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Philip Giraldi

A Country That Has Lost Its Way: U.S. Government and Corporations Combine to Strip Citizens of Their Rights

Friday July 9, 2021

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The American people have increasingly become aware that government surveillance and corporate censorship have combined to keep people ignorant and controlled. What is taking place has generated some dark humor. A friend of mine, also a former CIA officer, wrote to me recently and said tongue-in-cheek that he retains a lot of respect for the Agency because it is the only major government national security entity that does not read our mail and emails. Those jobs are the responsibility of the NSA and FBI. I responded that I would imagine that CIA does in fact read quite a lot of mail where it operates overseas but it is probably done the old-fashioned way by recruiting an underpaid mail clerk as an agent.

The whole issue of the government spying illegally on its own citizens has again made the news with the claims by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that NSA has been spying on him, presumably because he has connections that the government regards either as subversive or, in the new reckoning, as “extremists” who are potential “domestic terrorists.” Given the reasonable assumption that anyone who voted for Donald Trump might well fall under those categories, that means that something like half the US population could be under suspicion.

Mass electronic surveillance of literally trillions of phone calls and messages worldwide without a warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment restrictions on searches without probable cause or a proper warrant issued by a judge has been the regular NSA authorized procedure at least since 9/11 and there is no reason to assume that it is no longer the practice. It basically is initiated by the agency involved (normally NSA or FBI) going to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court or to some other appropriate judge to get a warrant on an individual where there is some probable cause. Probable cause can consist of “someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.”
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America Leader of the Free World? How to Forget US interference in Foreign Elections

Thursday July 1, 2021

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After only five months in office, President Joe Biden has already become notorious for his verbal gaffes and mis-spokes, so much so that an admittedly Republican-partisan physician has suggested that he be tested to determine his cognitive abilities. That said, however, there is one June 16th tweet that he is responsible for that is quite straightforward that outdoes everything else for sheer mendacity. It appeared shortly after the summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and was apparently intended to be rhetorical, at least insofar as Biden understands the term. It went: “How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country.”

There have been various estimates of just exactly how many elections the United States has interfered in since the Second World War, the numbers usually falling somewhere between 80 and 100, but that does not take into account the frequent interventions of various kinds that took place largely in Latin America between the Spanish-American War and 1946. One recalls how the most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps Major General Smedley Butler declared that “War is a racket” in 1935. He confessed to having “…helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”
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Butting Heads With China and Russia: American Diplomats Are Outclassed

Friday May 14, 2021

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With the exception of the impending departure of US and NATO forces from Afghanistan, if it occurs, the White House seems to prefer to use aggression to deter adversaries rather than finesse. The recent exchanges between Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a meeting in Alaska demonstrate how Beijing has a clear view of its interests which Washington seems to lack. Blinken initiated the acrimonious exchange when he cited “deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, economic coercion toward our allies.
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The US Congress Turns on Itself: Censuring and Threats of Expulsion Proliferating

Thursday April 29, 2021

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Mark Twain once wrote that “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Some developments over the past several weeks would certainly support that judgement if one regards a country’s legislative body as a mechanism intended to benefit the public that it is elected to serve. The hypocrisy of America’s two major parties is something to behold, with corruption at a level that is rarely attained in most third world countries.

Recently there have been some appalling cases that underline how far the American Congress has separated itself from any tangible national interest if one excludes getting rich and reelected, in whichever order one seeks to go about that. One of the best at getting rich and reelected in spite of not having two brain cells to rub together is the esteemed Maxine Waters of California, who has starred in her recent attempt to inspire an angry mob to get more “confrontational” if the murder trial of Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin were to go the wrong way through a failure to convict.

Now bear in mind that we Americans live in a no-fault no-accountability society, where no one is guilty of anything unless he or she is caught red handed and has no protectors in place to deny that anything at all happened. As Maxine has plenty of defenders because she is black, a woman and, most of all, a Democrat, it should have been expected that in her case a call to riot by a congressman would be treated as a non-event, and so it proved when the GOP made a feeble attempt to censure her for her behavior.
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Is Joe Biden Enabling Russiagate 2?

Wednesday March 24, 2021

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The old expression that “lightning never strikes the same place twice” is frequently used in the aftermath of a truly awful experience, meaning that the odds are that something exactly like that will never occur again. Unfortunately, however, we Americans will now have to endure lightning striking twice due to the emergence of President Joe Biden and whoever is telling him what to say. I am referring specifically to Russiagate, which is possibly the single most discredited bit of politically motivated chicanery that this country has seen in the past twenty years. Joe is relying on the “evidence” provided by a conveniently timed new declassified “Intelligence Community Assessment” entitled “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Election.” The document was dated March 10th but released by Director Avril Haines of the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) on March 16th.

The new report consists of eleven pages of text and charts. It specifically discounts any direct evidence to alter votes electronically, but asserts that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed his spies and proxies to turn the US election in favor of Donald Trump. Based in part on the report, Joe Biden subsequently labeled Putin a “killer” and vowed that both Russia and its president would “pay a price” which we will be “seeing shortly” for their claimed meddling in American politics. The Bidenesque grotesque overreach has led to the Kremlin recalling its ambassador in Washington home for “consultations” and will at a minimum put US forces in the Middle East at risk.

Does it sound more than a bit like the Democratic Party is still looking for revenge for 2016? You bet, and the name calling that took place during the 2020 campaign made it predictable that they would turn on Russia as soon as an opportunity presented itself, if only because it is always convenient to have a foreign enemy to blame one’s own failings on. And there is also payoff personally for Joe and his sons in the report, which strongly suggests that the claims and evidence of Biden family corruption were actually just disinformation put out by the Kremlin’s spy agencies.
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Neocons Poised to Join New Government

Friday November 13, 2020

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Donald Trump was much troubled during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns by so-called conservatives who rallied behind the #NeverTrump banner, presumably in opposition to his stated intention to end or at least diminish America’s role in wars in the Middle East and Asia. Those individuals are generally described as neoconservatives but the label is itself somewhat misleading and they might more properly be described as liberal warmongers as they are closer to the Democrats than the Republicans on most social issues and are now warming up even more as the new Joe Biden Administration prepares to take office.
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Iran Seeks to Confuse the United States?

Friday October 23, 2020

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Those who have been waiting for the elusive October Surprise that will upset the apple cart on election day are admittedly running out of time. The media’s unwillingness to even consider that the antics of Hunter Biden just might constitute an embarrassment of major proportions or even something worse has done much to kill that story. And the old tried and true expedient of starting a little war somewhere is also proving to be a false hope as no one appears ready to provoke the righteously wrathful Secretary of State Mike Pompeo by ponying up a casus belli.
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Internet Resources Become Weaponized

Tuesday October 20, 2020

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The current electoral campaign differs from that of 2016 in that the media, both conventional and online, has realized its power and has been openly playing a major role in what might well prove to be a victory across the board for the Democratic Party. At least that is the expectation, bolstered by a flood of possibly suspect opinion polls that appear to make the triumph of Joe Biden and company inevitable while at the same time denigrating President Donald Trump and covering up for Democratic Party missteps.

Most Americans no longer trust what is being reported in the mainstream media but when they look for “real” information they frequently turn to online resources that they believe to be more politically objective. That has never been true, however, and what most newshounds are actually seeking is commentary that reflects their own views. In reality, the news provided is almost always either spun or distorted and sometimes completely blocked, note particularly the resistance to reporting the tale of the shenanigans of Hunter Biden.

The New York Post is claiming that a trove of emails from a laptop reveals that “Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
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