Memo To Trump Impeachment Pushers: Be Careful What You Wish For

Who do you imagine will succeed "The Donald" if you succeed?

Mike Pence, the religious fanatic and extreme reactionary, becomes president.

Pence's domestic policies will be every bit as bad, and probably worse in some areas (such as the war against abortion rights) than Trump's.

On foreign policy, at least Trump is internally divided. He has "isolationist" (noninterventionist) impulses, so part of the time you get that, while at other times you get a violent lashing out, as the attack on the Assad regime airfield in Syria after the sarin attack by that regime- my only complaint about that Trump attack is that it was ineffectual. Plus, Trump isn't particularly interested in foreign policy. Therefore U.S. imperialism under Trump would probably be less focuses, less intense, and less assiduously imposed everywhere possible at all times than is the norm. Which is a MAJOR REASON the power establishment (political, media, and Deep State, which includes the military and secret police organizations) is so intent on hamstringing or, if possible, ousting Trump.

Pence can be expected to be much like Reagan and the Bushes on foreign policy; aggressively violent, employing the military and CIA very extensively.

Even worse, is that Pence projects a low-key, non-threatening, friendly and placid demeanor. In a word, he comes across as amiable. Thus he will be the more effective evil. Just as Obama was the more effective evil than Bush II, or than McCain or Romney would have been. Simply put, the "nice guy" personas of state criminals like Obama and Pence simply don't arouse the public opposition that Republicans generally and especially politicians who come across as intense do.

So Trump is a horror, but Pence would be worse.

By the way, Obama was a horror, Bush the Younger was a horror, Clinton was a horror, Bush the Elder was a horror, Reagan the fascist was a horror, Ford helped Indonesia invade East Timor and exterminate a third of the population (with Kissinger at his side, a policy continued by Clinton), Nixon (enough said), Johnson sent a 550,000 invasion force into Vietnam, and invaded the Dominican Republic to reverse an election he didn't like, and arranged for military dictatorship in Brazil, a U.S. plot begun by Kennedy, who created a U.S. torturer-training program in Latin America under the rubric of the "Alliance for Progress," and Eisenhower was responsible for the CIA coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) which ushered in two of the world's most murderous dictatorship, a quarter million people murdered in each case, and the consequences still being suffered by the peoples of those countries to this day. Truman, the man who atomic-bombed two cities, enough said- and I could go back and back, indeed all the way to Washington, but there are too many, and the crimes are literally in the tens of thousands. because imperialism is a criminal enterprise, and  the U.S. was imperialist from the beginning, when white colonizers "discovered" the Western Hemisphere, and  eliminated in North American over 90% of the people whose ancestors predated the Europeans' arrival by 15,000 years, in order to seize the land and resources.

The point is, Trump is not uniquely bad. That's the establishment line, because he's unpredictable and not anchored to their ideology. That means there are possibilities for cracks in the system to open. That is one reason people instinctively voted for him- on the hope he would "shake things up." Of course he won't deliver on his promises, but he IS a destabilizing presence in the White House. If nothing else, the attention of the criminal rulers is somewhat diverted by their obsession with demonizing, "investigating," undermining, neutralizing, and ultimately ousting him. That gives the world's population a bit of breathing space, or a lessening in the intensity of U.S. attacks (including perhaps domestic dissidents, with the FBI and CIA and NSA prioritizing their conspiracies against Trump).

The U.S. is a nation founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery, which has, with the immense power it has amassed, a world-historic opportunity to change the nature of civilization, but instead is simply repeating the same millenia-old game of domination, exploitation, and oppression. (By the way, committing genocide has been a very good way to get to the White House. For example, Andrew Jackson, exterminator of the Creek Indians, got to be President, as did William Henry Harrison, who destroyed the Confederacy of Northwest Tribes and oversaw the elimination of the charismatic native leader Tecumseh.)


In America now, we see a colossal waste of power and the squandering of a world-historic opportunity to change the world for the better.  And what a lack of ambition this bespeaks. The ambition to do something truly great and world-changing. With its unparalleled power, the U.S. could put humanity on a truly civilized path. Instead Americans prefer to delude themselves that their nation-state (and by extension, themselves) are "great" simply because they are powerful. But since the power is largely (not entirely) used for evil, their "greatness" is of a piece with the "greatness" of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. It may be awesome, but it is not admirable. It is anti-human, as we see even today, yet again, with President Trump and his Secretary of State, Rex "Gusher" Tillerson, praising the Saudi oppressors, among the very worst in the world, while simultaneously, with the maximal hypocrisy typical of the U.S. government, slamming Iran for its repression and "terrorism." (Trump and his gang talk as if IRAN is behind ISIS and Al-Qaeda, not Saudi Arabia!)

The blather and bullshit sure gets repetitive after awhile.

Too bad so many of the fellow travelers of the Democratic Party, who should know better, are mindlessly parroting the propaganda lines of that Party and its secret police temporary allies-of-convenience. (Rather stunning to hear Democracy Now boss Amy Goodman repeatedly saying the phrase "Russian meddling" in the U.S. election!)

Maybe putting things in historical and political perspective would help them think more clearly. No need to take sides in a battle between Godzilla and Mothra.  (Trump and his establishment enemies.) The proper response is to illuminate what is happening, including the real causes of the conflict, to report objectively and demystify the show that is being presented in the Bourgeois Media Theater.

Typical victims of U.S. "Defense of Freedom"

American Heroes with captive Woman

 

U.S. Torture To Come Roaring Back, As U.S. Continues Its Moral Degeneration. Obama Opened the Door.

Three of the top power positions of the U.S. Empire are being filled by men who are publicly and proudly pro-torture. First and foremost is the man at the very top, president-to-be Donald Trump, who during his campaign for the office promised to "bring back waterboarding and a lot worse." [1]

The designated Attorney General, head of the U.S. Department of "Justice," the racist and remorseless black vote suppressor Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, U.S. Senator from Alabama, is another public supporter of torture. Under his command will be a large part of the domestic repression apparatus of the U.S.: all U.S. prosecutors, the FBI secret police, the DEA drug and political police,  the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms police, the U.S. Marshals, and the Federal prisons- a total of about 114,000 personnel.

The man Trump picked to head the CIA, the U.S. global Gestapo, is Republican House Representative Mike Pompeo, a former U.S. Army tank officer, another torture-lover who for good measure has called on television for the execution of heroic, self-sacrificing whistleblower Edward Snowden. His new boss, Trump, also wants to use state power to murder Snowden. [2]

As the Republicans control the U.S. Senate, confirmation is pretty certain if not guaranteed for these vicious trolls. And Democrats are punks when it comes to fighting Republicans.

Looking at U.S. history, the arc of U.S. moral degeneration around torture comes clearly into view.
The U.S. has always tortured people, of course. Native American prisoners, slaves, and others of course were subjected to gruesome tortures. U.S. prisons have always been sites of torture, physical and psychological. Filipino insurgents were tortured during the invasion and subjugation of the Philippines around 1900.

The U.S. military and the CIA tortured countless thousands of Vietnamese during the invasion and occupation of Vietnam. We have a large body of evidence of military torture from the testimony of veterans.
And as part of Operation Phoenix, the CIA death squad program run by William Colby (later director of CIA), torture was routine, and at least 50,000 Vietnamese were murdered.

