NATO Poohbah Resorts To Mysticism In Latest Verbal Attack On Russia

The U.S. announced a few days ago that it is sending hundreds of armored vehicles and equipment sufficient for a 5,000 troop expeditionary force, to Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, and other eastern European and Baltic  nations, to “reassure” its “allies” (clients and lackeys) against Russian “aggression.” [1] In apparent response, Russian president Vladimir Putin has subsequently declared that Russia will deploy an additional 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles this year. (ICBMs are long-range missiles- note the name, Intercontinental. So they are not even directed at eastern Europe!)

 

This Russian announcement prompted NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg  to bloviate that this coming Russian deployment is one of the reasons for the NATO buildup. In other words, the cause of something in the past lies in a subsequent event. The future caused something to happen in the past. [2]

In the universe as most of us experience it, events that occur later in time do not cause events earlier in time.

But apparently the laws of physics are not binding in the world of Western imperialist apparatchiks. And no propaganda statement is too obviously ludicrous not to be treated as true by Western media propagandists. And Stoltenberg knew this or he never would have made his absurd statement.

Whatever one thinks of Putin’s move, it CANNOT POSSIBLY HAVE CAUSED SOMETHING TO HAPPEN IN THE PAST. Unless one is a flaked-out mystic. Maybe Stoltenberg should cast a spell on Putin with some eye of Newt and a bat wing. Or use some magic crystals to ward off the Russian evil.

1] “Russian aggression” refers to Russian support for the eastern Ukrainian separatists, and the reunification of Crimea and Russia, first voted for by over 90% of Crimean residents who participated in a referendum and then ratified by the Russian parliament, the Duma, is called “aggression,” and frequently painted as a precursor to a Russian invasion of the Baltics, Poland, etc.- an absurd, paranoiac fantasy used to justify a revival of the so-called “Cold War” by “the West,” that is, the U.S. and its European “partners” and other hangers-on like Canada.) 

2] A European civilian traditionally acts as a U.S. puppet “head” of NATO. NATO is actually run by an American general at all times, and always has been.  The secretary-generals are always picked for their reactionary attitudes and fealty to U.S. imperialism.

Stoltenberg’s statement was : "This nuclear saber rattling of Russia is unjustified, it’s destabilizing, and it’s dangerous. And this is something which we are addressing, and it’s also one of the reasons why we now are increasing the readiness and the preparedness of our forces. And we are responding [sic] by making sure that NATO also in the future is an alliance which provides deterrence and protection for all allies against any threat."

U.S. Political Trials Becoming Increasingly Kafkaesque in Age of Obama

We've already seen the sick charades staged in the U.S. military gulag in Guantanamo Bay, occupied Cuba, the so-called "military commissions," where the defense lawyers are bugged and tapped and even the courtroom is surreptitiously controlled by the CIA, as a military "judge" there learned to his surprise when the CIA suddenly cut off the transmission line from the room. "Evidence" obtained through torture is liberally used- in fact is most of what they have to "incriminate" those on "trial."

Then we had the military court martial of Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, for exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq to Wikileaks, most notoriously the murder of two Reuters journalists and over a half dozen other unarmed civilians in Baghdad, attacked in broad daylight by a bloodthirsty U.S. helicopter crew as the victims were walking casually on the street, and the attack on a van with children in it which stopped to try and help the wounded victims. (The crew sadistically chortled that that's what they get "for bringing children to a battle" (sic!). "That's right," seconds another crewman. [1] In Manning's legal crucifixion, evidence was tightly controlled, and reporters had severe, repressive restrictions placed on them and were subjected to intimidation. (I mean real reporters. The power establishment media was mostly AWOL from the trial. They saw their role as minimizing public sympathy for Manning, and thus mostly confined themselves to reporting prosecutorial hysteria and government propaganda as fact.) [2] 

Now we have the spectacle, in a domestic entrapment-and-frame-up case, being the latest episode of FBI Political Terror Theater, of defense lawyers being openly barred from seeing evidence. In the past, prosecutors would have to secretly violate their obligation to disclose evidence to the defense. This sort of prosecutorial misconduct was routine in America, in both Federal and state proceedings. But just as the secret police and military have new "authorities" to do "legally" what was formerly illegal, such as warrantless searches and seizures and mass surveillance (and torture and assassinations, let's not forget, even though the establishment prefers we remain unconscious of this New Normal most of the time and act like everything's fine- how prescient the movie "Brazil" has proven to be!) so too do prosecutors and courts now "normalize" what once was done more or less covertly and denied. [3]

The prosecutors in the case of Adel Daoud have gotten the judge to agree that the defense cannot know what "evidence" was in the affidavits the government used to obtain various warrants. (Such affidavits are routinely filled with lies, distortions, and gross exaggerations. Since they are filed in secret, without challenge, generally before an arrest during the "investigative" stage of a case, the government can get away with this. So they do.) This even though the defense lawyers had to get so-called "security" clearances from the government itself. In other words, the government had right of approval over who would even be allowed to defend the defendant. (The defendant in this case, as in most productions of FBI Terror Theater, is a hapless and helpless puppet. He's the puppet that gets beaten repeatedly over the head by a character wielding a baseball bat, to extend the metaphor.) [4]

