Loretta Lynch Tells Her First Whopping Lie as New Attorney General of the U.S.

“I don’t have drones.” 

This bald-faced, outrageous lie was uttered by Obama’s newly-minted “chief law enforcement officer of the United States,” Loretta Lynch, in front of an assemblage of human drones from the corporate media. Then they all went off and played make-believe-it’s-true.

Lynch is the head of the Department of “Justice.” The FBI secret police is part of the Department of “Justice.” The FBI operates drones. So Lynch is being nakedly dishonest. (Of course, being a lawyer, if she was called on it, she would say she was being literal, that is, she doesn’t personally own a drone which she keeps in her garage. See? Not misleading at all! That would be a Clinton interpretation. Hey, what does “is” mean, anyway?)

Lynch had summoned the corporate media to hear her announce an investigation of the brutal Baltimore police, who just murdered Freddie Gray, the latest in an innumerable series of crimes. Had there not been violent demonstrations as a result, nothing at all would be happening. As usual, only violence forces the rulers to make concessions. I don’t say that as an endorsement of violence, just a sad fact in this repressive society. It must also be noted that only the violence of the oppressed is “violence,” not the much greater, ubiquitous, systematic, and deliberate violence of the state and its agents. The elites only decry “violence” when it comes from the underclass. [1]

The New York Times dropped Lynch’s lie into the last two paragraphs of a sixteen paragraph story that read as a complete non sequitur to the article itself.  Here are the last two paragraphs. Notice how the NYT dismisses the real life experiences of the eyewitnesses who were the targets of this sinister sneaky state surveillance as “rumors:”

“At the news conference, the attorney general refuted rumors about Justice Department drones conducting surveillance of the city during last week’s unrest.

“I don’t have any drones,” she said.

There it is, a whopping lie, stuck at the very end of the article. [2] The NY Times lets readers believe the lie is true. It doesn’t point out the blatant falseness of Lynch’s Lie. Thus it is an accomplice once again in perpetuating a nightmarish police state by pretending it doesn’t exist. And so is most of the rest of the corporate oligarchy’s propaganda system, with a few honorable exceptions. (McClatchy comes to mind.)

As far as “refuting rumors,” since the “refutation” consisted of a blatant falsehood, nothing was refuted. The eyewitness accounts of those on the ground still stand- even if the New York Times, instead of reporting them, airily brushes them away as “rumors.” What high-handed assholes. The Times wants to make sure that just in case any of its oh-so-respectable readers heard some truths they're not supposed to know, those readers realize those are just rumors.

Thus does the NY Times turn falsehood into truth, and truth into falsehood. And designates a naked lie as a refutation of the lived reality of those being targeted.

These days, it is standard operating procedure to use drones, and cellphone signal grabbers, and cameras, and facial recognition technology, and license plate readers, and on and on, to spy on ALL protests that those in power don’t like. The information is added to the police state databases, and software is then used to spot patterns, map social networks, and pick out individuals for personal destruction.

As for Lynch’s crude lie, it doesn’t match the self-righteous unction of the lies of her predecessor, Eric Holder Jr. He beat his chest in public about his “opposition” to the death penalty, while unleashing his minions to pursue precisely that penalty in various cases. He claimed to oppose mass incarceration while making sure to continue it. He redefined due process to mean NO due process. He contemptuously refused to turn over subpoenaed documents to Congress in various DO”J” scandals and fulminated he was the victim of racist disrespect. He let the top echelon of the financial elite buy their way out of trouble, and offered up fatuous sophistries in justification. All in all, the po’ girl from the humble background (so we are told, and expected to celebrate how she rose to be a chief persecutor) probably lacks the sly cunning of corporate lawyer Eric Holder. But we shall see.

1] And when violence comes from revolutionaries, the elites get positively hysterical. They’re still denouncing the “violence” of “Sixties radicals.” Some asshole just wrote yet another book attacking the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, etc., and is getting a big boost from bourgeois media for his ideological effort. Talk about beating a dead horse. Perhaps they fear a return of such militancy, given the unrest their murderous police have managed to stoke, on top of the daily grinding oppression in a society in which the poor are preyed upon by the human hyenas who wield political and economic power over the powerless. I have no time for a book that wants to excoriate the Weatherpeople for planting a few bombs that killed no one (by design) while ignoring the six million tons of bombs dropped on Vietnam, which helped killed millions of people. It was those bombs that animated and radicalized the Weatherpeople in the first place.

2] “Justice Department Begins Civil Rights Inquiry Into Baltimore Police,” New York Times, May 8, 2015.

Update: the NY Times changed the title to the pro-police "Baltimore Case Is Full of Conflicts, Lawyers for Officers Contend." The link above goes to that article instead of the original one. The substituted article w deletes Lynch's lie.


And these smarmy, underhanded propagandists like to hammer the elisions and sneaky deletions from history of their opponents in Russia (and before that, the Soviet Union). Nothing like a pot calling a kettle black.

But I was a step ahead of the commissars at the NY Times and their Soviet-style journalism..I saved the article webpage in its original form before they pulled their switcheroo. You can view it at "Here's That Mysteriously Vanished NY Times Article, Resurrected from the Grave!"