But officially torture was not acknowledged. Officially the U.S. didn't torture. An absurd lie, but in those days vice still felt the need to pay tribute to virtue in the form of hypocrisy.

Then came the regime of Bush the Younger (January 2001-January 2009), which pretty overtly systematized torture by the military and CIA, even issuing written directives and guidelines and instructions for carrying it out- while denying torture was torture. A phrase was cribbed from a Gestapo torture manual, "enhanced interrogation techniques," with the insistence that U.S. torture wasn't torture. To this day, the U.S. media rarely will call it by its right name, instead using the euphemism "harsh interrogation techniques." Perhaps they think this slight change proves their independence from state control.  The more daring among the commentariat and "journalists" once in awhile dart to the edge of the forbidden ideological zone and call it "brutal interrogation methods." Hint hint. (Oh, they are so brave!)

So torture became official policy, while it was denied that it was torture. (That's called having your cake and eating it too.) When photographic evidence of torture at the U.S.' Abu Ghraib political prison in Iraq surfaced, due to the carelessness and lack of sophistication of soldiers there who weren't schooled in secret-police deviousness but had the habit of thinking that whatever they did under orders was legitimate and no shame and didn't need to be treated as a deep dark secret, the Bush regime put on a burlesque act of shock and surprise and a handful of fall guy privates and a sergeant who had been a sadistic prison guard in civilian life had to be sacrificed to military courts martial.

Barack Hussein Obama paved the way for the coming torture holocaust of the Trump regime by refusing to enforce U.S. law and treaty obligations by prosecuting the Bush regime torturers. To be sure, this would have been politically difficult and would have involved a battle royale with the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) and the establishment media, but was absolutely necessary morally and politically. Of course, it would have been exceedingly naive to expect the political hustler and con man Obama to undertake such a necessary task. His only interest was in successfully climbing the greasy pole of U.S. establishment politics and sitting comfortably at its top, perched at the pinnacle of power. Like virtually all politicians of his party, power was his end, not a means to some other end, such as justice, or making the world better. (And don't believe their hype to the contrary.)

If you allow people to break laws with impunity, deterrence against law-breaking and evil-doing is destroyed.

With the precedent established that the executive branch could get away with more or less overt torture, there is no bar to the Trump regime's bringing torture back with a vengeance.

Law in the U.S. is merely a weapon to attack the weak, target victims, and feed the insatiable maw of the prison-industrial complex, whose roots trace back to Nixon (the slogan for this repression being "law and order") and was ramped up by the Clinton regime especially.

The other use of law is to have legal lackeys like John Yoo (for Bush) and his counterparts in the Obama regime concoct tortured legal rationales for criminal policies like torture (Bush) and assassinations (Obama). Obama added the extra wrinkle of treating the rationales themselves as state secrets, not to be revealed. A real Kafkaesque touch.

With the Bush regime having established the precedent that torture could be conducted openly with just a thin veil of mendacious nomenclature to provide a means of cynical denial, Trump and his minions now dispense with even the euphemisms.

Thus the U.S. has gone from hiding its torture by pretending it didn't exist, to pretending its torture wasn't torture by slapping a Nazi label on it, to dispensing with pretense entirely. A pattern of moral degeneracy.

It needs to be mentioned that torture didn't actually stop under Obama. Torture, psychological and physical, is a daily occurrence in U.S. jails and prisons. And the UN Rapporteur on Torture officially found that U.S. Army soldier Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning was subjected to conditions amounting to torture in the Marine brig at Quantico. (Manning's treatment was highly irregular- being kept in Marine, not Army custody, being kept naked, not being tried for two years, during which time his rights were grossly violated, and more.) Obama has shown a vindictive streak numerous times, against whistleblowers, journalists who reveal state secrets (crimes), people who heckle him (he had Egyptian secret police thugs break Medea Benjamin's arm in the Cairo airport), and murdering the teenage son and nephew of Anwar al-Awlaki.

Obama is slick and smooth, Trump bombastic and crude. But both are gangsters.

What a subtle hint, Donald! From Al-Jazeera interview with Edward Snowden 
and Daniel Ellsberg. View clip here.

1]  Torture "a lot worse" means more "detainees" sadistically tortured to death, like the Afghan taxi driver chained by his wrists hanging from a wall whose legs were pulped by a club-wielding "contractor," one of those fascist military veterans the U.S. produces. (The victim was he subject of the documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side," a reference to Bush regime vice president Dick Cheney's assertion thatthe U.S. would have to go to "the dark side" in its "war against terrorism."

2] Pompeo claimed Snowden put "friends of mine" "in enormous danger" and called for his execution. After "due process," that is- see how fair Pompeo is? Pompeo told two whopping lies in this brief segment. That Snowden "released" the NSA documents to foreign powers, and the "enormous danger" canard. Obviously NO U.S. troops (who Army veteran Pompeo was referring to) were put in ANY danger, and Snowden didn't "release" the documents at all. He gave them to journalists and ONLY to journalists, and didn't retain copies. The journalists in turn are deciding what information to release to the public.
 
Watch liar Pompeo.

U.S. Senate Votes Unanimously To Empower 9/11 Victim Families to Sue Saudis: Obama Vows Veto

 The U.S. Senate voted unanimously yesterday for the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA).

The bill would limit sovereign immunity so as to allow lawsuits against foreign states for injuries, death and damages inside the U.S. stemming from a tort, including  acts of terrorism, committed anywhere by a foreign state or official. It now has to pass the House of Representatives. U.S. president Barack "DroneMan" Obama will veto it, as he insists he will. (He's true to his word when it's doing something bad.) Then the Congress will have to pass it again by at least a two-thirds majority in each chamber for the act to become law. This will enable the families of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government in U.S. courts, where so far sovereign immunity has shielded the Saudis from civil liability (and possible imposition of monetary damage awards) for their complicity in the attacks.

We see Obama once again protecting the Bush regime, as he did on the matter of torture. As I explained in my previous essay, dragging into public view the Saudi government role in the 9/11/01 atrocity threatens to pull the submerged role of the fascist Deep State out of the black lagoon where it lies hidden.

Obama of course is also a great friend of the Saudis, authorizing the sale of billions of dollars worth of U.S. weapons to them to wage their war in Yemen. Obama also has the U.S. military aiding the Saudi war effort by providing U.S. aerial tankers to refuel the Saudis' jets, and resupplying the munitions (including cluster bombs) the Saudis are dropping on homes, hospitals, clinics, markets, mosques, and the occasion armed Houthi tribesmen. (Over 3,000 Yemeni civilians have been killed by the Saudi-Gulf-State-U.S. war coalition so far, says the UN.)

Return of the Repressed: Pulling on 9/11 Thread Threatens to Unravel U.S.-Saudi Mass Murder Conspiracy

In the last few weeks, various segments of the U.S. media, and some mostly out-of-office politicians, have been agitating for the release of a suppressed 28-page segment of the joint Congressional inquiry into the 9/11/01  attacks in the U.S. that dealt with Saudi Arabian connections to the alleged al-Qaeda kamikaze plane hijackers. Rupert Murdoch's Fox "News" has had it's ranters jabbering away about the outrage of withholding the section, how the government is covering up. (But for some easy-to-guess reason they didn't once say "Bush," even though he was the president at the time, the guy who insisted on "classifying" the part of the report that damns the Saudi regime, the guy who fought against even having an investigating commission, and tried to put Henry Kissinger at its helm, and insisted that he and Cheney not testify under oath, and obstructed the commission in myriad ways. I'm sure many viewers had the impression it was all Obama's doing- after all, who personifies "the government" now?) John Lehman, a former Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan regime and member of the 9/11 Commission (separate from the Congressional inquiry) has called for the release of information on the Saudi government connection. Various other media commentators besides Murdoch's minions have similarly raised the issue.