 For example, for at least a decade, the Drug Enforcement Administration has had a entire secret unit devoted to laundering illegally obtained evidence by fabricating how they got the information. They call this "parallel construction," and has been standard practice by Federal "law enforcement" agencies for years. Even though these are known facts, no Federal judge has ordered the disbandment of this unit, sanctioned any Federal agents or prosecutors for them, dismissed any cases or barred testimony from the agencies doing this systematically. Often the information comes from the National Security Agency, the supersurveillance Pentagon arm. The military is barred by law, the posse comitatus act, from law enforcement functions. As usual, those in power pick and choose which laws they feel like obeying. Another dead letter law is the law that created the CIA, which barred it from domestic operations, something it ignored from the day it came into existence.
In the Daoud case, apparently the prosecutors aren't satisfied by how drastically the playing field is already tilted in their favor. Besides refusing to allow the defense access to critical information and documents, they are also insisting that the judge virtually gag the defense lawyers during the trial. There is a list of issues and items that the prosecution is demanding the defense be prohibited from mentioning during the trial. [5]

Of course, precluding a viable defense in political trials is a hoary American tradition. It goes back many decades. During the repression of the 1960s and '70s, a favorite shout of judges at defendants who tried to defend themselves by bringing some reality into the proceedings would be "the government isn't on trial here, YOU are!" Meaning, Don't mention what the government is doing or has done, don't mention their lawbreaking, don't mention their crimes that led to your resistances and protest. More recently, John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer persecuted for publicly criticizing torture, has explained that he had no choice but to take a plea deal after the judge in his case ruled in pre-trial hearings against any viable defenses and Kiriakou's lawyer told him they had no defense left.

This framework of frame-up has been institutionalized. Daniel Ellsberg points out that he couldn't have defended himself if his case had gone to trial. (What happened was that the fact that the Nixon regime offered the judge a bribe in the form of a promised appointment as FBI director, and when this fact became public, the judge felt compelled, reluctantly, to dismiss the charges because of government misconduct. And he had discounted the burglarizing of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office by Nixon's plumbers to get dirt on Ellsberg, the siccing of Cuban fascist exiles on Ellsberg, who beat him up, the plot by Nixon's henchmen G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt to assassinate Ellsberg, etc. It is understood that Edward Snowden would be precluded from offering any viable defenses should he ever be dragooned into a U.S. court for a show trial.

We can expect things to get worse and worse during the never-ending War on Terror. The "trials" are sick farces, show trials, where no real defense is permitted.

1] Search for "collateral murder video" on youtube, Wikileaks, etc. The longest version is about 17 minutes. The military, AFTER the video forced them to "investigate," declared that the murderous helicopter crew thought their victims were armed. Why that gave them the right to kill them on the spot, or to shoot up a civilian van that stopped to help, is not explained. Of course it's not true anyway, as the video shows us what the killers were seeing, and clearly these men aren't carrying assault weapons- most are carrying nothing at all. The journalists had camera. The crew chose to falsely report to the remote flight controller at base that their victims were armed.

2] For a discussion of the repression of reporters by the military in the Manning trial, see for example "Bradley Manning Awaits Verdict After Trial Ends with Prosecution 'Smears' & Harsh Gov’t Secrecy," Democracy Now, July 23, 2013.

For the use of "secret evidence" the defense and the rest of us weren't allowed to see, read "'He Wanted To Help America': Manning Attorney in First Extended Interview After 35-Year Sentence," Democracy Now, August 22, 2013.

3] Of course, torture by the U.S. is nothing new. They've done it for centuries. They trained foreign fascists in torture techniques for decades during the so-called "Cold War." (Which was their cover and alibi for waging global class warfare.) Domestically many police have tortured, as in Chicago where it was institutionalized, and apparently still exists in milder (?) forms at the police semi-black site uncovered by the Guardian (UK; U.S. media doesn't have much taste for uncovering the crimes of their own police) but brushed aside for years  as just guilty defendants lying. Nowadays torture isn't denied outright but defined away as "enhanced interrogation techniques," or maybe "harsh" ones. Once in awhile some U.S. media outfit will even say "brutal." (The Guardian has a whole series on the Chicago PD black site where "off the books" prisoners are taken for abuse and interrogation, held incommunicado. Start with "The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site', " February 24, 2015.

4] "Very Mention of Snowden’s Name Makes Prosecutors Tremble," The Intercept, June 4, 2015.

5] Details of what the defense is barred from mentioning at ibid.

An example of the cynical political uses of "terror plots" to justify increased state power, surveillance, control, and inevitably repression is illustrated in the article "How Dianne Feinstein Misled Congress About How 'Useful' NSA Spying Authorities Were In Stopping Plots," techdirt, August 1, 2014.

In fact, hardly a day goes by without more evidence piling up to prove my points. It has recently emerged that two government agents in the Silk Road website case are themselves under indictment for serious crimes. The defense was kept in the dark about this, and the judge then barred them from mentioning it in court, thus denying them the right to impeach the credibility of the accuser, the government. This is considered a "fair" trial in the U.S. The judge imposed a draconian sentence of two life terms, plus additional years, without parole, on the Silk Road defendant, Ross Ulbricht.
The establishment likes to pretend that its judges are impartial, favoring neither the defense nor prosecution. In fact, the overwhelming majority of American judges, on every judicial level, are effectively part of the prosecution. They bend over backwards to ensure that jurors won't waver or be swayed by defense arguments and will "do their duty" and duly convict. This is why well over 90% of criminal trials result in convictions here.

