Mistress of Torture Scales Summit Of CIA, An Event That Will Go Down In The Annals Of Feminism

At least, that's what the CIA propaganda campaign, aided and abetted by various media organs and stooges, would have us believe.

It's not every day that a CIA torturer is hailed as a feminist Icon.

Mistress of Torture Gina Haspel, Feminist Flag-Bearer? Really?

I don't think so. But that's one line of propaganda that was used to promote her as CIA Director to replace Michael "Death to Edward Snowden!" Pompeo, and is being echoed still after her successful promotion.

Oh, the quibbling and denials that would be hurled in reaction to "CIA torturer," if there was an actual political opposition in this country that was allowed to be heard in "official" forums, and in the "official" media. First of all, they refuse to call it torture. They prefer the Gestapo terminology, "enhanced interrogation techniques." Literally, that is the English translation from the Gestapo torture manual, and the CIA didn't just borrow the euphemism, they borrowed some of the "techniques" too. Sometimes "reporters" and "commentators" use the phrase "brutal interrogation techniques," I guess to show how daring and independent they are. Occasionally one is so bold as to say "torture," then quickly retreat back into the euphemisms.

When they stop using the euphemisms "law enforcement" and "intelligence agencies" for secret police, and "defense" for aggression, then I'll sit up and take notice.

The CIA quibblers and their enablers and protectors  would also seize on the technicality that the aforementioned CIA secret police officer, Gina Haspel, was merely in charge of a "black site" in Thailand, that is, a CIA torture center. She didn't do the dirty work with her own hands. For some reason, the CIA was squeamish about torturing people inside the U.S. Maybe they didn't want to rely solely on the permission slip written for them by Bush regime apparatchik John Yoo, a type of lawyer reminiscent of Third Reich lawyers who wrote the various genocidal Nazi laws and the legal "philosophy" that put an intellectual patina on Nazi ideology. Yoo has been rewarded for his Service To The Nation with a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Law School, an alleged bastion of liberalism. And by the way, "the" media has whitewashed most of the torture used. It was a lot more than waterboarding, as they are now presenting it, and the other "techniques" which they have tossed down the memory hole have been well documented.

Saying Haspel didn't torture anyone is like saying Adolf Hitler didn't kill any Jews. He didn't, actually. Not by his own hand, that we know of. Heinrich Himmler never tortured anyone either. In fact, the one time he ever witnessed people being executed, he vomited. Such a delicate soul.
The point is, it's completely disingenuous and dishonest for the CIA to deny Haspel's command responsibility for torture.

But no matter. As I expected, the U.S. Senate confirmed Haspel as the DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, chief of the CIA global Gestapo.

So the "glass ceiling" of secret police chief has finally yielded to a female. What a glad day.
Like the day a "black" man was elected president. You remember him. The guy who protected torturers, and imprisoned the only CIA officer who publicly denounced torture, John Kiriakou. The president who perfected the secret police total  surveillance state that the Bush regime began under the name "total information awareness." (A form of total population control.)

The "black" president who took Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act and ran with it, going after all manner of whistleblowers and journalists. Oh, what a "historic" presidency that was! A real advance for "black people." (That's why blacks stopped being imprisoned in vastly disproportionate numbers, and police stopped murdering blacks. Oops, those things didn't happen. But blacks got richer under Obama. Oh wait, they got poorer. A LOT poorer, especially since his banker buddies scammed so many of them out of their homes with mortgage chicanery. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...)

Before the whole sorry saga of the campaign to elevate Mistress of Torture Haspel is permanently consigned to the memory hole by the power establishment, let's take a stroll down memory lane and review some of the criminal media complicity with the CIA and its Torture Mistress. Come with me now back to the day Trump announced the nomination of Haspel to replace the loathsome billionaire Koch brothers toady Pompeo, who was picked to replace Rex Tillerson, unceremoniously bumped from his seat as Secretary of State by Trump, who announced his firing on Twitter without telling Tillerson, in order to publicly humiliate him.

 It was March 13, 2018.  At 8 am East Coast time, the alternative program Democracy Now!, a self-styled "progressive" show, came on the air and announced Trump's choice as new CIA director, and that she ran a CIA "black site" in Thailand where kidnapped prisoners were tortured and interrogated in secret.

Democracy Now! may have been aghast, but the reaction of the establishment media was celebratory. And they were apparently briefed in advance by the CIA on what line to push, unless they all just coincidentally think exactly alike.

For example, one of the main local New York City "news" radio stations, WCBS, a cog in the CBS/Viacom media empire, at 8:59 am hailed as historic the first woman to head the CIA. No mention of that key part of her resume, overseeing a secret torture prison and ordering the destruction of videotapes of the interrogations, evidence of her crimes.

Later that day, the U.S. government-created national radio "public" propaganda network, NPR, on their  4 PM "news" show, the propaganda reader Laksmi Singh falsely asserted that Haspel will likely face "tough questioning" over black sites at confirmation. Which was obvious bullshit, as turned out to be the case.

The British government's propaganda arm, the BBC, predictably made itself a handmaiden to the CIA propaganda campaign. The BBC "News"Hour show, that afternoon, promoted the "advance for women" line. As they so often do, they hauled on a U.S. imperialist apparatchik to spew propaganda without being challenged. This creep, a former chair of the House "intelligence" committee, a Congressional body under the control of the secret police, pushed the CIA line, asserting that Haspel "broke the glass ceiling."  He insisted that "no law was broken" by kidnapping, torture, and murder of prisoners. The mealy-mouthed Gestapo cheerleader gushed, "Not a blemish on her record to any degree...Trust me on this," she'll be great, he insisted.