For several years former Florida Senator Bob Graham has been pushing to get more information about the Saudi government connection to the al-Qaeda kamikaze attack of September 11, 2001, into the public domain. He has been in a tug-of-war with the FBI secret police agency, which, apparently following orders from first the Bush regime and now Obama, stubbornly refuses to divulge anything and rudely rebuffed Graham as a crank. [1]

This issue is currently getting new traction because a lawsuit by relatives of some of those killed on September 11, 2001, against the Saudi Arabian regime for its complicity in the attacks on the buildings, A previous lawsuit against the Saudis was dismissed by the U.S. courts. What is different now is a change in the political climate.

The Obama regime supposedly is poised to (very reluctantly) dribble out some bits of the suppressed 28-pages from the Congressional inquiry. [2]

The chair and co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former right-wing Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton (a past veteran of whitewashes) have suddenly piped up to tell people not to pay much mind to those 28-pages in the Congressional inquiry because the 9/11 Commission checked all that out and there was just one low-level Saudi contact with the hijackers. Which is a rather odd stance for them to take, because after the Commission issued its report, the two of them wrote a book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, in which they say the Commission was "set up to fail"! So then, what makes you guys think you got to the bottom of things, hmmm? These guys write that the lies of the Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration were so persistent that they toyed with the idea of doing an investigation of obstruction of justice by officials from those bodies. (But they punked out, of course. Lifelong made members of the establishment nomenklatura rarely sacrifice their privileges, status, and precious "reputations" for such fluff as morality, ethics, truth, justice, yadda yadda yadda.) [3]

It has long been known that Saudi diplomats and agents provided funds to the airplane hijackers. It is also no secret that the Bush regime barred the FBI from questioning numerous Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, and that an exception to the grounding of airline flight was made to hustle the Saudis out of the country in the days after 9/11/01.

As I mentioned, Bush and Cheney refused to provide testimony to the 9/11 Commission under oath. In other words, they wanted the freedom to lie.

The month before 9/11, the so-called "20th hijacker," Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested in Minnesota after arousing suspicion in his flight-training school. He was pretext-charged with an immigration violation and held. The French secret police had informed the Americans that he was a "terrorist."

The FBI field office in Minnesota asked Washington FBI headquarters to obtain a FISA court warrant for Mousaoui's computer, and was refused, with the incredible excuse that the court would not grant such a warrant. (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act "court" virtually never refuses warrant requests.) Moussaoui is a French national.

Two of the hijackers lived in San Diego, California, in the home of an FBI informer. After 9/11, the FBI refused to present the informer and his FBI handler to Congress for questioning.

The CIA tracked some of the hijackers into the U.S. and kept this secret from the FBI and from Richard Clarke, the chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council in the White House.

On the day of the attack the FBI immediately fingered 19 men as hijackers aboard the planes. A pristine passport for one of them magically survived the fireball and inferno of the plane crashing into one of the towers and was "found" on the ground.

These and numerous other facts indicate that the secret police were running a conspiracy to allow the attacks to occur.

But it's worse than that.

Overwhelming proof of the fact that three buildings in lower Manhattan were demolished by planted nano-thermite explosives is contained in a series of videos, ranging in length from a few minutes to over 2 hours, available on youtube. These explosives could only have been implanted, a process that would have taken days, by agents of the U.S. government. This was an act of high treason and fascist terrorism, designed to provoke an emotional reaction in the public that would be used by the culprits for their own political ends. 9/11 has elements of the JFK assassination, the Reichstag fire, and Operation Gladio rolled into one. [4]

It appears that the organizers of this conspiracy (which included Richard Cheney and to some unknown extent George Bush and other members of his family with close Saudi connections) intuited that the idea of such a crime would be literally unbelievable to people, and thus not comprehensible. Which is how they planned to get away with it. But the physical (and other) evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable. (Go watch the videos.) It would be physically impossible for even one of those three buildings to collapse straight down into their own footprints, at free fall rate, because planes crashed into two of them, as experienced architects and engineers know and explain.

That's why I say exposing the Saudi connection, pulling on that thread, is a dangerous act for establishment types, who apparently still don't comprehend the truth of the matter.

My theory is the Bush clan, with its close Saudi connections, was tipped to the al-Qaeda plot by the Saudi regime. Doubtless Saudi "intelligence" had long infiltrated al-Qaeda from its birth in the anti-Soviet Afghan war, when the U.S., Saudis, Pakistan, and various jihadists including Osama bin Laden were all on the same side.

The Bush-Cheney regime and elements within the Deep State of the secret police and military saw an opportunity to create the "second Pearl Harbor" they needed to carry out their long-standing goal of invading Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein, and ramming through police state laws greatly increasing the power of the secret police agencies (something Bill Clinton and then-Senator Joseph Biden tried and failed to do.

As a side note, I suspect the journalist Michael Hastings may have been murdered for pursuing the demolition of the World Trade Center buildings.

Now the Saudis are threatening to sell out their hoard of U.S. Treasury bonds if their role is dragged into the open. This rather hysterical response is an indication of guilt. If they aren't guilty, they would just defend themselves in court against the lawsuit by the victims' families.

9/11 is the story of a conspiracy wrapped around a conspiracy. The conspiracy by al-Qaeda was used as an element in a larger conspiracy enveloping it that took advantage of the much smaller conspiracy for its own ends. Both conspiracies achieved their aims. And while Osama bin Laden, coming from an engineering and construction family, probably understood that it wasn't the hijacked planes that caused the spectacular collapse of the towers, letting the credit/blame fall on him and al-Qaeda suited his interests. It made him and his organization appear fearsome and potent, it inspired and galvanized jihadists, and it provoked an attack by the U.S. Bin Laden's strategy was to provoke a war between the Western world and Sunni Muslim fundamentalism, as he made quite clear. Jihadists having beaten the Soviets, bin Laden was overconfident. Perhaps he forgot that the U.S. had his back in that war. In any event, the U.S. is now stuck in a Middle East quagmire, so the final chapter hasn't been written yet. Now the U.S. is wrestling with an even more vicious and fanatical foe, ISIS. And the U.S. has squandered trillions of dollars, mortgaging its future, which is a victory for bin Laden.


1] "Florida Ex-Senator Pursues Claims of Saudi Ties to Sept. 11 Attacks," New York Times, April 13, 2015. Graham, a Democrat, was a chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

2] "White House poised to release secret pages from 9/11 inquiry," AP, April 24, 2016.

3] "A Warning About the Secret 9/11 Pages," New York Times editorial page editor's blog, April 27, 2016. (Of course the New York Times is a reliable partner in any government cover-up.)

9/11 Commission entry at Wikipedia.org.

4] The videos proving the controlled demolitions of the buildings were produced by architects and engineers for 911 truth. Go watch them.

Bush Created "Enemy Combatants." Now Obama Has Invented "Unprivileged Belligerents," Formerly Known as Journalists

Amazingly, the U.S. has openly declared its intent to murder journalists.

