The Silencing of Dissent

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Hedges

The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting, censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and purveyors of “fake news.”

No dominant class can long retain control when the credibility of the ideas that justify its existence evaporates. It is forced, at that point, to resort to crude forms of coercion, intimidation and censorship. This ideological collapse in the United States has transformed those of us who attack the corporate state into a potent threat, not because we reach large numbers of people, and certainly not because we spread Russian propaganda, but because the elites no longer have a plausible counterargument.

The elites face an unpleasant choice. They could impose harsh controls to protect the status quo or veer leftward toward socialism to ameliorate the mounting economic and political injustices endured by most of the population. But a move leftward, essentially reinstating and expanding the New Deal programs they have destroyed, would impede corporate power and corporate profits. So instead the elites, including the Democratic Party leadership, have decided to quash public debate. The tactic they are using is as old as the nation-state—smearing critics as traitors who are in the service of a hostile foreign power. Tens of thousands of people of conscience were blacklisted in this way during the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s. The current hyperbolic and relentless focus on Russia, embraced with gusto by “liberal” media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC, has unleashed what some have called a virulent “New McCarthyism.”

The corporate elites do not fear Russia. There is no publicly disclosed evidence that Russia swung the election to Donald Trump. Nor does Russia appear to be intent on a military confrontation with the United States. I am certain Russia tries to meddle in U.S. affairs to its advantage, as we do and did in Russia—including our clandestine bankrolling of Boris Yeltsin, whose successful 1996 campaign for re-election as president is estimated to have cost up to $2.5 billion, much of that money coming indirectly from the American government. In today’s media environment Russia is the foil. The corporate state is unnerved by the media outlets that give a voice to critics of corporate capitalism, the security and surveillance state and imperialism, including the network RT America.

My show on RT America, “On Contact,” like my columns at Truthdig, amplifies the voices of these dissidents—Tariq Ali, Kshama Sawant, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Medea Benjamin, Ajamu Baraka, Noam Chomsky, Dr. Margaret Flowers, Rania Khalek, Amira Hass, Miko Peled, Abby Martin, Glen Ford, Max Blumenthal, Pam Africa, Linh Dinh, Ben Norton, Eugene Puryear, Allan Nairn, Jill Stein, Kevin Zeese and others. These dissidents, if we had a functioning public broadcasting system or a commercial press free of corporate control, would be included in the mainstream discourse. They are not bought and paid for. They have integrity, courage and often brilliance. They are honest. For these reasons, in the eyes of the corporate state, they are very dangerous.

The first and deadliest salvo in the war on dissent came in 1971 when Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney and later a Supreme Court justice, wrote and circulated a memo among business leaders called “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” It became the blueprint for the corporate coup d’état. Corporations, as Powell recommended in the document, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the assault, financing pro-business political candidates, mounting campaigns against the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and the press and creating institutions such as the Business Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Federalist Society and Accuracy in Academia. The memo argued that corporations had to fund sustained campaigns to marginalize or silence those who in “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, and the intellectual and literary journals” were hostile to corporate interests.

Powell attacked Ralph Nader by name. Lobbyists flooded Washington and state capitals. Regulatory controls were abolished. Massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy were implemented, culminating in a de facto tax boycott. Trade barriers were lifted and the country’s manufacturing base was destroyed. Social programs were slashed and funds for infrastructure, from roads and bridges to public libraries and schools, were cut. Protections for workers were gutted. Wages declined or stagnated. The military budget, along with the organs of internal security, became ever more bloated. A de facto blacklist, especially in universities and the press, was used to discredit intellectuals, radicals and activists who decried the idea of the nation prostrating itself before the dictates of the marketplace and condemned the crimes of imperialism, some of the best known being Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Sheldon Wolin, Ward Churchill, Nader, Angela Davis and Edward Said. These critics were permitted to exist only on the margins of society, often outside of institutions, and many had trouble making a living.

The financial meltdown of 2008 not only devastated the global economy, it exposed the lies propagated by those advocating globalization. Among these lies: that salaries of workers would rise, democracy would spread across the globe, the tech industry would replace manufacturing as a source of worker income, the middle class would flourish, and global communities would prosper. After 2008 it became clear that the “free market” is a scam, a zombie ideology by which workers and communities are ravaged by predatory capitalists and assets are funneled upward into the hands of the global 1 percent. The endless wars, fought largely to enrich the arms industry and swell the power of the military, are futile and counterproductive to national interests. Deindustrialization and austerity programs have impoverished the working class and fatally damaged the economy.

The establishment politicians in the two leading parties, each in service to corporate power and responsible for the assault on civil liberties and impoverishment of the country, are no longer able to use identity politics and the culture wars to whip up support. This led in the last presidential campaign to an insurgency by Bernie Sanders, which the Democratic Party crushed, and the election of Donald Trump.

Barack Obama rode a wave of bipartisan resentment into office in 2008, then spent eight years betraying the public. Obama’s assault on civil liberties, including his use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, was worse than those carried out by George W. Bush. He accelerated the war on public education by privatizing schools, expanded the wars in the Middle East, including the use of militarized drone attacks, provided little meaningful environmental reform, ignored the plight of the working class, deported more undocumented people than any other president, imposed a corporate-sponsored health care program that was the brainchild of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and prohibited the Justice Department from prosecuting the bankers and financial firms that carried out derivatives scams and inflated the housing and real estate market, a condition that led to the 2008 financial meltdown. He epitomized, like Bill Clinton, the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. Clinton, outdoing Obama’s later actions, gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the dismantling of the welfare system, the deregulation of the financial services industry and the huge expansion of mass incarceration. Clinton also oversaw deregulation of the Federal Communications Commission, a change that allowed a handful of corporations to buy up the airwaves.

The corporate state was in crisis at the end of the Obama presidency. It was widely hated. It became vulnerable to attacks by the critics it had pushed to the fringes. Most vulnerable was the Democratic Party establishment, which claims to defend the rights of working men and women and protect civil liberties. This is why the Democratic Party is so zealous in its efforts to discredit its critics as stooges for Moscow and to charge that Russian interference caused its election defeat.

In January there was a report on Russia by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The report devoted seven of its 25 pages to RT America and its influence on the presidential election. It claimed “Russian media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary [Hillary] Clinton.” This might seem true if you did not watch my RT broadcasts, which relentlessly attacked Trump as well as Clinton, or watch Ed Schultz, who now has a program on RT after having been the host of an MSNBC commentary program. The report also attempted to present RT America as having a vast media footprint and influence it does not possess.

“In an effort to highlight the alleged ‘lack of democracy’ in the United States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates,” the report read, correctly summing up themes on my show. “The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’ ”

It went on:

RT’s reports often characterize the United States as a ‘surveillance state’ and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use.

RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT’s hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted that government corruption and “corporate greed” will lead to US financial collapse.

Is the corporate state so obtuse it thinks the American public has not, on its own, reached these conclusions about the condition of the nation? Is this what it defines as “fake news”? But most important, isn’t this the truth that the courtiers in the mainstream press and public broadcasting, dependent on their funding from sources such as the Koch brothers, refuse to present? And isn’t it, in the end, the truth that frightens them the most? Abby Martin and Ben Norton ripped apart the mendacity of the report and the complicity of the corporate media in my “On Contact” show titled “Real purpose of intel report on Russian hacking with Abby Martin & Ben Norton.”

The blacklist published by the shadowy and anonymous site PropOrNot in November 2016 soon followed. The blacklist was composed of 199 sites PropOrNot alleged, with no evidence, “reliably echo Russian propaganda.” More than half of those sites were far-right, conspiracy-driven ones. But about 20 of the sites were major left-wing outlets including AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig, Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site. The blacklist and the spurious accusations that these sites disseminated “fake news” on behalf of Russia were given prominent play in The Washington Post in a story headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during the election, experts say.” The reporter, Craig Timberg, wrote that the goal of the Russian propaganda effort, according to “independent researchers who have tracked the operation,” was “punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.” Last December, Truthdig columnist Bill Boyarsky wrote a good piece about PropOrNot, which to this day remains essentially a secret organization.

The owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, also the founder and CEO of Amazon, has a $600 million contract with the CIA. Google, likewise, is deeply embedded within the security and surveillance state and aligned with the ruling elites. Amazon recently purged over 1,000 negative reviews of Hillary Clinton’s new book, “What Happened.” The effect was that the book’s Amazon rating jumped from 2 1/2 stars to five stars. Do corporations such as Google and Amazon carry out such censorship on behalf of the U.S. government? Or is this censorship their independent contribution to protect the corporate state?

In the name of combating Russia-inspired “fake news,” Google, Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence France-Presse and CNN in April imposed algorithms or filters, overseen by “evaluators,” that hunt for key words such as “U.S. military,” “inequality” and “socialism,” along with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura Poitras, the filmmaker. Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president for search engineering, says Google has amassed some 10,000 “evaluators” to determine the “quality” and veracity of websites. Internet users doing searches on Google, since the algorithms were put in place, are diverted from sites such as Truthdig and directed to mainstream publications such as The New York Times. The news organizations and corporations that are imposing this censorship have strong links to the Democratic Party. They are cheerleaders for American imperial projects and global capitalism. Because they are struggling in the new media environment for profitability, they have an economic incentive to be part of the witch hunt.