In the ensuing months, establishment propaganda coverage continued to push the CIA's ersatz "feminism" line, minimized the torture (reducing it to just waterboarding) while usually substituting the aforementioned euphemisms for "torture," rarely mentioning the destruction of evidence (and never the deaths of prisoners in CIA captivity), and mostly focusing on wondering whether Haspel would be confirmed, making a drama out of what was really a foregone conclusion given the reactionary, imperialist majority in the Senate, all the while pretending that the Senate "confirmation process" isn't just a show, or that there was any doubt about her confirmation. There was a small moment of semi-drama when the dying Senator John McCain (he has an incurable brain cancer) urged his colleagues to reject Haspel. McCain was shot down while bombing northern Vietnam and tortured in captivity, which taught him that torture was evil. Unfortunately that's the only lesson he learned, as he is going to his death still a fanatical believer in U.S. imperialism, aggression, militarism, and war against small and weak targets. A Trump aide counseled that McCain could be ignored since he would be "dead soon." This comment was duly leaked and then ginned up into a political soap opera pseudo-scandal for days on end by the establishment media and Democratic Party hacks, who demanded an apology or even firing of the offender.

But I actually don't think Haspel is any more egregious as a CIA head than predecessors like Pompeo, or Hayden, or Panetta, or Tenet (who delivered "faulty," i.e. mendacious, "intelligence" to prompt the invasion of Iraq in 2003), or Colby (who before he was DCI headed the Phoenix torture and mass murder program in Vietnam, which created over 50,000 corpses), or Helms, responsible for the CIA coup in Chile in 1973, or the fascist Allen Dulles, who organized the assassination of president Kennedy in 1963 (after he was out of office, but not out of power) and innumerable other crimes.

The CIA is responsible for millions of deaths, most of which they instigated by getting fascist militaries and secret police agencies to kill people whose names were mostly supplied BY the CIA. In Indonesia in 1965 they instigated the murder of a million "communists" by the military, and greased the skids for the awful dictator Suharto to take power as a U.S. client.(The horrible propagandist Fareed Zakaria, is to this day pushing the CIA disinformation story that what happened in Indonesia was an attempted "Communist coup" that was thwarted by the Indonesian military, an absurd story on its face given the million unarmed civilians who were murdered.) Under Allen Dulles, there were the fascist coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) which destroyed democracies in those nations and ultimately resulted in a quarter million state murders in each of those countries. These "operations" were done on the orders of president Eisenhower, who most of the American left only remembers fondly for a couple of throwaway sentences in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, where he says "we must guard against the undue influence, whether sought or unsought, of the military industrial complex." The complex that HE did so much to build up! And MOST of the speech was devoted to defending that complex, and denouncing the Communist Menace. He also uttered the standard guff about the U.S.' "peaceful" intentions and methods! But apparently leftists so crave "respectability" that they'll seize on an establishment icon, even the man who ordered the two most notorious coups in CIA and U.S. history, to "legitimize" their criticisms of an evil, anti-human power structure they think can be talked into reforming itself! Good luck with that! (Most leftists are fatally compromised by their compromises with the system and collaboration with it. Oh, and there's money too, if you trim your political sails.)

And speaking of torture, the CIA has been torturing people since its inception, and training fascists around the world in torture. One of the reasons the CIA scientist Frank Olson was murdered by the CIA was his disillusionment with the agency after he discovered it ran a torture/murder center in West Germany, with "ex"-Nazis, to interrogate defectors from the Soviet bloc who were suspected of being enemy agents. [1] JFK created the so-called "Alliance of Progress," to counter the revolutionary influence of Fidel Castro and Cuba in Latin America. One of its branches was the diabolically misnamed "Office of Public Safety," which sent CIA torture tutors to train fascist secret policemen and military interrogators. One of these monsters was a guy named Dan Mitrione, sent down to Uruguay to do his evil work. According to former CIA officer John Stockwell, Mitrione would have a homeless person kidnapped to demonstrate torture techniques on for his "students," after which the victim would be murdered. Human life to these monsters has no more value than an insect's. But on the all too rare occasions when one of them gets what's coming to them, oh the HOWLS of outrage, and the bathetic beating of breasts in melodramatic media-ready grief! Mitrione was captured and ultimately put to death by the Tupumaro guerrilla group, a rare instance of justice in the U.S. empire. Mitrione is regarded as a heroic martyr by the CIA. (Reminds me of how the Nazis took the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the number two man in the S.S., a much more important cog in a machinery of evil than Mitrione was.)

So Gina Haspel will have to commit some much more major crimes to really make her bones. Torturing a few Muslim "terrorists" is small change in the annals of CIA crimes against humanity.

Does Secret Police Chief + Vagina = Feminism?

1]  There are a number of documentaries about the Frank Olson case. See for example "CIA Documentary - Biological Weapons & Experimentation on Humans (Frank Olson)."

Martin Luther King, Jr. Dishonored on 50th Anniversary of His Murder

It shows contempt for King that his murderers are being protected, 50 years after they assassinated him. They are being protected by everyone who refuses to name them!

That, unfortunately and shamefully, includes allegedly "alternative," "progressive" media such as Mother Jones, Democracy Now!, and others. (The Nation, another CIA accomplice, doesn't fall into that category as it is Establishment media, the leftward-most edge of the U.S. propaganda system which has always conformed to official lies about U.S. assassinations.)

The murderers are well known, and ample evidence established their guilt long ago.

They are the CIA, the Memphis Police, and the FBI, whose main role, as in all major U.S. domestic political assassinations, was to do a sham "investigation" framing up the designated fall guy, who is always the same guy, the Lone Assassin.
  
The U.S.-government radio propaganda network, NPR (National Public Radio), asserted once again on its "news" show this morning that King was assassinated by James Earl Ray, the designated fall guy. This is easily disproved. Not just by the fact that Ray was no marksman, but by such facts that the CIA procured false identity papers for Ray in the names of four Canadian men who physically resembled him. The CIA's resident agent in Canada admitted after his retirement that he had obtained these documents prior to the assassination on orders from his superiors. (As I recall, this was reported in Rolling Stone magazine. Down the memory hole now!)