For good measure, the indicted agents also tricked Ulbricht into "hiring" them to kill someone they duped him into thinking had stolen $820,000 from his site which the agents themselves had stolen. The "murder" wasn't carried out, but Ulbricht is facing trial for being lured into the agents' plot. The agents were DEA and Secret Service men. It appears there are other corrupt agents involved, at DHS. [See "The Silk Road founder's life sentence appeal may rely on an alleged $800,000 theft by federal agents," Business Insider, June 4, 2015, and "Criminal Charges Against Agents Reveal Staggering Corruption in the Silk Road Investigation," Forbes, March 31, 2015.] The theft occurred the very same day a Silk Road employee was forced by the Federal government to turn over his administrative account to them, which they then used to steal the bitcoins without a moment's delay. Like you'd expect to happen in Mexico or Afghanistan. This of course in no way derailed the "investigation." Silk Road, contrary to lurid media depiction, was basically a site for buying and selling outlawed drugs people use for pleasure. This is considered a monstrous crime by our rulers. (Even though many of them have used such substances, including presidents Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, and vice president Gore and many, many others. Hey, I'm not going to call them hypocrites. That's shooting fish in a barrel. Anyway I think cynics is more on the mark.)

DEATH to Dzhokhar! So Sayeth the Jury!

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been sentenced to death by the jury in his Federal trial in Boston, Massachusetts, for the bombing attack by him and his older brother on the Boston Marathon two years ago. Dzhokhar was 19 at the time, now he’s 21. 

He was already convicted on all 30 counts, including 17 carrying the death penalty. The jury didn’t sentence him to death on all 17 death penalty convictions, just 6 of them.  They spent 14 hours deliberating on the sentence, and all 12 unanimously agreed. We are told that some were weeping.

Some media commentary has fatuously feigned surprise, because the State of Massachusetts has no death penalty and most people there oppose it. Of course this was a Federal trial, and any potential juror who opposed the death penalty was excluded from hearing the case. So I don’t see why there was anything surprising. And the judge acted as a hanging judge all along.

The defense conceded at the outset of the trial that Dzhokhar planted one of the two home-made pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of the race. Yet the judge allowed weeks of inflammatory testimony by maimed survivors and tear-jerking evocations of those killed, including a child. As the facts of the bombing, the deaths, the injured (we’ve never been given an exact number of those- it was “over 200” and kept creeping up until now it’s at “over 260,” with a dozen I believe losing parts of their limbs) and Dzhokhar’s culpability were STIPULATED by his defense, there was NO EVIDENTIARY REASON to spend weeks pushing the gore and “horror” in the jurors’ faces. It was done to manipulate the jury’s emotions so they would impose death.

Three people were killed in the bombing. We are being subjected to more bathos- a LOT more bathos- over these three deaths than over the 2,100 or so Palestinians killed by Israel in its most recent assault on Gaza, the now estimated one million Iraqis dead as a result of the 2003 U.S. invasion, the 3 or 4 MILLION Vietnamese -and another million Laotians and Cambodians- killed by the U.S.- because actually there’s zero bathos, and zero genuine remorse or sympathy, for those victims in the U.S. media. The word of the day is “closure.” The local U.S. attorney, Carmen “I Drove Aaron Swartz to suicide!” Ortiz, has invoked it. The Mayor of Boston has invoked it. The New York Times has invoked it. The “hope” is that the victims will find “closure” in the execution of Tsarnaev. (If snuffing out his life is supposed to make them feel better, they’ll have to wait a number of years while his futile appeals run their course.)

I’m certainly not saying those three deaths aren’t a tragedy. I wish total strangers no ill as a general rule. I don’t believe they “deserved” to die simply for being Americans. But unfortunately there is a brutal and remorseless logic to the targeting of random Americans, given the American habit, centuries old, of slaughtering so many other people. How, really, can Americans squeal like stuck pigs when they’re on the receiving end of violence? They believe (at least most of them do) that their violence is righteous.

Nor do I share jihadist ideology or goals, as any regular reader of this blog has surely noticed.  And I wish that rather than target a relatively enlightened part of the U.S. like Boston, jihadist terrorists would pick more worthy targets. 

I simply refuse to hypocritically condemn some crimes and not other (far, FAR more major) ones.

As a political matter, I don’t think terrorist acts inside the U.S. do anything to improve things. They only empower the military and secret police state we already are suffocating under here. And materially they do nothing at all to weaken the U.S. The only benefit for the jihadists- and it is a major strategic one- is to provoke more repression, and more attacks on Muslims, which plays perfectly into the worldview the jihadists are trying to sell to the mass of Muslims, namely that “the West” is waging war on Islam, and the U.S. is an implacable enemy.

As for executing Tsarnaev, it strikes me as a tawdry act of vengeance. He comes across as an empty vessel, filled with jihadi notions by his domineering older brother (who was killed days after the bombing). It was explained that the jurors were supposedly put off by his lack of remorse. How he was supposed to show remorse in the courtroom isn’t explained. Should he have sobbed? (When defendants do that, it is often interpreted by jurors and judges as self-pity, anyway.) Ortiz felt the need to relitigate the point of whether he was controlled by his older brother as the defense unsuccessfully argued in trying to get the jury to spare his life. At her presentation to the media after the jury decision on death, she reargued the point gratuitously. [1]

The truth is, by all accounts he is a bit of a cipher, showing little emotion in general. A wasted life, now he is a pawn, a symbolic token to be ritually put to death to make a political point, namely that “terrorists,” that is, people who kill for the wrong political reasons, are the lowest of the low, utter scum to be gotten rid of.