As I wrote about yesterday, ["Obama Regime Codifies Policy of Murdering Journalists U.S. Doesn't Like"] under Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Barack Obama, the Department of "Defense" has issued a new manual giving its killers carte blanche to deal with journalists whose work it considers a "threat" in the same manner that "enemy combatants" and "terrorists" are dealt with. These journalists are now to be considered "unprivileged belligerents." A belligerent is an enemy soldier. "Unprivileged" means the normal laws of war do not apply. In short, the Obama regime's Pentagon has declared its intent to murder journalists who displease it too much. (One such journalist, Michael Hastings, was murdered by the government last year, apparently at the instigation of  CIA boss John Brennan. Hastings was reviled by the military for "causing" the firing of general Stanley McCrystal, and held in contempt by establishment pseudo-journalists.) [1]

These categories were specifically created to dehumanize the intended targets of violence to legitimize, morally and pseudo-legally, torture, murder, and indefinite imprisonment in secret locations under barbaric conditions without having to bother with courts, lawyers, or trials. They create the psychological and political conditions to activate these crimes against basic human rights. Thus does Obama take the U.S. further into barbarism, continuing the evil project of his predecessors.
The fact that the U.S. is now openly declaring its "right" to treat journalists it finds annoying as subhuman scum to be eliminated at will moved the New York Times to publish a worried editorial on the matter. (Referenced and linked to in my previous essay noted above.)

The Pentagon document is a declaration of war against journalists who don't toe the U.S. line. Al-Jazeera journalists were targets of lethal U.S. violence from the very start of the "War On Terrorism" in 2001. In the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the target list of journalists was expanded to include "unembedded" journalists, that is, those who would not be stooges of the U.S. military.
What had been unofficial policy, a practice of selective murder thinly veiled under cynical claims of "accidents," is now openly proclaimed as stated U.S. military policy. As usual, the U.S. government does its Alice-In-Wonderland game of calling whatever they proclaim as "lawful." "Law is whatever the U.S. Killer State says it is."

U.S. involvement in or directly murdering journalists goes back at least to 1948, when CBS correspondent George Polk was murdered by Greek fascists and the Truman regime arranged to frame up communists for the crime. Polk had exposed corruption in the the fascist regime of former Nazi collaborations the Truman regime installed in Greece after World War Two. No less a personage than the notorious William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the wartime OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, was detailed to arrange the coverup and frameup. (A communist journalist was tortured into "confessing," among other, ahem, irregularities in the "trial." Make that show trial, a term the self-proclaimed "Free World" was fond of throwing at its Bolshevik adversaries. Or as they say in Wonderland, first the verdict, then then trial.)

The U.S. media and "educational" system has done an assiduous job of erasing the story of George Polk from general knowledge, while cynically recognizing the journalism award named after him. Very little has been written about this tawdry crime of U.S. Imperialism and its fascist underlings. I first learned of it years ago when a now-defunct magazine named More published a cover story about it, telling the true story. Then Kati Marton, a former wife of ABC chief "news" reader Peter Jennings and U.S. State Department tough guy Richard Holbrooke (both now deceased) wrote a book that also endeavored to reveal the truth.

Over the decades, the U.S. has been involved in the murders of hundreds of journalists by the various neo-fascist regimes it has installed in its various satrapies around the world, especially in Latin America. It has directly killed a smaller number, some in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, some inside the U.S. (See my essay referenced above for examples.) The particulars of each case leave no doubt that none were accidents or "suicides," and all were deliberate murders.

The U.S. used to put up a facade of denial. Now they have announced they will no longer even bother with that.

1] For a discussion of the hatred and contempt U.S. corporate propagandists had for the genuine journalist Michael Hastings, see "Michael Hastings: my friend and his enemies," the Guardian, (UK), June 19, 2013.

Remembering Investigative Journalist Danny Casolaro, A Martyr For Truth

While writing the previous blogpost this morning (below) about the Obama regime's newly-declared policy of murdering/torturing/imprisoning-without-trial journalists it doesn't like, I was trying to remember the name of the journalist who was murdered by having his wrists slit in a bathtub.

So I did an Internet search (using duckduckgo.com, which claims not to record your searches, unlike Google) for "journalist slit wrists suicide," since the murder was falsely called suicide by "the authorities." Got his name- Danny Casolaro- right on the first page. Then I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory some more, and- Damn!- Karmic coincidence. He was murdered on this date in 1991. Only a 1-in-365 chance of that.

So I guess that means it's my task to commemorate the man and remind people he lived, what he did, and why he was murdered by the regime of Bush the Elder 24 years ago today.

Danny was a genuine investigative journalist. That is, he actually investigated things that those in power wanted to keep hidden, and he was a journalist in that he thought journalism meant reporting truthfully to the public about matters that properly concerned them. Danny was sufficiently intrepid- or reckless and stupid, his murderers would say- to investigate the so-called "October Surprise." This was the secret deal Reagan's gang made with the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini (aka Evil Demon in U.S. propaganda) of Iran back in 1980 to not free the U.S. embassy "hostages" until James Earl "Jimmy" Carter was no longer president. He was also investigating a number of other secret U.S. Deep State scandals, some of which were CIA criminal operations. (These were Iran-Contra terrorist-financing scheme under Reagan featuring the fascist Colonel Oliver North, an American version of Otto Skorzeny; the BCCI CIA terrorist bank; and the Inslaw theft scandal.)

George H.W. Bush is the prime suspect in the murder conspiracy. He was president at the time, he was Reagan's Vice President for the entirety of Reagan's term (January 1981-January 1989), and he was vice presidential candidate in 1988 when the secret treasonous deal with Iran was arranged. (There's a sinister pattern in U.S. history. The Republicans always accuse the Democrats of treason, the Democrats defensively move to the right to try and prove it ain't so, and the Republicans commit treason, which the Democrats remain silent about. Just as the Republicans undercut the efforts of the Carter regime to free the "hostages," in 1968 Nixon sabotaged the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam War by secretly instructing the "South" Vietnamese fascist regime to boycott those talks. LBJ knew this through FBI surveillance of the "South" Vietnamese embassy, and warrantless wiretaps of Nixon and others, which he was afraid would be revealed. So Nixon got away with it.)

Bush the Elder was Director of the CIA in 1976. He formed close bonds with fascist cutthroats in that agency, some of whom tried to get him elected president in 1980. (That didn't pan out, but he did get to be Reagan's vice president instead.) During his tenure as CIA boss, the CIA helped smuggle the terrorist bombmaker Michael Vernon Townley into the U.S. from Chile. Townley made and planted the bomb that was used to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington, D.C. that same year. A week after the murder, the CIA planted an attributed item in Newsweek, on their "Periscope" page, saying the CIA has determined that the Pinochet regime secret police, DINA, didn't do it. How the CIA could "know" that in just a week wasn't explained. Of course, that was a big fat evil lie, as was subsequently proven. So Bush was a conspirator in an act of international terrorism, a double homicide, and aiding and abetting after the fact. Bush has been tight with the CIA ever since.

The Bush family's ties to terrorism, fascist cutthroats, and criminals are numerous and of long standing, and are no secret except in the U.S. establishment media, which prefers to portray the Bushes in glowing terms. (So much for the "liberal" media.) But if you go to, say, foreign media, or "alternative" media, there is voluminous documentation, as well as in books. See for example "The Bush dynasty and the Cuban criminals," the Guardian, (UK), December 1, 2002. 

