Tag Archives: war on terror

Americans Are Being Divided As The War On Domestic Terror Expands

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Americans appear too divided and distracted to recognize that the architects of the Patriot Act and the failed War on Terror now have their sights set on the American homeland.

By Derrick Broze

Source: The Last American Vagabond

The first week of 2021 kicked off with chaos at the Capitol in Washington D.C. Was it a protest, a riot or an insurrection? Were there provocateurs, and if so, were they Antifa, the cops, and/or the Feds? As usual, everyone on the internet thinks they know the answer within ten minutes. Unfortunately, this genuinely leads to the spreading of unfounded theories – many based on nothing but speculation and emotion. But while the public is debating over theories and arguing amongst themselves, the newly emboldened Military Industrial Complex is eagerly anticipating the incoming Biden Administration as an opportunity to expand the War on Domestic Terror.

In the immediate aftermath of the “storming of the Capitol”, the media pundits, intelligence community, and politicians began foaming at the mouth in excitement over the chance to push through Domestic Terror legislation. Michigan representative Elissa Slotkin, also former Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense and CIA analyst, said, “the post 9/11 era is over. The single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division. The threat of domestic terrorism.” Slotkin went on to say that she urges the Biden administration to “understand that the greatest threat now is internal.”

TLAV writer Whitney Webb responded to Slotkin’s comment by reminding the audience that, “before Congress, Elissa worked for the CIA and the Pentagon and helped destabilize the Middle East during the Bush and Obama admins. What she says here is essentially an open announcement that the US has moved from the “War on [foreign] terror” to the “War on domestic terror”.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) also reportedly released a bulletin warning that “domestic extremists” are planning a nationwide protest to stop Joe Biden from being sworn in as President. According to ABC News, “The FBI has also received information in recent days on a group calling for “storming” state, local and federal government courthouses and administrative buildings in the event President Donald Trump is removed from office prior to Inauguration Day. The group is also planning to “storm” government offices in every state the day President-elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated, regardless of whether the states certified electoral votes for Biden or Trump.”

Since the bulletin has not been publicly released the report should be viewed skeptically. However, it’s only one of many emerging reports and articles stoking the flames of civil war and internal chaos. The fact of the matter is that this is not a new attempt to demonize the American people. This current effort is simply a continuation of the effort to label Americans as terrorists that has been taking place since at least the mid-1990’s following the Oklahoma City bombing false flag. These efforts were expanded further after the attacks of 9/11. In fact, as most readers know by now, it was Joe Biden who wrote the anti-terror legislation in the 90’s which became the basis for the Patriot ACT after 9/11.

While the “War on Terror” launched by the George W. Bush administration was focused on imaginary enemies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere, there has also been a steady push to focus on the American public. In the first years of the Obama administration we saw the rise of the “Tea Party” movement, the American Libertarian movement, and Liberal Progressives who opposed the war machine, the surveillance state, and the militarization of the police. Organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) did their best to label activists “extremists” for constitutionally protected activism and organizing. In 2010, the SPLC even came up with a “Patriot Hit List” of so-called extremists.

The post-9/11 era saw the creation of Fusion Centers; centralized systems that pool and analyze intelligence from federal, state, local, and private sector entities. The National Network of Fusion Centers was created after the 9/11 attacks to provide for more streamlined communication between federal and local agencies. The Fusion Centers have been criticized as violations of civil liberties and a danger to separation of federal and local governments. They have been exposed for targeting of protesters of the Dakota Access Pipeline and most infamously, in 2009 it was revealed that the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) was targeting supporters of third party candidates, Ron Paul supporters, anti-abortion activists, and “conspiracy theorists” as potential domestic extremists.

The 2010’s also saw the passing of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act which included provisions allowing for indefinitely detaining Americans who have been labeled potential terrorists. Under these provisions, Americans lose the ability to have access to a lawyer and the right to a speedy trial. The measures were approved every year during the Obama and Trump administrations.

The truth is that the United States has long been pushing for a focus on Domestic Terror and Extremism, and regardless of what really happened at the Capitol on January 6, the event is being used as a way to justify the push for strengthening domestic terror legislation.

Another organization that is helping propel the “rise of domestic terror” narrative is the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), an organization with deep ties to the intelligence community and Western Military Industrial Complex. In October, the CSIS released a study claiming that two-thirds of the terrorist plots and attacks in the United States in the first eight months of 2020 were carried out by white supremacists and like-minded extremists. Coincidentally, journalist John Vibes recently reported that, “the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is listed as the “most recent employment” for three selections on Biden’s Department of Defense agency review team: Kathleen Hicks, who is a former defense official under President Barack Obama, as well as Melissa Dalton, and Andrew Hunter.”

The most likely candidate for new domestic terror legislation is the “The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act”, originally passed by the House in 2020, would create “dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism.”

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin has already promised to reintroduce the bill in the coming days. “Senate Democrats, along with the Biden administration, will work together to investigate, expose, and hold accountable domestic terrorism threats in our country,” Durbin and Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement. The bill also has support from the Anti-Defamation League and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Another domestic terror bill that has previously been considered is the “Confronting the Threat of Domestic Terror Act”. The bill was introduced by Rep. Adam Schiff, who claimed that “the legislation is narrowly crafted and includes protections to ensure it is not misused.” However, the American Civil Liberties Union warned, “people of color and other marginalized communities have long been targeted under domestic terrorism authorities for unfair and discriminatory surveillance, investigations, and prosecutions. Law enforcement agencies’ use of these authorities undermines and has violated equal protection, due process, and First Amendment rights.”

This is a crucial time for the American experiment. Will the American people allow themselves to be divided to the point of calling for domestic terror legislation to be used on their neighbors, co-workers, friends and family? With the public inundated with fears of civil war, stolen elections, rampant disinformation, and general exhaustion with COVID-19 measures, it appears to be a very critical moment which may decide whether America is destined for a renewed desire for liberty, truth, and free speech, or an accelerated push towards tyranny.

Not News But A Juicy Collection Of Narratives – How The New York Times Failed Its Readers

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By Moon of Alabama

The New York Times star reporter Rukmini Callimachi had been widely criticized for her exaggerated reporting about the Islamic State and terrorism. But her editors kept supporting and promoting her stories. That finally ended when Canada recently indicted one Shehroze Chaudhry, also known as Abu Huzaifa, for falsely claiming to have been an ISIS member. Chaudhry had made up his blood dripping stories. He had never been with ISIS and had never been to Syria or Iraq.

But the unverified stories of Abu Huzaifa al-Kanadi had been the central element of the NYT’s ten part Caliphate podcast by Rukmini Callimachi.

The failure of her reporting finally was so evident that the NYT had to allow its media columnist Ben Smith to write about the issue. Remarkably his reporting was published in the Business section of the paper.

