John Pilger: Why Hillary Clinton Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump

[Sophocles]

https://newmatilda.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Hillary-Clinton-Embassy.jpg
US Presidential Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. (IMAGE: US Embassy, Flickr)

John Pilger: Why Hillary Clinton Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump (https://newmatilda.com/2016/03/23/john-pilger-why-hillary-clinton-is-more-dangerous-than-donald-trump/)

By John Pilger on March 23, 2016
newmatilda.com

The following is an edited version of an address given by John Pilger at the University of Sydney, entitled ‘A World War Has Begun’.

I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 – the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.” A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers.

Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government”.

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying.

https://newmatilda.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Barack-Obama-3-1024x632.jpg
US president Barack Obama. (IMAGE: whoohoo120, Flickr)

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear]weapon more thinkable.”

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two – led by the United States – is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.

This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China.

Seldom a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a “threat”. According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander, China is “building a great wall of sand in the South China Sea”.

What he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines – a dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign called “freedom of navigation”.

What does this really mean? It means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China. Try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of California.

I made a film called The War You Don’t See, in which I interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain: reporters such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omar of the BBC, David Rose of the Observer.

All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.

The propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western “mainstream” – a Dan Rather equivalent, say – asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea.

The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear-armed bombers.

This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.

In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Sabre. Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes, such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cut off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

https://newmatilda.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Donald-Trump-1024x632.jpg
Donald Trump speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.
(IMAGE: Gage Skidmore, Flickr).

In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism.

Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing the dark forces of violence” in the United States. Unleashing them?

This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.

No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as “a world substantially made over in [America’s] own image”. The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.

Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.

As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies – just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope”. And the drool goes on.

Described by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “funny, charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician”, Obama the other day sent drones to slaughter 150 people in Somalia. He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to the New York Times, when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone. So cool.

https://newmatilda.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Predator-Drone.jpg
A US Predator Drone. (IMAGE: Wikipedia).

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State under Obama, she participated in the overthrow of the democratic government of Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, was publicly sodomised with a knife – a murder made possible by American logistics – Clinton gloated over his death: “We came, we saw, he died.”

One of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State, who has attacked young women for not supporting “Hillary”. This is the same Madeleine Albright who infamously celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “worth it”.

Among Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East. She and her husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the likes of Gloria Steinem in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.

A generation ago, a post-modern cult now known as “identity politics” stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes and individuals they supported – such as the fakery of Obama and Clinton; such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece, which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.

Self-absorption, a kind of “me-ism”, became the new zeitgeist in privileged western societies and signalled the demise of great collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality, racism and sexism.

Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again. Gradually. The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader are part of this awakening – as are those who rallied to support Senator Bernie Sanders.

In Britain last week, Jeremy Corbyn’s closest ally, his shadow treasurer John McDonnell, committed a Labour government to pay off the debts of piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called austerity.

In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she’s nominated. He, too, has voted for America’s use of violence against countries when he thinks it’s “right”. He says Obama has done “a great job”.

In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious parliamentary games are played out in the media while refugees and Indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the danger of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called defence budget of $195 billion that is a drive to war. There was no debate. Silence.

What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action, unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world? Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?

Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?

JohnPilger.com – the films and journalism of John Pilger (http://johnpilger.com/)

[Baby Steps]

Thanks, this is so important. The 'great work ' is coming to it's final stages, Trump will not play ball with the apocalyptic end game...

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?91848-People-Are-Furious-That-Bernie-Sanders-Just-Endorsed-Hillary-Clinton&p=1081632&viewfull=1#post1081632

[WhiteLove]

Thanks, very important stuff!

dahboo777 recently did a very good analyzis of the current US presidential election:

Ei5UBWGJ22Q

All in all my position is that Bush, Obama, Clinton and Trump all send or have sent a mixed signal to the people of the world. Trump has made it clear though, if he becomes the next US president, he will build the military so strong that "nobody is going to mess with us". He has proclaimed that "when you go to war you need to do so properly" - whatever that means!

So, it's sad. It's the people of the US that MAYBE can control the outcome, depends on whether the voting is RIGGED or not, much debate about that too.

If it becomes Trump, my hope goes to his softer more rational sides suddenly taking a grip on him, as well as to his advisors.

[Cidersomerset]

I posted this on another thread and its a good discussion and they
discuss the current Hillary neo -con verses the so called Trump Putin
pact amusing and educational.....

https://syrianfreepress.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/neoconnedboom-990x260.jpg?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Its all Putins fault what ever happens......


CrossTalk on Trump: Siberian Candidate?

w_xw5UYC01Q

Published on 27 Jul 2016

Who would have thought Russia and Vladimir Putin would play such an important
role in the American presidential election? The media treadmill claims Trump is
under Putin’s spell. And Hillary Clinton blames the Russian president for still another
scandal. Russia is a one-size-fits-all political tool.

CrossTalking with George Szamuely, Ray McGovern, and Daniel McAdams.

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neWX9iZm7vg

[Sophocles]

Here`s another article that gives a good example of why Hillary Clinton is more dangerous than Donald Trump. Btw. Robert Kagan seems to be a sucker for war (http://left.ru/2008/10/stolz_en179.phtml), the way I see it.

Robert Kagan and Other Neocons Are Backing Hillary Clinton (https://theintercept.com/2016/07/25/robert-kagan-and-other-neocons-back-hillary-clinton/)

Rania Khalek
theintercept.com (https://theintercept.com/)
July 25 2016

As Hillary Clinton puts together what she hopes will be a winning coalition in November, many progressives remain wary — but she has the war hawks firmly behind her.

“I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” leading neoconservative Robert Kagan told a group gathered around him, groupie-style, at a “foreign policy professionals for Hillary” (https://www.hillaryclinton.com/events/tickets/NBKXWTZLC7ZT5B45/?raiser=401334) fundraiser I attended last week. “I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.”

As the co-founder of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century, Kagan played a leading role (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/kagan_robert/) in pushing for America’s unilateral invasion of Iraq and insisted for years afterward that it had turned out great (https://www.salon.com/2007/03/11/kagan_11/).

Despite the catastrophic effects of that war, Kagan insisted at last week’s fundraiser that U.S. foreign policy over the last 25 years has been “an extraordinary success.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s know-nothing isolationism has led many neocons to flee (https://theintercept.com/2016/02/29/neoconservatives-declare-war-on-donald-trump/) the Republican ticket. And some, like Kagan (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-the-gops-frankenstein-monster-now-hes-strong-enough-to-destroy-the-party/2016/02/25/3e443f28-dbc1-11e5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story.html), are actively helping Clinton, whose hawkishness in many ways resembles their own.

The event raised $25,000 for Clinton. Two rising stars in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, Amanda Sloat and Julianne Smith, also spoke.

The way they described Clinton’s foreign policy vision suggested that if elected president in November, she will escalate tensions with Russia, double down on military belligerence in the Middle East, and generally ignore the American public’s growing hostility to intervention.

Sloat, the former deputy assistant secretary (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/bureau/215468.htm) of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, boasted that Clinton will be “more interventionist and forward-leaning than Obama’s been” in Syria. She also applauded Clinton for doing intervention the right way, through coalitions instead of the unilateral aggression that defined the Bush years.

“Nothing that [Clinton] did was more clear than the NATO coalition that she built to defend civilians in Libya,” said Sloat, referencing the Obama administration’s overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. That policy, spearheaded (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/hillary-clinton-libya.html?_r=1) by Clinton, has transformed a once-stable state into a lawless haven for extremist groups from across the region, including ISIS.