The World Socialist Web Site reported in July that its aggregate volume, or “impressions”—links displayed by Google in response to search requests—fell dramatically over a short period after the new algorithms were imposed. It also wrote that a number of sites “declared to be ‘fake news’ by the Washington Post’s discredited [PropOrNot] blacklist … had their global ranking fall. The average decline of the global reach of all of these sites is 25 percent. …”

Another article, “Google rigs searches to block access to World Socialist Web Site,” by the same website that month said:

During the month of May, Google searches including the word “war” produced 61,795 WSWS impressions. In July, WSWS impressions fell by approximately 90 percent, to 6,613.

Searches for the term “Korean war” produced 20,392 impressions in May. In July, searches using the same words produced zero WSWS impressions. Searches for “North Korea war” produced 4,626 impressions in May. In July, the result of the same search produced zero WSWS impressions. “India Pakistan war” produced 4,394 impressions in May. In July, the result, again, was zero. And “Nuclear war 2017” produced 2,319 impressions in May, and zero in July.

To cite some other searches: “WikiLeaks,” fell from 6,576 impressions to zero, “Julian Assange” fell from 3,701 impressions to zero, and “Laura Poitras” fell from 4,499 impressions to zero. A search for “Michael Hastings”—the reporter who died in 2013 under suspicious circumstances—produced 33,464 impressions in May, but only 5,227 impressions in July.

In addition to geopolitics, the WSWS regularly covers a broad range of social issues, many of which have seen precipitous drops in search results. Searches for “food stamps,” “Ford layoffs,” “Amazon warehouse,” and “secretary of education” all went down from more than 5,000 impressions in May to zero impressions in July.

The accusation that left-wing sites collude with Russia has made them theoretically subject, along with those who write for them, to the Espionage Act and the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which requires Americans who work on behalf of a foreign party to register as foreign agents.

The latest salvo came last week. It is the most ominous. The Department of Justice called on RT America and its “associates”—which may mean people like me—to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. No doubt, the corporate state knows that most of us will not register as foreign agents, meaning we will be banished from the airwaves. This, I expect, is the intent. The government will not stop with RT. The FBI has been handed the authority to determine who is a “legitimate” journalist and who is not. It will use this authority to decimate the left.

This is a war of ideas. The corporate state cannot compete honestly in this contest. It will do what all despotic regimes do—govern through wholesale surveillance, lies, blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed censorship and, eventually, violence.

Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

New York Times Propagates Russia Hacking Conspiracy Theory

Posted on September 14, 2017 by Reid Mukai

The New York Times reports as fact that Russia hacked the 2016 US presidential election despite failing to present any evidence to support this claim.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: Foreign Policy Journal

In late 2002 and early 2003, those of us who were warning that the US government was lying, that there was no evidence that Iraq still possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), much less active WMD manufacturing programs, were frequently dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”.

Of course, in reality, it was the US mainstream media that was propagating the government’s unfounded conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had such weapons and, further, had a cooperative relationship with Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization held responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The New York Times served the government in its campaign of deception by spearheading the media’s dissemination of the lies out to the public, thus manufacturing Americans’ consent for this illegal war of aggression.

Spreading government propaganda is a function the Times never ceases to serve well — the lesson from its own reporting during the run-up to the Iraq war, and from the mainstream media’s reporting in general, having been dutifully disregarded.

One of the latest government conspiracy theories the Times is helping to propagate, by serving effectively as the political establishment’s very own public relations firm, is the claim that the government of Russia was responsible for hacking into computers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and email accounts of John Podesta, who was then chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

In a report published September 1, 2017, the Times elaborated on this conspiracy theory under the headline “Russian Election Hacking Efforts, Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny”.

In it, the Times reports as fact that Russia was responsible not only for hacking the DNC and Podesta’s email account, but also for hacking directly into the US election system itself. All that’s old news, however, so the Times‘ new spin is that Russia’s efforts to hack state electoral systems were much more extensive than previously thought.

However, the Times presents not one shred of evidence to support the underlying claim that Russia hacked these systems, much less that this alleged hacking was much more widespread than previously reported.

To the scrutinous reader who is familiar with the propaganda techniques mainstream media use in order to manufacture consent for various government policies, the total lack of evidence is apparent. In fact, the Times actually acknowledges that there is no evidence to support the claim it is making in the headline. Yet, through obfuscation, use of deceptive language, and various other techniques, the Times leads the general reader to believe that its headline is true.

An examination of the article is useful to see just how the Times manages to lead readers to the conclusion the Russia hacking is a demonstrated fact when, in reality, it remains just another conspiracy theory originating from the government that the Times is all too happy to help propagate.

The Alleged Russian Hacking of US Electoral Systems

The first thing to note about this New York Times piece is its title. The headline makes two claims: 1) it’s a fact that Russia tried to hack the US election, and this fact has been known publicly for some time; and 2) the Times has new information showing not only that US election systems were hacked and that Russia was responsible, but also that Russia’s hacking efforts even more widespread than previously known.

The story begins with the case of Durham county, North Carolina, where, we learn, various irregularities occurred at polling stations on election day last November (bold emphasis added throughout):

Dozens were told they were ineligible to vote and were turned away at the polls, even when they displayed current registration cards. Others were sent from one polling place to another, only to be rejected. Scores of voters were incorrectly told they had cast ballots days earlier. In one precinct, voting halted for two hours.

Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state [North Carolina]. The problems involved electronic poll books — tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before.

“It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,” Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham.

Note that the Times does not say that Ms. Greenhalgh “believed” or “had heard” that Russian hackers were responsible for earlier hacking VR Systems, but that she “knew” this was so. With this verb choice, the Times is asserting that this claim is a proven fact.

The purpose of this assertion is to establish credibility in the mind of the reader that its headline is true, that the evidence shows that Russian hacking efforts were more widespread than previously known. If it is a fact that Russia hacked US election systems, then it is not hard to believe that its hacking was more extensive than previously thought.

But what evidence does the Times present to support its assertion that this earlier Russian hacking of VR Systems occurred?

Well, to answer that question, let’s first look at how Ms. Greenhalgh “knew” that Russians had hacked VR Systems. Much further into the article, more than halfway through, the Times tells us:

As the problems mounted, The Charlotte Observer reported that Durham’s e-poll book vendor was Florida-based VR Systems, which Ms. Greenhalgh knew from a CNN report had been hacked earlier by Russians. “Chills went through my spine,” she recalled.

So there were irregularities at the Durham county polling stations, and Durham county used VR Systems for its polling system, which Ms. Greenhalgh “knew” Russians had hacked because she’d heard it on CNN.

Mid-article, however, the Times also quotes Ms. Greenhalgh acknowledging, with respect to the specific case of Durham county, “We still don’t know if Russian hackers did this.”

If we don’t know whether Russian hacking was responsible for the supposed irregularities in Durham county’s polling station, why is the Times using it as an example to support the claim made in its headline that this hacking was more extensive than previously thought? If there are cases where there is evidence, why not feature one of those, instead?

The answer is that no such evidence exists; the Times has no evidence to support that claim in its headline. In fact, it acknowledges this in several other places in the article. What the Times is trying to do is to build the case that we can safely assume that what happened in Durham county was a consequence of Russian hacking. After all, if Russia hacked VR Systems, that certainly could explain those election-day irregularities, right?

But how solid is the Times‘ premise that Russia hacked VR Systems in the first place?

The Times doesn’t attempt to support this premise solely with hearsay about something CNN reported. It exerts slightly greater effort to convince the reader. Nine paragraphs into the article, we read:

Beyond VR Systems, hackers breached at least two other providers of critical election services well ahead of the 2016 voting, said current and former intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies.

Note here that the Times is once again acknowledging that it doesn’t actually have any evidence to support the claim that Russia hacked other companies in addition to VR Systems, which it is using to support the claim made in its headline that the Russian hacking was more widespread than previously thought. The Times is simply parroting government officials who’ve made this claim.

The Times‘ case crumbles even further the deeper one reads into the article. With respect to the Durham county irregularities, the Times next notes:

There are plenty of other reasons for such breakdowns — local officials blamed human error and software malfunctions — and no clear-cut evidence of digital sabotage has emerged, much less a Russian role in it. Despite the disruptions, a record number of votes were cast in Durham, following a pattern there of overwhelming support for Democratic presidential candidates, this time Hillary Clinton.

But months later, for Ms. Greenhalgh, other election security experts and some state officials, questions still linger about what happened that day in Durham as well as other counties in North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Arizona.

So keep in mind as we proceed that the Times is here once again acknowledging that no evidence exists to support the suspicion that the Durham county irregularities were due to Russian hacking. Yet it attempts to lead readers to that conclusion by suggesting that Russians did hack states’ electoral systems:

After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.

Note that here the Times is attributing the claim that Russia hacked into states’ electoral systems to various sources. In its next paragraph, however, the Times does away with attribution and transforms this claiminto an ostensibly verified fact:

The assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus — voter-registration operations, state and local election databases, e-poll books and other equipment — have received far less attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking of Democratic emails and spreading of false or damaging information about Mrs. Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than previously disclosed, The New York Times found.

Here we see that the Times is back to asserting as fact that the Russian hacking was more extensive than previously reported, even though it has admittedly not yet provided even a single piece of supporting evidence! How can it do that? Well, transparently, what is important to the Times is that its readers believe that its headline is true, not to actually demonstrate it. Whether it is actually true does not matter; it is just the belief that the Times is aiming to instill.

This is the nature of propaganda.

Turning to the premise, note that the Times is here claiming as fact that, one, US electoral systems were extensively hacked, and, two, Russia was responsible.

