handlers tell him to allow more surveillance even though security breaches, selling customer data, allowing for spying by CIA, NSA, DIA, GCHQ, MI6, Five Eyes, lying to Congress, meddling in elections, allowing everyone access to Facebook data, censoring conservatives, being a platform for the Democrat party, and many other charges have been brought against Facebook in other countries and America. Mark will not listen to me or anyone else about stopping the insanity. I believe he is unstable and not fit to run Facebook.

When I saw the $1.5 billion from George Soros and the Atlantic Council bring in the AI system (some built by the Cambridge Digital Forensic Research Laboratory) used in Europe to stop free speech, I had had enough. It was then that I knew Mark was truly being used by evil forces and that even he couldn’t stop it. He seemed to have a death wish to destroy Facebook and reveal some of its evil intent. This was ruining the company I was trying to help run. There were no other avenues that I could take the company down that would deter Mark from the total destruction of Facebook. Mark had been told to win the country for Hillary, or kill the company trying. He was making astounding mistakes that showed the truth of the evil foundations of Facebook.

Our secrets were gushing out like blood from a slaughtered pig. I kept talking to Mark, trying to change his mind, but he became more insane and impossible to talk to. Mark gave up control of the company to a crowd stumbling over themselves to take personal credit for Facebook’s “turnaround”, including Highlands Group, DHS, DoD, Naval Intelligence, SERCO, Crown Agents, IBM Eclipse Foundation, Clinton Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Google, Alphabet, Schmidt, Sandberg, Thiel, Hoffman, Breyer, Louie, Ketterson, Goldman Sachs, Blankfein, Dimon, Microsoft, Gates, Allen, Thompson, Balmer, Ozzi, Nadella, Milner, Obama, Pritzker, Hillary, Kutcher, Bono, Soros, Lamont, the Queen’s men Richard Allan and Nick Clegg, and the rest of the gang who are eager to clean up Mark’s messes. I could see that Facebook was on its last leg but I couldn’t understand why Mark would kill the company.

Then, one day I realized what Mark was doing with the obvious crash-landing of Facebook. He was being told that he would get a “deal” with the government charges against the company and would not have to pay billions in fines. The deal would be like the government’s deal with Standard Oil when they were charged with anti-trust, monopoly issues. They were made to break up into seven different companies – all of which became as big or bigger than Standard Oil itself. Splitting up the monopoly made the owners seven times richer.

That is what Mark is doing. He wants Facebook to be broken up instead of answer to the crimes it has willingly committed. Corporations can simply go bankrupt, dissolve, crash and burn, or do what Google did when it created a new company called Alphabet who is now called the Mother of Google and is worth even more. How a child becomes the parent is a new one for me. Eric Schmidt showed Mark exactly what to do and please remember that Eric Schmidt was also Mark’s mentor and the first person to invest hundreds of millions in Facebook before it went public. Eric Schmidt made billions off of his insider trader knowledge from the Highlands Forum investment in Facebook. Britain’s offshore banks feed them all with endless money laundering and “deal flow” as long as the Queen gets her cut. All us insiders know this global money game is totally rigged to perpetuate this evil power. I don’t want to go to my grave knowing that I didn’t do something to atone for my sins in perpetuating these lies.

I believe that Mark is doing everything in his power to get President Donald Trump deposed, just as he did everything he could to try to help get Hillary elected. If Trump continues, the globalist lose. Mark is a true globalist; he is not an American anymore. Mark essentially does not have a plan for Facebook, he simply does what he is told and always has. Mark has made no decisions on his own – not one. This current decision to destroy Facebook from the inside out is nothing more than Mark’s handlers using Mark in their last hours of power. Trump will win 2020 and Facebook will die. The only question left is whether Trump will charge Mark Fakerberg with the crimes he committed.

I, for one, want Mark in jail along with his handlers. I have personally been threatened and intimidated by these Big-Tech monsters since I met Mark Zuckerberg (Greenberg) – a person who truly does not even know his own name or who he is and yet is one of the richest people on earth. Mark did not earn nor deserve a single penny he has been given. Mark is a card-board cut-out who has lost his way and is completely delusional at this point.