Amy Goodman, the head of the Democracy Now! TV/radio program, speaks in incomplete sentences every time she mentions King's murder. She repeatedly mentions he was assassinated, but never says "by the CIA." She doesn't say who murdered him. She is being coy. She doesn't intone the Official Lie that James Earl Ray, the designated fall guy, did it. That would indicate she knows that isn't true. But she just leaves a blank. History is not blank here!

Of course, the corporate media is even worse. Goodman and others at least perform the service of retelling King's opposition to the Vietnam War (which arguably is what got him killed) and his solidarity with oppressed workers, specifically the striking, horribly abused black sanitation workers of Memphis, Tennessee, where the hit was performed.

How about respecting King enough to stop protecting his murderers? And drop the phony cant about "honoring" him!


See also “'Remembering' Martin Luther King, Jr., While Forgetting Who Murdered Him," January 19th, 2015.

Today's Attack Propaganda Against Trump Only Works On People With Amnesia

And those who are ignorant of basic legal concepts.

Today's attack mode: Donald Trump Jr,. an obnoxious character, son of the U.S. president, who is a chip off the old block, has been exposed by the U.S. secret police, using the New York Times as their megaphone, as having met with a Russian lawyer. The lawyer claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton- turned out she didn't.

Initially, moron Donald Jr. said the meeting was about adopting Russian children- an obvious, ludicrous lie. The Trumps seem adept at digging themselves in deeper and deeper in the political hole they're in.

So today we're being treated to the word "treason." Treason? The U.S. isn't at war with Russia. So there is no treason in an actual criminal law sense. The idea of "treason" is straight out of the McCarthy-Nixon-GOP playbook of 1947-1960, which the Democrats have latched onto as their strategy to try and topple Trump.

"Treason" having been so very loosely defined as being in cahoots with an enemy (Russia), what about the multimillion dollar donation to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for allowing Russian interests to buy uranium mines, approved by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? [1]

We're also getting "experts," from the secret police fraternity, no less, (like on NPR), saying this is a violation of campaign finance law, because information has value, and receiving such a "contribution" from a foreign source is illegal.

Well then, if "information" equals an illegal donation, what about that dodgy dossier compiled by BRITISH CITIZEN and former MI6 secret policeman Christopher Steele? He offered it to Trump's GOP rivals and to the Clinton campaign, and finally the U.S. secret police in the person of James "Mr. Upright" Comey, then-FBI Director, briefed Trump about it. Or for that matter, the numerous foreign contributions received by Bill Clinton back when, and the donors fled overseas to avoid investigators? No mention of THAT of course.

The hypocrisy and double-standards are breathtaking. As is the total obsession of U.S. media blatherers with every new arrow they can fire at Trump. (While barely covering the viciousness of his domestic policies. No surprise there. The entire power structure is fundamentally reactionary and thus objectively enemies of the overwhelming majority of the American population.) These propagandists and political hacks are apparently unaware that they are in a bubble, and that most people most probably could care less about all this nitpicking. Every day, a new molehill is blown up into a mountain by the propaganda system. Amazing.

I certainly agree that Trump is a rotten choice for president. But EVERY U.S. president has been rotten, only some more than others, because the U.S. has always been an evil empire. There are principled ways to oppose Trump. Unsurprisingly, the ruling elites and their minions have chosen an unprincipled way. True to their character.

One more point. One of the day's big propaganda talking points is that Donald Jr. should have immediately ran to the FBI and reported the approach to him! This is how far into a police state mentality the "liberals" of the media and Democratic Party are dragging us! It's thoroughly despicable. They are empowering the most evil part of the power structure more than ever, namely the secret police agencies, primarily the FBI, CIA, and NSA. They are treated as demigods now, and they are some of the most vile and malicious organs on the earth.

1]  The New York Times has amnesia for its own reporting. But you don't have to. See "Donations to the Clinton Foundation, and a Russian Uranium Takeover," April 23, 2015, and "Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal," April 23, 2015.

Trump Hits The Ground Running on Establishing Authoritarian Regime

On his very first day as president- and it was just a half day, as Trump was sworn in as president on noon, January 20- Trump already is quashing with an iron fist merely implied criticism of himself.

An employee of the Federal National Parks Service, which is part of the Department of the Interior, retweeted two tweets that failed to glorify the New Leader, the Magnificent Trump. One tweet claimed the crowd at Trump's inauguration was smaller than Obama's. The other noted, correctly, that upon taking the reins of power at noon on January 20th, the White House website, whitehouse.gov, was scrubbed of various policy areas, such as those dealing with disabled people (Trump infamously mocked in juvenile fashion a reporter with an affliction that causes spastic movements of the limbs) and women (Trump has bragged about how he grabs women "by the pussy" whenever he feels like it). References to climate change and other bête noires of the right also immediately disappeared, replaced by chest-thumbing bellows about "Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community" (meaning in practice supporting to the hilt police summary execution of African-Americans) and a "Making Our Military Strong Again" (who knew it was weak?).

A ukase immediately came down from on high to the Interior Department, ordering the immediate suspension of all the Departments twitter accounts:

"“All bureaus and the department have been directed by incoming administration to shut down Twitter platforms immediately until further notice,” Park Service employees were ordered on the very afternoon of the investiture of the Great Man. [1]

But lest you think that Obama represented light to Trump's dark, recall such things as Obama's government-wide diktat to all parts of the Federal government, that each employee should function as a spy and report on any "odd" behavior by fellow employees, apparently to put potential malcontents under scrutiny to prevent leaking. Furthermore, failure to report oddballs is itself an offense. Pretty nightmarish.