Remember the deluge of vitriol heaped on Rolling Stone for running a cover with his picture on it? For some reason the picture was considered flattering, and Rolling Stone was said to be “glamorizing” Tsarnaev and making him “cool.” Even slight deviation from the ideological diktat that The Enemy must be demonized at all times results in attacks to whip the offenders back into line.

According to Ortiz, “today is not a day for political debate,” just “reflection.” Okay Carmen, here’s some reflections from me. Let me know when we’re allowed to “debate” the endless “war on terrorism” and other political topics.

That damn Rolling Stone, glamorizing Tsarnaev by calling him a "Monster!"...Oh wait, "monster is BAD, right?

Pretty Vacant

Surrendering to police after they tried and failed to kill him. This time they'll get it right.

1] "U.S.Attorney Carmen Ortiz speaks after death penalty decision, May 15, 2015.” Ortiz raised the matter of the dead university cop (the jurors didn’t sentence him to death for that), the fact that children were killed (I think just one), the “weapons of mass destruction.” If a home-made bomb made out of a kitchen pressure cooker is a “weapon of mass destruction,” I wonder what the cluster bombs the U.S. drops on civilians, and gives to Israel to drop on Palestinians and Lebanese, and sells to Saudi Arabia which is killing Yemeni civilians with, are. Or a 30,000 pound “bunker buster” bomb. Or nuclear weapons. It seems like a hysterical exaggeration to call this a “weapon of mass destruction.”

But these days the U.S. classifies just about anything as a “weapon of mass destruction” if a “terrorist” holds it. 

As for the heinousness of killing children, American apparatchiks defend it when they do it, or Israel or others they back do it. Even the cold-blooded murder of four young Palestinian boys playing soccer on a Gaza beach, blown up by an Israeli gunboat as they ran for their lives, is swept under the rug. (NBC immediately pulled its eyewitness reporter out of Gaza to shut him down.) The point isn’t that it’s okay to blow up kids in America. The point is the insufferable, monumental hypocrisy of the American power establishment. Over its two centuries of existence, the U.S. has killed quite a few children, and doesn’t show any sign of stopping. The self-righteousness of these apparatchiks is rather nauseating.

Ortiz also stressed that the death penalty was imperative because Tsarnaev had tried to "coerce and intimidate the United States." Well, Honey, if the U.S. scares that easily, maybe it should just curl up into a ball and suck its thumb. The Soviet Union had 20,000 nuclear weapons, but two homemade bombs in what amounts to small buckets is a mortal threat to the United States? 

I guess the message is Don't Mess With The U.S.! That should deter all the Islamic zealots who seek martyrdom.

Kerry Cautions China on Developing Reefs it Claims- China Tells Him to Shove Off

U.S. Secretary of State John “Skull and Bones” Kerry is going to caution the Chinese rulers about their seizures and development of scraps of land and coral reefs in the oceans bordering their country, which they claim as their territories. And a Pentagon apparatchik tried to sound menacing towards China while testifying in the Senate. The Chinese responded in advance with the back of their hand, throwing the word “hypocrisy” in the U.S.’ face for good measure. 

Gee, whatever might they have had in mind?

Well, how about Guantanamo Bay? The U.S. doesn’t even pretend that is U.S. territory. It is occupied Cuban land on which the U.S. keeps a military base and torture center. Cuba has been demanding the U.S. pack up and leave for 55 years now.  (And all the while the U.S. has been trying to assassinate Cuba’s president, launching terrorist attacks on Cuba, murdering Cuban and foreign citizens, striving mightily to wreck Cuba’s economy, assassinating a Cuban diplomat in New York City, and on and on.)

But just to show the Chinese that the U.S. means business, the Obama regime threatened to make a threat, planting a reminder to China of the iron fist inside the U.S. velvet glove, in the New York Times, a U.S. ruling class bulletin board. Here’s what the Times said the Pentagon apparatchik, David Shear, told the august Senators:

“A senior Pentagon official said this week that the United States might consider sending ships and aircraft to within 12 nautical miles of built-up reefs near the Philippines, an American ally, to demonstrate its commitment to freedom of navigation in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.”  (My emphases.)[1]

Right. As usual, U.S. military muscle-flexing (which is a threat) and intimidation is altruistic. In fact, even when the U.S. slaughters hundreds of thousands (or millions, as in Indochina) of civilians, it’s altruistic. Everything the U.S. does is in Defense of Freedom. Who could criticize that? (Oh, and by the way, the Philippines is more of a U.S. protectorate than an “ally,” contrary to the Great Euphemiser, the NY Times.)

Or was that threatening to threaten to threaten? They didn’t say “consider sending” combat forces to menace the Chinese, they said they might consider sending them. Can you hedge it with any more qualifiers than that? Seems kind of wimpy. Hell, you didn’t even get around to considering doing it yet! No wonder the Chinese aren’t intimidated.