It continues:

Intelligence officials in January reassured Americans that there was no indication that Russian hackers had altered the vote count on Election Day, the bottom-line outcome. But the assurances stopped there.

Government officials said that they intentionally did not address the security of the back-end election systems, whose disruption could prevent voters from even casting ballots.

That’s partly because states control elections; they have fewer resources than the federal government but have long been loath to allow even cursory federal intrusions into the voting process.

That, along with legal constraints on intelligence agencies’ involvement in domestic issues, has hobbled any broad examination of Russian efforts to compromise American election systems. Those attempts include combing through voter databases, scanning for vulnerabilities or seeking to alter data, which have been identified in multiple states. Current congressional inquiries and the special counsel’s Russia investigation have not focused on the matter.

Note here how the Times is explaining that the federal government has not really focused much on investigating US election systems irregularities even while continuing to assert as fact that there were Russian efforts to compromise those systems! Further:

“We don’t know if any of the problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a sovereign nation-state,” said Michael Daniel, who served as the cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White House. “If you really want to know what happened, you’d have to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not find out even then.”

In interviews, academic and private election security experts acknowledged the challenges of such diagnostics but argued that the effort is necessary. They warned about what could come, perhaps as soon as next year’s midterm elections, if the existing mix of outdated voting equipment, haphazard election-verification procedures and array of outside vendors is not improved to build an effective defense against Russian or other hackers.

So, again, the Times is acknowledging that the kind of forensic investigation that would be required to determine whether US election systems were hacked have not actually been conducted. How, therefore, can the Times report as fact not only that such hacking occurred, but that Russia was responsible?

It gets worse. The Times at this point in the article has already acknowledged that there could be perfectly benign explanations for what happened in Durham county. As we continue reading, we learn that the those supposedly alarming irregularities the Times opened the article with were not actually all that irregular (and hence not all that alarming). To the contrary:

Still, some of the incidents reported in North Carolina occur in every election, said Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on election administration.

“Election officials and advocates and reporters who were watching most closely came away saying this was an amazingly quiet election,” he said, playing down the notion of tampering.

The Times next quotes Ms. Greenhalgh’s admission that there’s no evidence hackers got into Durham county’s system (much less that Russia was responsible).

Keep in mind that the claim the government and media have been making is that Russia interfered in the US election to throw the vote to Donald Trump. Yet, in the case of Durham county, the result was that, as the Times informs, “Hillary Clinton won 78 percent of the 156,000 votes”. This is a strange outcome if we are to assume that Russia hacked the system to tamper with the election!

But the Times is not unskilled in the art of propaganda, so it has an explanation ready for us: Russia tried to hack the system there, but was just unsuccessful! It continues:

Details of the breach did not emerge until June, in a classified National Security Agency [NSA] report leaked to The Intercept, a national security news site. That report found that hackers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., had penetrated the company’s computer systems as early as August 2016, then sent “spear-phishing” emails from a fake VR Systems account to 122 state and local election jurisdictions. The emails sought to trick election officials into downloading malicious software to take over their computers.

The N.S.A. analysis did not say whether the hackers had sabotaged voter data. “It is unknown,” the agency concluded, whether Russian phishing “successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed.”

VR Systems’ chief operating officer, Ben Martin, said he did not believe Russian hackers were successful. He acknowledged that the vendor was a “juicy target,” given that its systems are used in battleground states including North Carolina, Florida and Virginia. But he said that the company blocked access from its systems to local databases, and employs security protocols to bar intruders and digital triggers that sound alerts if its software is manipulated.

Take note again of the Times choice of verb: the NSA report “found” that hackers working for Russian intelligence had penetrated VR Systems’ computer systems. Through this choice of verb, the Times is communicating that it is a verified fact that Russia hacked VR Systems. But is it? To answer that, let’s turn to the Times‘ source.

The Intercept reported on this alleged hack much earlier, on June 5, 2017. Unlike the Times, however, The Intercept provided the following important caveat:

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

To reiterate, the supposed evidence that exists proving that Russia hacked VR Systems is classified and still unknown to either the public or the media, including The Intercept and New York Times.

As The Intercept notes, the NSA report “states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document.”

But upon what actual evidence is that unequivocal statement based?

The Intercept, like the Times, proceeds to accept this unequivocal summary statement as fact despite its acknowledged lack of access to the evidence supposedly supporting this claim:

The NSA has now learned, however, that Russian government hackers, part of a team with a “cyber espionage mandate specifically directed at U.S. and foreign elections,” focused on parts of the system directly connected to the voter registration process, including a private sector manufacturer of devices that maintain and verify the voter rolls.

Here The Intercept is being as disingenuous with its readers as the Times. Note again the deceptive verb choice. The NSA had not actually “learned” that Russia tried to hack US electoral systems; it had rather assessed that this was so. As the manufactured “intelligence” about Iraq’s WMDs should have taught us, those are far from the same thing.

Conveniently, The Intercept provides a graphic image from the NSA report illustrating the point:

The key element of this chart to note is in the left column, where it identifies the “Operators” responsible sending Phishing emails — emails designed to trick the recipient into giving away login credentials for whatever system the hackers were trying to get into. Note that, according to the NSA, these “Operators” were “Probably within” the GRU.

“Probably”.

So, does the NSA know that the Russian government was responsible for these Phishing emails?

No.

The NSA is claiming this is so. But the supposed evidence it is basing this claim upon has not been shown to even exist.

Now, perhaps the NSA has solid reasoning to arrive at this conclusion. Perhaps it has solid, though not definitive, evidence to back this up.

But the New York Times ought to be properly informing its readers that the Russian hacking of VR Systems is an allegation. It ought to be including the caveat with this information that this is according to the government, but that it has not yet been proven. Moreover, the Times ought to be informing its readers that the evidence supposedly supporting this conclusion has not been made public, and, further, that nobody at the Times has been able to verify it even exists.

But continuing in its propaganda effort, the Times reminds us that, “In an assessment of Russian cyberattacks released in January, intelligence agencies said Kremlin spy services had been collecting information on election processes, technology and equipment in the United States since early 2014.”

But that was just another example of the government making a claim for which no evidence has actually been provided. Each of these claims simply builds upon those that preceded it. In the next manifestation, the New York Times‘ claim that Russia’s supposed hacking was even more extensive than previously known will likewise be presented as fact, and the acknowledgments about the lack of supporting evidence will be omitted, just as the Times omitted that important caveat from The Intercept.

Of course, to write and publish this kind of story requires extreme cognitive dissonance on the part of journalists and editors at the Times. This psychological phenomenon of holding two fundamentally contradictory beliefs at the same time is palpable throughout the piece. Once more, even while reporting its headlined claim as fact, the Times acknowledges that it has no evidence to support it:

Beginning in 2015, the American officials said, Russian hackers focused instead on other internet-accessible targets: computers at the Democratic National Committee, state and local voter databases, election websites, e-poll book vendors and other back-end election services.

Apart from the Russian influence campaign intended to undermine Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic officials, the impact of the quieter Russian hacking efforts at the state and county level has not been widely studied. Federal officials have been so tight-lipped that not even many election officials in the 21 states the hackers assaulted know whether their systems were compromised, in part because they have not been granted security clearances to examine the classified evidence.

Of course, nobody at the New York Times has seen that evidence, either, to be able to verify that it even exists.

The Times closes by noting that, unlike Ms. Greenhalgh, Durham county officials “have rejected any notion that an intruder sought to alter the election outcome.” Nevertheless, the county has turned over computers to the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement in order for the matter to be investigated.

Of course, the Times‘ purpose with this piece, rather than being to properly inform the public, is to lead readers into the belief that, regardless of whether it happened in Durham county, there were extensive efforts by the government of Russia to hack into state electoral systems.

Never mind that the Times presents not one shred of actual evidence to support either of the two claims it makes in its headline.

Conclusion

We can again recall how the media, including the New York Times, piled lie upon lie in order to manufacture consent for the US’s war of aggression against Iraq.

Here, again, the political establishment has an agenda. Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of seeking improved relations with Russia, a deescalation of tensions, and greater cooperation with Moscow. The so-called “Deep State” was upset by Hillary Clinton’s loss. In order for the national security state to retain the authoritarian powers it has assumed supposedly in order to keep Americans safe, it needs to convince Americans that they need protecting. Russia has been selected to serve as a useful “enemy” to that end.

Framing Russia as an enemy of the United States also serves the interests of the military/security complex and the goal of maintaining and expanding US hegemony across the globe. This narrative has been used, for example, to prevent Trump from deescalating in Syria and increasing cooperation with Russia there. Trump had indicated that he would shift US policy away from the Obama administration’s goal of seeking regime change in Syria and only focus on combating the so-called “Islamic State” (a.k.a., ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh). The national security state has maneuvered rather to ensure that relations between the US and Russia remain tense and that US policy remains effectively to prolong the violence.

Whatever the motives for the propaganda campaign, we can observe that this propaganda campaign is occurring. Members of the establishment media have not only failed to learn the relevant lesson from their reporting about Iraqi WMD, but refusing to do so almost seems a job prerequisite.

News consumers should not make the same mistake.

Scrutinize. Question. Think.

If we want the mainstream media to change its behavior and actually do its job of properly informing the public, then news consumers need to change their behavior. Ever news consumers knows the old adage that you can’t believe everything you read in the newspaper. Nevertheless, all too habitually, that is precisely what they do — just as the journalists and editors they are relying on for information all too habitually accept claims from government officials as fact.

