Right Wing Terrorist Network Swings Into Action Against Kavanaugh Sexual Assault Victim

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who was nearly raped by Trump Supreme Court nominee and Republican apparatchik Brett Kavanaugh, has been terrorized into leaving her home with her family by death threats and hate mail. Her email was hacked, and she was impersonated online by malign attackers.

As usual, much of "the" media, the U.S. power establishment propaganda organizations, have the backs of the terrorists by not reporting on their terrorist actions. This makes them accessories and accomplices. While the death threats have been reported in print media, the radio news I monitor, including NPR and CBS, have not reported them.

That same media are also accomplices to all the fascist terrorist regimes the U.S. has ever supported by the same means, refusing to report the news. Every "friendly" dictator and dictatorship gets puff-piece treatment from the U.S. media. A current outstanding example of this is Saudi Arabia and its ruling despots, "King" Salman and his vicious son, "Crown Prince" Mohammad bin Salman, architect of the destruction of Yemen, shakedown artist, and repressor of any and all would-be reformers of the medieval Saudi social order.

And what about the police? Why don't they ever hunt down and prosecute rightwing terrorists and harassers? Harassment and death threats are illegal activities. I thought they were "law enforcers." I guess it depends.

Ford is a Congressional witness. Why isn't the FBI tracking those threatening a Congressional witness and arresting them and presenting cases to the U.S. attorneys?

Well, the questions may seem naive, but actually they are rhetorical. To make obvious what should be obvious but is never thought in America. To think the obvious is to immediately and implicitly challenge this repressive system that uses right wing terrorists as auxiliaries to the power structure.

Don't hear any DEMOCRATS demanding the terrorists be hunted down and prosecuted, do you? See, it's the power structure itself enabling rightwing terrorism.

As the U.S. does all over the globe.

Meanwhile, the serial sexual criminal who picked Kavanaugh to be a Supreme Court Justice and reactionary hitman to put the final nail in the coffin of the right to terminate a pregnancy, Donald Trump, who boasts of grabbing women's private parts and forcibly kissing them, made a big public display of how awful the treatment KAVANAUGH is getting is! He feels SO BAD that such a GOOD MAN is enduring this ORDEAL!

Being disgusting is par for the course (if I may use golf terminology) for the Groper-In-Chief.

And while "the" media has repeatedly mentioned that 65 women who knew Kavanaugh signed a letter avowing that he's the perfect gentleman, (leaving about 4 billion females on planet earth who have yet to confirm he never tried to rape them), I only found out by accident that 599 women have signed a letter in support of Dr. Ford. It wasn't on broadcast media. But that's only about ten times as many women supporting Dr. Ford as piped up to aid Kavanaugh. Not newsworthy, I suppose. [1]

1]  "599 alumnae from Christine Blasey Ford’s high school sign letter saying they support her," Vox, September 18, 2018.

FBI Caught Spying On Trump Presidential Campaign- and Trump Attacked for Objecting!

We're in an era of total supremacy of the secret police state when they are caught infiltrating a presidential campaign of one of two political cartel parties (of course they do it to the Greens, Socialists, Communists, etc.) and the president's demand for an investigation is met with howls of outrage from politicians (Democrats) and the corporate media chorus.

You'd think the FBI would have to run for cover. Instead we're being hysterically ranted at that Trump is "threatening national security" (!) and "endangering lives" (!!) by ordering the Department of "Justice" to investigate, and wanting to know who the spy was. (Turns out he was some shitheel retired professor.)

Sure, Trump is loathsome, but this is yet another example of how the Democratic Party and corporate media have put the secret police agencies on a pedestal and demand that we worship them. It's disgusting.

These are the same agencies that daily commit perjury, burglaries, stealing personal property, issuing 50,000 bogus "national security" letters a year demanding personal bank, medical, and every kind of record under the pretense of "investigating terrorism," and oftentimes assassinations.

They are no one to glorify.

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.

Uzbek Murders 8 Bicyclists in New York City: Will Trump Now Ban Everyone From Uzbekistan from Entering the U.S.?

According to the logic of his various travel bans, surely he must, to "keep America safe!"

An Uzbek rented a pickup truck and used it to careen down a bicycle path in Manhattan, mowing down bicyclists, 8 of whom died. After about a mile of mayhem, he crashed into a school bus, whereupon a cop shot him and he was taken to hospital, where he is under guard. This vicious asshole lived in Paterson, New Jersey, and decided he needed to kill some people in New York. He will go unnamed by me as he is not worthy of that recognition. There's a good chance some or all of his victims opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, or Israeli oppression of Palestinians, two of the Islamofascists' grievances.

In addition to the deaths, there were a dozen injuries. Five of the dead were Argentine visitors, one was German or Belgian, depending on the media report, and two were Americans. So the ISIS-manqué did a mediocre job of killing Americans. The attacker has a wife and two young children, whose well-being is apparently of little or no concern to him, since he has effectively abandoned them and they will be objects of opprobrium if not worse, and without a breadwinner for the family. He also must be indifference to the crap his Muslim neighbors will now endure.