Kagan has advocated for muscular American intervention in Syria (http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-crisis-of-world-order-1448052095); Clinton’s likely pick for Pentagon chief, Michelle Flournoy (https://theintercept.com/2016/06/22/hillary-clintons-likely-pentagon-chief-already-advocating-for-more-bombing-and-intervention/), has similarly agitated for redirecting U.S. airstrikes in Syria toward ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Smith told the audience that unlike Trump, Clinton “understands the importance of deterring Russian aggression,” which is why “I’ll sleep better with her in the chair.” She is a former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.

Smith left the government to become senior vice president of Beacon Global Strategies, a high-powered bipartisan consulting group founded by (https://theintercept.com/2015/12/18/beacon-global-strategies/) former high-ranking national security officials.

When Robbie Martin, a filmmaker who recently produced (https://shadowproof.com/2016/07/07/shadowproof-interview-heavy-agenda-3/) a three-part documentary on the neoconservative movement, asked how Clinton plans to deal with Ukraine, Kagan responded enthusiastically.

“I know Hillary cares more about Ukraine than the current president does,” Kagan replied. “[Obama] said to me [that he wouldn’t arm Ukraine because] he doesn’t want a nuclear war with Russia,” he added, rolling his eyes dismissively. “I don’t think Obama cares about Putin anymore at all. I think he’s hopeless.”

Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, the Obama administration’s hardline assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs. Nuland, who would likely serve in a senior position in a Clinton administration, supports (http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/18/the-undiplomatic-diplomat/) shipping weapons to Ukraine despite major opposition from European countries and concerns about the neo-Nazi elements (https://www.thenation.com/article/congress-has-removed-a-ban-on-funding-neo-nazis-from-its-year-end-spending-bill/) those weapons would empower.

Another thing neoconservatives and liberal hawks have in common is confidence that the foreign policy establishment is right, and the growing populist hostility to military intervention is naïve and uninformed.

Kagan complained that Americans are “so focused on the things that have gone wrong in recent years, they miss the sort of basic underlying unusual quality of the international order that we’ve been living in.

“It’s not just Donald Trump,” Kagan said. “I think you can find in both parties a very strong sense that we don’t need to be out there anymore.”

“If, as I hope, Hillary Clinton is elected, she is going to immediately be confronting a country that is not where she is,” he said. “She is a believer in this world order. But a great section of the country is not and is going to require persuasion and education.”

Sloat agreed, arguing that “it’s dangerous” for people to draw anti-interventionist lessons from Libya and Iraq.

The Clinton-neocon partnership was solidified by Trump becoming the Republican nominee. But their affinity for each other has grown steadily over time.

The neoconservative Weekly Standard celebrated Clinton’s 2008 appointment as secretary of state as a victory for the right, hailing her transformation from “First Feminist” to “Warrior Queen (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-great-right-hope-hillary-clinton/), more Margaret Thatcher than Gloria Steinem.”

But the fundraiser was perhaps the most outward manifestation yet of the convergence between the Democratic foreign policy establishment and the neoconservative movement.

Hannah Morris of the liberal pro-Israel lobbying group J Street celebrated this bipartisanship as a “momentous occasion.”

“We could not be more proud to have [Kagan] here today,” she said.

Source (https://theintercept.com/2016/07/25/robert-kagan-and-other-neocons-back-hillary-clinton/)

[Cidersomerset]

Hillary Clinton Is A Threat To All Of Humanity


0EGBOMvBrZw

Published on 25 Jul 2016

TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=19281

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a Wall Street-backed warmonger whose potential election
as President of the United States this November poses an existential threat not just
to Americans but to all of humanity.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?91646-FBI-quizzes-Hillary-Clinton-on-emails-2-July-2016-Hillary-Lied-Under-Oath.....&p=1084984&viewfull=1#post1084984

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http://static.bbci.co.uk/frameworks/barlesque/3.20.1/orb/4/img/bbc-blocks-dark.png

US election: Trump 'encouraged foreign hack of Clinton emails'

27 July 2016


Donald Trump has "actively encouraged" foreign powers to hack his presidential
rival Hillary Clinton, her camp says.

The Wikileaks group last week released emails from the Democratic National
Committee. Russia is accused of carrying out the hack.

Some 30,000 of the stolen emails are yet to be released. On Wednesday, Mr Trump
urged Russia to find them.

"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are
missing," he said.

"I think you'll be rewarded mightily by our press."

The emails would contain some "beauties", he said.

"This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively
encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent,"
Jake Sullivan, Mrs Clinton's senior policy advisor, said.

Read More....

http://static.bbci.co.uk/frameworks/barlesque/3.20.1/orb/4/img/bbc-blocks-dark.png

[Sophocles]

The Central Issue in the U.S. Presidential Campaign (http://thesaker.is/the-central-issue-in-the-u-s-presidential-campaign/)

By Eric Zuesse
July 27, 2016
The Saker

The central issue in the U.S. Presidential campaign can’t even be discussed in U.S. newsmedia, because America’s media have been almost uniformly complicit all along in hiding from the American public the crucial factual information that’s necessary in order for the public to vote in an intelligent and truthfully informed way about it. No news medium wants to report its own having been complicit in anything; so, the cover-up here just continues; it has a life of its own, even though it’s a life that brings the world closer and closer to a situation which would kill billions of people, as things get increasingly out-of-control the longer this coverup continues. The cycle of virtually uniform lying thus persists, despite the growing danger it produces. This article will need to be lengthy, because the American public have been almost consistently lied-to about so many very important things — things associated with the nation’s central issue — an issue even bigger than terrorism, and than global warming, and than rising economic inequality and corruption, but which is still virtually ignored. This article is thus intended to be ‘Drano’ for a political system that has become clogged by lies just jammed down into it, now backing up and pouring out onto America’s political floor. The overflowing sludge has got to be cleaned up, and discarded. Or else — and very suddenly — it will kill us all.

This central issue is whether or not to continue to move forward with the American government’s plan, ever since the Soviet Union and its military alliance the Warsaw Pact ended in 1991, to extend NATO — the anti-Russia military club — right up to Russia’s borders (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/09/how-america-double-crossed-russia-and-shamed-the-west.html), surround Russia with NATO nuclear missiles a mere five minutes flight-time to Moscow, and simultaneously build a “Ballistic Missile Defense” or “Anti Ballistic Missile” (BMD or ABM) system to nullify Russia’s retaliatory missiles (http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-end-of-m-a-d-the-beginning-of-madness/5528403?print=1) against an unannounced blitz U.S.-NATO invasion to take over, if not totally eliminate, Russia and its resistance to U.S. power. This operation is an ugly reality, but it is an American-led reality, and the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election will bring it into its final stage, either by ending it, or by culminating it — two drastically different outcomes, but one side or the other will prevail in this political contest, and the present article links to the documentation that America’s voters will need to be aware of that shows not only that they’ve been lied-to, but how and why they’ve been lied-to. The documentation is all-important, especially because the facts that are being documented have been hidden so successfully for so long. This is not a world that Americans want to know, but it is a world that especially the few Americans who are in control, don’t want the American public to know. That’s a toxic combination (public ignorance, which the people in control want to continue), but it is tragically real (as the documentation here will make clear).