An Arrest in Canada Casts a Shadow on a New York Times Star, and The Times

It is a pretty devastating report about the support Callimachi got from her editors even as an ever growing number of her collogues criticized her over-sensationalized reporting. The root cause of the problem is the way in which the Times, as well as other news media, try to change from news providers to narrative creators:

The crisis now surrounding the podcast is as much about The Times as it is about Ms. Callimachi. She is, in many ways, the new model of a New York Times reporter. She combines the old school bravado of the parachuting, big foot reporter of the past, with a more modern savvy for surfing Twitter’s narrative waves and spotting the sorts of stories that will explode on the internet.
…
Ms. Callimachi’s approach and her stories won her the support of some of the most powerful figures at The Times: early on, from Joe Kahn, who was foreign editor when Ms. Callimachi arrived and is now managing editor and viewed internally as the likely successor to the executive editor, Dean Baquet; and later, an assistant managing editor, Sam Dolnick, who oversees the paper’s successful audio team and is a member of the family that controls The Times.
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Ms. Callimachi’s approach to storytelling aligned with a more profound shift underway at The Times. The paper is in the midst of an evolution from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of great narratives, on the web and streaming services. And Ms. Callimachi’s success has been due, in part, to her ability to turn distant conflicts in Africa and the Middle East into irresistibly accessible stories.

The highlighted sentence is the essence of the piece. It was even repeated in the caption of a picture accompanying it.

The striving for ‘juicy narratives’ is the biggest mistake of current news media. Their attempt to copy the success of Hollywood dramas by creating narratives has destroyed their credibility. It has put incentives on the wrong aspect of a reporter’s work. Instead of requiring well checked facts the editors are now asking for confirmations of preconceived tales:

What is clear is that The Times should have been alert to the possibility that, in its signature audio documentary, it was listening too hard for the story it wanted to hear — “rooting for the story,” as The Post’s Erik Wemple put it on Friday.

Callimachi is far from the only one guilty of creating fake news to fulfill her editors demand of narratives. The four year long coverage of ‘Russiagate’, the fairytale collection of made up connections between Donald Trump and Russia, was full of such. The editorial push towards narratives is rooted in the desire to create clickbait and to generate a social media echo around the reporting. That may be profitable in the short term but it is also a guarantee for a long term failure.

False of hyped narratives will over time get debunked. People then lose trust in the media that provided them with the fake news. That again will cause a long term loss of readership.

A similar case of falling for ‘narratives’ happened to German magazine Der Spiegel. Its star author Claas Relotius wrote fake stories on a large scale. Whether he wrote about Trump voters in Arizona or about a little girl in Syria, Relotius invented the witnesses to the ‘news’ he provided. He made up ‘facts’ and described himself visiting places he had never been to. For years there had been warnings that many of the detail Relotius provided were wrong. But his editors promoted him because the slick ‘narratives’ he delivered were exactly what they wanted. Der Spiegel, a once universally trusted source of news, is now joked about as ‘the former news magazine’.

The media trend towards providing narratives instead of verified facts also increases the danger of falling for manipulation. Governments as well as political marketing campaigns love to provide ready made tales. It is easier and cheaper for media to pick these up and repeat them instead of digging into the facts and their logic. We thus get false tales about chemical weapon use in Syria and a Skripal poisoning ‘narrative’ that does not stand up to the slightest scrutiny.

Can we please have real news? Just the new facts, with no ‘narrative’ or moral tales attached to them? Facts that are verified and described in the context of the issue they relate to? Do they fit the logic of already known ones? Do they make sense? How may they influence further developments?

To provide the above can easily fill a reporter’s day of work. It is usually enough material to write an 800 words report. Its sufficient for the reader to create his own narrative from it.

Dear news media. Please go back to providing real news. If you do so you will eventually regain my trust. That will be, in the long run, a much more valuable asset than the social media chatter you are currently trying to generate.

Saturday Matinee: Taking Liberties

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“Taking Liberties” (2007) is a British documentary directed by Chris Atkins. Using a mix of animation, news footage and interviews, it examines how Labour has overreacted to the terror threat, using it as an excuse to weaken civil liberteis including the right to protest, right to freedom of speech, right to privacy, right not to be detained without charge, presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and protections against torture. In short, it’s a cinematic chronicle of the origin of the modern British surveillance state under the Blair ministry.

Trump’s Murder of Qassem Soleimani: Why We Must Stand Up to the Christianity of Brutality.

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ISTANBUL, TURKEY – JANUARY 05: People hold posters showing the portrait of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Major General Qassem Soleimani and chant slogans during a protest outside the U.S. Consulate on January 05, 2020 in Istanbul, Turkey. Major General Qassem Soleimani, was killed by a U.S. drone strike outside the Baghdad Airport on January 3. Since the incident, tensions have risen across the Middle East. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

By Sander Hicks

Source: New York Megaphone

This is the investigation that prompted our publication to establish an online conference on Nonviolence, and the Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, Oct. 2, 2020. It’s essential we understand how Pompeo and the GOP justify their violence in the name of Christianity. The future of nonviolence must stand apart from the “Christianity of Brutality.” That’s what Jesus would do.

Earlier this year, President Trump shocked the world by murdering a high-ranking Iranian government official. Pressured by Secretary Pompeo, Trump ordered the assassination of an Iranian general who enjoyed movie-star celebrity status in his home country, General Qassem Soleimani. The killing brought the world to the brink of a major new war. Among the many laws this act broke, it violated Iraqi sovereignty, as it took place in Iraq. It happened in the middle of the night on January 3rd, 2020, using an American MQ-6 Reaper drone.

Dexter Filkins, in the New Yorker, called the hit on Soleimani, “the most consequential act taken against the regime in Tehran in thirty years.” And that’s saying a lot, because the US has inflicted much suffering on Iran over time, from CIA coups, to pushing Iraq to kill a million Iranians in the “Iran-Iraq War,” to today’s harsh economic sanctions. Yet Iran has grown into an influential regional superpower able to stand toe-to-toe with US proxies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, to see through the hypocrisy and the posturing of the War on Terror.

Trump, earlier, wanted to re-open negotiations towards a new Nuclear Agreement with Iran. He was in contact with President Rhouhani. But killing the charismatic Soleimani shut down any chance of a new nuclear deal. Now the Iranians are free to develop their nuclear power capabilities, unhindered.

Trump was left to explain himself. How could the US President justify this attack?

Remember that one year ago, things were boiling over in Iraq/Iran. Various Iran-backed militias rioted in Baghdad and broke the windows at US consulates. An American contractor was killed and US officials feared another Benghazi, or a new Tehran-style Embassy hostage crisis like in 1979. The US Military and Trump responded by killing 25 Shi’a militia members. Pentagon top brass then offered killing Soleimani as an additional option but assumed Trump wouldn’t be so brash. That was like giving a pyromaniac teenager a set of matches and five gallons of gasoline.

Killing a foreign government official is illegal, according to US policy and international law. Trump, at first, asserted Soleimani had plans to target four U.S. embassies, a claim that his own Defense Secretary Esper was not able to substantiate.  It “seems to be totally made up,” said Congressman Justin Amash from Michigan.

On Twitter, Trump tried to give the last word by claiming that the US acted in self-defense because Soleimani posed an “imminent threat.” But Trump seemed unconvinced himself, as he tweeted that it “doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past.”

Ah, but it does matter.

Killing people is a crime, you see, and a lot of people think so. The US has written laws that restrain this kind of thing from coming out of the White House, as it does so much damage to the U.S.’s moral standing in the world. (If capitalism and imperialism haven’t mangled that reputation forever.)

