On Monday, President Trump announced he was issuing an executive order to reinstate the transfer of military weapons and equipment to local police forces. A partial ban had been put in place late in the Obama Administration. The weapons transfer program has a long history in the drug war but even 25 years later it has failed to make a difference in that war. It has been successful, however, in further undermining our civil liberties. A militarized police force is all about control, not safety... read on...
On Monday, The Guardian published a story which should have surprised no one: Information pushed aggressively on Twitter by anti-Trump conspiracy theorist duo Louise Mensch and Claude Taylor came from a hoaxer who duped Taylor in an email.
Taylor, a former White House staffer under Bill Clinton, tweeted out “fake details of criminal inquiries” related to Donald Trump which did not exist and were “invented” by a hoaxer claiming to work for the New York attorney general.
Mensch, a former conservative member of parliament in the UK and now a self-styled journalist, helped Taylor to spread the information on Twitter, while also claiming to have separate sources to back it up. read on...
In the wake of the protest in Charlottesville by white supremacists, many people are demanding a crackdown on dangerous right-wing extremists. The federal government has previously carried out similar campaigns against with disastrous results. Rather than intellectually purifying the nation, such efforts are far more likely to turn nitwits into martyrs and to ravage Washington’s credibility.
Prior federal law enforcement efforts to take down “bad ideas” quickly spiraled out of control. In the 1960s, an FBI COINTELPRO operation set up its own 250-member Klan organization “to attract membership away from the United Klans of America,” as a 1976 Senate report noted. One federally-funded informant admitted that he and other Klansmen had “beaten people severely, had boarded buses and kicked people off; had went [sic] in restaurants and beaten them with blackjacks, chains, pistols.” Other FBI COINTELPRO operations sought to destroy black activists, including Martin Luther King Jr. One FBI office boasted of spurring “shootings, beatings and a high degree of unrest … in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego.”
Once the FBI committed to subverting “dissident speech,” its crackdowns became a bureaucratic growth industry that eventually included even women’s liberation movements. Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston testified in 1975 of COINTELPRO’s tendency “to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.” read on...
When politicians are feeling the heat, they start a war and their popularity goes up even if the war is unnecessary or completely ridiculous. Donald Trump, the presidential candidate who promised that he would not take the nation into another Middle Eastern war, did so when he launched a fifty-nine cruise missile barrage against a Syrian Air Base even before he knew for sure what had happened on the ground. It was totally stupid but proved to be popular, even among talking heads and Congressmen, some of whom described his action as “presidential” in the best sense of the word.
It’s the same in Israel. For those who have not been following developments there, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under pressure due to an ongoing investigation for corruption. One of the truly great things about Israel is that while they have a lot of corrupt politicians, just like everywhere else, they actually investigate, indict, prosecute, convict and send them to jail.
The betting is that Netanyahu will soon be in prison, so he has been responding in the time-honored fashion by threatening his neighbors and hinting at the possibility of increased military action and even war. If there is a war going on, he believes, probably correctly, that no one will want to remove him. read on...
The Senate Intelligence Committee recently passed its Intelligence Authorization Act for 2018 that contains a chilling attack on the First Amendment. Section 623 of the act expresses the “sense of Congress” that WikiLeaks resembles a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such.” This language is designed to delegitimize WikiLeaks, encourage the federal government to spy on individuals working with WikiLeaks, and block access to WikiLeaks’ website. This provision could even justify sending US forces abroad to arrest WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange or other WikiLeaks personnel. read on...
The Ron Paul Institute's second annual Washington, D.C. conference got a shot in the arm over the weekend, as Wikileaks founder and chief editor Julian Assange agreed to open up the Whistleblowers Roundtable with a talk on the recent US Senate and Director of Central Intelligence attacks on Wikileaks as a "non-state hostile intelligence agency." Assange's appearance at the conference could not be more timely, as it looks like US intelligence is about to take more "active measures" against Wikileaks for publishing information that the spy agencies find embarrassing. Freedom of the press is under attack in the United States and Julian Assange will tell us what is at stake. There are few tickets to this event. Get yours here. read on...