A classic fake-out dirty trick was run to discredit the "October Surprise" story. A fake story was generated about Bush himself flying in an SR-71 Blackbird supersonic spyplane to a secret meeting in Spain to cut the deal with the Iranians. This absurd tale was then easily refuted, thus "disproving" the October Surprise "rumor."

A similar style operation was later run on Dan Rather, on behalf of Bush the Younger, regarding that spoiled creep's being AWOL from the cushy slot in the Texas Air National Guard that was arranged by Daddy Bush to keep Bush the Younger out of harm's way during the Vietnam War, yet allowing him to pose as a "veteran" who had "served his country." The real documents were removed from the archives, and forgeries were slipped to Rather's team at CBS, who fell for the bait. When the forgeries were duly exposed, CBS threw Rather overboard. (For some odd reason, American reactionaries have always despised Dan Rather. As Rather is no more "liberal" than the other corporate media talking heads, I never got what their beef was. But highly irrational people are often hard to figure out, especially since their "explanations" for things are equal parts falsehoods and incoherencies.)

These types of covert, nasty operations are one of the hallmarks of both the CIA and the GOP. Both are fascistic, vicious, ruthless, and devious. Both also have a history of murdering people who threaten to expose their crimes. (Scores were murdered just to eliminate witnesses after the assassination of JFK.)

Danny Casolaro had to work as a freelancer. Typically, U.S. media had no use for a genuine journalist who was interested in pursuing critical stories that would shine a light on the criminal nature of the U.S. power structure and expose some of its leading personages as the thugs they are. The U.S. media likes to misappropriate the slogan "speaking truth to power," as if they are brave Davids and not oppressive Goliaths. But those who really do try to speak truth to power are subject to severe retaliation. It could be a broken arm, dislocated shoulder, and torn ligaments, as happened to Medea Benjamin for daring to confront Emperor Obama during one of his speechifyings, it could be imprisonment, or it could be death, as happened to Casolaro.

 Casolaro was only 44 when he died. The beneficiaries of his silencing, Reagan and Bush the Elder, got to live to ripe old ages. (Bush of course is still haunting the earth and arranging who knows what evil schemes with his Saudi partners.) If the U.S. had had a genuine news industry at that time, his murder would have raised an uproar, demands for a real investigation, and followups on the leads he was pursuing.

Wikipedia has some information and links that are useful, although it inexplicably avers that " no evidence of murder was ever found." I beg to differ. His DEAD BODY is rather strong evidence of murder, as well as the totality of the circumstances around his death. Give no credence to that irritating falsehood.

It shouldn't fall to me alone to remind people of this crime, its coverup, and what it reveals about the gangster nature of the U.S. system of power. Really, people who consider themselves progressive or left-wing or opponents of the system of U.S. power, should not let such martyrs- and such crimes- be forgotten. Others have far more resources and support than I do. I think it's irresponsible and even feckless to unwittingly (or wittingly in some cases!) aid and abet a gangster government and ruling class in making sure its crimes stay forgotten.

Danny Casolaro, 1947-1991.

Obama Regime Codifies Policy of Murdering Journalists U.S. Doesn't Like

Another day, another U.S. outrage. Under the Obama regime, the Pentagon has issued a manual on how the U.S. military is to deal with journalists they don't like. They are to be deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” treated as enemy spies, and subject to assassination. [1]

The “privilege” being stripped from journalists would be the Geneva Conventions, an allegedly binding treaty obligation of the U.S. But as the regime of Bush the Younger already declared  those solemn Treaties null and void, Treaties which under the U.S. Constitution carry the same status as Constitutional law, they already are dead letters. The U.S. does what it wants, whenever it wants, as long as it thinks it can get away with it. The only thing that is new here is its open declaration of the fact that journalists are targets of its lethal violence. Although the declaration was done in a smarmy, matter-of-fact way that belies its awful significance. As happens so often in the Obama Regime, they want to slip one past us, reflecting the character of the Con-Man-In-Chief.

And make no mistake- murder is the real intent here. The New York Times asked an unnamed “senior Pentagon official” for an example of  a journalist as “unprivileged belligerent” (i.e. someone it's okay to murder, torture, imprison in secret “black sites” or the Guantanamo Bay military gulag, etc., since there are no rules once you discard the Geneva Conventions) and this creature gave the example of the Al-Qaeda assassins who murdered the leader of the Northern Alliance on September 10th, 2001. Who, of course, were not journalists but assassins masquerading as journalists.[2]

In other words, if they don't like what a journalist is doing, they'll be treated as a “terrorist.” You know what that means.

In fact, we know what it means from how the U.S. conducted itself in Vietnam, especially with the CIA's mass assassination program, Operation Phoenix. Or in Latin America, where it created and directed fascist terrorist regimes to slaughter all told hundreds of thousands. Or in Indonesia, where a minimum of 800,000 people were exterminated in a U.S.-instigated and CIA-planned mass murder.

Once the U.S. labels you a terrorist, your life is in grave peril.

The targeting of journalists actually isn't new in practice, as the U.S. has been murdering journalists for years. What's new is the overtness, the declaration of this vileness as official policy. As with torture and assassination generally, the U.S. no longer feels the need to put up a false front. As with outsourcing CIA subversion to the “National Endowment for Democracy,” the U.S. now does matter-of-factly what it used to try and hide. Whereas before U.S. hypocrisy was the tribute its vice paid to virtue, now the mask is off. Increasingly the U.S. sinks lower and lower into the abyss of immorality. [3]

But typically, the Obama White House was smarmily evasive when asked by the New York Times [2] about the Pentagon's newly declared official policy of targeting journalists, as if somehow Obama wasn't Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and chief of the executive branch of the U.S. Government. He does that a lot, trying to fob off responsibility as if he's just a bystander. He's been doing it on other issues to, like “criminal justice reform,” running around saying “Hey, we lock up too many folks,” instead of ordering his Attorney General to stop seeking maximum charges against people, deprioritize “drug” offenses, and use his own powers of commutation and pardon to free Federal prisoners. He's commuted fewer than 100 sentences- and pardoned no one- in all his years in office, vs. “dictator” Vladimir Putin of Russia freeing at least 1,000. Of course, Russia is oppressive, and the U.S. is “free.” That's why the U.S. has three times the prison population as Russia, and a much higher percentage of its adult population imprisoned.

Or maybe, rather than the U.S. sinking deeper into immorality, it is merely the U.S. returning to its roots. It is, after all, an evil empire founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery. Many have struggled mightily over the centuries to make it something better, with mixed results. After a brief upsurge of resistance, protest, and rebellion lasting about a decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s which consisted of disparate strands of black struggle, opposition to the Indochina war, and the Counterculture, the power structure has worked assiduously, using all its arms (every branch of government at every level, the media, corporations, schools, religion, and more) to beat back these movements and especially to delegitimize the ideological content of those movements and re-brainwash and re-indoctrinate the populace in the “correct” attitudes and ideas.

Another factor was the demise of the main force in the world that could check U.S. power and arrogance, the Soviet Union. This emboldened the U.S. tremendously. Bush the Elder even declared a “New World Order.” Meaning an era of unchallengeable U.S. hegemony.