Former DA Vincent Bugliosi, in his book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, showed that presidents could well go to prison for the extrajudicial killings and illegal wars they engage in. The Hague Convention of 1907 and the UN ban the killing of a foreign government official, outside of wartime. Even Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, denounced “assassination, poison, perjury” as brutal statecraft, “held in just horror.”

In the wake of the killings of JFK and MLK and the targeted domestic killings of COINTEL-PRO, the US Congress convened the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the mid and late ’70s. President Gerald Ford responded by issuing an executive order that has since become standard US policy. No US government employee “shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”

President Reagan affirmed and expanded this policy against assassination. But back at the Trump White House, the pressure to kill Soleimani came from evangelical Christian Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. CNN reported that White House insiders said Pompeo “was the one who made the case to take out Soleimani, it was him absolutely.” Pompeo also made a claim that Soleimani posed an “imminent threat,” but later backed off that claim, and instead explained that Soleimani had the “blood of American [soldiers]” on his hands from working with the Iraqi resistance.

At a loss for legal justification, Vice President Mike Pence stepped up with a “Hail Mary” kind of throw. He asserted that there may be a connection between Soleimani and “the 12 9/11 attackers.” (But Mike, there were 19 hijackers on 9/11.) Students of history will note that the NeoCon Right still invokes 9/11 when it’s desperate to justify a crime. 9/11 still has that power 20 years later. It’s like a myth that is eternal. If we allow it.

 

Who Was Qassem Soleimani

Millions of Iranians poured out into the streets for a three-day funeral in all top Iranian cities and towns. Hamed Ghashgavi in Tehran, told me, “General Soleimani, we know he was popular but none of us thought millions will mourn his death!”

Qassem Soleimani “had a command presence,” CIA Veteran John Maguire said. “He walked into the room and you could feel him.” Maguire had negotiated with Soleimani in Baghdad in 2004.

A native of the more tribal Southern Iranian province of Kerman, Soleimani was born in 1957. He fought at the front lines of the Iran/Iraq war, that nine-year slog fought with chemical weapon assaults, compliments of Iraq. The grinding agony, often in trenches, was compared to World War I. Inside Iran, the conflict is known as the “War of Holy Defense.” But the Reagan White House viewed the Iran/Iraq War as a chance to get aggressive and retaliate for the late 70’s hostage crisis. The US supported Iran‘s biggest rival, Saddam Hussein, as he invaded Iran. The USA gave Hussein several billions in economic aid and military training to help attack the nascent Islamic Republic.

The experience of Iraq invading Iran was deeply formative on young Soleimani, who lost many friends in the war. But Soleimani there became a legend known as “The Goat Burglar” for his talents at slipping behind enemy lines and coming back with live goats to feed his platoon. He regularly volunteered to fight at the front lines. He had a deep camaraderie with his fellows. Before battle, he would kiss each of them on the forehead and pray with them to be martyred.

From the end of the War, to 1997, Soleimani laid low, he didn’t get on well with President Rafsanjanhi. But sooner after that period, he rose to lead the elite “Quds” aka “Jerusalem” Force division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. His power grew, as did his closeness with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Gen. Petreaus once recalled that Soleimani told him, “You should know that I, Qassem Soleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan.”

Soleimani as US Ally Against Terrorism

In the corporate US media, Soleimani’s death was brushed off. He was expendable. A “terrorist.”

But a deeper look past the demonization shows an interesting pattern. Soleimani had a history of working with the Americans. Every time he worked with the USA, it went well for the Americans. In the end, the USA just stabbed him in the back.

When 9/11 happened, the Bush/Cheney regime decided to target Afghanistan and its Taliban regime. Qassem Soleimani saw an opportunity to reduce terrorism in the land immediately to the east of Iran. Soleimani worked with the US attacking forces. He and Iranian diplomats shared intelligence with the US on Taliban positions. The Americans informed the Iranians about an al-Qa`ida agent hiding out in Mashhad in eastern Iran.  Soleimani was, “pleased with [the] cooperation,” and spoke at this time that “maybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with the Americans.”

It was not to be.

Bush and Cheney bowed to pressure from their Zionist wing and slapped the Iranians in the face with the “Axis of Evil” speech. It has been a long-standing policy of Israel to block any rapprochement between the US and Iran. Bush named Iran as a leading proponent of terrorism, despite its recent work against terrorism, with the Americans in Afghanistan. Soleimani felt betrayed.

Cut to 2014, and the US is back asking for Iran’s help, when US coalition forces are losing in Iraq. The jihadists were on the offensive, taking territory in Iraq, including the major city of Mosul. Iraq’s leading Shia cleric Ali al-Sistani, issued a call-to-arms to fight the Sunni extremists. Young Shia men volunteered by the thousands. Soleimani and his elite Quds Force helped organize them.

For the next three years, until 2017, Iran helped turn the tide there against ISIS and Al Nusra. On a number of occasions, Americans were hitting Islamic State targets from the air while General Soleimani directed ground forces against the militants.

At the same time, the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel were working against Soleimani and Iran in Syria. The US had decided to work against the Ba’ath Arab Socialist, Bashar Assad, who sometimes enjoyed the support of Russia and Iran.

When Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) flew to Syria in 2017, it was to better understand the Syrian civil war. She met Assad and top Syrian officials. In the street, Syrian citizens begged her to stop the US funding of ISIS. She returned to Congress and proposed HR 608, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act. Because at this point, the US was fighting ISIS in Iraq, but working with ISIS in Syria. On the ground in Tehran, in 2017 at the New Horizon conference, when I asked Saudis, Arabs, and other locals from the region, who is funding ISIS? People uniformly named either Saudi Arabia or the USA.

Pop Quiz. Name the only country that has consistently opposed the Islamic State and al-Qaeda?

The Answer? No, it’s not the USA. It’s Iran.

The History of the US/Iran Relationship: 

A Crash Course from 1953 to the Present

Iran is a regional superpower in a kind of local “cold war” against Saudi Arabia and Israel. There are a set of facts that no one should do without when trying to figure out the real history of the Iran/US relationship.  A deeper understanding of this history could begin to lay the groundwork to re-establish diplomatic ties, which have been suspended since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

In 2000, even Madeline Albright recognized that the CIA’s brutal 1953 coup overthrew the democratically-elected progressive Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and replaced him with the fickle Iranian king, Reza Shah. With their SAVAK secret police, the Shahs repressed dissidents and communists, and so Islam became the legal method of resistance. When President Jimmy Carter allowed the ailing Shah to travel to the USA to receive healthcare, Ayatollah Khomeini called for a general strike in Iran and flew back to Iran from his exile in France. 98% of the population voted to replace the monarchy with the Islamic Republic, in a referendum vote.

Because of the US’s support of the Shah, the Islamic Revolution resulted in an unplanned take-over of the US embassy. 53 US hostages were kept for 444 days until they were released on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.

During the Iran/Iraq War, it’s worth noting that young Qassem Soleimani met the young Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when both were fighting the Iraqi invasion. They would have a long, complicated relationship, as Adhmadinejad would go on to become elected President of Iran, from 2005 to 2013. His politics were “hardliner” compared to his successor, the more moderate Rouhani. Ahmadinejad may be most famous for his 2010 speech in front of the United Nations, in which he questioned the official story about 9/11.