It is supposed to be the job of news media to analyze information, assess the veracity of sources, question government claims, and reveal the truth. Yet the establishment media not only fail to do so, but actively serve to propagate conspiracy theories originating from the government, and thus to manufacture consent for various government policies and the private agendas of the politically and financially powerful.

In light of how the mainstream media serve this function, it is critical for the consumers to develop the analytic skills necessary to determine the truth for themselves and be able to identify state propaganda when they see it.

Hopefully, this exercise has provided some useful insights into how to do just that.

Media’s Grim Addiction to Perseverance Porn

Posted on September 13, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Adam Johnson

Source: FAIR

You’ve seen or heard or read the personal interest story a thousand times: An enterprising seven-year-old collects cans to save for college (ABC7, 2/8/17), a man with unmatched moxie walks 15 miles to his job (Today, 2/20/17), a low-wage worker buys shoes for a kid whose mother can’t afford them (Fox5, 12/14/16), an “inspiring teen” goes right back to work after being injured in a car accident (CBS News, 12/16/16). All heartwarming tales of perseverance in the face of impossible odds—and all ideological agitprop meant to obscure and decontextualize the harsh reality of dog-eat-dog capitalism.

Man walks eight miles in the snow to get to work every day (ABC 27, 3/14/17). Or was it a teen walking 10 miles in freezing weather to a job interview (New York Daily News, 2/26/13)? Or was it 10 miles to work every day (Times Herald Record, 3/17/17)? Or was it 12 (ABC News, 2/22/17) or 15 (Today, 2/20/17) or 18 (Evening Standard, 2/9/09) or 21 (Detroit Free Press, 1/20/15)? Who cares—their humanity is irrelevant. They’re clickbait, stand-in bootstrap archetypes meant to validate the bourgeois morality of click-happy media consumers.

These stories are typically shared for the purposes of poor-shaming, typically under the guise of inspirational life advice. “This man is proof we all just need to keep walking, no matter what life throws at us,” insisted Denver ABC7 anchor Anne Trujillo, after sharing one of those stories of a poor person forced to walk thousands of miles a year to survive.

A healthy press would take these anecdotes of “can do” spirit and ask bigger questions, like why are these people forced into such absurd hardship? Who benefits from skyrocketing college costs? Why does the public transit in this person’s city not have subsidies for the poor? Why aren’t employers forced to offer time off for catastrophic accidents? But time and again, the media mindlessly tells the bootstrap human interest story, never questioning the underlying system at work.

One particularly vulgar example was CBS News(12/16/16) referring to an “inspiring” African-American kid who had to work at his fast food job with an arm sling and a neck brace after a car accident. To compound the perseverance porn, he was, at least in part, doing so to help donate to a local homeless charity. Here we have a story highlighting how society has colossally failed its most vulnerable populations—the poor, ethnic minorities, children and the homeless—and the take-home point is, “Ah gee, look at that scrappy kid.”

Journalism is as much—if not more—about what isn’t reported as what is. Here a local reporter is faced with a cruel example of people falling through the cracks of the richest country on Earth, and their only contribution is to cherry-pick one guy who managed—just barely—to cling on to the edge.

Perseverance porn goes hand in hand with the rise of a GoFundMe economy that relies on personal narrative over collective policy, emotional appeals over baseline human rights. $930 million out of the $2 billion raised on GoFundMe since its inception in 2010 was for healthcare expenses, while an estimated 45,000 people a year die a year due to a lack of medical treatment. Meanwhile, anchors across cable news insist that single-payer healthcare is “unaffordable,” browbeating guests who support it, while populating their broadcasts with these one-off tales of people heroically scraping by.

It’s part of a broader media culture of anecdotes in lieu of the macro, moralizing “success” rather than questioning systemic problems. Perseverance porn may seem harmless, but in highlighting handpicked cases of people overcoming hardship without showing the thousands that didn’t—much less asking broader questions as to what created these conditions—the media traffics in decidedly right-wing tropes. After all, if they can do it, so can you—right?

False Flag Terrorism Isn’t a “Theory” … It’s ADMITTED and Widespread

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Source: Washington’s Blog

Presidents, Prime Ministers, Congressmen, Generals, Spooks, Soldiers and Police ADMIT to False Flag Terror

In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos:

(1) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident”. The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: “Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the ‘Incident’ was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ….” And see this, this and this.

(2) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked several attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland. The staged attacks included:

The German radio station Sender Gleiwitz [details below]

The strategic railway at POSunka Pass (Jabłonków Incident), located on the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia

The German customs station at Hochlinden (today part of Rybnik-Stodoły)

The forest service station in Pitschen (Byczyna)

The communications station at Neubersteich (“Nieborowitzer Hammer” before 12 February 1936, now Kuznia Nieborowska)

The railroad station in Alt-Eiche (Smolniki), Rosenberg in Westpreußen district

A woman and her companion in Katowice

The details of the Gleiwitz radio station incident include:

On the night of 31 August 1939, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish (sources vary on the content of the message). The Germans’ goal was to make the attack and the broadcast look like the work of anti-German Polish saboteurs.

To make the attack seem more convincing, the Germans used human corpses to pass them off as Polish attackers. They murdered Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried German Silesian Catholic farmer known for sympathizing with the Poles. He had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo. He was dressed to look like a saboteur, then killed by lethal injection, given gunshot wounds, and left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed while attacking the station. His corpse was subsequently presented to the police and press as proof of the attack.

(3) The minutes of the high command of the Italian government – subsequently approved by Mussolini himself – admitted that violence on the Greek-Albanian border was carried out by Italians and falsely blamed on the Greeks, as an excuse for Italy’s 1940 invasion of Greece.

(4) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.

(5) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

(6) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and then falsely blamed it on the Nazis.

(7) The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews who were Holocaust survivors attempting to flee to safety in Palestine right after World War II, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the psuedo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see this, this and this).

(8) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this).

The U.S. Army does not believe this is an isolated incident. For example, the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies said of Mossad (Israel’s intelligence service):

“Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.”

(9) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

(10) The Turkish Prime Minister admitted that the Turkish government carried out the 1955 bombing on a Turkish consulate in Greece – also damaging the nearby birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey – and blamed it on Greece, for the purpose of inciting and justifying anti-Greek violence.

(11) The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change.

(12) The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s through the 1980s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.

As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” … so that “a state of emergency could be declared, so people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security” (and see this) (Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). And watch this BBC special. They also allegedly carried out terror attacks in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and other countries.

The CIA also stressed to the head of the Italian program that Italy needed to use the program to control internal uprisings.

False flag attacks carried out pursuant to this program include – by way of example only:

The murder of the Turkish Prime Minister (1960)

Bombings in Portugal (1966)

The Piazza Fontana massacre in Italy (1969)

Terror attacks in Turkey (1971)

The Peteano bombing in Italy (1972)

Shootings in Brescia, Italy and a bombing on an Italian train (1974)

Shootings in Istanbul, Turkey (1977)

The Atocha massacre in Madrid, Spain (1977)

The abduction and murder of the Italian Prime Minister (1978) (and see this)

The bombing of the Bologna railway station in Italy (1980)

Shooting and killing 28 shoppers in Brabant county, Belgium (1985)

(13) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested that the U.S. launch “a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow Castro]”.

(14) Official State Department documents show that, in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals.

(15) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

(16) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting attacks on nations within the Organization of American States – such as Trinidad-Tobago or Jamaica – and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.

(17) The U.S. Department of Defense also suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo.”

(18) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that – as part of its “Cointelpro” campaign – the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.

(19) A top Turkish general admitted that Turkish forces burned down a mosque on Cyprus in the 1970s and blamed it on their enemy. He explained: “In Special War, certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to increase public resistance. We did this on Cyprus; we even burnt down a mosque.” In response to the surprised correspondent’s incredulous look the general said, “I am giving an example”.

(20) A declassified 1973 CIA document reveals a program to train foreign police and troops on how to make booby traps, pretending that they were training them on how to investigate terrorist acts:

The Agency maintains liaison in varying degrees with foreign police/security organizations through its field stations ….

[CIA provides training sessions as follows:]

a. Providing trainees with basic knowledge in the uses of commercial and military demolitions and incendiaries as they may be applied in terrorism and industrial sabotage operations.

b. Introducing the trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques, likely to he used in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries by terrorists or saboteurs.

c. Familiarizing the trainees with the concept of target analysis and operational planning that a saboteur or terrorist must employ.

d. Introducing the trainees to booby trapping devices and techniques giving practical experience with both manufactured and improvised devices through actual fabrication.

***

The program provides the trainees with ample opportunity to develop basic familiarity and use proficiently through handling, preparing and applying the various explosive charges, incendiary agents, terrorist devices and sabotage techniques.

(21) The German government admitted (and see this) that, in 1978, the German secret service detonated a bomb in the outer wall of a prison and planted “escape tools” on a prisoner – a member of the Red Army Faction – which the secret service wished to frame the bombing on.

(22) A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.

(23) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him “to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident”, thus framing the ANC for the bombing.

(24) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author).

(25) In 1993, a bomb in Northern Ireland killed 9 civilians. Official documents from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (i.e. the British government) show that the mastermind of the bombing was a British agent, and that the bombing was designed to inflame sectarian tensions. And see this and this.