Here’s the exact quote the NY Times was paraphrasing, uttered by the aforementioned assistant Secretary of “Defense,” David Shear, “We are actively assessing the military implications of land reclamation and are committed to taking effective and appropriate action.” 

Well good for you, David!

However, the NY Times portrays U.S. jawboning as quite stern. “State Department officials [NAMELESS AND FACELESS ONES] said Mr. Kerry arrived in Beijing with a similarly tough [sic!] message: China’s intensified island-building campaign threatens relations as both countries are seeking to cooperate on several issues, including military ties, bilateral investment and climate change.

“In a background briefing on Wednesday, a senior State Department official [LACKING A NAME OR A FACE] said Mr. Kerry would leave Chinese leaders with ‘absolutely no doubt’ where the United States stood on the issue of China’s territorial claims. [2]

“’He is going to reinforce to them the very negative consequences on China’s image, on China’s relationship with its neighbors, on regional stability, and potentially on the U.S.-China relationship,’ the [FACELESS AND NAMELESS] official said.” 

Ah, POTENTIALLY on U.S.-China relations. Maybe the U.S. will stop having its consumer goods manufactured in low-wage China! Or stop letting China fund U.S. government deficits by buying Treasury bonds! Or kick China out of the anti-Iran coalition that is strangling Iran’s economy! Or…what, exactly?

But Kerry’s gonna TELL THEM! Kerry’s Tough Talk^TM worked wonders on the Israelis, and on blood-drenched Syrian dictator Assad. Oh, and on Vladimir Putin too. So you better WATCH OUT, CHINA! You are gonna get a tongue-lashing like you wouldn’t believe!

In other words, Kerry’s image-meisters were applying make-up to Kerry, and the NY Times, acting like a mirror, reflected the pretty picture of the tough Kerry taking it to the Chinese. This the NYT pretends is “news,” not State Department public relations imagery laundered through a “news”paper.

Speaking of Putin, the U.S. sabotaged its own encirclement-of-China strategy by ignoring core Russian geostrategic interests in Ukraine and brazenly seizing control of the country, causing it to split in two. Since then, they have been punishing and demonizing Russia and driving it into the arms of China. (Russia is already doing energy deals with China as a result of U.S.-EU sanctions and attacks.) Smart, U.S.

Arrogance makes people dumb. 

The same article contained evidence of the futility of U.S. verbiage. The Chinese ambassador to the U.S. had some choice words, bouncing the blame for tension back on the U.S. And the Chinese rulers did some ventriloquism in the Global Times, “a reliably nationalist newspaper in China,” which fulminated in an editorial that “If U.S. warplanes fly over China’s islands, and if its warships enter the waters 12 nautical miles from China’s islands, then we believe the Chinese military would prove that America’s pirate-style actions picked the wrong place and wrong people.”

Ooh, pirate-style! Harsh! Careful, you might hurt somebody’s feelings! Doesn’t sound like someone is ready to back off from gobbling up those islands, either! I hope this doesn’t all end up in tears.

May you live in interesting times.

1] “Kerry Expected to Bring Up China’s Sea Claims During Visit,” New York Times, May 15, 2015.

2] Ibid. Another euphemism for what the Times calls a “background briefing” is the word “guidance,” which perhaps tells too much. It’s feeding the corporate propagandists the government line. The media organs then transmit that line, sometimes with a little skepticism, rarely with a lot of skepticism, but in any event with top-line promotion. Usually the majority of the sourcing in such “important” articles is anonymous, which any reader of the NYT knows, or should know if they’re paying attention to what they’re reading. That doesn’t stop the Times and other power establishment media from attacking reporting they don’t like by sneering that it is based on anonymous sources, as the NY Times and others just did with Seymour Hersh’s article in the London Review of Books on the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Interesting how the U.S. media immediately went on the attack against Hersh, rather than investigating his claims first. That’s a dead giveaway that they aren’t journalists, but rather propagandists.

 

Oh, gee, that word “hypocrisy” is coming up again! I better look that up in my thesaurus before I start sounding like a broken record!

Here's That Mysteriously Vanished NY Times Article, Resurrected from the Grave!

Most Bizarre- That NY Times Article Just Disappeared!

And now the link goes to an article from the POV of the Baltimore killer cops' defense lawyers!
When I searched on the Times' website for "Justice Dept Begins Inquiry into Baltimore Police" I get either no result, or an article about the Warren Commission from 1964!

Anyway, I already had downloaded the article, and I will post screenshots of it for your viewing
next.

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

“I don’t have drones.” 

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t have any drones,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Arkansas Police Plant Spyware on Lawyer’s Computer

Police in the town of Fort Smith in the U.S. state of Arkansas have been caught red-handed planting spying software on the computer of a lawyer, Matt Campbell, who is representing former police turned whistleblowers. (The details are at the references below.) [1] This latest outrage is probably an increasingly normal occurrence in the police state of America. It would be akin to the warrantless tapping of the lawyer’s phone (they probably did that too) or planting room bugs and hidden cameras in his office. The malware was planted in the guise of providing discovery documents to the attorney in the course of a lawsuit against the police department.

 

After Campbell, the lawyer who was the victim of this devious and malevolent computer attack, went to the Arkansas State police to lodge a criminal complaint, they blew him off, refusing to enforce the law.