It hasn't worked out that way, due to various factors, including the rise of China, and the stubborn spread of Islamofascism, a huge example of “blowback” from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan,where the U.S. allied with the most reactionary Islamic elements and with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the two crucial patrons of Islamofascism.

But the U.S. elites are still drunk on power. Unfortunately for them, this arrogance makes them behave stupidly. So instead of seriously countering the rise of the most dangerous rival that looks set to become the next world hegemon in a few decades, China, they've decide to focus on attacking Russia. The U.S. and its Eurostooges creates a crisis in Ukraine, blamed that crisis on Russia, and used that as a pretext to restart the Cold War (and claiming it was Russia restarting the Cold War, for good measure!).

Meanwhile China repeatedly rips off Western businesses in China, and massively infiltrates U.S. computer networks and steals data, including critical information on weaponry, which China has used to build its own advances jets and missiles. The latest (announced) attack was the theft of personal data on 20 million people in Federal databases. Other than scapegoating the (female) head of the agency in question by firing her (Obama is constantly throwing women overboard like that- the same thing happened with Lois Lerner of the IRS and with the first female head of the Secret Service) the U.S. has taken it lying down. It is afraid to retaliate. It is afraid of China. It is afraid to confront China. And you better believe the Chinese rulers know this.

Thus China now has the psychological upper hand. This makes China the dominant “partner” in the “relationship.”

Some reactionary American demagogues will of course blame this on Democratic “weakness” and fecklessness, a card they've been playing since 1946 or so. (Hey, it still works, so why not?) Of course Republican regimes have also practiced appeasement towards China. U.S. policy towards China should rightly be called appeasement, punctuated by occasional “stern” talk. (Shades of Neville Chamberlain!)

The underlying reasons for this effective surrender and submission to China are two-fold. First, big corporations drive U.S. policy. And those corporations are still blinded by the chimera of “a market of 1.3 billion consumers.” The Chinese have cleverly played foreign corporations like fiddles, stringing them along, forcing them into “partnerships” with Chinese businesses that take all their knowledge and technology and methods, and then grab the whole or most of the pie. But the stupid foreigners never learn. GE has handed over critical jet engine technology (nothing like a capitalist selling the hangman the rope to be used to hang the capitalist!) which the U.S. government permitted. (Can you imagine the Chinese government permitting the reverse to occur?) China is a one-party dictatorship in a society that historically is very conformist and regimented, making it far easier to set coherent policies.

The other factor is U.S. cowardice. The U.S. has been spoiled by two centuries of weak enemies and easy expansion. I think the U.S. is basically a big bully, and deep down, bullies tend to be cowards. They fear adversaries they might actually lose to. (Obviously that is not to belittle the personal bravery of the cannon-fodder who do the actual fighting and dying. Don't confuse me with Donald Trump.)

Unfortunately, a world dominated by China (assuming the current one-party dictatorship is still in power) will be no real improvement over a world dominated by the U.S. So from the human perspective, there is no side to root for in this competition for global hegemony.

But at least it won't be total hegemony. True hegemony over the entire planet is a rainbow in the eyes of imperialists. They think it is real, and they constantly chase it, but they can never attain it. Global dominance however is attainable. So unfortunately the crushing oppression they CAN inflict on humanity is very much in the realm of the possible. Indeed, it has been the actual state of (sub)humankind for millennia.

I MAKE THE CONNECTIONS YOU NEED TO KNOW.

1] “The Pentagon’s Dangerous Views on the Wartime Press,” New York Times editorial, August 10, 2015. The manual is cynically titled “Department of Defense Law of War Manual June 2015.” Obviously the actual content is “There Is No Law For US, We Do What We Want!” If you want the Pentagon to capture your computer's IP address, and maybe plant spyware on you, the manual is in .pdf form here or here, Better, just get the pdf from public intelligence. 

The Pentagon had it's very own lawyers concoct this 1,204 page pile of excrement, so it MUST be “legal.”

The manual makes a nice bookend to the U.S. Army Field Manual, which instructs soldiers on torture techniques. That's not just my opinion. These torture methods are defined as torture by the United Nations. (But the U.S. holds the UN in contempt, so who cares?)

2] Ibid.

Meet the "public servants" who legalized the murder of journalists. Thank you for your service!

3] Examples of the U.S. targeting of journalists for death include the bombing of the Belgrade TV center in Serbia (one could argue whether those were journalists or propagandists, but just as one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, one man's journalist is another man's propagandist); the attack by U.S. Army tank on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, killing a Spanish journalist (the Spanish government, a quasi-satrapy of the U.S., helped the U.S. quash legal cases in the matter); the repeatedly bombings of the Al-Jazeera offices in Kabul and Baghdad (interesting footnote that is deeply buried in the memory hole- British Prime Minister and accomplice to U.S. aggression Tony Blair had to talk Bush the Younger out of bombing Al-Jazeera in its home country, the oil sheikdom of Qatar- you'd think that was an important enough fact NOT to systematically suppress); and the murder of American journalists Danny Casolaro, and of Michael Hastings in California, using a bomb planted in his car and the remote seizure of his car's accelerator, brake, and steering via the car's computer systems. Nor is this an all-inclusive list.

Casolaro was murdered on this very date in 1991 while investigating the secret deal Ronald Reagan and his henchmen made with the Khomeini regime in Iran to delay the release of the U.S. "hostages" until Carter was no longer president. (The "hostage crisis" was the key factor in Carter's defeat in the 1990 election. ABC even started a nightly "news" program, Nightline, to harp on the "hostage crisis" every single night. It was hosted by notorious propagandist and Kissinger sycophant Ted Koppel.  It's obvious purpose was to oust Carter, which the ruling class had soured on. The New York Times also spent a year portraying Carter negatively, even running a photo of him out of breath in a marathon and describing him as "panting," i.e. weak and pathetic. Real subtle.)

We should mention in passing U.S. pals that murder journalists. Two of the U.S.' favorite Latin American nations murder scores of journalists- Colombia and Mexico. In fact it is obviously their policy to do so as they've been doing it for years.

But not to be one-sided about this, “bad guy” nations kill journalists too. Iran, for example. And Russia has killed a few- a mere handful, far fewer than those two U.S. buddy nations I mentioned have killed. Which is not to exonerate those execrable regimes. The totalitarian theocrats of Iran hate the “wrong” kind of writers so much that they tried to murder an entire busload of them whom they lured to a fake “conference.” The bus driver tried to drive the bus over a cliff (after jumping out) but flubbed the hit. So the writers all had to be arrested and charged with “crimes” instead.

That latter move is standard procedure in dealing with dissidents and “subversive elements;” paint them as criminals. To return to my own country, that Beacon of Freedom, the U.S. does it incessantly. Just two recent examples (out of innumerable thousands over U.S. history): Randy Credico, who had the temerity to run for Governor of New York State, was punished for this infraction by being arrested and charged wih a non-existent “assault” on police, and Cecily McMillan, who was grabbed by her breasts from behind and mauled by a sadistic New York City cop with a history of violence. (Grantley Bovell, who happens to be black, another example of the fallacy of thinking that the way to change this repressive system is with more black cops.) McMillan blindly swung her elbow backwards, catching her assailant in the head. The Manhattan District Attorney, one Cyrus Vance, Jr., a scion of the ruling class and made member of the U.S. nomenklatura (his daddy was  Secretary of State in the Carter regime), following standard operating procedure when the police brutalize someone, indicted Cecily for felonious assault on a police officer. A group of sheep was impaneled as a jury, and Cecily was duly convicted after a “fair” trial (all U.S. trials are “fair” by definition) and imprisoned at the notorious Rikers Island prison complex, where beatings and deaths are commonplace. Also, she was enjoined from engaging in political activity for five years, on pain of reimprisonment. Because the U.S. is a “free” country, you see. (Reminds me of the South African apartheid regime's practice of “banning” people, to politically neutralize them. Come to think of it, the U.S. was an ally and protector of that regime until almost the very end. Hmmm.)