Obama perfected the perfect secret police state, in which the NSA secretly collects and stores everyone's phone calls, emails, text messages, tweets, Internet searches, and has advanced software to search this gigantic trove of data. They collect surveillance camera footage from thousands of cameras. Where license plate recorders are in use, they have records of where your car has been. Same with using EZ-Pass to pay tolls. Obama empowered all 17 U.S. Federal "intelligence community" agency members to freely access the NSA database. The FBI, DEA, and other police use it to cook up criminal cases against victims, hiding the warrantless search and Unconstitutionally obtained evidence from the courts and defense lawyers. The DEA has a formal unit dedicated to laundering the evidence through "parallel construction," inventing a legal explanation for how they acquired their evidence.

The FBI and the rest have free access to your financial records, your medical records, your credit card records, your airline ticket purchases, your everything.

Obama brought us "legal" indefinite imprisonment of Americans in military gulags without charges, as a matter of law- a law that currently is in force. And Obama has brought assassinations, including of American citizens, into wide acceptance.

Typical of Democrats, Obama is a slick operator who wears a velvet glove over the mailed fist, the better to delude and conceal, whereas the Republicans wear thin cotton gloves- or in Trump's case, no glove at all for disguise. Obama's many, systematic repressive acts has created the most thorough secret police surveillance state that has ever existed. This is his contribution to American history, and his bequeath to all his successors.

Meanwhile, in "violent" protests in Washington, D.C., (likely led by police agents provocateur posing as radicals, as per standard police practice) 90 people were arrested. No, 250. Wait,it was 90. Make that 100. On fifth thought, it was over 200. That, in sequential order, are the numbers reported on air by U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR yesterday and this morning.

As the French saying goes, The more things change, the more they stay the same.

1]  "Interior Department told to stop tweeting after unflattering retweets about Trump." Washington  Post, January 20, 2017.

No Honeymoon For President Trump

The current change in U.S. regime has certainly been different from the pattern of most of the last century or so. The usual practice is for the power structure to be at least outwardly respectful to the new Leader, and formally deferential. Media fawn over the new chief executive of the U.S. Government. The honeymoon can last for years in the case of an arch-reactionary like Reagan. Nixon had a second honeymoon in 1972 when he ran for reelection, when except for the Washington Post, the Watergate burglary was virtually ignored by the media- to the disgruntlement of Senator George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for president that election year.

The New York Times spent the first year of Jimmy Carter's presidency putting his smiling visage on their front pages almost daily, in a strenuous effort to repair the damage to the public esteem for the presidency in the wake of Nixon's forced resignation and his hand-picked successor Gerald Ford's pardoning of Nixon to protect him from criminal charges. But by the last year of Carter's rule, the Times was smitten by Reagan, and did its best to sabotage Carter's reelection, such as by putting a photo of him on the front page running a marathon and looking exhausted, and describing him as panting and weak. The media also ginned up a fake "rabbit attack" on Carter to make him look ridiculous.

With Trump, the media assault has been unrelenting. It began after he won the Republican nomination, when it apparently dawned on the media czars and their minions that Trump would be dangerously destabilizing an unpredictable with presidential power. (Until then they had made him the center of mostly benign media attention for months.) The assault increased in intensity and virulence after he "won" the presdiential election November 8, with fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, by winning in the Electoral College, that extremely peculiar U.S. version of electoral  "democracy." A shabby piece of libel, an alleged "dossier" or "report," cooked-up by a former British secret policeman from MI6 (Christopher Steele, currently in hiding) who was hired by Republican primary opponents of Trump to come up with derogatory information about Trump, and then peddled by the Brit to the Democratic camp, was used by the so-called "intelligence community" and U.S. media to smear Trump as a pervert who had hired Russian prostitutes to piss on a hotel bed in Moscow in which one of the Clintons had slept, and the Russian secret police covertly videoed the whole thing and are now using it or are going to use it to blackmail or control Trump. That such a cheap spy-novel fantasy is taken seriously shows the desperation of part of the U.S. power elite, including the main secret police agencies, to hobble Trump.

And when Trump refuses to buckle, and instead denounces the "intelligence" agencies for this tawdry behavior, he is attacked by the commentariat for "attacking" "his own" intelligence agencies and "siding with Putin," and admonished by "experts" (various secret policemen, secret police veterans, and members of the established nomenklatura) that he'll have to learn to "work with" the CIA, FBI, et al, and sit at their knees to learn from them.

Now, Trump is awful, for sure, and his cabinet appointments are the worst in modern history, worse even than the egregious ones of Reagan. But this tawdry propaganda campaign throws into stark relief the unethical nature of the power establishment. It also proves once again that the Deep State agencies, in particular the CIA, FBI, and NSA, truly are states within a state that care first and foremost about their own power and prerogatives. Their loyalty to the state as a whole, to the U.S. government, and certainly to the president, to whom they are nominally pledged to serve, is far less important to them than their own self-aggrandizing schemes. After all, the CIA arranged the assassination of the president in 1963, with the FBI as a full participant in aiding and abetting the crime by helping cover it up. And the entire U.S. media played along, and still do to this day by maintaining the absurd fictional account of the assassination by the Warren Commission. (By the way, Gerald Ford, the guy who pardoned Nixon, was one of the Commissioners and functioned as FBI spy on the Commission.)

It's unfortunate that "alternative" media and public figures have so lost perspective and are so incapable of objectivity that they are playing right along with every propaganda assault on Trump. Between Trump's distortions of reality, and the distortions of reality being fostered by the elements of the power establishment desperate to undercut Trump on foreign policy mainly, (they seem not too troubled by what he threatens to do domestically), people will be disoriented without a lodestar of objective truth to turn to.

Instead of becoming foot soldiers in one side of an intra-ruling class power struggle, progressives should chart an independent course, a principled course, and ultimately the actually pragmatic course of declaring a pox on both houses of the power elite and devise ways to take advantage of their conflict. Playing them off against each other, for example, not legitimizing the slanders of the anti-Trump faction. Heaven knows, there is plenty of legitimate information about Trump to use against him, without trying to paint him as a Putin puppet who engaged in a lurid defilement ritual involving urination.