(26) The United States Army’s 1994 publication Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces – updated in 2004 – recommends employing terrorists and using false flag operations to destabilize leftist regimes in Latin America. False flag terrorist attacks were carried out in Latin America and other regions as part of the CIA’s “Dirty Wars“. And see this.

(27) Similarly, a CIA “psychological operations” manual prepared by a CIA contractor for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels noted the value of assassinating someone on your own side to create a “martyr” for the cause. The manual was authenticated by the U.S. government. The manual received so much publicity from Associated Press, Washington Post and other news coverage that – during the 1984 presidential debate – President Reagan was confronted with the following question on national television:

At this moment, we are confronted with the extraordinary story of a CIA guerrilla manual for the anti-Sandinista contras whom we are backing, which advocates not only assassinations of Sandinistas but the hiring of criminals to assassinate the guerrillas we are supporting in order to create martyrs.

(28) A Rwandan government inquiry admitted that the 1994 shootdown and murder of the Rwandan president, who was from the Hutu tribe – a murder blamed by the Hutus on the rival Tutsi tribe, and which led to the massacre of more than 800,000 Tutsis by Hutus – was committed by Hutu soldiers and falsely blamed on the Tutis.

(29) An Indonesian government fact-finding team investigated violent riots which occurred in 1998, and determined that “elements of the military had been involved in the riots, some of which were deliberately provoked”.

(30) Senior Russian Senior military and intelligence officers admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechens, in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see this report and this discussion).

(31) As reported by the New York Times, BBC and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that in 2001, the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the “war on terror”. They lured foreign migrants into the country, executed them in a staged gun battle, and then claimed they were a unit backed by Al Qaeda intent on attacking Western embassies”. Specifically, Macedonian authorities had lured the immigrants into the country, and then – after killing them – posed the victims with planted evidence – “bags of uniforms and semiautomatic weapons at their side” – to show Western diplomats.

(32) At the July 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, black-clad thugs were videotaped getting out of police cars, and were seen by an Italian MP carrying “iron bars inside the police station”. Subsequently, senior police officials in Genoa subsequently admitted that police planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer at the G8 Summit, in order to justify a violent crackdown against protesters.

(33) The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war.

Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq war was really launched for oil … not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

Despite previous “lone wolf” claims, many U.S. government officials now say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the hijackers. (Many U.S. officials have allegedthat 9/11 was a false flag operation by rogue elements of the U.S. government; but such a claim is beyond the scope of this discussion. The key point is that the U.S. falsely blamed it on Iraq, when it knew Iraq had nothing to do with it.).

(Additionally, the same judge who has shielded the Saudis for any liability for funding 9/11 has awarded a default judgment against Iran for $10.5 billion for carrying out 9/11 … even though no one seriously believes that Iran had any part in 9/11.)

(34) Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country. And see this.

(35) According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

(36) The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.

(37) Police outside of a 2003 European Union summit in Greece were filmed planting Molotov cocktails on a peaceful protester.

(38) In 2003, the U.S. Secretary of Defense admitted that interrogators were authorized to use the following method: “False Flag: Convincing the detainee that individuals from a country other than the United States are interrogating him.” While not a traditional false flag attack, this deception could lead to former detainees – many of whom were tortured – attacking the country falsely blamed for the interrogation and torture.

(39) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

(40) Similarly, in 2005, Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School – a renowned US defense analyst credited with developing the concept of ‘netwar’ – called for western intelligence services to create new “pseudo gang” terrorist groups, as a way of undermining “real” terror networks. According to Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, Arquilla’s ‘pseudo-gang’ strategy was, Hersh reported, already being implemented by the Pentagon:

“Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists…

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls ‘action teams’ in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. ‘Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?’ the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. ‘We founded them and we financed them,’ he said. ‘The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.’ A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, ‘We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.’”

(41) United Press International reported in June 2005:

U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

(42) In 2005, British soldiers dressed as Arabs were caught by Iraqi police after a shootout against the police. The soldiers apparently possessed explosives, and were accused of attempting to set off bombs. While none of the soldiers admitted that they were carrying out attacks, British soldiers and a column of British tanks stormed the jail they were held in, broke down a wall of the jail, and busted them out. The extreme measures used to free the soldiers – rather than have them face questions and potentially stand trial – could be considered an admission.

(43) Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians, as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.

(44) Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and see this).

(45) A 2008 US Army special operations field manual recommends that the U.S. military use surrogate non-state groups such as “paramilitary forces, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistant or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political ‘undesirables.’” The manual specifically acknowledged that U.S. special operations can involve both counterterrorism and “Terrorism” (as well as “transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms-dealing, and illegal financial transactions.”)

(46) The former Italian Prime Minister, President, and head of Secret Services (Francesco Cossiga) advised the 2008 minister in charge of the police, on how to deal with protests from teachers and students:

He should do what I did when I was Minister of the Interior … infiltrate the movement with agents provocateurs inclined to do anything …. And after that, with the strength of the gained population consent, … beat them for blood and beat for blood also those teachers that incite them. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly, of course, but the girl teachers yes.

(47) An undercover officer admitted that he infiltrated environmental, leftwing and anti-fascist groups in 22 countries. Germany’s federal police chief admitted that – while the undercover officer worked for the German police – he acted illegally during a G8 protest in Germany in 2007 and committed arson by setting fire during a subsequent demonstration in Berlin. The undercover officer spent many years living with violent “Black Bloc” anarchists.

(48) Denver police admitted that uniformed officers deployed in 2008 to an area where alleged “anarchists” had planned to wreak havoc outside the Democratic National Convention ended up getting into a melee with two undercover policemen. The uniformed officers didn’t know the undercover officers were cops.

(49) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.

(50) The oversight agency for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police admitted that – at the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010 – undercover police officers were arrested with a group of protesters. Videos and photos (see this and this, for example) show that violent protesters wore very similar boots and other gear as the police, and carried police batons. The Globe and Mail reports that the undercover officers planned the targets for violent attack, and the police failed to stop the attacks.

(51) Egyptian politicians admitted (and see this) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts 2011 to try to discredit the protesters.

(52) Austin police admit that 3 officers infiltrated the Occupy protests in that city. Prosecutors admit that one of the undercover officers purchased and constructed illegal “lock boxes” which ended up getting many protesters arrested.

(53) In 2011, a Colombian colonel admitted that he and his soldiers had lured 57 innocent civilians and killed them – after dressing many of them in uniforms – as part of a scheme to claim that Columbia was eradicating left-wing terrorists. And see this.

(54) Rioters who discredited the peaceful protests against the swearing in of the Mexican president in 2012 admitted that they were paid 300 pesos each to destroy everything in their path. According to Wikipedia, photos also show the vandals waiting in groups behind police lines prior to the violence.

(55) On November 20, 2014, Mexican agent provocateurs were transported by army vehicles to participate in the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping protests, as was shown by videos and pictures distributed via social networks.

(56) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – recently admitted that the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.

(57) Two members of the Turkish parliament, high-level American sources and others admitted that the Turkish government – a NATO country – carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and falsely blamed them on the Syrian government; and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government.

(58) The former Director of the NSA and other American government officials admit said that the U.S. is a huge supporter of terrorism. Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted on CNN that the U.S. organized and supported Bin Laden and the other originators of “Al Qaeda” in the 1970s to fight the Soviets. The U.S. and its allies have been supporting Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups for many decades, and providing them arms, money and logistical support in Libya, Syria, Mali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iran, and many other countries. U.S. allies are also directly responsible for creating and supplying ISIS.

It’s gotten so ridiculous that a U.S. Senator has introduced a “Stop Arming Terrorists Act”, and U.S. Congresswoman – who introduced a similar bill in the House – says: “For years, the U.S. government has been supporting armed militant groups working directly with and often under the command of terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”

(59) The Ukrainian security chief admits that the sniper attacks which started the Ukrainian coup were carried out in order to frame others. Ukrainian officials admit that the Ukrainian snipers fired on both sides, to create maximum chaos.

(60) Speaking of snipers, in a secret recording, Venezuelan generals admit that they will deploy snipers to shoot protesters, but keep the marksmen well-hidden from demonstrator and the reporters covering the events so others would be blamed for the deaths.

(61) Burmese government officials admitted that Burma (renamed Myanmar) used false flag attacks against Muslim and Buddhist groups within the country to stir up hatred between the two groups, to prevent democracy from spreading.

(62) Israeli police were again filmed in 2015 dressing up as Arabs and throwing stones, then turning over Palestinian protesters to Israeli soldiers.

(63) Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target.

(64) The CIA has admitted that it uses viruses and malware from Russia and other countries to carry out cyberattacks and blame other countries.

(65) U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants.

(66) Similarly, police frame innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit. The practice is so well-known that the New York Times noted in 1981:

In police jargon, a throwdown is a weapon planted on a victim.

Newsweek reported in 1999:

Perez, himself a former [Los Angeles Police Department] cop, was caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine from police evidence lockers. After pleading guilty in September, he bargained for a lighter sentence by telling an appalling story of attempted murder and a “throwdown”–police slang for a weapon planted by cops to make a shooting legally justifiable. Perez said he and his partner, Officer Nino Durden, shot an unarmed 18th Street Gang member named Javier Ovando, then planted a semiautomatic rifle on the unconscious suspect and claimed that Ovando had tried to shoot themduring a stakeout.

Wikipedia notes:

As part of his plea bargain, Pérez implicated scores of officers from the Rampart Division’s anti-gang unit, describing routinely beating gang members, planting evidence on suspects, falsifying reports and covering up unprovoked shootings.