During McMillan's trial, the female prosecutor very convincingly explained the documented bruises on Cecily's breasts by saying she deliberately created  them herself. (You detected my irony there, I presume.)

But Credico and McMillan are two of  the “lucky” ones. The “unlucky” ones get imprisoned for decades, or are beaten, tased, gassed, or are victims of arson attacks, or are assassinated. (Note to dissidents: whatever you do, don't interrupt a speech by Barack Obama!)

Of course, all the attention of the Western propaganda systems go towards the crimes of enemy nations like Russia and Iran while completely ignoring the often more numerous crimes of the U.S. and its “partners.” (The U.S. media of course is completely despicable in this regard, but the BBC is no better. I have yet to hear a mention on BBC of the murder of journalists and labor organizers, among others, in Colombia. They only “report” on Colombia to demonize FARC, the guerrilla movement there. So is the BBC journalism or propaganda?)

I MAKE THE CONNECTIONS YOU NEED TO KNOW.

Supreme Court Okays Using DNA To Frame Up Innocent People

No, that's not what they say they did. But whether they realize it or not, that is now what's going to happen.

What the Supreme Court just ruled, 5-4, is that police can take DNA from people they arrest (not convicted yet, obviously) and add it to a database, just as they do with fingerprints. The case involved a Maryland defendant who was identified as a rapist after he was arrested for assault, as a result of the swab of cells taken from inside his cheek and tested against a DNA database including evidence samples from unsolved crimes including rapes.

This is an example of how hard cases make bad law. A scumbag like this needs to be captured and imprisoned. [1] But the precedent it establishes tightens the screw of police power around everyone's necks yet another notch.

The decision split the court in an unusual way. The "conservatives" (reactionaries) and "liberals" (conservatives) didn't line up on opposite sides from each other, but rather some were on each side of the decision. Antonin Scalia, in the minority, decried the decision, so it must be really awful!!

The reason I say this opens the door to DNA frame-ups is because that is what the police and FBI ALWAYS do with their powers. That is what they have done, over and over, with fingerprint evidence, for example.

What? you say. How is that possible?

Very easily, actually.

In the case of fingerprint frame-ups, there is a nearly foolproof method. The police merely claim they lifted a fingerprint of their chosen victim from a crime scene or from a piece of evidence such as a weapon or whatever.

There have been a few cases where the police got caught doing this. In California in the early 1970s there was a case that made the newspapers of a hapless ice cream vendor framed up who served 8 years until the frame-up was unraveled.

More recently, in New York State the State police were caught using planted prints in this manner. [2]

It must happen thousands of times that we don't know about. Since the public is brainwashed to believe that fingerprint evidence is infallible, no one believes someone who protests that that can't be their print. (Ah, it was their print, it just wasn't where the cops said it was!)

Back in the 1970s I read a textbook on fingerprint "science" by one of the recognized experts in the field, Andre A. Moessens. One section dealt with the issue of faking fingerprint evidence. He described a number of methods and why each one could be exposed. Then he came to the last one, where the police could "theoretically" claim to have lifted a print from a place they didn't. He said in that case we just have to trust the integrity of the police not to do that.

Right. Ever hear of "testilying," pal? [3]

Besides claiming to have lifted prints from sites they actually didn't obtain them from, police also misidentify prints, sometimes in good faith, sometimes accidentally. Frontline had a pretty good documentary a few years ago about the unreliability of so-called forensic science. [4] (It's more of a pseudo-science, actually. First, they claim an exactitude that is just false. Then they transfer the inculcated belief in the infallibility and precision of fingerprint "matching" to all manner of things that is just fraudulent, like hair, handwriting, tire tracks, tool marks, barrel marks on bullets, paint chips, even bite marks! There were numerous bogus murder convictions in Georgia based on bite marks on victims' bodies allegedly "matching" a defendant's teeth! You'd think common sense would be enough to refute such nonsense!)

Fingerprint "matching" is actually more of an art than a science, but the police will never admit that, since it would undermine their undeservedly ironclad credibility. The FBI claimed they had a  "100 percent positive"  fingerprint match to an Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who just happened to be Muslim, between him and a print from the 2004 Madrid railway bombing. He had a hellish few weeks, until the Spanish police announced that they arrested the person who actually had the finger the print came from. And since the finger was attached to that man's hand, and not to Mayfield's, it was a bit of an OOPS moment for the FBI.

The FBI had insisted the prints were an "absolutely incontrovertible match." And the FBI touts itself, and with longtime media cooperation has created the myth, that it is some kind of elite police force, the creme de la creme of "law enforcement." So imagine how competent the thousands of state, county, and local police departments are in America. Imagine how it is in poorer countries.

Well, in the Mayfield matter, the FBI apologized, and paid some money (which their victim had to sue them to get, of course- Gee, why are Americans "so litigious?" Could it be because that's the ONLY WAY to get redress for wrongs? Just wondering). Usually the FBI gets away with this sort of thing, and much worse, including political assassinations.

So now they can do the same things with DNA. Since a swabful of inner cheek cells contains a huge amount of detectable DNA molecules, there is plenty to use for purposes of "finding" some at crime scenes, etc. Just like taking a fingerprint and putting it on an evidence card. If the FBI agent or police officer says he got this sample he's submitting to the database for matching from such-and-such a spot, that is very hard to disprove. He merely has to assert it. And in U.S. courts, there is a presumption that police don't lie- even after so many years of evidence to the contrary. (And people not blindly hypnotized by authority are systematically weeded out from jury pools in advance of trials, so there is little skeptism among jurors towards police testimony and "evidence.")

To be sure, DNA could have been used anyway to frame people up, without the Supreme Court's help, by surreptitiously obtaining people's DNA. Perhaps a femme fatale or fake "friend" could serve a victim a drink, and the saliva left on the glass taken, a trick police already use against people in custody. Or government burglars could swab your toothbrush when you're not home. There are myriad possibilites for such a "dirty trick." But it would have also been necessary to "officially" get DNA from the target's body directly, in order to "prove" a "match." So without this legalization of taking DNA from arrestees- and the FBI has arranged countless tens of thousands of pretext arrests, for example the late political activist Abbie Hoffman alone was arrested over 50 times- it would have been harder to frame the person. They would have first had to be convicted of a felony to overtly take DNA from their body. (That was already allowed.)

The number of victims of just FBI political frame-ups is too numerous to list here. Two prominent ones are Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt (eventually exonerated after 30 years in a dungeon) and Leonard Peltier, who is destined to die in a Federal "supermax" torture prison. Peltier was framed with fake FBI "forensic science" evidence that claimed ballistic tests matched his rifle to a bullet taken from a dead FBI agent who had attacked American Indian Movement members. (One of whom, Joe Stuntz, was killed by the agents in the attack, a fact that never gets mentioned for some reason, so I'm mentioning it right here, and secret policemen who don't like it and monitor this site can lump it- I'm sorry, "lump it" won't translate well for those who use the Translate widget on this page. It means "too bad for you, I don't care.")