U.S. President Barack Obama has stated, on many occasions, that the U.S. is the only “indispensable” country, and that any country which refuses to capitulate to American global supremacy is an enemy. This applies especially to Russia and to China — two formerly communist nations. Thus, the ‘Cold War’ is being resumed, and U.S. arms-makers are booming again, even though the ideological excuse (the “red scare,” communism) is now gone.

For example, Obama told graduating cadets at West Point, on 28 May 2014 (https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/05/28/remarks-president-united-states-military-academy-commencement-ceremony):


“The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world. The question we face, the question each of you will face, is not whether America will lead, but how we will lead — not just to secure our peace and prosperity, but also extend peace and prosperity around the globe.”

He was telling West Point graduates there, that economic competition can become a cause for America to go to war, and that America’s global supremacy is their job to enforce.

Obama placed this into a moralizing framework, as he always so skillfully does (for propaganda-purposes; he’s terrifically gifted at that), by saying to those cadets:


“America’s willingness to apply force around the world is the ultimate safeguard against chaos, and America’s failure to act in the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocations not only violates our conscience, but invites escalating aggression in the future. … In the 21st century American isolationism is not an option. We don’t have a choice to ignore what happens beyond our borders. … As the Syrian civil war spills across borders, the capacity of battle-hardened extremist groups to come after us only increases. Regional aggression that goes unchecked — whether in southern Ukraine or the South China Sea, or anywhere else in the world — will ultimately impact our allies and could draw in our military. We can’t ignore what happens beyond our boundaries. And beyond these narrow rationales, I believe we have a real stake, an abiding self-interest, in making sure our children and our grandchildren grow up in a world where schoolgirls are not kidnapped and where individuals are not slaughtered because of tribe or faith or political belief. I believe that a world of greater freedom and tolerance is not only a moral imperative, it also helps to keep us safe.”

He was equating there the imposition of American control, as being “a world of greater freedom and tolerance,” which “helps to keep us safe.” Was it that, and did it do that, in Iraq? What about in Libya? What did it do for Ukraine (http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/obama-definitely-caused-malaysian-airliner-downed/)? Is it really doing that in Syria? What about all of the refugees that are pouring out of all of those countries, which are being ‘saved’ by Obama’s policy, which has been America’s policy for decades, and which is not challenged, and which is bipartisan in every regard except for the style of lying rhetoric that’s being used to ‘justify’ it?

Obama’s predecessor in office, George W. Bush, was working on the same plan, when he invaded Iraq in 2003. His allegations that he was certain that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear-weapons program, and saying against “Saddam’s WMD program” that “a report came out of the Atomic — the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/04/trustworthy-u-s-western-news-media.html)”, all of it were just bald lies from him, because all of it was false, and he knew that it was false (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/04/trustworthy-u-s-western-news-media.html). He knew that there was no such ‘IAEA’ ‘report’. And the press didn’t even challenge him on it, but instead just parroted the President’s lies as if they should automatically be taken as truths. (And the press also hid the IAEA’s immediate announcement that there was no such report. (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/04/trustworthy-u-s-western-news-media.html)) It’s happening again, but the stakes this time are even more dangerous.

We’re going into a Presidential election, in which one candidate, Hillary Clinton, clearly wants to continue the policy that has been in place since 1990 (and which her husband played a major role in), and in which the other candidate, Donald Trump, wants to stop it — he says we should end it. So, he is accused of being a ‘Soviet agent (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/07/clinton-trump-putin-nato/492332/)’. The same aristocracy that own the ‘news’ media and that control both of the political Parties, is being threatened by Trump’s repudiation of their program. They use moralisms — rightist ones for Republicans, and leftist ones for Democrats — to condemn him, but the real reason they are determined to defeat him is to continue their war which (on its U.S. side) never really was against communism; it was always a war for global conquest, global control; that’s how America’s controllers have been controlling this country since at least 1990. (http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/how-america-double-crossed-russia-and-shamed-the-west/) They want to continue it, though it’s heading all of us toward disaster.

In support of this aggressive agenda — a metastatically cancerous NATO — Obama in 2014 perpetrated a very bloody Ukrainian coup (propagandized as ‘democracy demonstrations’), carried out by U.S.-paid rabid racist-anti-Russian fascists, nazis actuall (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-RyOaFwcEw)y (and from a tradition in Ukraine that descended from the pro-Hitler, anti-Stalin, side of Ukraine during World War II (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx5EkV_PhPI) — the side that did Ukraine’s pogroms, etc.) and which had been allied with the Axis powers during WW II — but that now were in the pay of the U.S. government (http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/meet-ukraines-master-mass-murderer-dmitriy-yarosh/).

Some of the top members of Congress who have responsibility over foreign affairs refuse even to become acquainted with the evidence disproving the U.S. government’s lies on this. Elizabeth Murray (http://content.blubrry.com/kkfi901fm/ts_2016_01_21.mp3) was shocked to find in government officials, this intentional refusal to see evidence. She had served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council before retiring after a 27-year career in the U.S. government. (She should be the head of the CIA. (http://content.blubrry.com/kkfi901fm/ts_2016_01_21.mp3)) On 24 July 2016, in an article titled “Rep. Rick Larsen Bases Russia Policy on Myth (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/07/rep-rick-larsen-bases-russia-policy-myth.html)”, she described her efforts to inform congressman Larsen about the reality of the U.S. operation in Ukraine. Wikipedia says: “Richard Ray ‘Rick’ Larsen is the United States Representative for Washington’s 2nd congressional district and a member of the Democratic Party. … Larsen is a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. … He formerly worked as director of public affairs for the Washington State Dental Association and as a lobbyist for the dental profession. … the Second District was represented by future U.S. Senator Henry M. ‘Scoop’ Jackson between 1941 and 1953.” (Jackson later became famous as “the Senator from Boeing,” the first of the Democratic Party neoconservatives.)

Murray wrote (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/07/rep-rick-larsen-bases-russia-policy-myth.html) (and the links here are added by me):


I mentioned to Rep. Larsen that I had just returned from Russia with a U.S. delegation, and that all the people in Russia I had spoken with — including teachers, students, journalists, medical doctors, entrepreneurs and war veterans — had no desire for a nuclear war with the United States, but instead expressed the wish for peaceful, normalized relations . . . During our time in Yalta, I had organized a ‘swim for peace’ with Americans and Russian war vets swimming together in the Black Sea, which had caused quite a stir in local Russian language media. I explained to Rep. Larsen my understanding of why the Russian public is suspicious about U.S. moves in the region (based on what I heard from people there), and why they would expect the United States to be the first to make a unilateral confidence-building measure in the direction of nuclear disarmament. Russians were savvy to the Nuland ‘Yats’ youtube recording (in which Victoria Nuland is distinctly heard telling U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt that ‘Yats is the guy’ just prior to (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSxaa-67yGM) the regime change in which Arseniy Yatsenyuk became prime minister, and which directly implicated the U.S. in the Ukrainian coup (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/12/head-stratfor-private-cia-says-overthrow-yanukovych-blatant-coup-history.html)), felt threatened by the recent NATO/Operation Anakonda (http://www.eur.army.mil/anakonda/) maneuvers that took place during our delegation’s visit, and were extremely concerned about other provocative U.S. moves in the region, including economic sanctions on Russia and Crimea, the latter enacted after a majority of Crimeans (http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/entire-case-sanctions-russia-pure-lies/) voted to rejoin Russia in response to what they saw as outside interference in the affairs of Ukraine.