We shouldn’t be surprised that police are doing this. After all, they can brutalize and murder certain classes of people with impunity. Why shouldn’t they feel empowered to spy on lawyers? They already know they are above the law, and that the alleged “guaranteed rights” in the U.S. Constitution place little restraint on them.

It’s degenerated to the point that even in some podunk Hicksville in rural America cops are acting as secret policemen against attorneys. It is implausible to think that these redneck coppers are innovative enough to be the first ones to do this. They’re just unsophisticated, crude and ham-fisted enough to be caught at it.

The U.S. establishment brainwashes people into believing that the people of this nation have “rights” that are “protected” by a Holy Relic called the U.S. Constitution. That scrap of venerated parchment does indeed intone limits on police powers and specifies requirements to conduct searches. In U.S. law there is also supposed to be something called attorney-client privilege, which means that communications between lawyers and those they represent are supposed to be inviolate to state intrusion. That has long been violated in political cases. From now on we should expect it to be violated in all manner of cases. [2]

What the Fort Smith police did was felonious under Federal law. So will the FBI secret police investigate the Fort Smith police criminally? Will the Department of “Justice,” now under the establishment-feted new attorney general Loretta Lynch prosecute the police?

No, and no.

How do I know this? Experience and knowledge, that’s how. The history of the FBI, DO”J,” and America virtually guarantees it. And if anyone wants to place a bet with me on this, get in touch through my blogsite.

“Law” in the U.S. (and in other places) is not someone that binds all people equally. It is used by those in power against their perceived enemies (such as those who interfere with their venal behavior, as do whistleblowers and whistleblowers' lawyers) and against those who must be ruled, namely us. They themselves are largely exempted from law, unless there is exceptional political pressure. Then a lower-ranking scapegoat must be sacrificed.

Ironically at the same time the news of the criminal activity of the Fort Smith, Arkansas police broke in mid-April, a hacker living in the borough of Staten Island, in New York City, was sentenced to three years for his computer crimes. (This was the article following the one about the Arkansas police on the Emsisoft website referenced in footnote #1.) Which nicely illustrated the dual-standard nature of the U.S. legal system. Laws and punishment are for Thee, not for Me who Rules.

Understand that fundamentally, “law” is nothing but a fine garment that power wears to cloak its nakedness. At least that is the reality. It should, and maybe could, be better than that. But it isn’t.

As a system of power becomes more decadent morally and politically, as in the U.S., those wielding power within the system become less and less restrained. This manifests itself not only in increasing attacks on dissidents, spreading to the general population over time, but in “scandals” such as orgies by DEA agents paid for by south American drug traffickers (and the use of children to make pornographic movies by agents) and drunkenness and patronization of prostitutes by Secret Service men supposedly guarding the president on his trips abroad. Moreover, there is scant or no punishment for these acts, except that the head of the agency may lose their job, as happened in these cases. The fact that people get away with such transgressions shows how deep the rot has spread. It means that the attack dogs of the establishment are out of control. In fact, they fear them. This is why the head of the policemen's union in New York City can openly attack the Mayor, claiming he has “blood on his hands” after a mentally ill man shot dead two cops in retaliation for the murder by the police of Eric Garner on Staten Island. And the bulk of the local media, controlled by plutocrats, sided with the police union and criticized the mayor for not apologizing, that is, for not groveling before the insubordinate, demagogic union boss. (The union being the so-called “Patrolmen's Benevolent Association,” headed by a fascist thug named Patrick Lynch, and the Mayor being the “progressive” Bill deBlasio, who came up through the Democratic Party ranks via the Clinton camp and who supports repressive police tactics and opposes outlawing chokeholds by police- a chokehold being how the NYPD murdered Eric Garner.)

Speaking of surveillance, New York City is in many ways a dystopian Total Surveillance State, with tens of thousands of cameras feeding directly into police headquarters, where software reads and stores license plate information and facial recognition technology tracks people the NYPD wishes to persecute in real time as they move physically through the city, among other malevolent software of repression. The NYPD maintains tight links with the FBI, CIA, and through them the NSA. American police are creating their dream state of total power for themselves and powerlessness for the citizenry- except for the tiny sliver of rich people whom they “protect and serve.”

1] The malware the police planted on the computer- and a lawyer FOR the police was involved, so at a minimum that lawyer should be disbarred, but he won’t be- stole passwords, kept the computer connected to the Internet in the background even if the user tried to disconnect, and allowed for the remote installation of additional malware. For the details of how the lawyer’s hard drive was infiltrated by the police and the specific malware used, see “Arkansas Police send malware-laden hard drive to lawyer representing whistleblowers,” Emsisoft blog, April 18, 2015. Emsisoft is a computer software company that produces security software such as anti-virus programs. For more information surrounding the police crime, see “Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on drive supplied by cops: Says police department brass tried to infect him, seeks criminal sanctions,” ars technica, April 14.

The Alex Jones channel posted a one-minute video on youtube about the matter which is a summary in a nutshell and describes the malware. “Local Police Caught Acting Like The NSA,” April 16, 2015.

2] The evisceration of attorney-client privilege has been take to its logical extreme In the Kafkaesque burlesques of “trials” at the U.S. Naval base of Guantanamo Bay, on occupied Cuban territory, we have witnesses the total stripping away of any confidentiality between lawyers and the prisoners they’re supposed to represent and defend. Even in the “courtroom,” the CIA controls the video feed, and cut it off at one point, to the startlement of the military officer playing “judge.”