During appeals, the FBI was forced to admit that the ballistic "match" was bogus, but of course the appeals court let the conviction stand anyway, despite the utter absence of any other evidence proving Peltier shot the agent. The FBI has made clear over the years that releasing Peltier is absolutely unacceptable to it, and people IN the establishment know enough not to mess with the FBI, which has blackmailed and imprisoned many politicians and judges over the years. Plus Federal judges are ideologically hostile to anyone who forcibly resists the oppression of the system.

But a legal system that is part of the enforcement machinery of an oligarchy cannot be relied upon as a vehicle for justice. That means that almost anyone, at any time, not just opponents of the system, can be victimized by such a judicial system- and many are, both those who are victims of criminals where the perpetrators are overlooked, and those framed up as criminal culprits- framed up by lazy and indifferent police and prosecutors, or framed up by criminals with state power.

1]  Rapists are particularly dangerous as they are usually repeat offenders. Except maybe for Bill Clinton, who raped Juanita Broaddrick, as a story on NBC revealed some years ago. Clinton had thugs threaten women he'd sexually used or abused- one had her cat killed, and a goon then accosted her while she was jogging and terrified her, for example. His right-hand woman, Betsy Wright, had as one of her tasks suppressing "bimbo eruptions," that is, ensuring that his past paramours would maintain omerta (silence). So it is impossible to know if he only raped one woman in his entire life.

However we do know that he's committed mass murder more than once.

-In Haiti, where he overthrew Aristede and had the CIA create a death squad called FRAPH. (FRAPH stands for "The Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti," an amazingly cynical and Orwellian title. It was like a successor to the murderous Tonton Macoute of the Duvalier dictatorship.)

-In Sudan, where he blew up the country's only pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, newly built, which meant death for thousands of poor Sudanese.

-In Iraq, where the sanctions he maintained are credited with killing 500,000 Iraqi children. When Leslie Stahl confronted his Secretary of State, the evil harridan Madeleine Albright, about this on the TV show 60 Minutes, asking "was it worth it?" Albright didn't even dispute the half million dead children Stahl cited and ended her answer with "We think it was worth it." What the "it" was that was allegedly achieved, I still can't figure out. Of course, their goal was to overthrow Saddam Hussein, which was not accomplished until Clinton's successor Bush the Younger invaded Iraq.

 -In Rwanda, where he ordered UN Secretary General Kofi Annan* to pull out UN troops instead of sending requested reinforcements, which led directly to the genocide there. The commander of the troops said he could have easily prevented the slaughter with relatively few reinforcements. (Most of the killing was by machete and burning people alive. These were mobs, mostly, not modern military forces committing the massacres.) That last one is maybe more of a failure to prevent, although it wasn't mere passivity, but active interference that in effect aided and abetted the murderers.

So that's four mass murders on Clinton's head, three of them very directly and deliberately by him. If you want to add one more failure-to-prevent mass murder to his account, there's his failure to kill Osama bin Laden when numerous opportunities presented themselves, according to former CIA officer Michael Scheuer. Scheuer also faults Bush II for similar failures. (See youtube.com interviews with Scheuer, especially "Conversations With History.") Of course this one wasn't foreseeable, as the Rwandan one was, and is speculative, as killing bin Laden would not have necessarily prevented the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers. We're told the "mastermind" of that is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, currently on "trial" in a kangeroo pseudo-court on the military base in occupied Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It's not that I necessarily doubt his guilt. I just don't like Stalinist-style show trials that make a mockery of justice and legal process. In fact, such show trials are highly destructive to law and justice, not only in the particular instance, but by discrediting law and justice conceptually and delegitimating them in the eyes of the people.

* Annan was a willing U.S. stooge, in the tradition of UN Secretary Generals. In fact, those aren't so pliable risk death, as happened to Dag Hammarskjold, who was murdered in 1961 when the CIA sabotaged his plane, to prevent him from interfering with U.S. designs in the Congo. See the BBC News magazine story "Dag Hammarskjold: Was his death a crash or a conspiracy?" Also CIA assassin Dean Selmier, in his book Blow Away, which describes his career as a killer for the CIA, recounts a conversation with a French intelligence officer who tells him Hammarskjold was murdered, and that the Frenchman said he opposed the hit. Barnes and Noble is selling the book online for $1.99. A bargain for a hardcover!

2] Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article, "Fingerprints." I recommend the article to interested readers.

"In April 1993, in the New York State Police Troop C scandal, Craig D. Harvey, a New York State Police trooper was charged with fabricating evidence. Harvey admitted he and another trooper lifted fingerprints from items the suspect, John Spencer, touched while in Troop C headquarters during booking. He attached the fingerprints to evidence cards and later claimed that he had pulled the fingerprints from the scene of the murder. The forged evidence was presented during John Spencer's trial and his subsequent conviction resulted in a term of 50 years to life in prison at his sentencing. Three state troopers were found guilty of fabricating fingerprint evidence and served prison sentences."

I wonder who did more time in prison, the victim or the police criminals? Wikipedia doesn't say. I don't have time to research it at the moment- but you can.

Of course, the real solution to all this is honest, ethical police and prosecutors with checks on their ability to pursue  ideological vendettas and political agendas (whether of personal aggrandizement or repression of dissent and resistance to injustice). That won't happen until they are less powerful and under more external controls. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," as Lord Acton famously phrased it. The problem isn't so much the tools of law enforcement as who wields them, and for what ends.

3]  There are so many examples of blatant frame-ups by venal cops and prosecutors over the years, in numerous states, that it would take a large tome just to cover the ones that became prominent in the media. Right now in New York, there is an ongoing review of murder convictions engineered by a Brooklyn, NY detective, who for example used the same drug addict as an "eyewitness" in numerous separate murder cases! The only reason the cases are "under review" is because the New York Times, to their credit, exposed some of the "questionable" cases, thus forcing the venal Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles Hynes, to order a "review." He's up for reelection yet again, but he needn't worry: TV network CBS has rushed to his rescue with a suspiciously timely multi-episode TV series lionizing his office, including portraying as heroic a vicious prosecutor in his employ who was revealed by the Times series as a frame-up artist. If I had to speculate as to why, I'd say it's because Hynes has made himself useful to the powerful Jewish Hasidic community in Brooklyn (which votes as a bloc) and CBS is a key organ of Jewish power in the U.S. This kind of cohesiveness is one key to Jewish power in America. (Contrast that with the fractiousness of African-Americans, who daily gun down other African-Americans for no good reason.)

There are a number of stories on the NYT website, such as "Review of 50 Brooklyn Murder Cases Ordered,"  "Scrutiny on Prosecutors After Questions About Brooklyn Detective’s Work," "Jailed Unjustly in the Death of a Rabbi, Man Nears Freedom," and "In Review of Brooklyn Cases, So Many Obstacles." You can search their website for more. And that's just one example in the U.S. This happens all over, all the time. With the increase in police and prosecutorial power over the last few decades, and the evisceration of rights and protections for the people, we should expect it to get worse.

4]  See "Judge Harry T. Edwards: How Reliable is Forensic Evidence in Court?" In fact, there are a number of relevant stories at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/   Search with the keywords "forensic science on trial."