Larsen immediately responded with rebuttals, stating flat-out he didn’t believe there was a U.S. role in the Ukrainian events (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-RyOaFwcEw) — that what I’d just told him was ‘not what I’ve been hearing’ – and he went on to talk about how the Baltic states felt threatened by Russia, etc. He didn’t know what ‘Operation Anakonda’ was and seemed unaware that the largest-ever NATO military maneuvers since WWII had just taken place on Russia’s borders. I offered to send his office additional information about that and the Ukrainian events – an offer he ignored.

The path we’re on can end only in one of two ways: Either the U.S. ‘news’ media will get real and start reporting the crucial realities (such as that the aggression in Ukraine wasn’t Putin’s ‘seizure’ of Crimea (http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/entire-case-sanctions-russia-pure-lies/) but the immediately prior coup (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-RyOaFwcEw) — and its necessary ethnic cleansing afterwards (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/08/enemies-ukraine-speak.html) — by Obama’s hirees, which started being organized by him no later than 1 March 2013 (http://rinf.com/alt-news/editorials/new-video-evidence-americas-coup-ukraine-means/), and which culminated nearly a year later), these being the crucial realities that contradict the official lies (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/08/how-why-the-u-s-media-do-propaganda-against-russia.html) and thus might (if we’re extremely lucky) compel the U.S. government to reverse its present course; or else, there will be a surprise blitz attack by U.S.-NATO against Russia, or else by Russia against U.S.-NATO. The closer we get to the end of this matter, the more difficult the former option becomes, and the more inevitable the latter option — a blitz attack (by either side) — becomes. That’s the reality.

Obama’s ‘mono-polar world’ is a fiction, and the sooner that he and his Big Lie can be exposed (by the Western press, to the Western publics), the safer everyone will be. Discomforts on the parts of those who have promulgated and propagandized that lie will be vastly less than the disastrous alternative, which would destroy the world for everyone.

...................

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 (https://www.amazon.com/Theyre-Not-Even-Close-Democratic/dp/1880026090?ie=UTF8&qid=1339027537&ref_=sr_1_9&sr=8-9), and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. (https://www.amazon.com/Theyre-Not-Even-Close-Democratic/dp/1880026090?ie=UTF8&qid=1339027537&ref_=sr_1_9&sr=8-9)

The Saker (http://thesaker.is/the-central-issue-in-the-u-s-presidential-campaign/)

[ZooLife]

Quite the racket when we are force (if we even chose to vote) to choose between more or less dangerous.

Is that like choosing between one or two stabs in the heart?

Man, the people deep in politics have to be a sub-breed of people, it's the only way I can even begin to understand the political mindset.

[Mike]

She may very well be more dangerous than Trump...but ive got a bet with a friend that she'll win the election. A 6 pack of sculpin ipa is on the line, so go Hillary!

No joke: whereas before I didnt really care, I am now following the race like a hawk. I might even vote for the first time in my life...despite my strong belief against waiting in lines. We're talking about a $15 six pack here. Thats almost unprecedented. Plus i'm pretty competitive.

But as far as who gets elected - outside my bet - I just cant muster up any interest. I just don't care....for better or worse. Not sure if thats an indictment on me or the system.

[Sean]

Good stuff from John Pilger.
I think this was posted before(maybe), and I'll repeat what I said then: Dissidents in the arts find themselves not working much, or outright blacklisted, if you speak up. CIA and Hollywood have a very long relationship.

And, as I found out the hard way: If you criticize Israel, your career is ****ed, completely and thoroughly. So, people with mouths to feed shut up and go along. My issue here is, I still can't figure Trump out. He is a buffoon, but would he try to do the right thing? Or is he controlled opposition?

[Sophocles]

I personally think that the world will be better off with Trump in the presidency rather than Clinton. But then again, this is politics, so I guess we`ll have to wait and see until some time after the elections.

Lindsey Williams: I feel a moral obligation to tell you the truth about Donald Trump… (http://www.lindseywilliams.net/lindsey-williams-i-feel-a-moral-obligation-to-tell-you-the-truth-about-donald-trump/)

[Cidersomerset]

I was trying to find an article to post on this thread and the Global Research
one at the bottom fits and I was about to post that , then thought the whole
post gives more background....

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?91646-FBI-quizzes-Hillary-Clinton-on-emails-2-July-2016-Hillary-Lied-Under-Oath.....&p=1085702#post1085702
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

‘They have a history of corruption’: Clinton Cash documentary author Peter Schweizer

By David on 29 July 2016 GMT

https://www.davidicke.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Untitled-185-6.jpg

‘They have a history of corruption’: Clinton Cash documentary author Peter Schweizer

YoTn3cHtXxQ

Published on 27 Jul 2016
RT spoke to the author and executive producer of the documentary 'Clinton Cash' -
Peter Schweizer, who believes Hillary Clinton needs power to keep the money coming in.


======================================================
======================================================


Clinton slams Trump for praising dictators, despite having own ties

By David on 29 July 2016 GMT

https://www.davidicke.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Untitled-104-1.jpg


bcaSE_l4rPQ

Published on 28 Jul 2016
After calling on Russia to help release Hillary Clinton's emails, Trump was quickly accused
of quote 'treason' and encouraging espionage. But it's not just alleged ties between the
billionaire and Russia that are worrying Americans. Barack Obama has also lashed out at
the Republican candidate, accusing him of praising Saddam Hussein. But as RT's Gayane
Chichakyan reports, Hillary Clinton's own foreign policy is no blank canvas.

====================================================
====================================================


‘Of course I’m being sarcastic’: MSM misses Trump’s joke on Russia & missing emails

By David on 29 July 2016 GMT Political Manipulation


https://www.davidicke.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/579a4471c3618865278b4595.jpg

‘Mainstream media can apparently no longer tell the difference between when Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump is being bombastic and when he’s joking. Telling the
Russians to hack Hillary Clinton and the State Department was the latter, he says.

On Wednesday, news outlets across the country freaked out when Trump weighed in on the
Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) leaked emails and Clinton’s use of a private email
server when serving as secretary of state. The comments were made during a speech at
Trump National Doral, in Doral, Florida.’

Read more: ‘Of course I’m being sarcastic’: MSM misses Trump’s joke on Russia & missing emails

https://www.rt.com/usa/353758-trump-sarcastic-russia-emails/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=aplication_chrome&utm_campaign=chrome

===============================================
===============================================

GLOBAL RESEARCH

Trump Critics Enter the Twilight Zone, Claiming He’s a Manchurian Candidate for President Putin

By Stephen Lendman
Global Research, July 28, 2016

US establishment figures are so hellbent for Hillary, they’re reaching new lows to
make her America’s 45th president – a legally challenged, trigger-happy Wall Street
tool she-devil perhaps eager for global war.Trump is no solution to changing
America’s deplorable state. Compared to Clinton, he’s the lesser of two malign
forces.With no public track record, he’s judged by his rhetoric alone, along with
knowing all politicians and wannabe ones lie. Nothing they say is credible. Judge
them by their actions alone.

Clinton’s notorious history is abominable, DNC party bosses and complicit media
scoundrels suppressing what’s too scandalous and criminal to ignore.

Trump’s unorthodox, anti-establishment-sounding rhetoric makes him political
enemy number one. Propaganda targeting him incredibly suggests he’s a
Manchurian candidate for Russia’s President Putin.Brainwashed Americans believe
most anything repeated enough. Propaganda works this way – a tool for deception,
for misinformation and Big Lies, for convincing people about anything powerful
interests want them to believe, suppressing hard truths they’re not told.