Trump, Imitating U.S. "Intelligence" Agency Method, Claims Secret Knowledge Refuting Russian "Election Hacking" Charges

Oh, the irony!

One of the long-standing modus operandi of U.S. secret police agencies (euphemistically referred to as "intelligence" or "law enforcement" outfits) is the claim to secret information, which means if you knew what they know, you'd see that their propaganda and ideological assertions were true! Of course, they can't tell you what the alleged information is, because it's "classified," that is, "secret," and revealing it would risk exposing their "sources and methods," and even RISK PEOPLE'S LIVES!, but you should just trust these righteously upstanding, loyal and True-Blue Patriots. (The same "patriots" who daily urinate on the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, systematically violating the alleged "rights" of Americans they don't like, as they have done since their inception. Of course their have to break U.S. law by persecuting people whose beliefs or activities they don't like, to "protect our freedoms." How's that for an Orwellian mind-bender!)

This tawdry, dishonest trick of bluffing was analyzed decades ago in a book co-authored by a former CIA officer and a former State Department official, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. [1]

Well, it turns out that others can play the same mystique of intelligence game.

Namely Donald Trump.

Starting months ago with anonymous secret policemen whispering in the ears of their media enablers, there has been a propaganda campaign (and the propaganda could be partially or wholly true, keep in mind- propaganda sometimes is) tarring Russia for allegedly sneaking into email accounts of Democratic Party apparatchiks, including that of John Podesta, a sort of eminense grise behind the Clintons. These communications then surfaced on WikiLeaks, the hated information-exposing operation headed by Julian Assange. (The U.S. government has had WikiLeaks and Assange under siege for over five years now, trying mightily to destroy the organization. The first WikiLeaks "crime" that sparked U.S. outrage was the online publication of "classified" U.S. State Department cables and military reports and, most notoriously, the infamous collateral murder video showing the murderers' eyes view from a U.S. Army helicopter in Iraq murdering journalists and civilians on the ground in Baghdad, and attempting to murder children in a van. U.S. Army Specialist Chelsea- formerly Bradley- Manning was persecuted for sending this data to WikiLeaks.) [2]

The emails from Podesta and Democratic National Committee apparatchiks revealed a concerted campaign to destroy the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton rival Senator Bernie Sanders, including various nasty subterfuges. Pulling up this rock also gave a general view of the smarmy interior of the Democratic Party, usually kept carefully hidden from public view. (If they'd wanted to, the establishment media could have revealed the truth about the Democratic Party decades ago, but the two-party political cartel of the Democrats and the Republican Party, aka the GOP- Gang Of Plunderers, is a key pillar of corporate oligarchy, and "the" media is fundamentally the mouthpiece of that oligarchic power structure. The two-party political cartel and the corporate media are pillars of the power structure and are fundamentally allied, no matter their conflicts and disagreements which lie on a more superficial level.)

We also got to see the text of the Secret Speech that Hillary Clinton was paid a cool quarter million dollars to read to a Goldman Sachs audience, those wizards of financial chicanery, which confirmed what should have already been obvious- that the Clintons are handmaidens of the top echelons of U.S. capital, and Clinton's campaign rhetoric to the contrary was just the standard Democratic Party mendacity. (Her rhetoric was pulled to the "left" by the competition from Sanders for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.)

By and by, government officials were forced to reveal their faces to sell the "Russia Hacking Sacred U.S. Democracy" story. So first we got James "Pinocchio" Clapper, he of the false Senate Intelligence Commitee testimony, Obama's "Director of National Intelligence," pointing the finger at Russia. Then came the CIA, an agency of professional liars and deceivers, avowing that Russia Was Guilty. The FBI hedged a bit, apparently to allow it to wiggle out later if the whole thing was exposed as false.

Finally Obama demanded conclusionary reports from the CIA and FBI by the time he finally exits the White House on January 20. Congresspeople of both parties waxed wroth at the Russian "interference" in "our election" and "subversion of our democracy." Obama then imposed sanctions on Russia as punishment, expelling 35 Russian diplomats and closing two Russian facilities in the U.S., announcing more attacks on Russian assets, and threatening unspecified covert acts of retaliation. (Putin cleverly parried Obama's hostile attack by refusing to retaliate in kind, even inviting the children of U.S. diplomats in Russia to attend Kremlin Christmas and New Year's celebrations! Stuffed, Obama!)

Trump has adamantly refused to conform to this campaign, despite daily brickbats hurled at him by numerous branches of the media (including the "comedy" show "Saturday Night Live" on NBC, which portrayed Trump as a "Manchurian Candidate" of Putin [3]).

Then Trump played the "I know things you don't know" card, the card the secret police habitually play. Trump said he knew “things that other people don’t know” that would be revealed “on Tuesday or Wednesday.” (Don't hold your breath.)

A few salient points about the bad faith and fraudulence of this entire "Russia Tried To Damage Our Democracy" propaganda campaign, which U.S. media mostly refuse to breathe a word about:

-Clinton got 2.9 million more votes than Trump. She "lost" because of the idiotic, archaic Electoral College, a political straitjacket that the Democrats refuse to blame, much less reform or abolish, even though the same thing happened to them in 2000. They prefer to be slaves to the dead hand of the past, apparently. Thus do U.S. "Founding Fathers," in their graves for two centuries, impose their will on the present. Sick. [4]

-Clinton led Trump in polls by 14% until FBI secret police chief James Comey reignited the issue of her private server State Department emails just before the election, causing her lead to vanish.

-We have the right to the information provided by WikiLeaks, allegedly via Russia. (Assange denies it came from Russia.)

-The feckless, cowardly Democrats habitually scapegoat others for their losses, instead of making an honest accounting and taking positive, constructive action. In 2000 Ralph Nader was their designated scapegoat. Today it's Russia.  They are cowardly punks who never challenge GOP election stealing, in 2000, 2004 (Ohio stolen), and this year, with massive voter disenfranchisement and invalidation of valid ballots. (See Greg Palast's work.)