(As a side note – and while not technically false flag attacks – police have been busted framing innocent people in many other ways, as well.)

(67) A former U.S. intelligence officer recently alleged:

Most terrorists are false flag terrorists or are created by our own security services.

(68) The head and special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office said that most terror attacks are committed by the CIA and FBI as false flags.

(69) The Director of Analytics at the interagency Global Engagement Center housed at the U.S. Department of State, also an adjunct professor at George Mason University, where he teaches the graduate course National Security Challenges in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology, a former branch chief in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and an intelligence advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security (J.D. Maddox) notes:

Provocation is one of the most basic, but confounding, aspects of warfare. Despite its sometimes obvious use, it has succeeded consistently against audiences around the world, for millennia, to compel war. A well-constructed provocation narrative mutes even the most vocal opposition.

***

The culmination of a strategic provocation operation invariably reflects a narrative of victimhood: we are the
victims of the enemy’s unforgivable atrocities.

***

In the case of strategic provocation the deaths of an aggressor’s own personnel are a core tactic of the provocation.

***

The persistent use of strategic provocation over centuries – and its apparent importance to war planners – begs the question of its likely use by the US and other states in the near term.

(70) Leaders throughout history have acknowledged the “benefits” of of false flags to justify their political agenda:

“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”.
– Adolph Hitler

“Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
– Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened”.
– Josef Stalin

Postscript 1: It is not just “modern” nations which have launched false flag attacks. For example, a Native American from one tribe (Pomunkey) murdered a white Englishwoman living in Virginia in 1697 and then falsely blamed it on second tribe (Piscataway). But he later admitted in court that he was not really Piscataway, and that he had been paid by a provocateur from a third tribe (Iroquois) to kill the woman as a way to start a war between the English and the Piscataway, thus protecting the profitable Iroquois monopoly in trade with the English.

Postscript 2: On multiple occasions, atrocities or warmongering are falsely blamed on the enemy as a justification for war … when no such event ever occurred. This is more like a “fake flag” than a “false flag”, as no actual terrorism occurred.

For example:

The NSA admits that it lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 … manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to create a false justification for the Vietnam war

One of the central lies used to justify the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq after Iraq invaded Kuwait was the false statement by a young Kuwaiti girl that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies in hospitals. Her statement was arranged by a Congressman who knew that she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. – who was desperately trying to lobby the U.S. to enter the war – but the Congressman hid that fact from the public and from Congress

Another central lie used to justify the Gulf War was the statement that a quarter of a million Iraqi troops were massed on the border with Saudi Arabia (see also this article)

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reported that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this and this

Time magazine points out that the claim by President Bush that Iraq was attempting to buy “yellow cake” Uranium from Niger:

had been checked out — and debunked — by U.S. intelligence a year before the President repeated it.

Everyone knew that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. More

The entire torture program was geared towards obtaining false confessions linking Iraq and 9/11

CIA agents and documents admit that the agency gave Iran plans for building nuclear weapons … so it could frame Iran for trying to build the bomb

The “humanitarian” wars in Syria, Libya and Yugoslavia were all justified by highly exaggerated reports that the leaders of those countries were committing atrocities against their people. And see this

Afterword: The corporate media will likely never report on false flags … as it is ALWAYS pro-war.

3 Signs You Might Be a Pawn of the New World Order

Posted on August 18, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Sigmund Fraud

Source: Activist Post

The mother lode of all conspiracies is the New World Order. In essence, it is a high-level, multi-generational plan to render all sovereign national governments subservient to an unelected, supranational, authoritarian world government. In this scheme, the people of planet earth will be micromanaged with strict social, technological and financial controls. It is the total consolidation of global power into the hands of a ruthless, minority elite who aim to rape the planet and enslave the human race.

They can’t do it alone, though, they need your help. They need witting and unwitting minions to set the brush fires of revolutionary change in our towns and cities. They need pawns to agitate and disrupt the relative peace, and to upend the status quo with turmoil. They need senseless, animal-like violence, caught on camera and replayed ad infinitum on cable news and social media. They need terror, of both the foreign and domestic variety. They need fear in the streets, and fear in the minds of the proles.

Most of all, though, they need you to create chaos, so that they can bring order.

The powers that be, those demons of the deep state, those orchestrators of fear, famine, debt and war, cannot achieve their plan without leading the masses into confusion and disarray, for only then will the masses demand an end to their own freedoms and privacy. And sadly, it appears their army of minions is growing in strength and audacity.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville it is more clear than ever that there is no shortage of pawns for the New World Order. The armies of ignorance are gathering, and here are three signs you might be among them.

1. You’re Playing the Divide and Conquer Game

Left vs. Right. Black vs. White. Republican vs. Democrat. Citizen vs. Immigrant. Communist vs. Fascist. Have vs. Have Not. My Team vs. Your Team. Me vs. You.

There a thousand and one ways for a society to faction and split apart, but without community and unity we are lost, doomed and done. If you’re entrenched in one side of any dualistic paradigm, seeking to convert or to crush the other side, then you’re playing right into the hands of the NWO.

The tactic of top-down divide and conquer is the oldest play in the book of how to overthrow sovereign people. The rulers foment conflict amongst the people, then step out of the way and let them fight it out, so that they can step in later as the benevolent savior… big brother.

If you’re playing this game, then you’re doing their work for them.

2.) You’re a Vocal Supporter of the War Du Jour

Today the drums are beating for a nuclear assault against North Korea… and military intervention in Venezuela. Just recently we’ve been told we need to prepare for conflict with Russia, and that an invasion of Syria is in our best interests. Prior to that we destroyed Libya and Iraq, we occupied Afghanistan, and we’ve been using the war on drugs and the war on terror as casus belli for interference in dozens of countries around the world.

The imperial mindset is several generations deep in America, and the citizenry has all but fully abandoned the anti-war stance in favor of gung-ho, jingoistic cheerleading of any and all military escapades.

The New World Order is brute force, but in our hyper-connected world they need to create the appearance of public support in order to advance the military industrial colonization of the world. It cannot do this without the public support and advocacy of at least some segment of the proletariat.

If you’re always on board for the expansion of international conflict, taking cues from mainstream media in this regard, and demanding action against all of our perceived enemies, you are aiding and abetting the New World Order.

3.) You Direct Your Anger and Frustration Towards Anyone but Those at the Very Top of the Pyramid

Zero doubt there are a million problems plaguing our complex world today, and it can be comforting to blame someone whom you can look in the eye, someone who is unprotected by the wealth and security afforded by the oligarchy. Emotional reactions to the stresses in our modern world are to be expected, but without knowledge of the contemporary power structures pulling the big strings, those reactions can be sorely misdirected onto lesser players and other pawns.

The truth is out there. At the root, a geo-political financial elite is conquering the world through manipulation of currencies, the imposition of astronomically insurmountable levels of public and private debt, and full-spectrum military dominance of uncooperative nations. This program is far above and beyond the capacity of your fellow citizen.

If you’re convinced that taking your outrage to the streets in war against your fellow countrymen is going to solve the problems of the world, you’re helping to fulfill the goals of the New World Order.

Final Thoughts

Social unrest and civil war are the final stepping-stones to a brave new authoritarian future. In order to get there, the American people must exhibit a self-motivated and determined resolve for violence against each other.

The New World Order needs blue pill takers, those people who deliberately choose ignorance in exchange for spurious peace of mind. They need useful idiots to help distract the rest of the population from the crimes of the oligarchy. They need armies of volunteer foot soldiers and pawns who will create the conditions necessary for martial law and even broader restrictions of rights and freedoms.

For the New World Order to succeed, we must ultimately demand our own slavery.

Fake Everything — Confronting Our Ideological Hegemony

Posted on July 5, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Janet Phelan

Source: Activist Post

The recent invocation of “fake news”—notably being levied by those on both sides of the political fence—points to more than allegations of conspiratorial efforts to sway the opinions of John Q Public. What we are seeing emerge is a challenge to the very protoplasm in which we live.

News is history, present tense. As such, accurate news is foundational to understanding the world we live in and the forces that mold it. It only takes a brief immersion into the recording of recent historical events to realize that the history books do not provide a faithful and truthful record.

According to many history books, JFK was felled by a lone assassin, a disgruntled ex-military and Communist sympathizer named Lee Harvey Oswald.

Less than 25% of the American people believe this today. A multiplicity of theories have sprung up in the wake of the Kennedy assassination; what can be agreed upon is that this event remains an open sore in the American psyche, unresolved and possibly unresolvable.

Foreknowledge surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor, 9/11, the genesis of why we went to war in Iraq and, most currently, dispute as to who launched gas attacks in Syria (which seem to be impelling us towards war against Assad)—these pivotal events remain in dispute, while facile news reports, bleeding into the history books, provide inadequate answers to troubling questions as we march on towards an increasingly dim future.

If we cannot trust news and history, what can we trust?

Very little, as it turns out….

FAKE LAWS

The US’s legal system is nearly bullet proof, we are told. The separation of powers between the three branches of government ensures an independent judiciary, pivotal to the foundational promise of freedom and justice for all. I have harped enough in these pages over the years as to the weaponization of our legal system, which can be and is levied against targeted groups.

The reality is that there is no law, in terms of its equal application. And if there is no equal application, then what we have is not law but the naked exercise of power. The recent revelations that judges are laundering under the table bribes is only further evidence that we are living in a state of legal nullity.