How To (Mis)Remember a Slaughter of Poor Workers

The BBC “World Service” took a look at factory conditions in Bangladesh to see “if things have changed” since the collapse of the Rana Plaza sweatshop a year ago, causing massive loss of life of the workers there. [1] First a three-minute piece light on facts. We're told at the end of that segment that the monthly minimum wage was raised from $40 to $68. UNMENTIONED: is it actually enforced.

Also not so much as a hint about the violent government repression of labor organizers. There aren't unions among the garment workers because labor organizers are viciously and systematically repressed by the government, including being subjected to torture and murder. For example, a prominent Bangladeshi labor organizer, Aminul Islam, was brutally tortured and murdered by the Bangladeshi “security forces” in 2012.

[Read the rest at my blog devoted to propaganda analysis, under BBC Blackout Propaganda.]

Five Teenagers Vs. 200 Australian Cops

Five teenagers, aged 18-19, were rounded up in raids by 200 Australian police in “terror” raids. The government claimed the teens were planning to go around stabbing people, “inspired by” ISIS. One has been charged so far. The alleged plot was to occur on a military memorial day. (Anzac Day, commemorating Australia's entry into World War I as a loyal client state of Britain, way back in 1914.

According to the BBC (April 18), TWO of the five, both 18, were accused of “plotting an attack.” “They were apparently inspired by Islamic State, and were planning to target police,” said the BBC

(my emphasis). “Police said evidence [unspecified] at the scene suggests they were ISIS-inspired” (also BBC later same day). (Again, my emphases.) (The U.S. domestic radio propaganda network, NPR, merely broadcast a BBC report and did no original reporting.)

Right-wing prime minister Tony Abbott disingenuously announced that “people shouldn't be afraid,” honeyed words belied by his regime's regular beating of the “terrorism” drum, including these very ostentatious raids by a massively-excessive force with maximum media hype. Like yelling “BOO!” and then adding “Don't be scared.”

He is literally right, however, despite his cynicism. If five teenagers with knives vs. 200 armed-to-the- teeth cops (probably encased in body armor and accompanied by helicopters and maybe armored vehicles) is emblematic of the correlation of forces (“terrorists” vs. Australia) I think Australia is in no mortal danger

A previous episode of Tony Abbott's Terror Theatre also featured hundreds of cops raiding homes, which netted a very scary sword. (No bombs, no guns, but maybe computer traces to nasty websites.)

 Obviously Australia monitors hotheads and periodically uses some as fall guys in terror theater productions.

 Tony Abbott, Terrorist Hunter, Stares Down Danger!

It's worse in the U.S., where the FBI employs con men and criminals as agents provocateur to entrap the mentally ill and dirt-poor down-and-outers into FBI “terrorist plots” which are then “broken up” with great fanfare (and multi-decade sentences for the hapless, duped losers). Even when a targeted victim refuses to play along, and even blows the whistle on the entrapment attempt, he's imprisoned anyway, as Khalifah al-Akili has been, sentenced to eight years literally for a photograph. (See “The FBI Informant Who Mounted A Sting Operation Against the FBI,” The Intercept, April 15, 2015.)

 

Five teenagers with knives- major terrorist threat, or the makings of a small street gang? Obviously ideology makes all the difference. What the teens allegedly THINK is used to turn this into part of an International Threat to Civilization.

A massive global secret police surveillance system is deployed to catch young malcontents. Research in recent years has demonstrated that teenagers' brains incline them to impulsivity, risk-taking, and poor judgment. It has also been shown that they are very susceptible to peer influence, and take risks with their peers that they would never undertake solo. The fact is that the constant, lurid attention to Islamofascism is going to draw the attention of some teenagers. Islamofascism, like cigarettes or illegal drugs or alcohol or sex or driving too fast, has the attraction of the forbidden.

I'd bet that most young seeming adherents to Islamofascism would grow out of it in a few years, given the opportunity. Ironically, the Saudis are pursuing a more enlightened policy towards some “terrorists,” if only out of pragmatism. They have reeducation programs to modify their ideological and psychological orientation. Life in prison for teenagers who do stupid things is draconian and primitive.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the just-convicted surviving Boston Marathon bomber, is facing an all-out attempt by the Obama regime and Eric “I Oppose the Death Penalty” Holder's “Justice” Department to have him executed. He was 19- a teenager- at the time of the bombing 2 years ago in April 2013, and under the thrall of his domineering older brother Tamerlan, who was 26 at the time of the bombing and his death immediately afterwards. [1]

 

Interestingly, the parents of an eight-year-old boy killed in the bombing just published an op-ed in the Boston Globe calling for his life to be spared. Outside of Boston, U.S. media are mostly ignoring it. They too want Dzhokhar to die.

 

I think spending the rest of his life in a tiny concrete box, which will be his fate if he isn't executed, is hardly going soft. In fact, it's less than all but one of the Blackwater butchers of Nisour Square just got. (The Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad was a case the U.S. proved very reluctant to pursue, with the Department of “Justice” doing its best to throw the case, even failing to file some charges until after the statute of limitations ran out. Seventeen Iraqis were slaughtered, trapped in their cars in a traffic jam, although only 14 deaths are being acknowledged by establishment media. One defendant got life, and three got 30 years- the mandatory minimums. The Federal judge obviously regretted having to impose the sentences, making excuses for the killers as he did so.)