The politicians and police have branded the attack terrorism, because he presumably had a "political" motive. (The use of a vehicle to commit homicide is one of ISIS' suggested ways to harm people in its exhortations to launch attacks, and was used previously in Germany, France, and Britain. A note in Arabic in the truck hailed ISIS, proclaiming obviously falsely that it would live "forever. Nothing in the universe does that. The killer was an Uber driver with 1,400 trips under his belt. Uber has swung into action and banned him from now on. Good idea.) [1]

Whatever fear is generated by this "terrorism" is being generated by the incessant media drum-beating on it, with the same scant details reiterated over and over, and politicians stirring the pot with exaggerated, doleful statements. One of the worst is the Mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has been positively maudlin. To hear him tell it, every New Yorker has just courageously endured an unspeakable ordeal yet remains unbowed and unbroken. (I'm not exaggerating, that is how he's talking.) In terms of the scale of tragedy, this is the same as a bad traffic accident! (And the Uzbek sure had a fearsome arsenal: a paint gun, a pellet gun, and some knives. Terrifying! Luckily a "hero" cop shot the guy. A cop so "humble," related the police commissioner, that he feels he was just doing his job! Amazing!)

As for what Trump should do, if he follows his own "logic,"  just banning all Uzbeks from entering the U.S. won't be "tough" enough. This man is a permanent legal resident and entered the U.S. in March of 2010. So to be truly "safe," the U.S. must DEPORT all Uzbeks.

However, a Muslim from any country could become a "terrorist." Shouldn't all Muslims be banned? After all, "we don't know who these people are!" as Our President has repeatedly pointed out.

But the U.S. loves religion, so it doesn't want to "discriminate" against Muslims. Nor are U.S. Federal judges showing an inclination to disregard U.S. anti-religious-discrimination law. So it needs to ban all people from countries where there are Muslims. That would be most nations on earth.

But I'm sure Trump, being a reasonable and sensible man, will instead call for some weak half-measure. Actually he'll probably just use this to argue for the necessity of his latest ban, which is irrelevant to this incident (he's never banned people from Uzbekistan entering the U.S., and as I said, the bicycle-butcher has been here since 2010) just as most of the gun control proposals are irrelevant after each headline-grabbing mass shooting. (Most shootings involve "legitimate" gun purchasers using legally-obtained weapons, so more background checks or background checks on gun show purchases or banning whatever are irrelevant. Banning buttstocks that increase the rate of fire, and large capacity ammo magazines, would probably lower the number of casualties in mass shootings, but would not eliminate them. But the U.S. Congress won't even do that, and the two-thirds of U.S. states controlled by the GOP have been removing restrictions on carrying guns in public, even allowing them on college campuses.)

Trump took absolutely no action and called for no new laws or regulations whatsoever after the recent Las Vegas gun massacre that killed 58 people at a concert and wounds and injuries to about 500. So far, in the aftermath of the NYC attack on bicyclists, he's responded by ordering intensification of scrutiny of foreign visitors under his "extreme vetting" regime. I suppose now it's "super-extreme vetting," "vetting like you've never seen before, believe me." Totally irrelevant to this case, as the perpetrator was a legal resident of the U.S. since 2010. He's also calling for an end to the particular visa program under which the Uzbek got his green card to live in t he U.S. In other words, punish thousands of completely innocent people. That's a good response, Trump.

As a measure of how irrelevant this is, ISIS hasn't even claimed responsibility for the attack! Apparently they find it disappointing. ISIS is quick to take credit for any mayhem it plausibly can, whether it was their operation or not.
 
The local media are reporting that the culprit is "bragging" and "unrepentant" and "unapologetic" from his hospital bed. They were expecting an apology?

One thing this shows, which no media notes because it conflicts with their desire for threat inflation (which is also a prime motivation of politicians and secret policemen) is this shows how WEAK ISIS is. ISIS DID NOT mount this attack. It did not infiltrate operatives into the U.S. It has no sleeper cells in the U.S. (I'm sure with ISIS being squeezed out of its territorial conquests, it would have activated them if it did.) It did not even train this jackass. He's being described as a "lone wolf" attacker by people like New York State Governor Andrew "Son of Maximum Unction" Cuomo. What kind of powerful organization is that? [On the afternoon of Nov. 1, a day after the attack, news broke that the FBI was interested in a second man in the attack. Also the attacker was identified in a previous terrorism investigation but wasn't the "subject" of that investigation. I wonder if they planted tiny cameras in his home, like they do to non-violent dissidents.]

As for the Attack Of The Uzbek, the FBI has seized charge of the New York investigation. The BBC announced that the FBI will be reaching out to other agencies, including abroad, to learn about this man's movements and contacts. BBC, the British government's global propaganda arm, said for sure this would be a multi-agency investigation. They forgot to mention the most important sources of data about people and their connections: the NSA and  its junior partners in the "Five Eye" countries, which includes GCHQ in the UK. The FBI has free access to the NSA's stupendous database of the world's Internet, telephonic, wire, and other traffic, including records from license plate readers and surveillance cameras. Using facial recognition software, they can search for places the man has been in the past.