FAKE HUMAN RIGHTS

Our much revered Constitutional protections are reflected in a number of international human rights treaties, most of which the US has refused to sign or ratify. On the rare occasion of US ratification, such as with the Convention Against Torture, we can see where the US has resorted to schizophrenic babble in her efforts to justify her behavior. Senator Tom Cotton’s recent declaration that “waterboarding is not torture,” which echoes previous assertions by President Bush, should have alerted us that the US intends to honor no international accords. Certainly not where human rights are involved.

The international human rights community has increasingly accommodated US imperatives here, morphing from an original mandate to political support of the oppression that it is tasked with addressing.

For example, let’s take a look at Front Line Defenders, an international Dublin based NGO whose website declares that “The mission of Front Line Defenders is to protect, defend, support, and act for and with human rights defenders whose lives and health are at risk because of their peaceful and legitimate activities.”

A review of FLD’s 230 open cases reads like a carefully vetted political tract. Third World journalists and human rights defenders in China, the Russian Federation and Iran top the list. There is not one single case involving a First World individual. Not one from the US, not one from Western Europe.

Perhaps such individuals have never seen the need to contact FDL, you wonder. The answer is a resounding NO. FDL refuses its services to Western journalists and human rights defenders.

FDL’s financial statements provide a clue to its political decision making of which human rights defenders it will assist and which it will throw to the lions. FDL admits to having received 2,535,982 Euros in government sponsorship in 2016, up from 2,351,474 in 2015. Public donations accounted for a mere 38,900 of last year’s income, which totaled 4,688,641 Euros. Its state sponsors include Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, Germany and the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights. Its corporate sponsors include George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, among others.

Article19, the international press freedom NGO, also appears to be toeing the line in terms of trumpeting the causes of vetted Third World journalists. Article19 has admitted to getting funding from the US State Department and while it maintains offices in the Americas, it notably excludes US journalists at risk from its services or reports.

You may still not believe that Western journalists and human rights defenders may currently be at risk. These NGOs have done a very good job in keeping up that perception.

FAKE FOOD

We are not only living in a state of falseness. We are also eating it. The supermarket food is not only GMO-laden. It is also laced with carcinogens and Alzheimer’s inducing agents. This report from the venerable National Institutes of Health is ten years old but deserves to be revisited.

In the intervening decade, the push to contaminate otherwise healthy food, such as yogurt, with cancer inducing fake sugars, has only increased.

And if you thought that your brain was immune to chemical attack, this report should stop you in your tracks. As the so called age related diseases of dementia and Alzheimer’s are now occurring in younger populations, one might want to start asking why the push to chemicalize our bodies, our brains, our environment and our futures.

FAKE MEDICINE

That would be not only vaccines. Many so called beneficial medicines are now found to cause severe illness. Drug induced liver diseases, drug induced renal diseases, drug induced neurological and auto immune diseases—one wonders sometimes if the cure is worse than the illness. The pervasiveness of medically induced medical conditions has led Dr. Josh Axe to declare that “Conventional Medicine is the Leading Cause of Death.”

FAKE RELIGION

Somewhere in the Old Testament, between the Garden of Eden and Moses coming down from the mountain with those venerable tablets, a certain perception of man’s place in the universe got launched. Genesis declared the following: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Man appears to have taken this to heart.

Dominionism. Manifest Destiny. The White Man’s Burden. Colonialism. Wars for Oil and Wars of Eugenics. All these speak to a mindset wherein man is allowed, no, entitled to assert his mastery over the earth and, if he has enough brute strength, over his fellows. The world view of humans living with, living among, not in ascendency over but in cooperation with, has largely fallen to the Biblical imperative of asserting control over and manipulation of an increasingly beleaguered planet.

Recent research points to the possibility of an entirely different reality than what we have assumed. In as yet unpublished research by Ana Willem, she writes that

The crux of the notion or argument pointing towards existence as a holographic reality, or that points to the Universe (or more correctly, Multiverse as per the work of Richard Amoroso and Elizabeth Rauscher in their book ‘The Holographic Anthropic Multiverse’) being a holographic reality, hinges on the physical and mathematical co-existence of different dimensions in which information or energy is shared or actedon in a way that it is transformed.

Willem goes on to write that

The point of departure for my work is the Mayan Calendar, and more specifically the ‘base’ Tzolkin calendar which is created using the numbers 13 and 20 to create a 260 day calendar grid. The calendar is assembled in a grid using the number 13 as the count of columns, and the number 20 as the count of rows. It is created by starting at the top-left cell of the grid, and counting to 13 as you move down the first column. When you hit the 14th row of the first column, you start counting over again at 1 as you continue to move first down, and then to the next column, and then down again, until you have counted to thirteen 20 times, and the 260 day grid is filled.

According to her,

Part of my work studies the various ways in which the Matrixes I am discovering diverge from the work on Toroidal Vortexes of Rothko and Powell. In addition, I found that the spliced grid created a numerical topology in which the inherent ‘scale’ of a given numerical matrix creates sections of coherent waves that cycle in between the harmonic topologies representing infinity and zero, changing polarity at each crest, and then cycling back. They occur only in specific sections of the spliced the matrix, and interweave like a family of related sine-like waves through one another in a way that resembles highways or streams. This is one way that the matrices I am studying are different than the ones being researched by Powell and Rothko. Much like the topologies being studied by Rothko and Powell, and being made into actual machines/products by Daniel Nunes), the phenomenology of what I have discovered acts very much like a machine.

The million dollar question, asserts Willem, is “what it means or how it specifically relates to the idea of a Holographic Anthropic Multiverse is not yet answered.”

If we are to survive this century, we will need to do more than drain the swamp. We will need to reassess not only the circumstances which bespeak profound efforts at deception by our leaders. We will also need to reassess our place in the universe, with humility and frankness. Our continued trumpeting that God is on our side, that we are in fact formed in His image—and by implication, His representative on this earth, has pushed us to the brink of apocalypse. If we are to survive ourselves, we must first recognize who we are—and who we are not.

Janet Phelan is an investigative journalist whose articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The San Bernardino County Sentinel, The Santa Monica Daily Press, The Long Beach Press Telegram, Oui Magazine and other regional and national publications. Janet specializes in issues pertaining to legal corruption and addresses the heated subject of adult conservatorship, revealing shocking information about the relationships between courts and shady financial consultants. She also covers issues relating to international bioweapons treaties. Her poetry has been published in Gambit, Libera, Applezaba Review, Nausea One and other magazines. Her first book, The Hitler Poems, was published in 2005. She is also the author of a tell-all book EXILE, (also available as an ebook). She currently resides abroad.

The U.S. Deep State Rules – On Behalf of the Ruling Class

Posted on March 23, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Glen Ford

Source: Black Agenda Report

“The U.S. Deep State is unlike any other, in that there is no other global superpower bent on world domination.”

The Deep State is busy denying that it exists, even as it savages a sitting president and brutally bitch-slaps its host society, demanding the nation embrace its role as global psycho thug and kick some Russian ass. The New York Times, always available to divert attention from the essential facts of who rules America, points to Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan as the natural habitats of Deep States. Apparently, Deep State-infected countries tend to be nations with majority Muslim populations, whose military-intelligence apparatus hovers over society and periodically seizes control of the civil government.

The Times quoted high-ranking operatives of the Deep State to prove that such structures are alien to the U.S. Michael V. Hayden, who ran the CIA under Democratic President Obama and Republican George Bush, recoiled at the term. He “would never use” the words Deep State in connection with his own country. “That’s a phrase we’ve used for Turkey and other countries like that, but not the American republic.”

Loren DeJonge Schulman, a former Obama National Security Council official, claimed to be repelled by the very idea of an American Deep State. “A deep state, when you’re talking about Turkey or Egypt or other countries, that’s part of government or people outside of government that are literally controlling the direction of the country no matter who’s actually in charge, and probably engaging in murder and other corrupt practices,” she said.

Apparently, Ms. Schulman did not consider it murder when Obama and his top national security advisors met every Tuesday at the White House to decide who would be assassinated by drone or other means. But she is “shocked” to hear “that kind of [Deep State-phobic] thinking from” President Trump “or the people closest to him.”

Once the Times had located the nexus of Deep Statism in the Muslim world, the lesser lights at The New Yorker endorsed the corporate media consensus that the U.S. is Deep State-free. Staff writer David Remnick admits that U.S. presidents “have felt resistance, or worse, from elements in the federal bureaucracies,” citing Eisenhower’s warnings against the military-industrial complex, Lyndon Johnson’s “pressure from the Pentagon,” and the “rebuke” of Obama’s Syria policy through the State Department’s “dissent channel.” However, he denies that any “subterranean web of common and nefarious purpose” threatens the orderly and transparent processes of the U.S. political system.

In reality, the U.S. Deep State is by far the world’s biggest and most dangerous version of the phenomenon; a monstrous and not-so subterranean “web of common and nefarious purpose” that is, by definition, truly global, since its goal is to rule the planet. Indeed, the Deep States of Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan — all nominal U.S. allies – are midgets in comparison and must operate in a global environment dominated by Washington’s Deep State apparatus. So vast is the imperial Deep State, that its counterparts in other nations exist largely to collaborate with, resist, or keep tabs on the U.S. behemoth, the predator that seeks to devour all the rest.