As for those five teenagers in Australia, no propaganda opportunity goes to waste. The New York City radio station of the CBS-Viacom media octopus seized this minor event on the other side of the world to sound the terrorist alarm bell for the 10,000^th time. “A plot inspired by ISIS!” they blared. Note the weasel word “inspired.” That's as connected to ISIS as “inspired by a true story” is in the media Moloch's fictional entertainments are connected to actual facts. Who will parse that word, “inspired”? All they'll hear is “ISIS.” Oh, ISIS recruited teenagers to murder people in Australia! Well, no. There was no actual connection to ISIS, unless hearing and reading about something is a “connection.” So I'm “connected” to the Third Reich, and to ancient Egypt, and to the moon.

CBS relied on Rupert Murdoch's propaganda empire, putting on a recording of one of his minions from Sky TV (a cable propaganda network in Britain) to tell us again that the “plot” (no details provided) was “inspired by ISIS” and [unnamed] officials “called it terrifying and evil.” (If there are any government officials terrified of five teenagers with knives, they need to resign immediately. Of course what the “officials,” and the propagandists, really mean is, We want YOU to be terrified! So you'll let us have even more power and take away even more of your rights.

But somehow, the murder of 30 people in an ISIS-CLAIMED, not “inspired,” bombing in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, which also happened yesterday, didn't grab CBS' attention much, if at all. Odd, that. And Afghanistan is actually a lot closer to New York than Australia is.

NPR, the U.S. government domestic radio propaganda network, identified the arrestees as “men,” omitting their ages, even though the BBC, which NPR relies on for most of its overseas coverage, including on this story, clearly said they were teens and gave their ages. They said five were arrested and two charged with a “terrorist plot,” unspecified.

No explanation why three other teens are being jailed on no charges.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. But don't be afraid- the secret police will protect you.

1] How, exactly, Tamerlan died is still murky. At the time, it was claimed his brother ran him over during a shootout with the police. In retelling the story, sometimes establishment media repeats the “run over by his brother” claim, sometimes it doesn't. There was even talk of an explosion. (Alleged photos of Tamerlan's corpse shows large and wide black gashes in his chest.)

Speaking of Tamerlan as domineering, after I wrote this I read an article in Murdoch's very reactionary Wall Street Journal and came across this: “During the first part of the trial, defense lawyers said the younger Mr. Tsarnaev followed the lead of 26-year-old Tamerlan, a domineering force in his family.”

See? Even the Wall Street Journal agrees with me that Tamerlan was domineering. (“Tsarnaev Lawyers Tap Local Imam To Testify,” April 18-19, 2015, page A3, paragraph 5.)

You can't check the citation online unless you pay. Mega Billionaire Rupert Murdoch is a greedy bastard.

The same article gives a one-sentence version of Tamerlan's demise: “His [Dzhokhar's] older brother died shortly after the bombings in a showdown with police.” A showdown? Not a “shootout”? Hmmm.

Given the very strong evidence of the FBI being mixed up in the bombings in advance, such as trying to recruit Tamerlan as an “informer” and then denying the Russian secret police, the FSB, had tipped them off to the Tsarnaevs, after initially claiming the FSB gave them information that was “too vague,” the attempt to execute the unarmed Dzhokhar as he lay motionless inside a small boat parked in a homeowner's driveway, the FBI murder of an acquaintance of Tamerlan's, Ibragim Todashev after two days of interrogation and the subsequent illegal high-speed deportation of three people connected to Todashev, I'm thinking perhaps the plan was to execute both Tsarnaevs on sight. Todashev was shot seven times in his kitchen while surrounded by FBI and police, including in the top of the head.

Todashev was interrogated by the FBI at least five times, and was finally executed on May 22, 2013, the month following the Marathon bombing, in his own kitchen, surrounded by FBI agents and Massachusetts State police, who were far from their jurisdiction in Florida where Todashev lived. Todashev was recovering from knee surgery and needed crutches to get around at the time. The FBI has engaged in a permanent stonewall ever since. Meanwhile the FBI and Massachusetts police has pinned a triple murder in Massachusetts that occurred two years before the bombing on Tamerlan Tsarnaev and on Todashev. For two years there were no arrests or charges in those murders, so I rather doubt the “case closed” propaganda the police and FBI executioners have put out and that the establishment media dutifully repeats as fact. (The dead are so easy to convict. The FBI did the same thing to

The U.S. never notified Todashev's family in Russia of his death, and the FBI “ordered” the local Florida authorities to not release the autopsy report. The FBI only allowed Todashev's corpse to be sent to his family in Russia after a family friend managed to take photos of the body with the bullet wounds, and the family held a news conference in Moscow displaying the pictures. At that point keeping their victim's corpse was pointless for the FBI.

For a primer on the fate of Todashev, the numerous series of mutually exclusive lies spewed by the FBI, the FBI's suppression of information and the illegal deportations, see “The ever-changing stories in Todashev murder.”

For other details and his father's futile attempt to get at the truth of his son's murder by the FBI, see “Todashev Family's Futile Search For Answers in FBI Murder of Son.”

Some of the many weapons Superman Ibragim Todashev used to attack a roomful of FBI agents and Massachusetts State Police in his kitchen, according to "law enforcement sources." (Hey, the New York Times believed them!)