The FBI will search the government's database of airline travel (they know everywhere you've flown- they have that automatically, oh, and all your financial and medical records too) and arrest records in the U.S. and abroad. Cooperating foreign police and secret police agencies will cough up whatever is in their files on the man. (Unless it would reflect badly on them. Like if he was once an informer, or worse, for one of them.) By 11 AM the next day the New York City Police (NYPD) informed the press at a "news conference" that they knew the killer exited the George Washington Bridge at 2:43 PM when their license plate capture system recorded his vehicle, and a surveillance camera outside the Holland Tunnel recorded the beginning of the attack.

Does living in an omniscient police state stop "terrorism"? Does it make people safer? It certainly doesn't make victims of state political persecution safer. Already the BBC's Uzbek correspondent has reported that the secret police there are expected to use this opportunity to increase the already severe repression in that nation.

The "terrorists" give the secret police of every nation just what they want: an excuse to tighten their chokehold on the lives of the citizens. In Kenya, the regime of the "democratic" dictator Uhuru Kenyatta, who just got himself "reelected" "president" unopposed, runs death squads under the tutelage of the U.S., Britain, and Israel, that murder hundreds of people a year. This is known as "counter-terrorism." Watch the excellent Al-Jazeera documentary exposing this ongoing campaign of extreme criminality by four states, which has been totally blacked out by the establishment media of the culprit countries. Which means those media are accomplices to state terrorism and murder and by rights should be held criminally culpable.  [2]  

Al-Jazeera is run by the government of Qatar, which is currently under blockade by Saudi Arabia, its Persian Gulf lackeys, Egypt, with the U.S. piling on. The main demands of the Saudi -led assault on Qatar, publicly endorsed by Donald "Pussy-Grabber" Trump, are three: adopt the same hostile posture towards iran as these states have; stop "supporting terrorism"- no explanation of what they're referring to; and shut down Al-Jazeera.

Al-Jazeera isn't hated by only the Saudis. Al-Jazeera has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. since 2001, for reporting things the U.S. doesn't want reported. The U.S. has responded with verbal attacks, branding it "terrorist propaganda," and with physical attacks, bombing Al-Jazeera offices at least four times, kidnapping its staff, one of whom was imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay torture center for years, where the U.S. tried to force him to agree to be a U.S. spy inside Al-Jazeera, and launching cyberattacks on it. Tony Blair, the loathsome, self-righteous, oleaginous former British prime minister who conspired with Bush the Younger in the invasion of Iraq, had to talk Bush out of bombing Al-Jazeera's main headquaters inside Qatar! Where the U.S. has military bases! Talk about being drunk on power. I guess Bush found a substitute for alcohol and cocaine.

So no surprise that the Saudis are demanding Al-Jazeera be killed. It reports real news from all over the Arab and Muslim worlds, much of which the totalitarian, hyper-repressive Saudi regime finds threatening. (Just about anything human is threatening to them.)

 Oh, by the way, Kenya is "an ally in the fight against terrorism." That is to say, it invaded Somalia to help out the U.S., which prompted Al-Shabab, the Somali Islamofascist organization, to counterattack inside Kenya, against "soft targets" like the shopping mall and university attacks. Notice the pathological symbiosis between Islamofascist fanatics and state terrorists. Each creates the conditions for the perpetuation of the other. Repression breeds resistance, which leads people with no other options except surrender and acceptance of random state murders and other forms of oppression, or joining up with the only armed opposition available to them, the Islamofascists. The continued existence of armed terrorist groups gives the regimes excuses to increase political repression and murder pesky dissidents and political opponents, along with "potential" or "likely" or "identified" "terrorists." That latter category, in the case of Kenya, is supplied by U.S. and UK "intelligence," and those named are duly "eliminated" by one of several Kenyan government death squads.

As Dick Cheney said, "we have to go to the dark side," or in the words of CIA goons like Cofer Black, they've "taken the gloves off." Which is to say, governments are flat-out murdering people they don't like. In Kenya, this has happened in cases after the government has taken people to court, where they were acquitted. On such thin "evidence" the government then proceeds to murder the victims, because in their minds, suspicion is certainty. Not suspicion of actual crimes either, but of possible future crimes.

Now, there's nothing to stop the Kenyan government from setting up internment camps for people with "radical views." Those are the so-called "terrorists" that Western "intelligence agencies" and the Kenyan regime have "identified."

Between the totalitarian Islamofascist rebels on the one hand, and the repressive "democracies" and make-believe democracies like Kenya trying to crush them (and eliminate dissent in the process) on the other, a normal human being must say: a pox on both their houses.

1]  A fellow Uzbek described the 29-year-old killer to the BBC as a malcontented loner. Apparently ISIS propaganda provided him with an explanation for his unhappiness, and ideas for discharging his rage on random strangers. The attack occured around 3 PM on Tuesday October 31. If this pathetic, malevolent jerk had waited a few hours, he could have attacked the annual Halloween parade just north of where he attacked. It's claimed a million people were there. He could have disrupted fun for a million people. Or in a few days this Sunday there's the annual New York Marathon, a major event that such an attack could potentially wreck. Yet the city mayor, Clinton machine politician Bill deBlasio, has been carrying on as if it's 9/11 all over again. (De Blasio insisted on hogging the mic at a "news conference" the next morning with the Governor, the city police and fire commissioners, the boss of the New York City FBI field office, and other government poohbahs.) So in terms of disrupting life in the city, this nasty fool was inept. Most of the disruption has come from the reaction of "the authorities."