One-sidedly supporting Clinton, Washington Post editors call Trump “a threat to the
Constitution…a unique and present danger…uniquely unqualified to serve as
president, in experience and temperament.”

The New York Times deplorably said Trump’s calling on Russia to find Hillary’s
30,000 missing emails is “another bizarre moment in the mystery (sic) of whether
(Putin is) seeking to influence the United States’ presidential race.”

Trump said “(o)f course I’m being sarcastic” in urging Moscow to uncover and
reveal Hillary’s missing emails.

“They have no idea if it’s Russia…China (or) somebody else,” responsible for
hacking and revealing DNC emails. “(T)he real problem is what was said” and
done. “It’s disgraceful…and (now) they’re just trying to deflect from that.”
Read More...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-critics-enter-the-twilight-zone-claiming-hes-a-manchurian-candidate-for-president-putin/5538494[/U]

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?91646-FBI-quizzes-Hillary-Clinton-on-emails-2-July-2016-Hillary-Lied-Under-Oath.....&p=1085702#post1085702

[Cidersomerset]

'Too Big to Jail': The Revolving Doors- From HSBC to the Clintons

By David on 30 July 2016 GMT

GABljOJYmXc

Published on 15 Jul 2016


The Revolving Doors between governments and corporations go way beyond
conflicts of interest. A criminal network exists that is subverting the judicial
system, ensuring business as usual for the elite. Let’s take a look at a great
recent example of this phenomenon in the case of Hillary Clinton and HSBC,
and their gate-keepers, from FBI’s James Comey and DOJ’s Loretta Lynch,
to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger!


=================================================
=================================================

Politics is Fake and Staged

W6KHSNKpmdg

Published on 21 Jul 2016


SOURCES: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=19321

Only a psychopath could read someone else's lies from their teleprompter with such
feigned emotion. And only the flag-waving, dumbed down masses could believe
them. Politicians are puppets, and your only questions should be: "Who is writing
their speeches? And who is pulling their strings?" This is a public service
announcement from The Corbett Report.

[Chester]

It has been said that to be allowed in as a member of "the Illuminati" one must have 500 Million in "monopoly chips" as an admission requirement. If this same "Illuminati" has plans for themselves that differ from the rest of us, and potential applicants like the Clintons have a good idea as to what these plans might be, this may explain their utterly ridiculous, unbelievable behavior over the last several decades, especially since Bill left the White House and the Clinton's declared themselves broke.

How many folks go from "broke" to (as I have read in some reports) a current net worth of $300 million USD in 15 or so years?

What's the spookiest thing of all is knowing what she would do to ensure they have the other $200 million (or more) before the supposed rumored "plan" goes to that final level of operational.

For me its a no brainer who to vote for though voting won't matter anyways as the results are rigged with the fallback being the ease of fixing via the electronic voting machines.

Trump is a saleseman but he's also an unknown (we don't know what his administration may do). But what is certain is what a Hillary administration will do which could not be worse for humanity as a whole though it is just as possible that all she really does is assist in speeding up the achievement of the final goals anyways.

[ulli]

https://m.imgur.com/wFovN4O

[Chester]

https://m.imgur.com/wFovN4O

wow - saw this same type of demonstration in that other video that has been circulating... clearly something is just not right here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd4NH9jKNas

[Sophocles]

Politicians (just two more examples why not to vote):

rJ9y1c73-IM


mNGi3rodvVQ

[Cidersomerset]

Things don't change from 30 years ago...sound familiar politicians

PCvQmCQpkIU

[Cidersomerset]

Barack Obama Worked For The CIA – John Pilger

By David on 2 August 2016 GMT


https://www.davidicke.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Untitled-9.jpg

ezcr18NTOtA

[Sophocles]

Inside the Invisible Government; War, Propaganda, Clinton & Trump (http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/28/inside-the-invisible-government-war-propaganda-clinton-trump/)

counterpunch.org
October 28, 2016
by John Pilger

The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda.

The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.

In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade – behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”

Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it”.

He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government”.

Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged.

Imagine two cities.

Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people.

But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties.

In the second city – in another country nearby – almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics.

The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by “us” – by the United States and Britain. They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and America.

Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city – which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.

Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad.

What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria.

Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.

Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell’s fabrications.

The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, “What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?”

He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq”.

It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question — Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul.

There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.

When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria – and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy”. That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak.

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.

The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an “agreement” that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable.

As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.

From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage.

Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.”

The West’s medieval client, Saudi Arabia – to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars’ worth of arms – is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half the children are malnourished.

Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs – “our” bombs – that the Saudis use against dirt-poor villages, and against weddings, and funerals.

The explosions look like small atomic bombs. The bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers. This fact is not on the evening news.

Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia — and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post.

These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.

And they love war.

While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life.

In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people. That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie.

In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all, his independence were intolerable.

So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France. Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, “We came, we saw, he died!”

The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian: “Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong.”

Intervention — what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction.

According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The Unicef report on the children killed says, “most [of them] under the age of ten”.

As a direct consequence, Sirte became the capital of ISIS.

Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war.

All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.

This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil.

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine – except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.

Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

There is almost the joie d’esprit of a class reunion of warmongers.

The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain.

But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behaviour and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America’s design for the 21st century.

This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible, China.

To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China.

In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.” That was not news.

Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House.

The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world – unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China.

Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq. When she ran against Obama in 2008, she threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran. As Secretary of State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and Honduras and set in train the baiting of China.

She has now pledged to support a No Fly Zone in Syria — a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime –a distinction for which the competition is fierce.

Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public.

That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders.

Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way – in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target.

Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8th, If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defence drills being conducted in Russia. None will recall Edward Bernays’ “torches of freedom”.

George Bush’s press spokesman once called the media “complicit enablers”.

Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history.

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

This is adapted from an address to the Sheffield Festival of Words, Sheffield, England.

Source (http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/28/inside-the-invisible-government-war-propaganda-clinton-trump/)

[Sophocles]

Unprecedented Crisis, Collapse of the Clinton Apparatus? Hacker Whistleblowers, Trump, and the FBI Converge (http://www.globalresearch.ca/unprecedented-crisis-collapse-of-the-clinton-apparatus-hacker-whistleblowers-trump-and-the-fbi-converge/5554349)

By Larry Chin
Global Research
November 01, 2016

It is far from over. Expect October Surprises, November Surprises, and the unprecedented.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Podesta-Clinton.jpg

With one week left in the most chaotic and dangerous presidential contest in American history, the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign is damaged and sinking. Even the propaganda protection of the Clinton-controlled mainstream corporate media is starting to buckle.

Hillary Clinton is being bombshelled on a daily basis by hacker whistleblowers led by Wikileaks (https://wikileaks.org/).

Companion sites such as Most Damning Wikileaks (http://www.mostdamningwikileaks.com/), which sorts the raw data and provides analysis, have also been in overdrive.