What is a Deep State? The U.S. Deep State is unlike any other, in that there is no other global superpower bent on world domination. (Washington’s political posture is also unique; no other nation claims to be “exceptional” and “indispensable” and thus not subject to the constraints of international law and custom.) Indeed, the U.S. is so proudly and publicly imperialist that much of what should be secret information about U.S. military and other capabilities is routinely fed to the world press, such as the 2011 announcement that the U.S. now has a missile that can hit any target on the planet in 30 minutes, part of the Army’s “Prompt Global Strike” program. Frightening the rest of the world into submission — a form of global terrorism — is U.S. public policy.

However, arming and training Islamic jihadist terrorists to subvert internationally recognized governments targeted by the U.S. for regime change is more than your usual variety of covert warfare: It is a policy that must forever be kept secret, because U.S. society would suffer a political breakdown if the facts of U.S. and Saudi nurturing of the international jihadist network were ever fully exposed. This is Deep State stuff of the highest order. The true nature of U.S. foreign policy in the 21^st century, and the real character of the current wars in Syria and Iraq, must be hidden from the U.S. public at all cost. An alternative reality must be presented, through daily collaboration between corporate media, corporate universities, and the public and covert organs of the U.S. State.

What part of the New York Times coverage of the war against Syria is a lie? Damn near all of it. What role does the Deep State play in crafting the lies dutifully promulgated by the corporate media? That’s impossible to answer, because the Deep State is a network of relationships, not a clearly delineated zone or space or set of organizations. The best way to describe the imperial Deep State is: those individuals and institutions that are tasked with establishing the global supremacy of the corporate ruling class. Such activities must be masked, since they clash with the ideological position of the ruling class, which is that the bourgeois electoral system of the United States is the world’s freest and fairest. The official line is that the U.S. State is a work of near-perfection, with checks and balances that prevent any class, group or section from domination over the other. The truth is that an oligarchy rules, and makes war on whomever it chooses — internationally and domestically — for the benefit of corporate capital.

The Deep State and its corporate imperatives manifestly exists when corporate lobbyists and lawyers are allowed to draw up the Trans Pacific Partnership global “trade” agreement, but the contents are kept secret from the Congresspersons whose duty is to vote on the measure. The Deep State is where corporate power achieves its class aims outside the public processes of government. It’s where the most vicious class warfare takes place, whether on a foreign killing field, or in the corporate newsroom that erases or misrepresents what happened on that battlefield.

At this stage of capitalism, the U.S. ruling class has less and less use for the conventional operations of the bourgeois state. It cannot govern in the old way. More and more, it seeks to shape events through the levers of the collaborating networks of the Deep State. It’s number one global priority is to continue the military offensive begun in 2011, and to break Russia’s resolve to resist that offensive. The ruling class and its War Party, now consolidated within the Democratic Party and regrouping among Republicans, have effectively neutralized a sitting president whose party controls both Houses of Congress, less than two months into his term.

Only a Deep State could pull that off.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Glen Ford’s blog

The New Media World Order

Posted on March 20, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: Voltairenet.org

In only a few months, the content of the Western national and international medias has undergone profound change. We are witnessing the birth of an Entente about which we know almost nothing – neither the real initiators, nor the real objectives – but whose direct anti-democratic consequences can be noticed immediately.

The West is currently going through an unprecedented systemic change – powerful forces are progressively orienting the totality of medias in a single direction. At the same time, the content of the medias is mutating– only last year, they were still logical, and tended towards objectivity. They offered one other mutual contradiction in a spirit of healthy competition. Now they act in gangs, basing their coherence on emotions, and becoming vicious when they are facing people they condemn.

The idea of an Entente between the medias is an extension of the experience of the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), which does not unite the medias, but only individual journalists. It made itself famous by publishing information stolen from the accounts of two law firms in the British Virgin Islands, and from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the bank HSBC, and the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca. These revelations were mainly used to discredit the Russian and Chinese leaders, but also, once in a while, to shine some light on genuine offences committed by the Westerners. Above all, under the honourable pretext of the struggle against corruption, the violation of the confidentiality of lawyers and banks seriously damaged thousands of their honest clients without any reaction from public opinion.

Over a period of approximately forty years, we have been witnessing the progressive grouping of medias within certain international trusts. Currently, 14 groups share more than two thirds of the western Press (21st Century Fox, Bertelsmann, CBS Corporation, Comcast, Hearst Corporation, Lagardere Group, News Corp, Organizações Globo, Sony, Televisa, The Walt Disney Company, Time Warner, Viacom, Vivendi). From now on, the alliance operated by Google Media Lab and First Draft is forging links between these groups, which already enjoyed a dominant position. The presence in this Entente of the three most important Press agencies on the planet (Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters) guarantees it hegemonic power. This is without any doubt an «illicit entente», established not with the goal of price-setting, but mind-setting, the imposition of an already dominant thought.

We may have noticed that all the members of the Google Entente – without exception – have already, over the last six years, given unequivocal visions of the events that occurred in the Greater Middle East. And yet there had been no prior agreement between them, or at least, none of which we were aware. It is intriguing to note that five of the six international television channels which participated in the NATO propaganda cell are part of this Entente (Al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN, France24, Sky, but apparently not al-Arabiya).

In the United States, France and Germany, Google and First Draft assembled the medias present locally in the countries concerned, and others present on the international scale, to check the veracity of certain arguments. Besides the fact that we do not know who is hiding behind First Draft, and what political interests may have influenced a commercial company specialised in computer science to finance this initiative, the results achieved have little to do with a return to objectivity.

First of all because the allegations are not chosen for the place they occupy in the public debate, but because they have been quoted by individuals that the media Entente intends to vilify. We might imagine that these verifications enable us to get a little closer to the truth, but that is not the case at all – they reassure the citizen in the idea that the medias are honest, while the people they are condemning are not. This approach is not aimed at better understanding the world, but at beating down the people to be sacrificed.

Next, because an unwritten rule of this media Entente stipulates that only allegations from sources outside the Entente should be checked. The members agree not to use any critical faculty in the mutual appreciation of their work. They agree to reinforce the idea that the world is divided in two – «we» who tell the truth, and «the others» who are liars. This approach is damaging for the principle of pluralism, a precondition for democracy, and opens the way to a totalitarian society. This is not a new phenomenon, because we saw it at work during the coverage of the Arab Springs and the wars against Libya and Syria. But for the first time, it is aimed at a Western line of thought.

Finally, because the allegations that have been qualified as «false» will never be envisaged as errors, but always as lies. The point is to charge the «others» with Machiavellian intentions in order to discredit them. This approach damages the presumption of innocence.

That is why the functioning of the ICIJ and the Entente created by Google and First Draft violates the Munich Charter adopted by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) (Title II, articles 2, 4, 5 and 9).

It is no coincidence that certain absurd legal actions have developed against the same targets as those in the sights of the media Entente. In the United States, the Hogan Law has been dragged out for use against the Trump team, despite the fact that this text has never, absolutely never, been applied since its promulgation two centuries ago. And in France, the Jolibois Law has been revived for use against the political tweets of Marine Le Pen, despite the fact that jurisprudence had limited the application of that law to the distribution of a few ultra-pornographic magazines lacking a plastic wrapping. Since the principle of the presumption of innocence for scapegoats has been eradicated, it is now possible to put anyone on trial for any legal pretext. Furthermore, the legal actions mounted against the Trump team and Marine Le Pen, in the name of the laws named above, should also be be brought against a great number of other people – but they are not.

Moreover, citizens no longer react when the media Entente itself broadcasts false allegations. Thus, in the United States, they imagined that the Russian secret services had a compromising dossier on Donald Trump and were blackmailing him. Or, in France, this Entente invented the idea that it is possible to employ a fictitious parliamentary assistant, and went on to accuse François Fillon.

In the United States, the large and small medias which are members of the Entente went after the President. They garnered their own information from the wire-tapping of the Trump team which had been illegally ordered by the Obama administration. They work in coordination with the magistrates, who are using them to block the actions of the present government. This is without doubt a Mafia system.

The same US and French medias are attacking two candidates for the French Presidential election – François Fillon and Marine Le Pen. To the general problem of the media Entente is added the false impression that these targets are victims of a Franco/French conspiracy, whereas in fact, the instigator is a US citizen. The French notice that their medias are rigged, wrongly interpret the conspiracy as being directed against the right wing, and continue erroneously seeking the manipulators in their own country.

In Germany, the Entente is not yet effective, and probably will not be until the general elections.

During Watergate, the medias claimed to represent a «Fourth Estate», after the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary. They affirmed that the Press exercised a function of control over the government in the name of the People. We can ignore for a moment the fact that President Nixon was charged with a similar offense to that of President Obama – bugging his opponent. We know today that the Watergate source, «Deep Throat», far from being a «whistle-blower», was in reality the Director of the FBI, Mark Felt. The treatment of this affair was a battle between a part of the administration and the White House, in which the electors were manipulated by both sides at once.

The idea of a «Fourth Estate» supposes that we recognise the same legitimacy for the 14 corporate trusts which own the great majority of the Western medias as for the citizens. This is to affirm the substitution of an oligarchy for democracy.

The remains one point which needs clarification – how have the targets of the Entente been chosen? The only obvious link between Donald Trump, François Fillon and Marine Le Pen is that all three hope to re-establish contacts with Russia, and fight with her against the breeding ground of jihadism – the Muslim Brotherhood. Although François Fillon was the Prime Minister of the goverment implcated in these events, all three of them represent the train of thought which contests the dominant vision of the Arab Springs and the wars against Libya and against Syria.

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After the Crash

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

Tag Archives: corporate news