The BBC calls the Uzbek truck attack "the main news" today, thus continuing the Western media's bad practice of inflating the significance of violent acts by people who self-align with ISIS, encouraging more attacks, and adding to ISIS' stature. Not only is it disproportional to the significance of these events, it makes the "terrorism problem" WORSE. And of course the U.S. media is waving the attack like a bloody flag. The "coverage" of what this one unhappy asshole did is nonstop, repetitive, and way overdone.

Here's some perspective: every year, about 250 pedestrians are killed in New York City by motor vehicles, plus about 50 bicyclists. So this is 8 more. It makes no difference to the victims whether it was accidental or deliberate or what the motive of the driver might have been. Dead is dead. Tens of thousands of people a year die in traffic in the U.S. The same goes for "terrorist" knife attacks. Many thousands of people a year get stabbed. Why is an "ordinary" knife attack yawn-inducing, but a "terrorist" one an occasion for near-hysteria? No good reason. The bad reasons are political: To induce the population to submit to police state measures and acquiesce in endless wars abroad. Those wars, by the way, are the motivation for the "homeland" attacks using trucks and knives and occasionally guns. That doesn't necessarily mean ending the military role against Islamofascism is the correct course of action. It means that it is disingenuous and dishonest to pretend the attacks are acts of inexplicable madness. (The Uzbek has already been labeled a "madman" by NYC radio station WCBS. His motives are comprehensible. To understand is not to condone.)

2]  "Al Jazeera Investigates - Inside Kenya's Death Squads," on YouTube.com.

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.

Slow-Motion Coup Against Trump Takes The Obvious Next Step

Well, who couldn't have seen this one coming?

"Special Counsel" Robert Mueller, who was head of the dreaded secret police agency, the FBI, for 12 years, has expanded his criminal investigation to include obstruction of justice charges against the president of the U.S., Donald Trump. Ostensibly he was appointed to "investigate" possible collusion between Russian "meddling in Our Election" and the Trump campaign. In short order, the "investigation" has been "expanded" and the true target has been made manifest.  [1]

We learned this not through any official announcement, but by the usual method, the surreptitious planting of "news" in complicit media organs.

This latest step in the campaign to neutralize/remove Trump follows the pattern of so many of the previous steps. Elements of the Deep State illicitly "leak" (plant) a story with cooperative media of choice, this time the Washington Post, the hometown newspaper of the power elite of the capital city of the U.S. empire,  with damaging information aimed at Trump. (The other favorite receptacle of the secret police for their excretions is the New York Times. The media pack of running dogs then take the stories from those papers and run with them.)  Next, the Trump camp, often Trump himself, futilely issues an ineffectual verbal counterattack, which is always brushed off by the media.  In this case, Trump's lawyer shrieked his outrage about the leak. (Many of the leaks have been criminal acts under U.S. law, namely the providing of classified information to people not authorized to receive it- namely "journalists. The criminals are either secret policemen of the FBI, CIA, or NSA, or polticians with security clearances.)

So now, for the first time, Trump is a target of a criminal probe. This shortly after Trump finally got public acknowledgement that he hadn't been under investigation all along, before now. (He could never get the FBI boss he recently fired, James Comey, to public state that Trump wasn't under investigation, even though he wasn't. Comey speciously justified keeping a black cloud like this over the head of the president of the U.S., in his recent orchestrated testimony before the Senate "Intelligence" Committee.)

While Mueller, the designated hatchetman du jour, violates ethical an legal standards by sneakily planting a story in the complicit press, we are simultaneously subjected to a propaganda campaign extolling the same Mueller as a paragon of virtue and uprightness, a man of sterling integrity. J. Edgar Hoover himself didn't have a more fawning press.

The upshot of the campaign to get rid of Trump is that the secret police are made ever more supreme in the hierarchy of U.S. power. This is latest contribution of the Democratic Party to constructing the U.S. police state. Starting with Woodrow Wilson, the man who initiated the modern U.S. police state, imprisoned anyone who dared voice oppostion to World War I or the draft and gave us the hated Espionage Act, through FDR, then Truman, who created the CIA and NSA, then LBJ, who unleashed every element of the secret police state on the anti-war and black power movements, to Obama, who perfected NSA total domestic electronic surveillance and used the Espionage Act bequeathed to him by Wilson to terrorize and persecute whistleblowers, the Democratic Party, far from being "liberal," has proven itself a politically repressive menace.

But it must be noted in passing that Donald Trump is one of the most monumental assholes that has ever existed.

1]  The list of crimes against human rights committed by Mueller when he was boss of the FBI is way too extensive and detailed to adequately summarize here. There was a systematic campaign of entrapment operations to create fake "terror plots" which the FBI then "smashed." Books and articles have been written exposing this fraudulent political theater. And the FBI of course continued  the practices it has throughout its existence, of warrantless burglaries, planting of spy devices, harassment, sabotage, theft, and overall persecution of all manner of political dissidents of a progressive persuasion and people the FBI just doesn't like. The use of illegal NSA intercepts to bring criminal cases became institutionalized under Mueller. See "Robert Mueller Arrogated To Himself Sweeping Power To Ignore U.S. Constitution."