Countless Web/social media-based investigators, journalists and activists (Anonymous (https://www.youtube.com/user/AnonymousWorldvoce/featured), DC Leaks (http://dcleaks.com/index.php/portfolio_page/hillary-clinton/), Guccifer 2.0 (https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/clinton-foundation/), Michael Trimm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vGCdZo8ydU), H.A. Goodman (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDB5XReUyyqt-FTNdkzFN-A/videos), Styxhexenhammer666 (https://www.youtube.com/user/Styxhexenhammer666/videos), and anonymous posters at 4Chan (http://boards.4chan.org/pol/), to name just a few), Project Veritas (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEE8w-v6Gg4j3ze3oX-urEw), Judicial Watch, and surging populist forces behind Donald Trump, are exposing the Clinton machine from every angle. There are still more bombshells to come.

Now the FBI has opened two new investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The most recent Wikileaks exposures provide clear evidence that Hillary Clinton and her team of aides and operatives knowingly used unencrypted private computers to conduct secret business (including exchanging classified information), knowingly tried to hide and destroy evidence of this activity, and were involved in an active cover-up.

Emails of Clinton associate Cheryl Mills also implicate President Barack Obama. Obama not only knew about Clinton’s private server, he knowingly communicated with Clinton via this private server.

It is believed that the overwhelming amount of significant evidence compelled the FBI to act.

At the center of it all is top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The FBI has found some 650,000 emails on the computers and devices of Abedin and her estranged husband, former congressman Anthony Weiner. The classified Clinton-related emails were a surprise discovery made in the course of FBI’s investigation into Weiner’s pedophilia case. The Department of Justice has obtained warrant to search multiple Abedin/Weiner computers.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Screen-Shot-2016-11-01-at-10.49.03.png

What the new stash contains is being sorted out and catalogued by the FBI. The sheer number of surprise new emails raises questions all by itself.

What exactly were Hillary and her team trying to hide? Was Clinton running secret operations, with Obama’s knowledge and participation, via private devices? If so, what were these secret operations? Was it to hide “shadow government” foreign policy, and “off the books” activities?

Or was it about hiding the criminal activities of the Clinton Foundation, which has already been exposed by Wikileaks as a (very Iran-Contra) front for the covert funding of terrorists (including ISIS, via Saudi Arabia and Qatar), influence peddling, pay-for-play schemes, money laundering, fraud, weapons deals, and other crimes?

Was it to hide personal depravity along the lines of pedophilia and connections to a larger Washington pedophilia ring?

Will the new investigation go beyond the violation of security procedures, to the issue of criminal intent, as well as the evidence of crimes contained in the emails themselves?

Indictments are being prepared.

The FBI decision in context

http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/loretta_lynch_ap3_1160x629-300x162.jpg

Both FBI Director James Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch (right) are compromised individuals with deep ties to the Clintons. Why did Comey take action at this time? Lynch was pressured or blackmailed by Bill Clinton to stop the initial investigation of Hillary, but did not, or could not, stand in the way of this round.

President Obama has adopted a “neutral” stance. Obama has also stopped campaigning for or with Hillary.

The fact that these Clinton surrogates and Obama (an important Hillary cheerleader), are now “turning against Hillary” speaks volumes:


1. There is so much damning evidence that new probes had to be opened, according to the Hatch Act, which would make it a crime for Comey not to take action. So much that not even Comey/Lynch/Obama can cover for Hillary any longer.

2. Serious internal pressure within the FBI itself caused Comey to do his job, or face a mutiny. Many FBI agents were furious about how Comey let Clinton off the hook the first time. Comey is now “covering his rear end”.

3. Clinton’s campaign is damaged, possibly beyond repair. “Rats are jumping off the sinking ship”. The Democratic establishment may be forced to consider a backup plan to replace Clinton (with Tim Kaine) or cancel the election by some other means.

4. Now that his own security-breaching communications with Clinton via her private server have been exposed by Wikileaks, Obama is distancing himself from Clinton, a major blow to Hillary’s campaign.

5. Some skeptical observers have proposed that the FBI investigation could be a smokescreen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1y1v3zgxws) diversion, a distraction from more potentially damaging, game-ending material expected to be released by Wikileaks and other sources in the coming week. However, it does appear that the actual “smoking guns” are so numerous and blatant, that the Clintons are in real trouble.

The Democratic Party establishment is in panic mode. They have resorted again to blaming Russia. Comey is being attacked as a Russian agent. Comey (left) has now become as much of a target as Trump, who continues to be accused of being a Russian spy.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/james-comey-300x179.jpg

The weak and empty response by an already weakened Hillary and the Democratic Party leadership is a sure sign that the election could very well be lost.

All the queen’s women and men

In the Watergate scandal, Nixon’s surrogates took the fall, and Gerald Ford pardoned him. In Iran-Contra, numerous operatives “fell on the sword” to protect the Bushes and the CIA.

What fate awaits Hillary Clinton?

Will Hillary’s operatives (Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Neara Tanden, John Podesta, Bob Creamer, etc.) protect her, or turn on her? Who will be left to protect her?

Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile, a faithful Clinton surrogate, has been forced to resign, after Wikileaks exposed the fact that she helped Hillary cheat in two debates. (Brazile was abused by Hillary in meltdown mode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NfFAaPZqs8) after she had failed to effectively help Hillary cheat her way through a panel with NBC’s Matt Lauer. She will no longer have to put up with being called a “cow” by Clinton.)

Saudi-born (Muslim Brotherhood-connected) Huma Abedin, perhaps the key figure in the case, has asked for immunity. If Abedin tells the truth, she could destroy the Clintons, and be in danger for the rest of her life. Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s most personal aide, has been missing, not been seen with Hillary or the campaign in days.

On the other hand, it would not be surprising if Abedin resorts to pleading the Fifth, or the favorite technique used by the guilty: repeatedly saying “I don’t recall”. Huma has already suggested she had “no idea” how the emails wound up on her computer.

It seems that some of the incriminating documents are contained in a file titled “Life Insurance”. This suggests that Abedin stashed incriminating material for insurance in the event that the Clintons threatened her life.

Weiner, however, is a different matter. He is not beholden to the Clintons, and could be more inclined to “sing”.

The first of a new kind of information war

The incendiary warfare for this election, and the control of the US government is all happening without the knowledge of the large segment of the ambivalent/ignorant population that relies exclusively on mainstream (Clinton-dominated) corporate media.

The war for information is being fought entirely on the Web and, as exemplified by the Clinton scandals, the battle is over the contents of computer data. Corporate broadcast and print media has not covered much of the action at all. Within the corporate media bubble, Hillary still retains a lead, Trump is still a pervert and a madman, and the FBI is on a puzzling witch hunt. But even this bubble is beginning to burst. Hillary is in so much trouble, that even the corporate media is starting to be forced to report.

There is a strong possibility that this election will be fought and decided without the participation of this left-out segment.

These people will be shocked, surprised and baffled by it all. There is not much time left to get them to begin to understand.

Unprecedented crisis

Hillary Clinton and her campaign have been severely damaged by resistance from all sides. According to conditions on the ground, and according to a growing number of the more accurate national polls, Trump is surging (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MVlRqS6R0I). He may even have a significant lead.

However, the election has already been rigged and stolen for a Clinton victory. They have the means, the technology, and it is already happening. The question now is whether the FBI investigation, and last minute bombshells from Wikileaks, completely changes the landscape in the remaining days.

This conflict will last well beyond the election and its result.

Nixon won the presidential election in 1972 in a landslide, but was forced to leave office because of Watergate.

Even if Clinton gets her way, she will be also be scandalized and investigated a la Nixon. A constitutional crisis is virtually guaranteed. She could be indicted before or after taking office. She could be pardoned by Obama. She could be impeached. In the unlikely event that she survives all of that, resistance to her will be never-ending. She is so corrupt, and has antagonized so many people and nations, that will not be able to govern or conduct diplomacy in any case.