Two police officers in Kissimmee, Florida, were recently shot and killed while investigating illegal drug activity in a dangerous part of town. According to the New York Times, government officials praised the officers for their service and asked Floridians to pray for other law-enforcement personnel. President Trump weighed in with a tweet in which he offered his thoughts and prayers for the Kissimmee police and their families.
There is one big thing about that picture, however: It is the drug war itself, which Trump and, no doubt, most of the Kissimmee police department, favor, that is the reason that those two police officers are dead. If drugs were legal, those two dead police officers would not have been investigating illegal drug activity because there would be no illegal drug activity.
Take a look at this very interesting and revealing article in yesterday’s New York Times about a DEA agent named Enrique Camarena. He too is dead, having been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in 1985 by a Mexican drug gang. Not surprisingly, the DEA went ballistic over the murder and pulled out all the stops, including violent kidnapping, to bring the malefactors to justice.
One big thing to notice, however: It is the drug war itself, which most DEA agents favor, that brought about Camarena’s death. If drugs had been legal, Camarena wouldn’t have been in Mexico investigating illegal drug activity because there wouldn’t have been any illegal drug activity. read on...
Since the German Marshall Fund of the United States unveiled its “Alliance For Securing Democracy (AFSD)," I’ve resisted commenting, simply because the lobby group’s “Hamilton 68 dashboard” is too preposterous to merit serious analysis.
It has rightly been ridiculed by journalists and activists who never tire of knocking the Kremlin.
The portal purports to use “600 Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence efforts online” to prove how Moscow is trying to sow seeds of doubt in the Western political system, via the social network. However, the creators won’t reveal the users concerned, and results seem to suggest they are mostly members of the US alt-right and alt-left. Meaning this is yet another attempt to pass off American dissent as some Kremlin “Psy-op.” Which is beyond ridiculous.
Furthermore, the names behind AFSD betray the project’s real purpose: to shift blame from internal American and European factors to the convenient Russian bogeyman. Which, of course, suits its financial backers, including the State Department, NATO, and the ubiquitous weapons maker Raytheon. All of whom benefit commercially and politically from strained ties between Moscow and Washington.
To achieve these goals they’ve hired the usual roll call of reliably anti-Russia blowhards. Including Estonian-American politician Ilves Toomas and rent-a-quote talking head Michael McFaul, the 'Mother Theresa of the Russia beat.' Those two are joined by neoconservative windbag William Kristol and ex-CIA chief Michael Morell. read on...
President Trump’s ability to trigger a nuclear war is "pretty damn scary" said former US intelligence director James Clapper this week. Remember when Trump vowed to "bomb the shit" out of his enemies?
I don’t have much respect for Clapper, who brazenly lied to Congress and is a ringleader of the deep government’s efforts to overthrow Trump. But this time, Clapper is 100 percent right. He’s scared and I am too.
This week, Trump proclaimed he would continue the pointless, stalemated US colonial war in Afghanistan and might ask India to help there – a sure-fire way to bring nuclear-armed India and Pakistan into a terrifying confrontation.
Meanwhile, Trump has backed himself into a corner over North Korea. His threats and bombast have not made the North’s leader Kim Jong-un stop threatening to launch nuclear-armed missiles at the US island of Guam, Hawaii, Japan and South Korea. That is, if the US and South Korea keep up their highly provocative annual military war games on North Korea’s borders that each year invoke North Korea’s fury. read on...
For some time it has been clear that the White House of President Donald Trump was convulsed with a struggle among various court factions vying for the Emperor’s ear. Crudely oversimplified, these are variously described as:
1. The military "Junta" (Generals McMaster, National Security Council; Mattis, Pentagon; and Kelly, White House Chief of Staff;
2. The Goldman-Sachs "Globalists" (preeminently First Daughter Ivanka and First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner);
3. The "Populist-Nationalists" ("the two Steves" Bannon and Miller); and
4. The Regular Republicans who, to their credit, in 2016 chose to join the Trump populist movement over more conventionally "conservative" GOP candidates (Former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway).
It is understood that the first two factions were generally allied against the second two. Following Priebus’s ouster, the bellwether would be who got tossed out next: Bannon or McMaster. It was Bannon.
On August 18, with Bannon’s defenestration, it became clear that the Junta and the Globalists were firmly in charge. The only outliers left – besides somebody named Trump – are Conway and Miller. We’ll see how long they last. Any of them. read on...