FBI Secret Police Boss Tacitly Admits Trump Wiretap, While Denying It

FBI secret police chief James Comey testified to the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, and disclosed what the U.S. media considers a "bombshell;" namely that the FBI has been running a so-called foreign counterintelligence investigation since July 2016 into possible ties between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia. He also averred that criminal charges could be brought, depending on what was found.

Well, obviously such an investigation would involve monitoring of phones. And since Trump ran his campaign out of his lair in Trump tower, those phones would likely be tapped. And the calls of campaign aides to Trump would capture conversations between him and them.

The U.S. media is absurdly pretending that the likes of Comey would never lie. What nonsense. In fact, the first secret police poohbah who was trotted out publicly to deny Trump's claim of being tapped was known, egregious liar James "Pinocchio" Clapper, Obama's former Director of National Intelligence. That U.S. corporate propagandists could pretend Clapper has the slightest credibility shows how cynical and unethical they are.

In any event, ALL of our phones are tapped ALL the time by the NSA, a military agency. The media propagandists want us to believe that if the FBI and NSA bosses deny something, we should absolutely trust them. (Both claimed to be unaware of any taps on Trump.) Secret police agencies are in the business of deception and concealment. Lying is their usual mode. Only a fraction of what they say is ever truthful.

NSA veteran Russ Tice has told us about the NSA's practice of spying on the communications of all the members of the top echelons of U.S. power, including their putative "overseers," the judges of the FISA court and Congresspeople on the intelligence committee. They even spied on an Illinois State Senator who was preparing to run for the U.S. Senate in 2004, a guy by the name of Barack Hussein Obama.

Here are links to Clapper's most notorious lie:

Short version: "James 'Pinocchio' Clapper's biggest whopper."  

Longer excerpt with context: "7 Minutes of Lies & Evasions From DNI James 'Pinocchio' Clapper culminating in his notorious whopper."  

Here is the link to the excerpt from the Tice interview. From there you can go to the full interview. "NSA Whistleblower Russ Tice Describes top NSA domestic targets."  

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. Media Looking Down the Barrel of the Most Media-Hostile Presidential Regime in History

The U.S. media better prepare itself for a rough ride for the next 4 years- those elements that aren't willing to grovel and become Trump sycophants, that is. (I exclude from consideration fascist agitprop and overtly racist pseudo-media. They are thrilled by Trump's election, which should tell you how ominous Trump's attainment of presidential power is.)

Trump is a thin-skinned narcissist who reacts explosively to any perceived slight. He believes any criticism of himself at all is grossly "unfair," even "nasty." And he has already demonstrated repeatedly that he will have no tolerance for media reportage of him and his regime that displeases him.

During his campaign, Trump frequently directed vitriol at the media from the stage, and pointed out media people in the arena. He would egg the crowd on to menace and intimidate the press people.

Even before getting "elected" by a minority of the citizens voting (and fewer than Clinton received), Trump blacklisted  over a dozen media organizations, barring them from his events, including major media organs, because their coverage failed to be sycophantic towards him.

Post victory, he doesn't allow media to fly on his plane, a break with established practice.

Trump's first reaction to the protests against him when he was deemed president-elect was to tweet that the media was to blame for creating the protests.

Nixon is going to look like a media-lover compared to Trump.

Well, the media created Trump in many ways, from NBC making him a TV star with his awful show, "The Apprentice," based on abuse of people, to the billions of dollars worth of free air time. CBS boss Leslie Moonves giddily bragged, infamously, about how much money CBS was making by its grotesquely over-saturated "coverage" of Trump, saying Trump may be bad for America, but he was great for CBS. [1]

On the other side of the ledger, the media almost totally blacked out Bernard Sanders, to the extent of airing an empty Trump podium instead of a live Sanders speech. The media gave billions of dollars of free TV time to every Trump tweet, while virtually ignoring Sanders. Then,  after Trump won the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) nomination, the media elites panicked and skewed their coverage to favor Clinton and try to undermine Trump.

But it didn't work. With the FBI's help, Trump closed the gap and came close enough to win a majority of Electoral College votes. [2]

The media made its bed. Now it has to lie in it. Unfortunately so does everyone else on earth.


Two of the jackasses who brought us Donald Trump: Media czars Leslie Roy Moonves (CBS) and Jeffrey Adam Zucker (formerly of NBC, now CNN Worldwide).

Jeffrey Adam Zucker

                                                                  

 Zucker yuks it up with his Creation, the Creature from the Mar-a-Lago Lagoon.

 Leslie Roy Moonves
"Hey, I'm making so much money! My shareholders will be pleased! Who cares if America goes to hell in a handbasket?"

 Moonves doesn't want any doubt about who runs CBS so he himself holds all three top positions: Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer of CBS Corporation. "Big Ego? Who, Me?"