As a Facebook insider I demand Mark be fired and all assets taken from him due to his non-stop lying to stockholders and Facebook users. The Board of Directors, underwriters and institutional investors all know about the secret government contracts that have been propping up the company since the beginning, but most average shareholders do not. It is a government-owned and operated military psy-ops weapon that has gotten out of control and been used for treasonous purposes and for seditious actions against the American people.

After she got sick of the lies, Mark’s former speech writer Katherine Losse described in her 2004 book The Boy Kings that Facebook has stolen personal data and sold it, created a “dark” profile on every user and sold it to everyone who would pay the price, created secret files of compromising photos, allowed all government agencies to access all user data, breached every user agreement, lied continuously to all users, built in back-doors and zero-day programs for the military, and many other unethical, immoral and illegal activities. Did Mark Zuckerberg (Greenberg) willing and with intent allow these criminal activities to go on unchecked on Facebook? – You bet he did. And he is still doing it and getting worse every day. Like other Facebook insiders, I want no part of this squelching of free speech or illegal surveillance activities or the purposeful experimentation on users to develop new and better means to electronically control, manipulate, and imprison people.

I have stood against Mark’s immoral and evil actions since our freshman year at Harvard. Nothing has changed, except that Mark has gotten worse and his handlers have become so demanding that they are condemning Facebook to the trash heap and creating the circumstances for Mark to become even richer and more insane. His next projects include a system much like what Eric Schmidt has created for China, a social credit system that controls the freedom of every American.

When Facebook is broken up, the new companies will have the Eric Schmidt “Dragonfly” social credit system built in. Mark wants to be like Eric and control the world from a digital Ivory Tower and oversee the depopulation of the earth. These maniacs believe they are “above the human race” and are actually higher beings sent to the earth to control the masses. From my experience, these attitudes are extremely prevalent with Silicon Valley tech giants — and they make me sick.

The time has come to simply end the fake social media experiments and call them governmental black-ops projects. I personally know most of these cyber tech-lords and I can testify that they do not possess the tech skills they claim founded their companies. They are simply tech thieves, like Mark Zuckerberg, who need to pay back those they stole from and be put in jail for their crimes. I personally am willing to testify without immunity and suffer whatever consequences I deserve for knowing these things and never bringing them forth until now. I know that the corruption is so great in Washington D. C. that I would not stand a chance of bringing forth this information without being squelched, killed, or silenced like I have seen done to others.

I suggest that the new Attorney General simply read this letter, investigate and then ask Mark Greensberg to program a single line of coherent code. When he cannot, lock him up.

Demasking the Torture of Julian Assange

Posted on July 1, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture

Source: Medium

I know, you may think I am deluded. How could life in an Embassy with a cat and a skateboard ever amount to torture? That’s exactly what I thought, too, when Assange first appealed to my office for protection. Like most of the public, I had been subconsciously poisoned by the relentless smear campaign, which had been disseminated over the years. So it took a second knock on my door to get my reluctant attention. But once I looked into the facts of this case, what I found filled me with repulsion and disbelief.

Surely, I thought, Assange must be a rapist! But what I found is that he has never been charged with a sexual offence. True, soon after the US had encouraged allies to find reasons to prosecute Assange, two women made the headlines in Sweden. One of them claimed he had ripped a condom, and the other that he had failed to wear one, in both cases during consensual intercourse — not exactly scenarios that have the ring of ‘rape’ in any language other than Swedish. Mind you, each woman even submitted a condom as evidence. The first one, supposedly worn and torn by Assange, revealed no DNA whatsoever — neither his, nor hers, nor anybody else’s. Go figure. The second one, used but intact, supposedly proved ‘unprotected’ intercourse. Go figure, again. The women even texted that they never intended to report a crime but were ‘railroaded’ into doing so by zealous Swedish police. Go figure, once more. Ever since, both Sweden and Britain have done everything to prevent Assange from confronting these allegations without simultaneously having to expose himself to US extradition and, thus, to a show-trial followed by life in jail. His last refuge had been the Ecuadorian Embassy.

Alright, I thought, but surely Assange must be a hacker! But what I found is that all his disclosures had been freely leaked to him, and that no one accuses him of having hacked a single computer. In fact, the only arguable hacking-charge against him relates to his alleged unsuccessful attempt to help breaking a password which, had it been successful, might have helped his source to cover her tracks. In short: a rather isolated, speculative, and inconsequential chain of events; a bit like trying to prosecute a driver who unsuccessfully attempted to exceed the speed-limit, but failed because their car was too weak.