-Finally, and most importantly, just how hypocritical can the U.S. get with all this screeching about "foreign interference"? No nation on earth has done more interfering in other countries than the U.S.! From massive CIA intervention in European politics after World War II (funding politicians, parties, newspapers, paying gangsters to beat up leftists, etc.) to COMPLETELY DESTROYING DEMOCRACIES in places like Iran (1953) Guatemala (1954) Brazil (1965) Chile (1973), and various other military coups. The U.S. INVADED the Dominican Republic in 1965 when it didn't like who won an election there.

So now U.S. elites are screeching about Russia letting the American public in on some Democratic Party poohbahs' dirty secrets? BOO-HOO! Get over it.

"I got special secret information stored right in here! I'll gladly tell you about it tomorrow if you'll give me a headline today."

1] The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, 1974. But nothing changed, the populace remains ignorant and willfully naive, and the same old tricks of mass manipulation work. With the cooperation of a venal media, of course, without which the secret police couldn't get over with their shit.

Marchetti was a CIA officer and assistant to the CIA deputy director,  Marks a former Foreign Service Officer.

2] "Collateral Murder" videos on youtube.com. You must watch this if you never have yet.

3]  Posted on youtube.com by "Saturday Night Live" [NBC]. "Donald Trump Christmas Cold Open - SNL," published December 18, 2016. The SNL opening skit was crude and obvious, apparently to make sure that even the politically unsophisticated would get the message. I found it funny anyway, and grossly distorted. But then, satire is based on exaggeration. "Rex Tillerson" (Trump's designated Secretary of State who just resigned as head of ExxonMobil) also appeared in the skit.

A "Manchurian Candidate," which comes from a novel by that name, refers to a programmed assassin whose mind is under external control. That's beyond being a stooge, beyond being a puppet. It's being a hypnotized zombie.

4] The Democrats won't even back the movement among states to agree to give their Electoral College votes to whoever wins the "popular" vote. The plan is that when states with a total number of Electoral Votes equalling a majority of Electoral College votes (270 or more ) agree to join, the plan becomes effective. So far state legislatures controlling around 160 Electoral College votes have passed the necessary legislation.

For details on the Electoral College, and how the U.S. has historically been anti-democratic, see "In the Self-Proclaimed 'World's Greatest Democracy,' the Candidate With the Most Votes Just Lost," November 14, 2016.

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. Brazenly Announces Its Coup Plans for Venezuela

The New York Times has for years been the favorite bulletin board for high U.S. government officials to post anonymous messages. Their missives to the world at large are often granted page one placement. These messages, converted into "news" stories by the NY Times, are always intended to advance a political agenda, manipulate what people think, and often are disinformation (that is, lies).

A revealing example of this phenomenon appeared a few days ago under this headline:

"Nicolás Maduro Tightens Hold on Venezuela as U.S. Fears Further Tumult." [1]

Now the first thing that needs to be said, indeed stressed, is the absurdity of the word "Fears." The U.S. doesn't fear tumult in an enemy state. The U.S. seeks to CREATE tumult in enemy states! That is one of the "tools" in its "toolbox" for destabilizing hated leftist regimes. So the editors are being smarmily disingenuous before the reader even gets to the article.

Now let's move on to the body of the article. (It was co-written by Mark Landler, one of the more dodgy NY Times "reporters.") Here's the first three paragraphs:

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela threatened Saturday to seize idle factories in his country using a new emergency decree, moves that followed warnings by United States officials that economic chaos in the country had turned even his allies against him.

“An idle plant is a plant the people will take,” local news outlets quoted Mr. Maduro as saying at a rally. “We will take all the actions necessary to activate production, which is being paralyzed by the bourgeoisie.”

The threats came a day after Mr. Maduro said he would extend a state of emergency for another 60 days, a measure he said was aimed at reviving the country’s collapsing economy. The government said the move would extend presidential powers, though it was vague on specifics.

Notice the Bad Guy makes "threats," the Good Guys "warn."

The next paragraph describes in three sentences dire economic conditions in Venezuela. Then we get some ersatz hand-wringing from U.S. secret police bosses:

The United States fears that Venezuela could face a major eruption of street violence in the coming months, according to senior American intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in discussing the government’s latest intelligence assessment.

While Mr. Maduro has so far held off a recall vote against him, the American officials said that they believed his grip on power was weakening by the day, and that he could be removed from power, either in a palace coup by members of his party or by the Venezuelan military.

While the military’s high command appears unlikely to act against the government right now, these officials said, its midlevel officers are more restive. One American official said intelligence officials were worried about some kind of change, but were not aware of any active plots. [My emphases, obviously.]

The CIA (presumably) is "worried" Madura might be overthrown? Is that sarcasm? Eager to see "some kind of change" (oh so coy; just say "Maduro overthrown") is the obvious truth! What kind of "newspaper" prints whopping lies without pointing out their falsehood? Certainly when the Times quotes Putin or Ayatollah Khamenei they make sure to contradict what they're saying.

After some more description of economic problems in Venezuela (with nary a mention of their causes, such as the plunge in oil prices over the past couple of years) we come to the last paragraph:

                 The officials acknowledged that the United States had limited influence in
                 Venezuela, where the government has blamed American meddling for the 
                 instability.

"Meddling" meaning subversion. By the way, there are some "secrets" the NY Times doesn't report- what the U.S. has been up to in Venezuela since Hugo Chavez ascended to power. You'll have to go elsewhere to learn about that. To the NY Times, those are just some wild and baseless accusations being flung about by a leftie government to cover up for its own failings. (And I'm not saying the Venezuelan government has no failings. But there hasn't been any honest discussion of them in the Western capitalist media, which has confined itself to Chavez-Maduro bashing since Day One.)