The Man Who Knifed the Democrats By Dredging Up Clinton's Emails Again: FBI secret police chief and registered Republican James Brien Comey, Jr. (Thank Obama for appointing this Bush regime apparatchik to his post! What is it about Democrats? They long for Republican love. Bill Clinton also had a bad habit of appointing Republicans. Do Republicans ever appoint Democrats to top power posts? I can't think of any.) [See footnote 2.]

1] "Jeff Zucker’s singular role in promoting Donald Trump’s rise," Washington Post, October 2, 2016.

Moonves in February, 2016, at a Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, said, "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." "Donald's place in this election is a good thing." "What can I say, the money is rolling in." "I've never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going."

Audio on youtube.com

Link to articles in establishment media on Moonves comments here.

2]  After the release in October of videotape of Trump bragging about sexually molesting women, it seemed that he was destined to lose. He trailed Hillary Clinton by 14% in national polls, a huge deficit so close to the election November 8. Then on October 28, eleven days before the election, FBI chief James Comey lobbed a bomb into the campaign. He sent a letter to 8 Congressional chairs saying the FBI found more Clinton emails in an unnamed, unrelated investigation. It transpired that in persecuting the hapless, sexually compulsive Anthony Weiner, the FBI found some Clinton emails as they seized devices used by his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a top Hillary Clinton confidant and operative. Irrationally, this caused the polling gap to evaporate immediately. Trump ultimately won enough states to win in the Electoral College, even though he actually lost the "popular" vote (what is called the "vote" in every other country on earth). See my previous essay for a discussion of that, below.

["In the Self-Proclaimed "World's Greatest Democracy," the Candidate With the Most Votes Just Lost."]

For my earlier analysis of the tempest-in-a-teapot email "scandal" redux, see " Much Ado About Emails: FBI Stirs the Pot Again Over Clinton Private Computer Server."

Much Ado About Emails: FBI Stirs the Pot Again Over Clinton Private Computer Server

FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to a clutch of Congressional Committee chairpeople notifying them that the FBI is reviewing a new batch of Hillary Clinton's emails that they found in the course of "an unrelated investigation." [Media reports say that investigation is of Anthony Weiner.]

What could possibly be new in this? The FBI had already concluded that there was "classified" emails on Clinton's server, and Comey harshly rebuked her at the close of the long investigation but concluded there was no criminal intent on her part. (She used a private server for her government business as Obama's previous Secretary of State apparently to avoid her emails being part of government records subject to possible disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act or other parts of the government, including Congress.) So what is there are more "classified" emails?

Maybe the FBI wants to create more suspense in the presidential election November 8th.

The FBI has a long, notorious history of meddling in U.S. politics. (Most dramatically in its roles in the CIA assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., where the FBI role was to conduct fake investigations that duly blamed the designated fall guys and threw dirt on the trails leading to the CIA. Even interfering in urban politics isn't beneath the FBI, as in their targeting of former New York City comptroller John Liu, whose phone was tapped for years in a futile attempt to trap him in campaign finance crimes. Ultimately an FBI plant tricked one of his campaign aides into accepting an illegal contribution and she was prosecuted. The taint on Liu helped wreck his political career and sabotage his mayoral campaign.) Being a reactionary secret police organization, it wouldn't be out of character for it to sabotage the Democratic candidate, Clinton.

I suspect that FBI agents forced Comey's hand, although he may have been very willing.

The latest batch of emails were discovered in searched of computers and other devices seized from Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife, top Clinton assistant Huma Abedin. The FBI is conducting a sexual witchhunt investigation against former Congressman Anthony Weiner for alleged "sexting" to a 15-year-old girl. Media reports specified that Weiner sent a bare-chested photo of himself to the teenager. (A photo of Weiner texting bare-chested and holding his young child had been earlier publicized by the media.)

If that is a crime, then what is it when men in bathing suits walk on beaches or hang around pools where minors are present? Logically that must be criminal too.

Guess we better start wearing burqas to the beach.

If anyone under 18 sees this, it's a crime in the U.S. (No wonder they're pals with Saudi Arabia!)

 "Hey, I got a compulsion! Ain't that nutty?"
Libido trumps politics.

Why Did the FBI Pass On Adding Another Scalp To Its "Terrorist Plot Smashed" Belt In The Case of Orlando Gay Nightclub Mass Murderer Omar Mateen?

Information has been dribbling out from the establishment media and from the FBI itself, including from the mouth of FBI secret police boss James Comey, over the days since the Sunday, June 12th 2 am massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 mostly Latino gays were murdered and 53 wounded. What's somewhat curious now is the fact that the murderer Omar Mateen would have been a perfect target for the FBI's "create a terrorist plot we can foil" program. The FBI has a long-established pattern of luring hotheads, malcontents, poor criminals looking to score money, and the mentally ill into "terrorist conspiracies" created by "confidential informants" (in actuality agents provocateur), giving them fake explosives, and arresting them when they walk into the trap. Or even when they just sound like they're "planning" "terrorist acts." Then the FBI trumpets its feat, and a complicit media blares the story with top-level, luridly overheated coverage.

The story we've been given so far is that Mateen first came to the attention of the FBI in 2013, when they launched an investigation of him, which was subsequently closed. They investigated him a second time in 2014, again throwing the fish back into the pond instead of hooking it and reeling it in.