Regarding 9/11/01, Iran was not involved, but US Allies were. The USA’s CIA Counterintelligence Database reports that two Mossad agents were among five Israelis arrested by NJ Police, on 9/11/01, for celebrating the attacks publicly, as they watched the World Trade Center burn. Held in custody for two months by FBI, Bush officials intervened and all five were released to go back to Israel. On Israeli television, they were celebrated as heroes.

15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, including two with ties to Saudi intelligence (Al Mihdhar and Al Hamzi). When Congress’s suppressed “28 Pages” of its own 9/11 Report were released in 2016, they documented Saudi funding of the 19 hijackers, from none other than US Ambassador from Saudi Arabia,  Prince Bandar bin Sultan (aka “Bandar Bush”). But even Bandar’s many appearances in the suppressed “28 Pages” have yet to prompt a grand jury investigation in US courts.

Later that month, in September 2001, General Wesley Clark, reported that a senior general inside the Pentagon told him, “Here’s the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense [Rumsfeld] outlining the strategy. We’re going to take out seven countries in five years.’ And he named them…ending with Iran.”

The Iraq War officially started in 2003 and phase one didn’t end until 2011. Similar to the 9/11 official story, the premise for the Iraq War was a loose set of assumptions and insinuations, not hard facts or evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Hussein’s overthrow and execution was another targeted killing on a grander scale, similar to that of Soleimani. The Bush/Cheney “War on Terror” was a colossal waste of money, even by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute. “A recent study…puts the cost of the War on Terror at roughly $5 trillion — a truly astonishing number. Even if one believes American efforts have made the nation marginally safer, the United States could have achieved far greater improvements in safety and security at far less cost through other means.”

In 2007, German news magazine Die Spiegel leaked that Vice President Dick Cheney had a secret plan to invade Iran next.

Barack Obama was elected as a symbol of hope and change, but his pick of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was tragic for Iran. Hillary Clinton removed the Iranian terrorist group MEK from the State Department’s “Terrorism Watch List” in 2012. The media crowed that the lobbyists had done it again, as MEK represents big money ex-patriate Iranians who would like to see violent regime change in Iran. MEK was once a bizarre culty Islamic splinter group, banished to Albania, and hated in Iran for backing Iraq in the Iran/Iraq War. But money changes everything, and now with lavish funding, these days the MEK throws huge gala events in DC and NYC and pays Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton to come speak.

After President Barack Obama jettisoned Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, he did some ground-breaking work by working with moderate President Rouhani and signing the “Iran Nuclear Deal,” the JCPOA in 2015.

In 2017, with Trump in Office, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and others routinely ignored the Trump White House’s multiple calls to pressure Iran militarily. Their belief was that Syria’s Assad had effectively won the Syrian civil war, thanks to Iran and Russia, and now the war on ISIS took priority. Mattis quit at the end of 2018 when Trump demanded US withdrawal from Syria.

In 2018, former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson quit as Secretary of State, and Mike Pompeo succeeded him. Pompeo lost no time in focussing a target on his longtime nemesis, Qassem Soleimani. It started in April of 2019, with the shocking designation of Iran’s entire Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) as a “terrorist organization.” According to The Iran Agenda book by Reuters reporter Reese Erlich, the IRGC is a huge economic entity in Iran, and it controls about 10% of the entire Iranian economy. So declaring IRGC a terrorist organization would be like declaring Amazon a terrorist organization in the US.

But there were more than words in the declaration. The knives were coming out. “Bolton and Pompeo knew that that designation opened up the targeting aperture,” one former senior Trump administration official said.

 

War Powers

In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution. It requires the President to report to Congress whenever armed forces are introduced “into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated,” and to terminate any hostilities after 60 days unless authorized by Congress.

But since 1973, Congress has done little to reclaim its constitutional responsibility to control the war machine. Professor Jack Goldsmith points out, “Our country has, quite self-consciously, given one person, the President, an enormous sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war.”

If there’s any one issue that may someday inspire a US Constitutional Convention, it may be the long history the USA has had with a “unitary executive” who abuses their powers to wage undeclared wars on smaller, weaker nations. Our system is running contrary to the spirit and the letter of the US Constitution. What happened in the Soleimani case is more than just the murder of one man. It shows that our current class of leadership, from Clinton to Trump, is so in love with violence, it crosses a line into contempt for the Constitution. The love of war is all.

What could possess their souls?

 

The Christianity of Brutality

The flaws of the American brand of evangelical Christianity led directly to Soleimani’s fiery death with nine others. The dominant religion in America birthed a bloody global trauma that caused the whole planet to smell the stench of World War III. However, any student of the New Testament will notice that Jesus actually stood against the nationalism and the exclusionary practices of the Jewish leadership. He called the Pharisees and Scribes, “vipers” and even worse, “lawyers.”

Jesus’s pivotal lesson about the Good Samaritan exposes the hypocrisy of the “purity” of the High Priests. They were so obsessed with purity, they wouldn’t help a man beaten up in the street. Their religion blinded them to the basic humanity in all of us. At a time of crisis, when we need something to unite us, religion could reveal an inner light within us all. The Good Samaritan story holds up the forgotten and hated people of our day.  The one who is hated most by society turns out to have the most heart. The outsider, the Samaritan ignores all the codes of the day and stops to care for the crushed and bloodied man. That’s the path. Actions of compassion and healing are the true way, not a religion of showiness, prestige, and power.

Mike Pompeo and the neoConservative Christians are super Pro-Israel, because their Christianity is based in the Old Testament, where God is oftentimes a violent, nationalistic force who favors his “Chosen People” in their many wars.  Pompeo has compared Trump to King Cyrus, and likes to dwell on the Book of Esther, in which the Jewish people commit genocide on the Iranians/Persians, killing over 5,000 in one fell swoop. (An event celebrated every year with the Jewish feast of Purim.)

The Old Testament also has eternal wisdom, great laws, and lessons in it, like “Thou Shalt Not Kill” from the Ten Commandments. The Wisdom literature, such as Psalms and Proverbs, show the universal conception of God, evolving into a more compassionate, loving vision over time. But to rely on the Old Testament as a true book of history is shaky ground. To base US Foreign Policy on it is ahistorical. Most of the Old Testament is war stories, in which genocide and exclusion are held up as ideals. A little-known fact is that some early Christians didn’t at first want to include the Old Testament in their Bible. They felt that the teachings of Christ were complete: be humble, be of service, make your life about truth, integrity, and nonviolence. These were so much more substantial than the old books, which had led directly to the superficial posturing of the Pharisees, and the “Simple Way” resistance of Jesus of Nazareth.