In the short term, the possibility of a major false flag event to distract from, and cancel election, remains the biggest and most terrifying scenario. And/or a martial law crackdown on the US in the event of civil unrest caused by a contested election.

More bombshells, possibly the biggest ones yet, have been promised for the final weeks and days, including more Wikileaks, more from Project Veritas, more from Anonymous.

It is far from over. Expect October Surprises, November Surprises, and the unprecedented.

The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Chin, Global Research, 2016

Source (http://www.globalresearch.ca/unprecedented-crisis-collapse-of-the-clinton-apparatus-hacker-whistleblowers-trump-and-the-fbi-converge/5554349)

[Cidersomerset]

WIKILEAKS 26 JUST RELEASED: DOJ Illegally Helps Clinton Campaign. Clinton Takes Prison Lobby Money

8P7OFsRN5Uc

Published on 2 Nov 2016

My name is H. A. Goodman and I’m an author, columnist, and journalist www.hagoodman.com
MY NEW DAILY CALLER ARTICLE: http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/01/thi...
WIKILEAKS 26 IS OUT https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/...

[Sophocles]

Assange: Clinton & ISIS funded by same money, Trump won’t be allowed to win (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE) (https://www.rt.com/news/365299-assange-pilger-saudi-clinton/)

Rt.com
4 Nov, 2016 05:00

k9xbokQO4M0

In the second excerpt from the John Pilger Special, to be exclusively broadcast by RT on Saturday, courtesy of Dartmouth Films, Julian Assange accuses Hillary Clinton of misleading Americans about the true scope of Islamic State’s support from Washington’s Middle East allies.

In a 2014 email made public by Assange’s WikiLeaks last month, Hillary Clinton, who had served as secretary of state until the year before, urges John Podesta, then an advisor to Barack Obama, to “bring pressure” on Qatar and Saudi Arabia, “which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [Islamic State, IS, ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups.”

“I think this is the most significant email in the whole collection,” Assange, whose whistleblowing site released three tranches of Clinton-related emails over the past year, told Pilger in an exclusive interview, courtesy of Dartmouth Films.

“All serious analysts know, and even the US government has agreed, that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS and funding ISIS, but the dodge has always been that it is some “rogue” princes using their oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that it is the government of Saudi Arabia, and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.”

Assange and Pilger, who sat down for their 25-minute interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the whistleblower has been a refugee since 2012, then talk about the conflict of interest between Clinton’s official post, which held throughout Obama’s first term, her husband’s nonprofit, and the Middle East officials, whose stated desire to fight terrorism may not have been sincere.

John Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the first two, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton is secretary of state, and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly Saudi Arabia.

Julian Assange: Under Hillary Clinton – and the Clinton emails reveal a significant discussion of it – the biggest-ever arms deal in the world was made with Saudi Arabia: more than $80 billion. During her tenure, the total arms exports from the US doubled in dollar value.

JP: Of course, the consequence of that is that this notorious jihadist group, called ISIL or ISIS, is created largely with money from people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation?

JA: Yes.

Pilger also questioned Assange over increasingly frequent accusations from the Clinton camp, and Western media, that WikiLeaks is looking to swing next week’s US presidential election in favor of Donald Trump – perhaps at Russia’s behest.

But Assange dismissed the prospect of Trump, who is behind in the polls, winning as unlikely – and not necessarily due to his standing with the electorate.

“My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he has had every establishment off his side. Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment,” said Assange. “Banks, intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and the journalists themselves.”

Source (https://www.rt.com/news/365299-assange-pilger-saudi-clinton/)

PS! I posted this before I saw your (Cider`s) posts on other threads regarding the same issue.

[Sophocles]

A Deep State of Mind: America’s Shadow Government and Its Silent Coup (http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/26/a-deep-state-of-mind-americas-shadow-government-and-its-silent-coup/)

counterpunch.org
October 26, 2016
by John W. Whitehead

http://uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/dropzone/2016/10/92068792_d347273d5f_z-1.jpg
Photo by Diego Torres Silvestre | CC BY 2.0


Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_E._Jenner). Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system … a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state…. The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization… It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government…. This group … is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.”

— Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech

Unaffected by elections. Unaltered by populist movements. Beyond the reach of the law.

Say hello to America’s shadow government.

A corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country, this shadow government represents the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.

No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, this shadow government is here to stay. Indeed, as recent documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow government—also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group (http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/17/fbi-releases-100-new-pages-on-clinton-email-probe.html)”—may well have played a part in who will win the White House this year.

To be precise, however, the future president will actually inherit not one but two shadow governments.

The first (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/09/AR2006060900891.html) shadow government, referred to as COG or Continuity of Government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.” COG is a phantom menace waiting for the right circumstances—a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an economic meltdown—to bring it out of the shadows, where it operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will transition to martial law.

Yet it is the second shadow government (http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/)—also referred to as the Deep State—that poses the greater threat to freedom right now. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government (http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/) is the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our government.

The Deep State, which “operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government.

So who or what is the Deep State?

It’s the militarized police, which have joined forces with state and federal law enforcement agencies in order to establish themselves as a standing army. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects. It’s the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take precedence over due process and justice. It’s the military empire with its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the nation. It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/) with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.” It’s what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies (http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/)”: the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members of the defense and intelligence committees.

It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.

These are the key players that drive the shadow government.

This is the hidden face of the American police state that will continue long past Election Day.

Just consider some of the key programs and policies advanced by the shadow government that will continue no matter who occupies the Oval Office.

Domestic surveillance.

No matter who wins the presidential popularity contest, the National Security Agency (NSA), with its $10.8 billion black ops annual budget, will continue to spy on every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. Thus, on any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. Local police have been outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike—including homes. Coupled with the nation’s growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial recognition software, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

Global spying.

The NSA’s massive surveillance network, what the Washington Post refers to as a $500 billion “espionage empire (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html),” will continue to span the globe and target every single person on the planet who uses a phone or a computer. The NSA’s Echelon (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/05/cyber/articles/27network.html) program intercepts and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax and email message sent anywhere in the world. In addition to carrying out domestic surveillance on peaceful political groups (http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html) such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and several religious groups, Echelon has also been a keystone in the government’s attempts at political and corporate espionage (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN).

Roving TSA searches.

The American taxpayer will continue to get ripped off by government agencies in the dubious name of national security. One of the greatest culprits when it comes to swindling taxpayers has been the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), with its questionable deployment of and complete mismanagement of millions of dollars’ worth of airport full-body X-ray scanners, punitive patdowns by TSA agents and thefts of travelers’ valuables. Considered essential to national security, TSA programs will continue in airports and at transportation hubs around the country.

USA Patriot Act, NDAA.

America’s so-called war on terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, will continue to chip away at our freedoms, unravel our Constitution and transform our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act. These laws completely circumvent the rule of law and the rights of American citizens. In so doing, they re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the U.S. Constitution, is the map by which we navigate life in the United States. These laws will continue to be enforced no matter who gets elected.

Militarized police state.

Thanks to federal grant programs allowing the Pentagon to transfer surplus military supplies and weapons to local law enforcement agencies without charge, police forces will continue to be transformed from peace officers into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, will continue to keep the masses corralled, controlled, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.

SWAT team raids.