What we've been told so far is that Mateen was first investigated by the FBI in 2013 when co-workers (Mateen was a security guard at the time, of all things) called the FBI and reported that Mateen claimed to be a member of the Lebanese Shiite militia/political movement Hizbollah, a "terrorist" organization to the U.S. Government.  The FBI then interviewed Mateen, who told them he just said that out of anger at his co-workers, who he felt belittled him over his Muslim religion. (There's scant evidence Mateen was particularly religious.) Comey claims the FBI interviewed him three times in all, tailed him, tapped his phone calls, but after 10 months deemed him to not be a threat and closed the case. Then in early 2014, the FBI investigated him a second time over "links," as they say, to a suicide bomber in Syria, but inexplicably took him off their watch list soon after in May 2014.

In any event, one of these investigations included ten months of surveillance, and the assignment of an "informant" to surreptitiously record conversations with him. For unexplained reasons, this investigation was terminated without the usual procedure of setting up the target on some kind of conspiracy terrorism rap, which merely requires verbal agreement with the agent provocateur to carry out a fantasy attack, plus one overt act "in furtherance of the conspiracy," like duping the target into buying a spool of wire from a hardware store "to build a bomb." It's extremely easy to do this in the U.S. police state, and in fact they've been doing this sort of thing since at least the 19th century, when labor organizers, among others, were set up in  similar ways. They've got it down to a routine by now. Police manuals and training courses teach the ABCs of it.

You have to wonder, after TWICE homing in on Mateen, and in one instance spending ten months in a serious effort, they just abandoned the project. There was already a significant investment of time and energy expended, and Mateen was quite a violent person, as those who knew him are describing. His former wife had to be physically rescued from him when he virtually imprisoned her, forbade her to communicate with her family, and violently abused her. Former co-workers describe a volatile, angry man. And it turns out that he frequented the gay nightclub he attacked, Pulse, up to a dozen times. Patrons remember him as nursing drinks alone, and sometimes angrily lashing out. Seems like an easy lay-up shot for the FBI to lure such an alienated hothead into a "conspiracy."

You'd have thought the FBI would be rubbing their hands over finding a live one like Mateen. His co-workers said he claimed Hizbollah membership (his denials to the FBI could always be dismissed as self-serving and untrustworthy), so once lured into a "plot," he could be portrayed as a typical aspiring terrorist. Slam dunk for the FBI.

It's not as if the FBI feels sorry for the sad sacks they entrap and send to prison for decades. And as it turns out, Mateen really WAS a menace.

On the other hand, the FBI has been unrelenting in their surveillance, harassment, and sabotage of me for over 40 years. Numerous "black bag jobs," warrantless wiretaps and bugs, physical surveillance, the whole gamut of "counterintelligence" techniques, wherein they treat American dissidents like spies for a foreign power. In my case, without ever bringing charges, by the way. Make of that what you will. What I make of it is that persecuting people for ideological reasons is one of their top priorities, if not the top one.
                                  

Example of FBI psychological warfare. This wireless network appeared within range of my home starting last year and is on around the clock. And no, it isn't in a van. I had to waste my time checking out that possibility. Another chunk of my life stolen. Over the years. the stolen time (life) and money has been significant.

To the FBI, and to their local police accomplices in repression, anyone on the "left" is a "terrorist," including environmental activists and most recently the Occupy Movement.

Perhaps we'll get more clues in the coming days as to what happened in the Mateen matter. It will require careful parsing of FBI information/misinformation/disinformation, and sorting and weighing other information. Of course much that seems to be independent reporting in the media will be government planted, so care must be taken in evaluating it.

The FBI is in a somewhat delicate situation. They in effect let a dangerous man slip through their fingers twice. Recall that in the Boston Marathon bombing, they had interviewed the elder Tsarnaev brother, in fact apparently tried to recruit him as an "informant." They had also been warned by the Russians that he was a terrorist. The FBI claimed, variously, that they hadn't been warned, or there was "no evidence." (As if evidence was needed to imprisoned thousands after September 1, 2001, all around the U.S. in a mass roundup of Muslim men, and in Guantanamo Bay and various other military dungeons and CIA black sites. The suspicious minds of FBI secret police don't need evidence to decide someone is guilty. First the verdict, then the evidence.)

I suspect they'll take their usual tack when one of their glaring failures becomes public. They'll whine that their hands are tied by pesky rules and regulations and "rights," and they need still MORE power to get the job done. That's how they turn their blunders to their advantage. It happens over and over.

Meanwhile, the liberals and their auxiliaries on the "progressive left" are taking the opportunity to claim that the problem is that people can buy guns. Well, with 300 million guns in private hands, seems to me there are plenty of options for people to buy guns secondhand, or steal one. It seems odd that one man can shoot over a hundred people with semi-automatic weapons, then hold 30 hostage. Maybe the NRA has a point that if more citizens carried weapons, the net effect at least in mass shootings, would be fewer deaths in mass shooting situations. A hundred plus people being helpless against one vicious mad dog- there's something wrong here. And you'll never prevent a determined, vicious person from acquiring weapons.