It seems that with the killing of Soleimani, something has hijacked the spirituality of a man like Mike Pompeo. He became a “born-again Christian” inside the super-powered pressure-cooker of West Point US Military Academy. It’s like someone only gave him half the story. The American right-wing wants the righteousness of religion without doing the real work of Jesus’s core command, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”

The story of the New Testament is really this: a young, passionate, former carpenter from the sticks, Jesus of Nazareth, picks up the oral traditions of  a “street rabbi.” Able to quote the prophets, see people’s problems, and inspire people to change, he becomes a traveling street preacher, able to talk about the love of God in a radical new way. He challenges the aristocracy of the high priests and denounces their rigidity and formalism. He gathers a wide range of people “from below.” He teaches and heals among the peasant and working classes (without excluding Roman soldiers). Drawing on the Wisdom literature, he expands and radicalizes his message, in a time in which occupied Palestine was seeking ways to resist the violence of the Roman Empire.  Influenced by the Zealots, and tempted by the lure of political power, Jesus ultimately rejected that path. He did consider it but rejected driving Rome out of Palestine with a sword. He even welcomed Pharisees at his gatherings and teaching sessions. His challenge to “love our enemies” was really a challenge to see that there is a light within all of us, including Americans, Israelis, and Iranians, and that it’s a common love of the truth. The historical Jesus never endorses killing people. He says we should “turn the other cheek” rather than retaliate with violence.

Essentially we have here an avatar, one of history’s most dynamic and radical figures, revered today in both Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, because he opened up a new space of what is possible for humanity: living in a place of dialogue, a love for the Word, sharing, truth, eating together, healing each other, reveling in our common humanity, and working out problems without violence. That is the space of God.

The violent Christianity of Mike Pompeo feels about as authentic as his boss, Donald Trump, wielding a Bible like a weapon, as a vague warning to protestors and radicals fed up with racism and police brutality.

They need to look deeper, because 2000 years ago, Jesus would have been among those protestors. According to the book Rabbi Jesus by Bruce Chilton, when Jesus cleared the Temple in Jerusalem, he went in with an affinity group of 50-100 followers. It was an “Occupy the Temple” action, in which Jesus stood up to capitalism: the money-changers, animal-sellers, and merchants who had turned religion into a business. Jesus and crew literally pushed over the tables and set the doves free. It clarified Jesus’s work and became one of his last public acts of direct action.

In their zeal to make Christianity about violence and Old Testament rivalries against Iran, Pompeo and Trump totally miss the revolutionary spirituality of compassion for all beings and the essentially anti-capitalist message of Jesus. I am reminded of the young, rich kid who comes up to Jesus in the New Testament and says, “Hey, I have followed all the rules, but nothing is working for me!” So Jesus says, You must give up all your wealth, your power, your status, all you cling to, and get on the road with us, follow this path, be inside our movement, follow me. But the kid couldn’t do it because he was too attached: to luxury, to his self-concept, to his fragile and tender illusions, to a status quo of empire, class, and power.

It’s like that kid today is Mike Pompeo, and all the American Christians who do what he does. They want to follow Jesus, but can’t escape their formalism, their illusions, they can’t give up the habits of easy nationalism, their remote-control high tech violence, their sloganeering and stereotyping. Jesus says something truly radical – it’s not too late to turn around – give up all you have and follow me.

Instead the modern day Pharisees have been sending the FBI out to harass American activists.

 

Summer of 2019: FBI at My Front Door

I have been researching this article for six weeks, but I began to write the first draft on August 6, 2020. That date is actually the one year anniversary of the FBI visiting my home to stifle my international travel plans to advocate for peace with Iran. It seems that calling for peace has become something of a crime, in the time of Trump and Pompeo.

The FBI also visited such US dissidents as former Pentagon official Michael Malouf, and former US-Saudi diplomatic attaché Michael Springmann, and about fifteen others. What we all had in common was that we had previously attended the Iranian’s New Horizon conference, where dissidents from the USA and other countries were able to gather, share views, network, and brainstorm solutions to the problems of aggression, imperialism, and world peace.

When the FBI was at my house, they handed over a copy of a recent indictment of an American who had defected to Iran. But this situation had nothing to do with the New Horizon conference. The US Treasury, however, had sent the FBI to enforce their recent harsh economic sanctions against New Horizon. Four Iranians from New Horizon were sanctioned for hosting this  international think tank, a kind of “Davos of the Global South.”

The FBI home visit was a gross violation of my core rights to free speech, religion, and the right to peaceably assemble and tackle grievances. The Bill of Rights took a backseat to an obsession with killing. We had been planning to attend the next New Horizon in Beirut that Fall.

This was certainly a nadir for US activists, but shortly thereafter, there was a bit of a thaw, when in September 2019, President Trump fired his White House war-monger, John Bolton.  And then, the next month after that, the “mastermind” of the Trump White Houses’s sanctions on Iran, Sigal Pearl-Mandelker, resigned after being harassed by peace activists at a public event.

 

Against the Balance of Power, Towards the Balance of Peace

President Woodrow Wilson, once said, “Peace cannot…rest upon an armed balance of power.” Lasting peace, he maintained, required “not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.”

So instead of old religions, old rivalries, and old prejudices being given all of the power, what if the world could coalesce around a new vision, in which political assassination was banned, and just not required, because the balance of power was no longer based on violence.

The next step would be to map out a path to a place where we as one people on Earth can declare that war itself is simply out of date. How can we get to a place where we have outgrown it? The answer is to grow. We are close to being capable of global nonviolence. Gandhi said that the roots of nonviolence were already in the heart of all the world’s great religions.

The words of President Wilson ring true, “There is only one power to put behind the liberation of mankind, and that is…the power of the united moral forces of the world.”

“The power of the united moral forces of the world” is a power that peoples of all religions, and no religions, could get behind, support, and live.

Practical Proposals for Global Social Change

It’s time for a Truth and Reconciliation Conference around the murder of Qassem Soleimani. It will be a way to start to talk about the truth behind the “balance of power” and begin the healing among the peoples of the world.

So that’s why, this article is not just some investigative journalism about a criminal act, I have created a way for you to get involved, in an international dialogue, with Iranian and American activists, on Zoon, this Friday, on October 2, the International Day of NonViolence. From 4 PM to 9 PM, we will have political and spiritual speakers from Iran, and the USA, and other countries.

We will hold a global Truth and Reconciliation Conference, to talk about a global cultural shift, to change the entire system. We have a great bunch of speakers: everyone from Lt. Col. (Ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson, to radical priest Fr. John Dear, to Iranian film-maker Nader Talebzedeh.

Qassem Soleimani did not die in vain. He wanted to be a martyr. Now, let us work to have his death help to transform the world.

 

Come Celebrate Peace and Nonviolence, Celebrate Gandhi’s Birthday.

4PM – 9 PM Oct. 2 on Zoom. More Info:

https://www.newyorkmegaphone.com/oct-2-gandhi-nonviolence-day

The author of the article above wishes to acknowledge Porsché Mysticque Steele for her editorial work, and thanks also to C. Maupin for advice.

Saturday Matinee: Afghanistan War Exposed: An Imperial Conspiracy

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Every American Should Watch Abby Martin’s New Afghanistan War Documentary

Abby Martin’s new documentary, “Afghanistan War Exposed: An Imperial Conspiracy,” is a tour de force, a must watch for every American seeking a holistic understanding of American’s longest-running war.

By MintPress News Desk

The perpetual occupation of Afghanistan has become so normalized that it mostly serves as background noise to most Americans. It’s even jokingly referred to as the “Forever War,” accepted as just another constant reality. A soldier dies now and again, a couple of dozen civilians get killed in another bombing. It’s never enough to stir the population to pressure Washington enough to stop it. And the endless war drags on.