Well then, I thought, at least we know for sure that Assange is a Russian spy, has interfered with US elections, and negligently caused people’s deaths! But all I found is that he consistently published true information of inherent public interest without any breach of trust, duty or allegiance. Yes, he exposed war crimes, corruption and abuse, but let’s not confuse national security with governmental impunity. Yes, the facts he disclosed empowered US voters to take more informed decisions, but isn’t that simply democracy? Yes, there are ethical discussions to be had regarding the legitimacy of unredacted disclosures. But if actual harm had really been caused, how come neither Assange nor Wikileaks ever faced related criminal charges or civil lawsuits for just compensation?

But surely, I found myself pleading, Assange must be a selfish narcissist, skateboarding through the Ecuadorian Embassy and smearing feces on the walls? Well, all I heard from Embassy staff is that the inevitable inconveniences of his accommodation at their offices were handled with mutual respect and consideration. This changed only after the election of President Moreno, when they were suddenly instructed to find smears against Assange and, when they didn’t, they were soon replaced. The President even took it upon himself to bless the world with his gossip, and to personally strip Assange of his asylum and citizenship without any due process of law.

In the end it finally dawned on me that I had been blinded by propaganda, and that Assange had been systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed. Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide. And thus, a legal precedent is being set, through the backdoor of our own complacency, which in the future can and will be applied just as well to disclosures by The Guardian, the New York Times and ABC News.

Very well, you may say, but what does slander have to do with torture? Well, this is a slippery slope. What may look like mere «mudslinging» in public debate, quickly becomes “mobbing” when used against the defenseless, and even “persecution” once the State is involved. Now just add purposefulness and severe suffering, and what you get is full-fledged psychological torture.

Yes, living in an Embassy with a cat and a skateboard may seem like a sweet deal when you believe the rest of the lies. But when no one remembers the reason for the hate you endure, when no one even wants to hear the truth, when neither the courts nor the media hold the powerful to account, then your refuge really is but a rubber boat in a shark-pool, and neither your cat nor your skateboard will save your life.

Even so, you may say, why spend so much breath on Assange, when countless others are tortured worldwide? Because this is not only about protecting Assange, but about preventing a precedent likely to seal the fate of Western democracy. For once telling the truth has become a crime, while the powerful enjoy impunity, it will be too late to correct the course. We will have surrendered our voice to censorship and our fate to unrestrained tyranny.

This Op-Ed has been offered for publication to the Guardian, The Times, the Financial Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, the Canberra Times, the Telegraph, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Newsweek.

None responded positively.

Buried In Broad Daylight – The ‘Free Press’ And The Leaked OPCW Report On Douma

Posted on June 28, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By David Cromwell and David Edwards

Source: Media Lens

A defining feature of the propaganda system is that facts supporting the agenda of Western power are pushed to the forefront of the ‘mainstream’ media, while inconvenient facts are buried. A prime example is the shameful media silence in response to a devastating document leaked from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), discussed in a recent media alert. The document, an engineering assessment of two chlorine cylinders found at two separate locations after an attack on the Damascus suburb of Douma on April 7, 2018, casts serious doubt on the official narrative that Syrian government forces had dropped them from helicopters. The claim that Assad had used chemical weapons ‘against his own civilians’ was used by the US, UK and France to ‘justify’ missile strikes on ‘chemical weapons facilities’ on April 14, 2018.

One of the cylinders was found on top of a four-storey building with its front end lodged in a hole in the roof. The other cylinder was found lying on a bed in the top-floor room of an apartment with a crater-like opening in the roof. Engineering analysis – based on measurements, photographs and computer modelling – were conducted on the two cylinders and the scenes where they were found. The aim was to ‘evaluate the possible means by which these two cylinders arrived at their respective locations as observed.’ The leaked report, signed by Ian Henderson, a senior OPCW engineer with many years’ experience, concluded:

‘In summary, observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest that there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft.‘ [Our emphasis.]

But this dissenting engineering analysis was excluded from the final OPCW Fact-Finding Mission report presented to the UN Security Council on March 1, 2019.

Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology, and international security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose main expertise is in ballistic missiles, gave an initial assessment of the leaked OPCW report on May 21, and agreed with its conclusion. He summarised:

‘For now, it suffices to say that the UN OPCW engineering report is completely different from the UN OPCW report on Khan Sheikhoun, which is distinguished by numerous claims about explosive effects that could only have been made by technically illiterate individuals. In very sharp contrast, the voices that come through the engineering report are those of highly knowledgeable and sophisticated experts.’

On June 4, Postol released a more in-depth assessment which completely rejected the propaganda claim that the cylinders could only have been dropped from Syrian government helicopters. This strengthens the conclusion that the April 2018 Douma attacks were indeed staged, presumably by Syrian rebels attempting to provoke a Western military response against Assad (and perhaps even with Western connivance).

Postol noted the glaring discrepancies between the OPWC report that was submitted to the UN (minus the dissenting analysis of the leaked document) and the facts on the ground:

‘The calculations produced as proof for the conclusions bear no relationship to what was observed at the scene and both the observed data from the scene and the calculations bear no relationship to the reported findings.’

Postol expanded:

‘An important characteristic of concrete is that it is brittle. By definition, such a material is not flexible but will develop cracks and fail catastrophically when subjected to stresses that are sufficiently large. Concrete can be substantially strengthened [as in this case] by embedding reinforcing steel rebar or other strong but flexible materials within it. The rebar performs the function of maintaining the strength of the material when it is flexed rather than failing catastrophically as is the case with the surrounding brittle material.’

He added:

‘A very important additional phenomenon associated with the impact of an object can be the creation of a hole due to a process that is generally referred to as “tunneling.” Because the breach created by the penetrating object results in the crushing and pushing of brittle concrete as the object moves forward, the diameter of the hole produced by the impact of the object will be very close to that of the penetrating object. This means that a hole created by a 40 cm diameter chlorine cylinder should be close to 40 cm in diameter…’

But this was not the case:

‘The diameter of the hole is nearly twice that of the cylinder and the steel rebar that was supposed to stop the cylinder from penetrating through the roof is instead completely shattered and bent away from the forward direction by more than 60°… This photograph shows that the crater was produced by an explosion on the roof which had nothing to do with the impact of a chlorine cylinder. These discrepancies simply mean that the cylinder was placed on the roof after the hole was produced by the explosion of a mortar shell or artillery rocket.’

Postol provided much more detail, but this was his summary:

‘There is absolutely no doubt that the OPCW finding that the chlorine cylinder found at what it identifies as Location 2 did not produce the hole in the roof that allegedly led to the killing of more than 30 people that the OPCW claims were trapped and poisoned in the building. The OPCW’s own science-based technical analysis does not come close to matching what was observed at Location 2.’

The only possible conclusion is that ‘chemical weapons attacks’ at the two sites where the cylinders were found must have been staged.

Postol praised the high-quality analysis presented in the leaked OPCW document. But he was damning about senior OPCW management who had disregarded the dissenting engineering assessment and instead presented a deeply biased and misleading final report to the UN:

‘The OPCW has been compromised in terms of the content they are providing. The deception of the OPCW is quite blatant. Perhaps they are not used to people who are knowledgeable on these issues scrutinizing their material.’

On June 3, Labour MP Chris Williamson submitted a parliamentary question:

‘To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, with reference to investigations suggesting that reports of the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian Government in Douma in April 2018 were staged and with reference to reports that OPCW expert advice was redacted from its final report, whether he has made a reassessment of the decision to bomb targets in Syria in 2018.’

In an interview with Afshin Rattansi on RT’s Going Underground, Williamson rightly pointed to the insidious part played by the ‘mainstream’ media:

‘The hysterical mainstream media at the time a year ago who seemed to be clamouring for military airstrikes have been incredibly silent about this [leaked OPCW report]. I remember having a very rough interview on Channel 4 about the whole issue. And yet they seem to, as far as I’m aware, have failed to follow up now with this quite damning revelation which has been brought to light by a whistle-blower.’

He added:

‘What is very regrettable today is the tradition that we used to take for granted, that investigative journalists – serious journalists like John Pilger – seem to be sadly lacking these days.’