What I found a bit stunning was how the Obama regime openly advertised Maduro's alleged vulnerabilities. Maduro can only take these as threats (note the oh-so-innocent CIA avowal of being unaware of any coup plots. Sure. Fomenting coups are one of the CIA's main purposes, and it has a long, vicious history of committing and attempting them.) It's like a gangster walking into a business and saying "Nice little shop you have here. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it." The idea that the U.S. and CIA don't want anything BAD to happen to the hated Maduro is just a weird insult to our intelligence, once that the CIA and, worse, the New York Times is willing to shovel down the gullets of its presumably educated (but apparently infinitely credulous) readers- infinitely credulous when the guff is coming from their bourgeous bible, the NY Times. 

It's germane to mention here the fact that the NY Times has a history of hailing U.S. coups, including the three most notorious ones, Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, and Chile, 9/11/73. And leading up to those coups, the NY Times used it propaganda powers to prepare public opinion to see those mass murderous acts as Good Things, "rescuing" countries from "communism."

"Senior American Intelligence Official." 

We got rid of that bastard Chavez, now Maduro goes down!  John Brennan, CIA Director.

By the way, the "government's latest intelligence assessment" is no doubt highly classified, which means the "intelligence officials" who divulged it to the Times committed felonies, since New York Times reporters don't have security clearances. But Obama certainly won't be siccing the FBI and "Justice" Department on them, like he does to whistleblowers, nor put the reporters under criminal investigation, as he's also done. These are "authorized" "leaks." (They aren't leaks, they're plants. The U.S. media deliberately mischaracterizes what is going on in these cases when the government uses the media for its political ends.)

The Washington Post is another imperialist bulletin board where high government apparatchiks can freely post anonymous political notes. Here too those ghostlike "intelligence officials" made an appearance. But the Post is a lot more honest than the Times in this instance, even though the Post is definitely to the right of the Times these days. (The Times is also quite mealy-mouthed, which could be a factor in this case.) [2]

Here are the opening paragraphs of the Post version of the Obama regime secret police planted article:

        Venezuela, where clashes erupted this week between security forces and demonstrators

        protesting food stortages, power blackouts and political gridlock, may be headed toward 

        an all-out popular uprising.that could lead to the overthrow of its government this year, 

        senior U.S. intelligence officials said.

        “You can hear the ice cracking,” an intelligence official said [or gloated]. 

        “You know there’s a crisis coming.” [He added, licking his chops.]

         Disaster is pending in Venezuela at the same time the Obama administration believes that
         it has vastly improved U.S. standing in Latin America, compared with the days when political          
        and economic turmoil in the hemisphere was blamed, sometimes with reason, on either            
        interference or disregard by Washington.

       There have been many times over the past two decades when the United States has wished

       for the demise of the left-wing Bolivarian revolution begun by former Venezuelan president            
       Hugo Chávez and carried on since 2013 by his successor, Nicolás Maduro. The Obama            
       administration and its predecessor have charged the government in Caracas with corruption,
       human rights abuses and drug smuggling, among other things, and have supported the
       political opposition.

You can see the relative frankness of the Post's version vs. the dishonesty of the Times. Still, the Post is discreet enough not to mention with what "reason" the U.S. was "blamed" for "turmoil," which "sometimes" the accusations weren't just shrill blame-shifting, and what the "interference" consisted of. (Like, installing murderous military dictatorships, maybe?)

And yet the Post, like the Times, was perfectly willing to provide a platform for absurd lies, which it ran without demurral. Such as this:

       The days of America rooting for the ouster of Chávez and his revolutionary movement
      “are over,” the intelligence official said. Now, “it’s not really the case that the United
      States is rooting for any outcome, other than that it’s not an outbreak of political violence.
      You’d have to be insane not to worry.” [We all know how much the U.S. ABHORS violence!]

      The senior intelligence officials, who briefed a small group of reporters, spoke on the
      condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the government.

Why they would be any less eager to get rid of Maduro than Chavez is left unexplained.

The Post article concluded by explicating three ways to overthrow the Venezuelan government:

           
      The intelligence officials outlined three possible change-of-government scenarios.
      The failure of this year’s recall referendum could lead to another petition next year.
      But the opposition — itself divided and ill-disciplined — has been a disappointment
      to the Obama administration.

      Second, there could be a “palace coup” in which some members of Maduro’s
      government move to oust him with the help of some segment of the military.

      The third possible scenario is a military move, possibly led by lower-ranking officers
      and enlisted members who also are feeling the economic pinch, to remove the
      government altogether.

Nothing like spelling it out, guys. (Gals too, these days, They're so "progressive," they even let women and blacks be imperialist gangsters now! And gays! How much more enlightened can you get!) So there's the game plans. Rather, the end game plans.

"Senior U.S. intelligence official."

The Maduro regime is this close to the edge. All it needs is one little push...  

James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence.

Here's a measure of the depth of cynicism involved in this propaganda salvo. If the U.S. were truly worried about a collapse in Venezuela, and wanted to avert a coup, it wouldn't PUBLICIZE all this. It wouldn't in effect goad the opposition, and the military, in this way. Instead of very conspicuously handing out a roadmap for overthrowing Maduro, it would quietly inform key opposition and military figures that the U.S. would not support a coup.

Of course the U.S. WILL support a coup, just as it supported the Honduran coup, a fact Obama's previous Secretary of State, Hillary "Hard-nosed Realist" Clinton even bragged about in her recent book,  In fact, it probably prefers one, as that will make it easier for the U.S. to choose Maduro's successor than if the regime is toppled by a mass rebellion of some sort.

So on the guise of being worried about the Maduro regime falling (and the end of Chavismo, hopes the U.S. global masters), the U.S. global gestapo is trying to cause that very thing.