By the way, Mateen had a 3-year-old son, who he was apparently willing to abandon in pursuit of his sick sanguinary goal. Mateen had a degree in "criminal justice technology" and was looking for a career in "law enforcement."

So that's one less killer-cop we have to worry about. There's your silver lining.

Omar Mateen, Myspace photo. Good riddance.

Mateen, age 29, the aspiring policeman.

Compulsive Liars of FBI Blatantly Lie Again- Media Doesn't Notice

You may recall that for the last month or so, the FBI has been insisting that the only way they can get into the encrypted data on an iPhone used by one of two Islamofascists who committed a massacre in San Bernardino, California, is if the Apple Corporation creates a software program to break its own encryption on the phone. [1]

Well whaddaya know, turns out it's not so. The U.S. Department of "Justice" is dropping its court case to compel Apple to make cracker software for the FBI. The FBI, after a full-court press in the media for a month, claiming that the terrorists were going to destroy "National Security" if Apple didn't submit, said Never Mind. They "found" a company that can do the job. Surprise surprise.

Actually it was always obvious that the FBI could break into the iPhone of the dead killer without forcing Apple to create software that the FBI, contrary to its oh-so-innocent protestations, would then use routinely and in secret to break into the phones of whomever it doesn't like. (People like me. Although I personally don't have an iPhone.) For one thing, there's this outfit called the NSA (National Security Agency) that most certainly already has methods to defeat iPhone security. And the FBI has free access to the NSA's databases and can call on them for assistance. (They just don't want to admit it in open court.)

For another thing, there's an entire industry devoted to data retrieval. Edward Snowden even pointed this out weeks ago. So the FBI is availing itself of the services of a company that specializes in this.

It had already been pointed on tech websites that various means exist to get past the Apple encryption, such as merely copying the contents of the flash storage as many times as needed and trying out password possibilities on the copies until one worked. (That's called a brute force attack.) There was much repetition of the claim that after 10 wrong password attempts, all th date would be deleted and gone forever. Not so, according to some tech experts. The password would be deleted.

The point is, the FBI's original claim was bogus, knowingly false. But the U.S. media will never, ever, point out an FBI lie, no matter how obvious. (The BBC won't either, I've noticed.)

But in the meantime, we were subjected to a month of media attacks on Apple for selfishly putting profits ahead of "National Security" and Protecting the American People from Terrorism. (Funny, I thought corporate profits were the whole point of this system! That's the reason they overthrow governments and slaughter millions of people, to make the world safe for corporate profits.) As part of this propaganda offensive to aid and abet yet another FBI power grab, the media trotted out the usual suspects, giving a platform to various secret police poohbahs and the political enablers of the secret police state. Some of whom you might not have expected in such a role, such as the "progressive" mayor of New York City, that alumnus of the Clinton cabal, Bill "My Deeds Contradict My Words" de Blasio, who scolded Apple and lectured them on the necessity of "protecting" people's "safety" rather than worrying about their image and profits. His hand-picked police Commissioner, Bill "The Velvet Repressor" Bratton, chimed in likewise.

Apple, for self-interested reasons, dug in its heels. Other tech companies verbally backed them. But this is only a defeat for the secret police leviathan in the sense that a grab for still more repressive power was stymied. The principle that corporations have to act as accomplices to the secret police in making cracker software was temporarily staved off. But no legal precedent was set, since the case was dropped. In practice however the secret police still strip all of us naked of any privacy every second of every day. And the tech companies, and especially the phone companies, are still almost fully cooperative with the secret police, as they have been ever since the invention of the telephone. (The telegraph too, for that matter.)

We'll see what repercussions, if any, will be visited on Apple CEO Tim Cook for his effrontery. Remember what happened to the head of Qwest Communications, Joseph Nacchio, when at the beginning of the regime of Bush the Younger, the NSA went around to all the telecoms to tap into their networks illegally. Nacchio said Sure, just show us the warrant. He was the ONLY telecom exec to require a warrant. The NSA said Never Mind, and the next thing that happened was the Federal government found an excuse to indict Nacchio on a insider trading charge and he was socked with a 6 year stretch in prison.

By the way, the NSA was setting up this massive illegal spying in February 2001. That's 7 months before September 11, when agents of the U.S. Deep State, acting on the orders of Richard Cheney, blew up those three buildings at the World Trade Center, which has ever since been used as a justification for every state crime under the sun.

1] The San Bernardino massacre occurred December 2 of last year. The attack was carried out by a married ethnic Pakistani couple, who targeted an office party for the husband's co-workers, killing 14 of them. For details and background on the San Bernardino killers, see "Last Days: Preparing for the apocalypse in San Bernardino," New Yorker, February 22, 2016. For an interesting insight into how extremists go unnoticed by people who know them, see "San Bernardino and the Mechanics of a Double Life," New Yorker, December 16, 2015. This also refutes the demagogues who insist that the Muslim "community" shelters and hides terrorists.We just heard it again from the U.S. demagogues, including Donald Trump and the "talk" radio stormtrooper ranters, saying that the Muslims in Belgium "had to know" the terror suspects were among them. Like everybody knows who's hiding in a given apartment! It's called hiding for a reason.