Williamson also cited Robert Fisk – ‘a very unusual animal these days’ – who reported from Douma last April, after interviewing civilians in the vicinity of the alleged chemical weapon attacks. A senior Syrian doctor, Dr Assim Rahaibani, told him that the ‘gas’ video that had so horrified the world showed patients who had been overcome, not by gas, but by oxygen starvation:

‘I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.’

BBC Syria producer Riam Dalati said earlier this year via Twitter that:

‘After almost six months of investigation, I can prove without a doubt that the Douma hospital scene was staged’.

He subsequently set his Twitter status to ‘private’. Moreover, in a now deleted tweet, he stated two days after the Douma attack:

‘Sick and tired of activists and rebels using corpses of dead children to stage emotive scenes for Western consumption. Then they wonder why some serious journos are questioning part of the narrative.’

As far as we know, BBC News has never given proper coverage to the serious doubts surrounding the alleged ‘chemical weapons’ attack on Douma, other than to ascribe such doubts to Syrian and Russian government claims of ‘fabrication’. As we saw with Iraq and Saddam’s ‘denials of WMD’, a powerful propaganda technique to dismiss facts, evidence and truth is to make them come out the mouths of Official Enemies.

The BBC Goes Quiet

That the OPCW may be so compromised as to present a misleading report to the UN Security Council that could be used as post-facto ‘justification’ for a Western military attack is, to say the least, an extremely grave matter. Indeed, it casts doubt on the whole integrity of an important international organisation. Ted Postol said in an interview with Sharmini Piries of The Real News Network that he believes the official OPCW report into an alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan Shaykhun on April 4, 2017 – almost exactly one year before the Douma attack – may also have been ‘severely compromised’.

As Tim Hayward, a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), the group of independent scholars and researchers that originally published the leaked OPWC document, noted:

‘While Western politicians and news media echo tropes about obstructive Russia & outlaw Syria, States of Non-Aligned Movement and China share their concerns about politicisation and polarising of OPCW.’

Hayward added:

‘Suppressed OPCW document undermines the claimed justification for Western missile strikes on Syria in April 2018, and it reveals an organisation in need of radical reform.’

Regardless of the findings of the official and leaked OPCW reports, the leaders of the US, UK and France, including Prime Minister Theresa May, were guilty of launching an unprovoked military attack on another country in violation of the UN Charter; the ‘supreme international crime’, in the words of the post-WW2 Nuremberg judgement. These are issues that would, in a sane media system, be extensively reported and debated.

However, as we wrote over three weeks ago in our earlier media alert, other than the small-circulation, left-wing Morning Star, the damning leaked document has been mentioned in just two articles in the national press: one by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday and one in the Independent by Robert Fisk. Remarkably, but unsurprisingly, this remains the case at the time of writing. Nor is there a single mention of it anywhere on the BBC News website. Hitchens has also submitted questions direct to the OPCW which appear to have been ignored by the body.

Our repeated challenges to senior BBC journalists, including Kamal Ahmed, the BBC’s head of news, have met with a stony silence, with one exception. Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, replied via Twitter on May 24:

‘thanks for your message. I am in Geneva today, in Sarajevo and Riga last week, and heading to Gulf next week. It’s an important story. Will make sure programmes know about it. As you know, UK outlets focused on May & Brexit last few days.’ [Our emphasis.]

Let us set aside the implausible argument that ‘UK outlets focused on May & Brexit’ should preclude any coverage of a vital reappraisal of the West’s ‘justification’ of an attack on Syria; or the notion that senior editors at the BBC, with its vast monitoring resources, would have to be informed by Doucet of the leaked document. But, if we were to take Doucet’s words at face value, she would surely be happy to respond to our follow-up query, asking for an update. Seemingly not. She has now retreated behind the wider, blanketing BBC silence.

And yet, last week, evidence emerged that the BBC is well aware of the leaked document. In a live-streamed panel debate at the annual meeting of GLOBSEC, a global security thinktank, on June 6, the BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner asked OPCW director-general Fernando Arias about the Independent report ‘by someone called Robert Fisk’. Was this an example of fake news? In his evasive reply, Arias stated that:

‘all the information given by any inspectors is considered but sometimes it is not fit to the conclusion.’ [Our emphasis.]