All this parallels Obama's habitual pattern of saying the exact opposite of what he actually intends to do. (Sometimes, of course, he says what he means- when it's something evil.) Obama may well be the most mendacious president in U.S, history. (Although Bill Clinton, another conscience-free con man, is certainly in the running.) Not even Reagan and Nixon quite compare, as both of them frequently came right out with their reactionary intentions. Not so Obama. Obama endeavors to deceive almost always.

Now, here's something very important to notice, that the U.S. propaganda system and imperialist government is trying to slip by you: for all the moaning about leftists taking over Latin America, the U.S. has been overthrowing  can one left-leaning government after another, or certainly giving them a shove. In Brazil, the largest and most important Latin American nation, thieving legislators have removed president Dilma Rousseff (whom the vengeful Obama no doubt held a grudge against for taking offense at his NSA listening in on her phone calls- and if you don't think he's vengeful, and ruthless, take note of how he had Egyptian secret police goons break Medea Benjamin's arm after she interrupted one of his speeches, and how he had Anwar al-Awlaki's son and nephew bumped off). These fine men defenestrated Rousseff so they can quash the criminal investigations into themselves. In Argentina, U.S. billionaire Paul Singer financed an election victory for Macri, replacing Isabel Kirshner. Macri promptly handed over billions of dollars of Argentina's national funds to Singer and his fellow hedge fund hyenas. Honduras I already mentioned. Obama has pried open the door to internally subvert Cuba, an elusive "prize" the U.S. has sought since 1959. Guess we better assume Ecuador and Bolivia are on the list. And except for Cuba, none of these regimes is or was particularly leftist, just mildly social democratic. That shows the extreme intolerance and hard right-wing nature of the permanent U.S. imperialist state.

Capo di tutti capi

I LOVE you guys!     U.S. Emperor Obama

One more thing worth remembering: we still don't know what caused Hugo Chavez's lethal cancer. We do know that Imperialist Boss Obama sure seemed satisfied with it..

This was Obama's entire statement upon Chavez's death, from the White House website: 

March 05, 2013

Statement of President Obama on the Death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

At this challenging time of President Hugo Chavez’s passing, the United States reaffirms its support for the Venezuelan people and its interest in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government. As Venezuela begins a new chapter in its history, the United States remains committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.

There it is. Not a single word of condolence. And a reiteration in coded language of the U.S. determination to overthrow the leftist regime. This is the new verbiage the U.S. uses since invoking The Communist Menace as an alibi for its subversion, sabotage, terrorism and coups became obsolete. Obama's own record is crystal clear the contempt in which he actually holds "democratic principles, the rule of law, and respect for human rights." Massive secret surveillance of the entire U.S. population, assassinations of even teenagers by drone, contempt for law- he writes his own laws, in secret, and refuses to let anyone else read them, and has taken the pieces of the Bill of Rights shredded by his predecessor and reduced them to confetti- this is the rhetoric of cynical global gangsters.

Keep in mind that Obama personally reviews death lists before the CIA and military carry out their assassinations. He even authorized the murder of the teenage son and nephews of al-Qaeda in Yemen propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki. So he's not squeamish. (Awlaki father and son, "terminated with extreme prejudice" two weeks apart, were both American citizens, for what that's worth. Not much, it seems. Mere citizenship didn't save Michael Hastings or Sandra Bland either. "Fellow Americans" is indeed a hollow, cynical term.)

To review the death of Chavez, the cold satisfaction the U.S. took in his death, and the unresolved question of whether the CIA murdered Chavez by inducing the cancer that the Cubans' best doctors couldn't cure, see "Chavez, Cancer, and the CIA," March 9, 2013; "With Chavez Dying, Obama "National Security Team" Preparing to Gloat," January 10, 2013; "Dead Man Walking: Hugo Chavez Doomed. CIA Dancing a Jig?," December 12, 2012.

And the British government did its bit in the demonization of Chavez. Like a puppy-dog eager to please, it is usually avid in its desire to demonstrate its usefulness to the U.S., an urge manifested in its leaping to the U.S. military's side with forces of its own when there's a fight on somewhere. (This sycophantic urge was played on by Obama when he opined that the UK would be less useful to the U.S. if it left the EU. The cold manipulator Obama thus expertly plucked the strings of British elite insecurity about its power and position in the world.)

The British ruling class still suffers from the delusion that the U.S. will reciprocate its servility by sticking up for Britain's dessicated imperialist pretensions. (At best, the UK is allowed to ride the U.S.' coattails. Here's a telling historical fact: the Reagan regime almost sided with the fascist Argentine military junta in the Falklands War, at the urging of the fascist Jeane Kirkpatrick and demented reactionary Alexander Haig.*  What turned Reagan around was his Secretary of war, Caspar Weinberger, who insisted the U.S. had to aid Britain.) Someone needs to tell the British: nations don't have "friends," notwithstanding the constant invocation of that word, nations have interests.

Given this quasi-craven attitude of the British government, it's no surprise that its propaganda arm, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), often reliably parrots the U.S. media/government line and attitude. A particularly grotesque example of this occurred when Huge Chavez died. I discussed this, quoting the BBC in the essay title: "Hugo Chavez: Champion of the Poor or Unhinged Megalomaniac?" March 6, 2013. Oh those English are so refined and subtle.


* Haig was an obscure colonel and son of a Republican lawyer whom Nixon rapidly elevated to four-star general rank. A reactionary fanatic, he committed many crimes during his "career." He actually suggested a "nuclear warning shot" in Europe to "deter" the Soviet Union. [Congress and the Nuclear Freeze: An Inside Look at the Politics of a Mass Movement, by Douglas C. Waller, 1987, page 19.]

But the bourgeois media will remember him, if at all, for declaring himself "in control" at the White House when Reagan was shot and hospitalized in March 1981. Haig was Secretary of State at the time, a post he resigned in mid-1982, a year and a half into Reagan's reign.

1] New York Times, May 14, 2015.

2] "U.S. intelligence officials: Venezuela could be headed for collapse," Washington Post, May 13,      2016.

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."