With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans by local police for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties will continue to rise. Nationwide, SWAT teams will continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession.

Domestic drones.

The domestic use of drones will continue unabated. As mandated by Congress, there will be 30,000 drones crisscrossing the skies of America by 2020, all part of an industry that could be worth as much as $30 billion per year. These machines, which will be equipped with weapons, will be able to record all activities, using video feeds, heat sensors and radar. An Inspector General report revealed that the Dept. of Justice has already spent nearly $4 million on drones domestically, largely for use by the FBI (http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2013/09/28/doj-report-reveals-details-of-domestic-drone-usage/#4deaff985650), with grants for another $1.26 million so police departments and nonprofits can acquire their own drones.

School-to-prison pipeline.

The paradigm of abject compliance to the state will continue to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior. School districts will continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court.

Overcriminalization.

The government bureaucracy will continue to churn out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, rendering the rest of us petty criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to this overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal. Consequently, small farmers who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community will continue to have their farms raided.

Privatized Prisons.

States will continue to outsource prisons to private corporations, resulting in a cash cow whereby mega-corporations imprison Americans in private prisons in order to make a profit. In exchange for corporations buying and managing public prisons across the country at a supposed savings to the states, the states have to agree to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years.

Endless wars.

America’s expanding military empire will continue to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.

Are you getting the message yet?

The next president, much like the current president and his predecessors, will be little more than a figurehead, a puppet to entertain and distract the populace from what’s really going on.

As Lofgren reveals, this state within a state, “concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue,” is a “hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”

The Deep State not only holds the nation’s capital in thrall, but it also controls Wall Street (“which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater”) and Silicon Valley.

This is fascism in its most covert form, hiding behind public agencies and private companies to carry out its dirty deeds.

It is a marriage between government bureaucrats and corporate fat cats.

As Lofgren concludes:


[T]he Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change… If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda.

In other words, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590793099/counterpunchmaga), as long as government officials—elected and unelected alike—are allowed to operate beyond the reach of the Constitution, the courts and the citizenry, the threat to our freedoms remains undiminished.

So the next time you find yourselves despondent over the 2016 presidential candidates, remember that it’s just a puppet show intended to distract you from the silent coup being carried out by America’s shadow government.

Source (http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/26/a-deep-state-of-mind-americas-shadow-government-and-its-silent-coup/)

[Sophocles]

Assange: Clinton resisted FBI, and now they’re out for payback (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE) (https://www.rt.com/news/365404-assange-pilger-clinton-fbi/)

https://img.rt.com/files/2016.11/original/581d64a5c3618885018b4567.jpg
Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (L) and Julian Assange,
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks © Reuters / Darthmouth Films

Rt.com
5 Nov, 2016 05:29

Hillary Clinton sparked an FBI backlash, which is now surfacing, when she stonewalled the Feds, who were trying to investigate her private server, Julian Assange said during the John Pilger Special, courtesy of Dartmouth Films, which is now available in full on RT.

“If you go to history of the FBI, it has become effectively America's political police. And the FBI demonstrated with taking down the former head of the CIA [David Petraeus in 2012] over classified information given to his mistress that almost no one was untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that. ‘No one can resist us,’” Assange told the Australian journalist during the 25-minute interview.

“But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI's investigation. So, there is anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak.”

FBI director James B. Comey threw a spanner into the presidential race that threatened to become a Clinton procession last week, when he claimed that the agency had potentially obtained new information pertaining to Clinton’s use of a personal email server, set up shortly after she became Secretary of State in 2009, when they obtained the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the ex-husband of close Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Weiner was being investigated for an unrelated sexting offense.

Clinton has categorically denied mishandling classified information by using a vulnerable personal email address for State Department business. Fox News has alleged (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/03/sources-99-percent-chance-foreign-intel-agencies-breached-clinton-server.html) that the FBI has obtained new evidence from Weiner’s computer that shows that Clinton was “very likely hacked.”

The right-wing network has also claimed (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/02/fbis-clinton-foundation-investigation-now-very-high-priority-sources-say.html) that there is a “high priority” FBI investigation into whether favors were exchanged by Clinton for donations to her husband’s foundation, though other media have refuted (http://www.salon.com/2016/11/04/the-fbi-isnt-indicting-hillary-clinton-over-the-clinton-foundation-but-fox-news-wants-you-to-think-it-is/) these claims, saying that an earlier investigation into the Clinton Foundation, which cleared the power couple, remained closed.

Assange, whose WikiLeaks website has over the last ten months released (https://wikileaks.org/-Leaks-.html) three sizable batches of emails, relating to Clinton herself, the Democratic National Committee, and her campaign manager John Podesta, said the FBI has cause to investigate Clinton.

“There's a thread that runs through all of these emails. There is quite a lot of "pay-to-play," as they call it – taking… giving access in exchange for money for many individual states, individuals and corporations. Combined with the cover-up of Hillary Clinton's emails while she was Secretary of State this has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI [to investigate] increases,” Assange said.

Regardless of whether Clinton ever faces charges, Assange asserted that Clinton was beholden to corporate and political entities that have been hidden from the electorate during the race to the White House.

“She's this centralizing cog, so that you've got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs, and major elements of Wall Street, and intelligence, and people in the State Department, and the Saudis, and so on. She's is the, if you like, the centralizer that interconnects all these different cogs. She's smooth central representation of all that, and all that is more or less what is in power now in the United States,” stated Assange, who said that the leaked emails presented a clear picture of this nexus of influences.

Assange also insisted that despite his image, projecting hope and change, President Barack Obama became “very close to banking interests” during his own initial White House campaign in 2008.

“In fact, one of the most significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed – and half the [first] Obama cabinet was basically nominated (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/8190) by a representative from Citibank. It is quite amazing,” Assange said.

‘Libya was Hillary’s war’

According to Assange, Clinton’s emails reveal a masterplan, hatched months before the West’s intervention in Libya in March 2011, to make it the signature conflict of her tenure as secretary of state, and a podium from which to realize her presidential dreams.

“Libya more that anyone else's war was Hillary Clinton's war. Barack Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person who was championing it? Hillary Clinton. That's documented throughout her emails,” Assange said.

“There's more than 1,700 emails out of the 33,000 of Hillary Clinton's emails we published just about Libya. It's not about that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state something that she would use to run in the general election for president. So late 2011, there's an internal document called the "Libya Tick Tock" that is produced for Hillary Clinton, and it's all the... it's a chronological description of how Hillary Clinton was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state.”

But the scheme not only failed on a personal level, after Clinton was largely blamed for allowing a jihadist ransacking of a US compound in Benghazi in 2012, but also continues to haunt the country, which remains in a state of civil war, and Europe.

“As a result, there [have been] around 40,000 deaths within Libya. Jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in. That led to the European refugee and migrant crisis, because not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people then fleeing Syria, destabilization of other African countries as a result of arms flows,” said Assange.

Over the course of the interview, Assange also expounded on his views on Donald Trump, the relationship between WikiLeaks and Russia, and his plan to leave the Ecuadorian embassy, where he has lived as a legal fugitive since 2012.

The full transcript of the interview is available here (https://www.rt.com/news/365405-assange-pilger-full-transcript/), and previous excerpts here (https://www.rt.com/news/365164-assange-interview-wikileaks-russia/), and here (https://www.rt.com/news/365299-assange-pilger-saudi-clinton/).

RT (https://www.rt.com/news/365404-assange-pilger-clinton-fbi/)