This remarkable admission that serious evidence and analysis were disregarded because it does ‘not fit the conclusion’ went unchallenged by the BBC’s Gardner and everyone else in the room. It echoed the infamous statement in the 2002 Downing Street memo on plans to invade Iraq that ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’ The focus of Arias’s concern was to defend the OPCW and to identify the whistle-blower, stating that:

‘”actions had to be taken” following the leak…”I stand by the impartial and professional conclusions” of the full OPCW report.’

On June 12, Peter Hitchens, mentioned earlier for his excellent reporting on Syria, challenged Gardner on whether he had reported his exchange with the OPCW director-general. Later that day, Hitchens tweeted:

‘BBC this afternoon stated that @FrankRGardner has *not* reported on the exchange, indeed BBC as a whole, despite vast resources paid for by licence holders, has yet to report at all on this major development.’

The only response to the leaked OPCW report by a Guardian journalist so far appears to have been this remarkable outburst from George Monbiot on Twitter:

‘The Assad apologists are out in force again, and baying for blood. It’s chilling to see how they latch onto one person’s contentious account of a single atrocity, while ignoring the vast weight of evidence for chemical weapons use and conventional massacres by the govt. #Syria’

Monbiot added:

‘They seek to exonerate one of the bloodiest mass murderers on the planet, denying his crimes and whitewashing his record. In doing so, they share some of the blame for his ongoing mass killing of Syrian people.’

As we, and many other people, pointed out, this was an inexplicably irrational response to an obviously important, indisputably authentic, highly credible, leaked document that was not at all ‘one person’s… account’. The leaked material simply has to be taken seriously and investigated, not dismissed out of hand. We are, after all, talking about possible war crimes under Trump, the famously dangerous, fascist US President every liberal journalist is supposed to be determined to excoriate at every possible turn. Why should we not, then, describe Monbiot as a ‘Trump apologist’?

Last year, during an exchange about Syria, Hitchens told Monbiot what we had already concluded about him:

‘This is important. I have until now regarded you as a fundamentally decent and honest person (and defended you against those who have argued otherwise). But your behaviour in this matter is causing me to reconsider this opinion. Please argue honestly.’

The near-total ‘mainstream’ media blanking of the leaked OPCW document is a genuinely disturbing sign of growing corporate media conformity and totalitarian-style mendacity. In the age of social media – with netizens repeatedly challenging the likes of the BBC’s Lyse Doucet and the Guardian‘s George Monbiot – the stonewalling, and the denial of newsworthiness, is happening in plain sight. Corporate journalists know that it is important, they know that we know that it is important, they know that we are asking why they are ignoring it, and they are ignoring us anyway, with the whole act of censorship swathed in silence. As the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko once said:

‘When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.’

People Who Support Internet Censorship Are Infantile Narcissists

Posted on June 20, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

As of this writing, journalist Ford Fischer is still completely demonetized on YouTube as the result of a new set of rules that were put in place because of some doofy Twitter drama between some unfunny asshole named Steven Crowder and some infantile narcissist who thinks the world revolves around his opinions named Carlos Maza. It remains an unknown if Fischer will ever be restored to an important source of income around which he has built his livelihood.

Fischer often covers white supremacist rallies and counter-protests, and his channel was demonetized within minutes of YouTube’s new rules against hate speech going into effect because some of his content, as you’d expect, includes white supremacists saying and doing white supremacist things. Maza, a Vox reporter who launched a viral Twitter campaign to have Crowder removed from YouTube for making homophobic and bigoted comments about him on his channel, expressed concern over Fischer’s financial censorship.

“What’s happening to Ford is fucking awful,” Maza tweeted yesterday. “He’s a good journalist doing important work. I don’t understand how YouTube is still so bad at this. How can they not differentiate between white supremacist content and good faith reporting on white supremacy?”

https://twitter.com/gaywonk/status/1136425011970019329

I say that Maza is an infantile narcissist who thinks the world revolves around his opinions because it genuinely seems to have surprised him that good people would get harmed in the crossfire of his censorship campaign.

I mean, what did he think was going to happen? Did he think some soulless, multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley corporation was going to display company-wide wisdom and woke insightfulness while implementing his agenda to censor obnoxious voices? Did he imagine that YouTube executives were going to sit down with him over a cup of coffee and go down a list with him to get his personal opinion of who should and should not be censored?