From George W. Bush to Barack Obama, to Donald Trump, every U.S. president has promised to end the war. But their plans to bring the troops home inevitably require first sending more troops to the country. You can’t look at all this rhetoric and reality and not conclude that the United States wants to stay in Afghanistan forever. And there is a reason, despite an unresolvable military quagmire, that the Empire won’t let go of Afghanistan.

In this latest “Empire Files” documentary, journalist Abby Martin covers reveals the reality of  America’s Wars in Afghanistan, from the CIA construct of the 1980s through today’s senseless stalemate. MintPress brings you documentary in its entirety, published with permission from filmmaker Abby Martin.

Virus of Mass Destruction

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Medical personnel arrive to perform COVID-19 coronavirus infection testing procedures at Glen Island Park, Friday, March 13, 2020, in New Rochelle, N.Y. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

By CJ Hopkins

Source: Consent Factory, Inc.

There comes a point in the introduction of every new official narrative when people no longer remember how it started. Or, rather, they remember how it started, but not the propaganda that started it. Or, rather, they remember all that (or are able to, if you press them on it), but it doesn’t make any difference anymore, because the official narrative has supplanted reality.

You’ll remember this point from the War on Terror, and specifically the occupation of Iraq. By the latter half of 2004, most Westerners had completely forgotten the propaganda that launched the invasion, and thus regarded the Iraqi resistance as “terrorists,” despite the fact that the United States had invaded and was occupying their country for no legitimate reason whatsoever. By that time, it was abundantly clear that there were no “weapons of mass destruction,” and that the U.S.A. had invaded a nation that had not attacked it, and posed no threat to it, and so was perpetrating a textbook war of aggression.

These facts did not matter, not in the slightest. By that time, Westerners were totally immersed in the official War on Terror narrative, which had superseded objective reality. Herd mentality had taken over. It’s difficult to describe how this works; it’s a state of functional dissociation. It wasn’t that people didn’t know the facts, or that they didn’t understand the facts. They knew the Iraqis weren’t “terrorists.” At the same time, they knew they were definitely “terrorists,” despite the fact that they knew that they weren’t. They knew there were no WMDs, that there had never been any WMDs, and still they were certain there were WMDs, which would be found, although they clearly did not exist.

The same thing happened in Nazi Germany. The majority of the German people were never fanatical anti-Semites like the hardcore N.S.D.A.P. members. If they had been, there would have been no need for Goebbels and his monstrous propaganda machine. No, the Germans during the Nazi period, like the Americans during the War on Terror, knew that their victims posed no threat to them, and at the same time they believed exactly the opposite, and thus did not protest as their neighbors were hauled out of their homes and sent off to death camps, camps which, in their dissociative state, simultaneously did and did not exist.

What I’m describing probably sounds like psychosis, but, technically speaking, it isn’t … not quite. It is not an absolute break from reality. People functioning in this state know that what they believe is not real. Nonetheless, they are forced to believe it (and do, actually, literally, believe it, as impossible as I know that sounds), because the consequences of not believing it are even more frightening than the cognitive dissonance of believing a narrative they know is a fiction. Disbelieving the official narrative means excommunication from “normality,” the loss of friends, income, status, and in many cases far worse punishments. Herd animals, in a state of panic, instinctively run towards the center of the herd. Separation from the herd makes them easy prey for pursuing predators. It is the same primal instinct operating here.

It is the goal of every official narrative to generate this type of herd mentality, not in order to deceive or dupe the public, but, rather, to confuse and terrorize them to the point where they revert to their primal instincts, and are being driven purely by existential fear, and facts and truth no longer matter. Once an official narrative reaches this point, it is unassailable by facts and reason. It no longer needs facts to justify it. It justifies itself with its own existence. Reason cannot penetrate it. Arguing with its adherents is pointless. They know it is irrational. They simply do not care.

We are reaching this point with the coronavirus narrative. It is possible that we have already reached it. Despite the fact that what we are dealing with is a virus that, yes, is clearly deadly to the old and those with medical conditions, but that is just as clearly not a deadly threat to the majority of the human species, people are cowering inside their homes as if the Zombie Apocalpyse had finally begun. Many appear to believe that this virus is some sort of Alien-Terrorist Death Flu (or weaponized Virus of Mass Destruction) that will kill you the second you breathe it in.

This is not surprising at all, because, according to the official narrative, its destructive powers are nearly unlimited. Not only will it obliterate your lungs, and liquidate all your other major organs, and kill you with blood clots, and intestinal damage, now it causes “sudden strokes in young adults,” and possibly spontaneous prostate cancer, and God knows what other medical horrors!

According to all the “scientists” and “medical experts” (i.e., those that conform to the official narrative, not all the other scientists and medical experts), it is unlike any other virus that has ever existed in the history of viruses. It certainly doesn’t follow the typical pattern of spreading extensively for a limited period, and then rapidly dying down on its own, regardless of what measures are taken to thwart it, as this Israeli study would seem to indicate.

Also, “we have no immunity against it,” which is why we all have to remain “locked down” like unruly inmates in a penitentiary until a vaccine can be concocted and forced onto every living person on earth. Apparently, this mandatory wonder vaccine will magically render us immune to this virus against which we have no immunity (and are totally unable to develop immunity), which immunity will be certified on our mandatory “immunity papers,” which we will need to travel, get a job, send our kids to school, and, you know, to show the police when they stop us on the street because we look like maybe we might be “infected.”

Germany (where I live) is way out in front of this. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the federal government plans to introduce a coronavirus “immunity card” as part of its “Infection Protection Law,” which will grant the authorities the power to round up anyone “suspected to be contagious” and force them into … uh … “quarantine,” and “forbid them from entering certain public places.” The Malaysian authorities have dispensed with such niceties, and are arresting migrant workers and refugees in so-called “Covid-19 red zones” and marching them off to God knows where.

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot … the germ and chemical warfare researchers at DARPA (i.e., the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have developed some new type of fancy blood test that will identify “asymptomatic carriers” (i.e., people who display no symptoms whatsoever). So that will probably come in handy … especially if the “white supremacists,” “Red-Brown extremists,” and “conspiracy theorists” keep protesting the lockdown with their wives and kids!

And these are just the latest additions to a list of rather dystopian examples of the “brave new normal” official narrative that GloboCap is rolling out, right before our very eyes (which the OffGuardian editors have streamlined here and here, and which continues on Twitter). It’s all right there in black and white. They aren’t hiding the totalitarianism … they don’t have to. Because people are begging for it. They are demanding to be “locked down” inside their homes, forced to wear masks, and stand two meters apart, for reasons that most of them no longer remember.

Plastic barriers are going up everywhere. Arrows on the floor show you which way to walk. Boxes show you where to stand. Paranoid Blockwarts are putting up signs threatening anyone not wearing a mask. Hysterical little fascist creeps are reporting their neighbors to the police for letting their children play with other children. Millions of people are voluntarily downloading “contact tracing applications” so that governments and global corporations can monitor their every movement. In Spain, they bleached an entire beach, killing everything, down to the insects, in order to protect the public from “infection.” The Internet has become an Orwellian chorus of shrieking, sanctimonious voices bullying everyone into conformity with charts, graphs, and desperate guilt-trips, few of which have much connection to reality. Corporations and governments are censoring dissent. We’re approaching a level of manufactured mass hysteria and herd mentality that not even Goebbels could have imagined.