Think about it. How narcissistic do you have to be to assume that a vast corporation is going to use your exact personal perceptual filters while determining who should and should not be censored for oafish behavior? How incapable of understanding the existence of other points of view must you be to believe it’s reasonable to expect that a giant, sweeping censorship campaign will exercise surgical precision which aligns perfectly with your own exact personal values system? How arrogant and self-centered must you be to demand pro-censorship reforms throughout an enormous Google-owned platform, then whine that they’re not implementing your censorship desires correctly?

This is the same staggering degree of cloistered, dim-eyed narcissism that leads people to support Julian Assange’s persecution on the grounds that he’s “not a journalist”. These egocentric dolts sincerely seem to believe that the US government is going to prosecute Assange for unauthorized publications about US war crimes, then when it comes time to imprison the next Assange the US Attorney General is going to show up on their doorstep to ask them for their opinion as to whether the next target is or is not a real journalist. Obviously the power-serving agenda that you are helping to manufacture consent for is not going to be guided by your personal set of opinions, you fucking moron.

The fact that other people aren’t going to see and interpret information the same way as you do is something Carlos Maza and the thousands of people who’ve supported his pro-censorship campaign should have learned as small children. Understanding that the world doesn’t revolve around you and your wants and desires is a basic stage in childhood development. People who believe Silicon Valley tech giants can implement censorship in a way that is wise and beneficent are still basically toddlers in this respect. One wonders if they still interrupt their mother’s important conversations with demands for attention and apple juice.

Youtube's new censorship escalation could easily see them removing videos which question the legitimacy of possible legit false flags, like the Douma incident in Syria, or any other attempt to manufacture consent for military interventionism.https://t.co/KrvscxKiS4 pic.twitter.com/EzDPfnSO8A

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 5, 2019

Ford Fischer was not the first good guy to get caught in the crossfire of internet censorship, and he will not be the last. In addition to the way unexpected interpretations of what constitutes hate speech can lead to important voices losing their platforms or being unable to make a living doing what they do, the new rules appear to contain a troubling new escalation that could see skeptics of legitimate military false flags completely censored.

“Finally, we will remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place,” reads a single sentence in the official YouTube blog about its new rules.

The sentence appears almost as an aside, without any elaboration or further information added, and at first glance it reads innocuously enough. No Holocaust deniers or Sandy Hook false flag videos? Okay, got it. I personally am not a denier of either of those events, so this couldn’t possibly affect me personally, right?

Wrong. YouTube does not say that it will just be censoring Holocaust deniers and Sandy Hook shooting deniers, it says it will “remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place.”

So what does this mean? Where exactly is the line drawn? If you are not an infantilized narcissist, you will not assume that YouTube intends to implement this guideline in the same way you would. It is very possible that it will include skeptics of violent events which the entire political/media class agrees were perpetrated by enemies of the US-centralized power alliance, which just so happen to manufacture support for increased aggressions against those nations.

Would the new rules end up forbidding, for example, this excellent YouTube video animation explaining how a leaked OPCW report disputes the official narrative about an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria last year? If you are not making the assumption that YouTube will be implementing its censorship using your own personal values system, there is no reason to assume it wouldn’t. After all, the official narrative that dozens of civilians were killed by the Assad government dropping chlorine cylinders through rooftops is the mainstream consensus narrative maintained by all respected US officials and “authoritative” news outlets.

This is a perfect example of a very real possibility that could be a disastrous consequence of increased internet censorship. It is a known fact that the US government has an extensive history of using false flags to manufacture consent for war, from the USS Liberty to the Gulf of Tonkin to the false Nayirah testimony about removing babies from incubators to the WMD narrative in Iraq. These new rules could easily serve as a narrative control device preventing critical discussions about suspicious acts of violence which have already happened, and which happen in the future.

Consider the fact that Google, which owns YouTube, has had ties to the CIA and the NSA from its very inception, is known to have a cozy relationship with the NSA, and has served US intelligence community narrative control agendas by tweaking its algorithms to deliberately hide dissenting alternative media outlets. Consider this, then ask yourself this question: do you trust this company to make wise and beneficent distinctions when it comes to censoring public conversations?

In a corporatist system of government which draws no meaningful distinction between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Only someone who believes that giant Silicon Valley corporations would implement censorship according to their own personal values system could ever support giving these oligarchic establishments that kind of power. And if you believe that, it’s because you never really grew up.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

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