Meanwhile, they’re striking the mostly empty “field hospitals,” and the theatrical “hospital ship” is now gone, and despite their attempts to inflate the Covid-19 death count as much as humanly possible, the projected hundreds of millions of deaths have not materialized (not even close), and Sweden is fine, as is most of humanity, and … just like there were no WMDs, there is no Virus of Mass Destruction.

What there is, is a new official narrative, the brave new, paranoid, pathologized “normal.” Like the War on Terror, it’s a global narrative. A global, post-ideological narrative. It’s just getting started, so it isn’t yet clear how totalitarian this show will get, but, given the nature of the pilot episode, I am kind of dreading the rest of the series.

COVID-19: A Pretext for World Government and Totalitarianism

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We are now beyond the point of no return.

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

The crazy thing about the COVID-19 “crisis” is how easy it is for the state and its media to frighten the public and manipulate ill-informed citizens into embracing economic and social decapitation. 

Blinded by scary headlines based on irrational speculation—subsequently revised downward and published on page C-23 of corporate newspapers demanding a bailout—the American people have embraced authoritarian measures supposedly imposed to win a battle against an invisible enemy. 

We are now beyond the point of no return. The inflicted economic and social damage has already taken a heavy toll and it will get worse the longer health bureaucrats, state governors, and a remarkably clueless president and his apparatchiks demand we stay imprisoned in our homes, frightened of a bug the state and its media have fictionally rendered as an insatiable and inescapable Gorgon of Doom. 

https://twitter.com/BarbaraMcK42/status/1246210326405599232

Scott C. Tips, president of the National Health Federation, writes:

In February 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO)—never known for its accuracy or consistency—declared a “Pandemic” for the coronavirus and claimed that the mortality rate for the novel coronavirus disease now designated as COVID-19 was 3.4%, while that for the seasonal flu was 0.1%. Of course, the news media ran with those numbers and splashed scary headlines across the World stating how much more deadly this new virus was than the seasonal flu. The problem with WHO’s statement, however, was that they applied two different formulas for the two viruses. For the COVID-19 disease, for example, they simply didn’t count any of the mild cases of COVID-19 that resolved themselves; yet, they did with the seasonal flu. If WHO were to apply the same formula to seasonal flu cases as it did with COVID-19 cases, then the seasonal flu is revealed more truthfully as being twice as deadly as the COVID-19 virus.

In other words, the globalist WHO—essentially a PR group for transnational Big Pharma and what should be considered the health-industrial complex—is engaged in massive fraud. 

The COVID-19 aggrandizement and propaganda campaign is not simply a public relations scheme for Big Pharma and its highly dubious—and often deadly—vaccines. It also serves as a cover for authoritarian measures the ruling elite have schemed to put in place for decades, measures designed to monitor and control everything you do. Orwell’s helicopters peering in bedroom windows in search of sex offenders—or drones in search of the infected and suspected vaccine scofflaws—are now a stark reality.

9/11 wasn’t sufficient. The reach of that false flag event’s fear quotient and authoritarian measures were limited and ultimately muted. The fairy tale prospect of cave-dwelling terrorists plotting dirty bomb attacks on kindergartens and other nefarious acts of deviltry had limited effectiveness and relatively short shelf life. 

However, an invisible virus portrayed as a pandemic on par with the Black Death is far more effective than a cartoon nemesis like Osama bin Laden in the ongoing effort to move cattle—as our rulers consider us—in the preferred direction. 

In addition to “smart” surveillance and control of the populace, the virus panic is being manipulated to cover and shift blame for a ransacked economy. 

“The economy was already faltering. The false boom stimulated by a decade of monetary meth was likely turning to bust even before the virus,” writes Keith Weiner. 

The real culprits pushing for economic collapse—the globalist financial class and kindred corporate fascists—want to attribute slamming on the economic brakes and toppling an already precarious house of cards to a virus that so far is little worse than seasonal flu, if that. 

It is now obvious a thoroughly propagandized populace will readily accept what amounts to an open-ended house arrest and the nonsensical authoritarian demands of the state—don’t go outside, don’t go to the grocery store or pharmacy, fashion DIY masks out of t-shirts and furnace filters, snitch on your neighbors if you suspect an infection, condemn the preppers as selfish hoarders, et cetera. 

Our future is no longer in doubt. The psychopathic control freaks are steering us toward world totalitarianism. Henry Kissinger recently advocated as much in the War Street Journal, following up a similar call for by the former “Right Honorable” Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. 

A virus has accomplished what the war on manufactured terror was unable to pull off—driving us with nary a bleat of complaint toward the rocks of economic and social destruction. 

Detect, Deter and Annihilate: How the Police State Will Deal with a Coronavirus Outbreak

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it’s indistinguishable from the purest paranoia.”— Terrence Rafferty, New York Times

What do zombies have to do with the U.S. government’s plans for dealing with a coronavirus outbreak?

Read on, and I’ll tell you.

The zombie narrative was popularized by the hit television series The Walking Dead, in which a small group of Americans attempt to survive in a zombie-ridden, post-apocalyptic world where they’re not only fighting off flesh-eating ghouls but cannibalistic humans.

For a while there, zombies could be found lurking around every corner: wreaking havoc at gun shows, battling corsets in movies such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and running for their lives in 5K charity races.

Understandably, zombie fiction plays to our fears and paranoia, while allowing us to “envision how we and our own would thrive if everything went to hell and we lost all our societal supports.” Yet as journalist Syreeta McFadden points out, while dystopian stories used to reflect our anxieties, now they reflect our reality, mirroring how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

Indeed, the U.S. government has spent a lot of time and energy in recent years using zombies as the models for a variety of crisis scenarios not too dissimilar from what we are currently experiencing.

For instance, back in 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put together a zombie apocalypse preparation kit “that details everything you would need to have on hand in the event the living dead showed up at your front door.” The CDC, in conjunction with the Dept. of Defense, even used zombies to put government agents through their paces in mock military drills.

Fear the Walking Dead—AMC’s spinoff of its popular Walking Dead series—drove this point home by dialing back the clock to when the zombie outbreak first appears and setting viewers down in the midst of societal unrest not unlike our own experiences of recent years (“a bunch of weird incidents, police protests, riots, and … rapid social entropy”). Then, as Forbes reports, “the military showed up and we fast-forwarded into an ad hoc police state with no glimpse at what was happening in the world around our main cast of hapless survivors.”

Forbes found Fear’s quick shift into a police state to be far-fetched, but anyone who has been paying attention in recent years knows that the groundwork was laid long ago for the government—i.e., the military—to intervene and lock down the nation in the event of a national disaster.

We’re seeing this play out now as the coronavirus contagion spreads.

What we have yet to experience (although it may only be a matter of time) is that the government through the imposition of martial law could pose a greater threat to our safety (and our freedoms) than any virus.

As the Atlantic noted about Fear the Walking Dead: “The villains aren’t the zombies, who rarely appear, but the U.S. military, who sweep into an L.A. suburb to quarantine the survivors. Zombies are, after all, a recognizable threat—but Fear plumbs drama and horror from the betrayal by institutions designed to keep people safe.”

Indeed, zombie fiction perfectly embodies the government’s paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored, tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered impotent.

Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons?

For years now, the government has been carrying out military training drills with zombies as the enemy. In 2011, the DOD created a 31-page instruction manual for how to protect America from a terrorist attack carried out by zombie forces. In 2012, the CDC released a guide for surviving a zombie plague. That was followed by training drills for members of the military, police officers and first responders.

As journalist Andrea Peyser reports:

Coinciding with Halloween 2012, a five-day national conference was put on by the HALO Corp. in San Diego for more than 1,000 first responders, military personnel and law enforcement types. It included workshops produced by a Hollywood-affiliated firm in…overcoming a zombie invasion. Actors were made up to look like flesh-chomping monsters. The Department of Homeland Security even paid the $1,000 entry fees for an unknown number of participants…

“Zombie disaster” drills were held in October 2012 and ’13 at California’s Sutter Roseville Medical Center. The exercises allowed medical center staff “to test response to a deadly infectious disease, a mass-casualty event, terrorism event and security procedures”…

[In October 2014], REI outdoor-gear stores in Soho and around the country are to hold free classes in zombie preparedness, which the stores have been providing for about three years.

The zombie exercises appeared to be kitschy and fun—government agents running around trying to put down a zombie rebellion—but what if the zombies in the exercises were us, the citizenry, viewed by those in power as mindless, voracious, zombie hordes?

Consider this: the government started playing around with the idea of using zombies as stand-ins for enemy combatants in its training drills right around the time the Army War College issued its 2008 report, warning that an economic crisis in the U.S. could lead to massive civil unrest that would require the military to intervene and restore order.

That same year, it was revealed that the government had amassed more than 8 million names of Americans considered a threat to national security, to be used “by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.” The program’s name, Main Core, refers to the fact that it contains “copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.”

Also in 2008, the Pentagon launched the Minerva Initiative, a $75 million military-driven research project focused on studying social behavior in order to determine how best to cope with mass civil disobedience or uprisings. The Minerva Initiative has funded projects such as “Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?” which “conflates peaceful activists with ‘supporters of political violence’ who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on ‘armed militancy’ themselves.”

In 2009, the Dept. of Homeland Security issued its reports on Rightwing and Leftwing Extremism, in which the terms “extremist” and “terrorist” were used interchangeably to describe citizens they perceived to be disgruntled or anti-government.

Meanwhile, a government campaign was underway to spy on Americans’ mail, email and cell phone communications. News reports indicate that the U.S. Postal Service has handled more than 150,000 requests by federal and state law enforcement agencies to monitor Americans’ mail, in addition to photographing every piece of mail sent through the postal system.

Fast forward a few years more and local police were being transformed into extensions of the military, taught to view members of their community as suspects, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and equipped with all of the technology and weaponry of a soldier on a battlefield.

The Obama administration then hired a domestic terrorism czar whose job is to focus on anti-government American “extremists” who have been designated a greater threat to America than ISIS or al Qaeda. As part of the government’s so-called war on right-wing extremism, the Obama administration agreed to partner with the United Nations to take part in its Strong Cities Network program, which is training local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism.

Nothing has changed for the better under the Trump Administration.

Those who believe in and exercise their rights under the Constitution (namely, the right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share their political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), continue to be promoted to the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

“We the people” or, more appropriately, “we the zombies” are the enemy in the eyes of the government. This coronavirus merely ups the ante.

So when presented with the Defense Department’s battle plan for defeating an army of the walking dead, you might find yourself tempted to giggle over the fact that a taxpayer-funded government bureaucrat actually took the time to research and write about vegetarian zombies, evil magic zombies, chicken zombies, space zombies, bio-engineered weaponized zombies, radiation zombies, symbiant-induced zombies, and pathogenic zombies.

However, in an age of extreme government paranoia, this is no laughing matter.

The DOD’s strategy for dealing with a zombie uprising, outlined in “CONOP 8888,” is for all intents and purposes a training manual for the government in how to put down a citizen uprising or at least an uprising of individuals “infected” with a dangerous disease or dangerous ideas about freedom.

Rest assured that the tactics and difficulties outlined in the “fictional training scenario” are all too real, beginning with martial law.

As the DOD training manual states: “zombies [stand-ins for “we the people”] are horribly dangerous to all human life and zombie infections have the potential to seriously undermine national security and economic activities that sustain our way of life. Therefore having a population that is not composed of zombies or at risk from their malign influence is vital to U.S. and Allied national interests.”

So how does the military plan to put down a zombie (a.k.a. citizen) uprising?

The strategy manual outlines five phases necessary for a counter-offensive: shape, deter, seize initiative, dominate, stabilize and restore civil authority. Here are a few details:

Phase 0 (Shape): Conduct general zombie awareness training. Monitor increased threats (i.e., surveillance). Carry out military drills. Synchronize contingency plans between federal and state agencies. Anticipate and prepare for a breakdown in law and order.

Phase 1 (Deter): Recognize that zombies cannot be deterred or reasoned with. Carry out training drills to discourage other countries from developing or deploying attack zombies and publicly reinforce the government’s ability to combat a zombie threat. Initiate intelligence sharing between federal and state agencies. Assist the Dept. of Homeland Security in identifying or discouraging immigrants from areas where zombie-related diseases originate.

Phase 2 (Seize initiative): Recall all military personal to their duty stations. Fortify all military outposts. Deploy air and ground forces for at least 35 days. Carry out confidence-building measures with nuclear-armed peers such as Russia and China to ensure they do not misinterpret the government’s zombie countermeasures as preparations for war. Establish quarantine zones. Distribute explosion-resistant protective equipment. Place the military on red alert. Begin limited scale military operations to combat zombie threats. Carry out combat operations against zombie populations within the United States that were “previously” U.S. citizens.

Phase 3 (Dominate): Lock down all military bases for 30 days. Shelter all essential government personnel for at least 40 days. Equip all government agents with military protective gear. Issue orders for military to kill all non-human life on sight. Initiate bomber and missile strikes against targeted sources of zombie infection, including the infrastructure. Burn all zombie corpses. Deploy military to lock down the beaches and waterways.

Phase 4 (Stabilize): Send out recon teams to check for remaining threats and survey the status of basic services (water, power, sewage infrastructure, air, and lines of communication). Execute a counter-zombie ISR plan to ID holdout pockets of zombie resistance. Use all military resources to target any remaining regions of zombie holdouts and influence. Continue all actions from the Dominate phase.

Phase 5 (Restore civil authority): Deploy military personnel to assist any surviving civil authorities in disaster zones. Reconstitute combat capabilities at various military bases. Prepare to redeploy military forces to attack surviving zombie holdouts. Restore basic services in disaster areas.

Notice the similarities?

Surveillance. Military drills. Awareness training. Militarized police forces. Martial law.

As I point out in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if there is any lesson to be learned, it is simply this: whether the threat to national security comes in the form of imaginary zombies, actual terrorists, American citizens infected with the coronavirus, or disgruntled American citizens infected with dangerous ideas about freedom, the government’s response to such threats remains the same: detect, deter and annihilate.