James Howard Kunstler

Twitter execs were regularly meeting with FBI over what to censor. Twitter’s censorship was almost 100% aligned with the Dem Party. Twitter’s chief censors were deranged ideologues abusing their power over our discourse to silence dissent. —Glenn Greenwald

Startling fact of the week: Twitter’s senior ranks of content moderators included over a dozen former FBI and CIA agents and analysts who let child porn run loose all over the app while surgically removing any utterance contradicting the government’s claim that mRNA “vaccines” are “safe and effective” — not to mention the effort this elite crew expended against anyone objecting to the Woke-Left’s race and gender hustles. Wouldn’t you like to know how much they were paid? Probably more than government work.

Here’s another awful reality (better fasten your seatbelts): What also emerged in the tweet record of Yoel Roth, the company’s chief censor (former “Head of Trust and Safety”), begins to look like a gay mafia assault on the collective American psyche. Having gained official federal government sanction and protection, a statistically tiny homosexual demographic left in charge of the country’s main public forum has been out for revenge against their perceived enemy, political conservatives — Americans disinclined to join the cheerleading for drag queen story hours, “minor-attracted persons,” transsexuals in the military, and other LBGTQ cultural pranks.

In the process, that gay mafia running the public dialogue supported every lie that the government, its protector, put out, to keep it happy and well-fed. Shocking, I’m sure… but there it is.

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Saman Mohammadi

"The world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but that which we're edging toward understanding. And the world is made of language. I can't say that enough. Whenever we get into these discussions about reality, or effects in space and time, we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language." - Terence McKenna, from a talk he gave on September 11, 1993.

"As always: combatting Terrorism is not the end of the War on Terror; the War on Terror is the end in itself, and Terrorism is merely its pretext." - Glenn Greenwald, "Since bin Laden’s death," May 1, 2012.

Jose Rodriguez, one of the CIA's inquisitors, defended torture and the Agency's destruction of evidence on CBS's 60 minutes on Sunday, April 29.

As the former Deputy Director for Operations, Rodriguez committed many war crimes, torture being among them. He is a 21st century version of a Spanish inquisitor. His job is to protect National Security orthodoxies, smear victims with false charges, and sell the lie to the American people that the War on Terrorism is a noble struggle which the CIA must fight with an iron will.

According to CIA inquisitors and their defenders in the press, no questions about CIA policies should be raised because the CIA is holy and pure, while its detractors are just a bunch of conspiracy theorists, left-wing radicals, and Islamofascists. — As we can see, there are many similarities between the modern charges of terrorism and conspiracy theory made by intelligence agencies and the medieval charges of blasphemy and heresy made by religious authorities. The Catholic Church promised its flock salvation; the National Security State promises its flock security. Neither salvation or security can be delivered by political and religious authorities, but that fact hasn't stopped religion and government from going out of business yet.

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Glenn Greenwald & Murtaza Hussain

Just three years after NATO’s military intervention in Libya ended and was widely heralded by its proponents as a resounding success, that country is in complete collapse. So widespread is violence and anarchy there that “hardly any Libyan can live a normal life,” Brown University’s Stephen Kinzer wrote in The Boston Globe last week. Last month, the Libyan Parliament, with no functioning army to protect it from well-armed militias, was forced to flee Tripoli and take refuge in a Greek car ferry. The New York Times reported in September that “the government of Libya said . . . that it had lost control of its ministries to a coalition of militias that had taken over the capital, Tripoli, in another milestone in the disintegration of the state.”

Sectarian strife and economic woes destroyed efforts by the U.S. and U.K. to train Libyan soldiers, causing those two nations last week to all but abandon further programs: “not a single soldier had been trained by the U.S. because the Libyan government failed to provide promised cash.” AP reports this morning that an entire city, Darna, has now pledged its allegiance to ISIS, “becoming the first city outside of Iraq and Syria to join the ‘caliphate’ announced by the extremist group.” A report issued by Amnesty International two weeks ago documented that “lawless militias and armed groups on all sides of the conflict in western Libya are carrying out rampant human rights abuses, including war crimes.” In sum, it is almost impossible to overstate the horrors daily faced by Libyans and the misery that has engulfed the country.

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Nick Barrickman

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden highlight the extensive collaboration between the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Israel’s SIGINT National Unit (ISNU). The documents were published in The Intercept by journalist Glenn Greenwald.

One document, dated April 13, 2013, shows that the NSA works with ISNU to collect and analyze raw data, including data acquired from US citizens. According to the document, the NSA “maintains a far-reaching technical and analytic relationship with the Israeli SIGINT National Unit, sharing information on access, intercept, targeting, language, analysis and reporting.”

“This SIGINT relationship has increasingly been the catalyst for a broader intelligence relationship between the United States and Israel.” “The Israeli side enjoys the benefits of expanded geographic access to world-class NSA crypto analytic and SIGINT engineering expertise, and also gains controlled access to advanced US technology and equipment via accommodation buys and foreign military sales.”

The same document shows that the NSA and the ISNU work together to acquire intelligence on targets in North Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, South Asia and the former Soviet Union, sharing “a dedicated communications line” for the “exchange of raw material, as well as daily analytic and technical correspondence.”

“The single largest exchange between NSA and ISNU is on targets in the Middle East which constitute strategic threats to US and Israeli interests…Within that set of countries, cooperation covers the exploitation of internal governmental, military, civil and diplomatic Communications.”

Documents leaked by Snowden also expose the substantial support enjoyed by Israel from Western intelligence as it coordinates war crimes against the Palestinians.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Washington’s propaganda machine is in such high gear that we are in danger of losing the facts that we do have.

One fact is that the separatists do not have the expensive Buk anti-aircraft missile system or the trained personnel to operate it.

Another fact is that the separatists have no incentive to shoot down an airliner and neither does Russia. Anyone can tell the difference between low-flying attack aircraft and an airliner [even] at 33,000 feet.

The Ukrainians do have Buk anti-aircraft missile systems, and a Buk battery was operational in the region and deployed at a site from which it could have fired a missile at the airliner.

Just as the separatists and the Russian government have no incentive to shoot down an airliner, neither does the Ukrainian government nor, one would think, even the crazed extreme Ukrainian nationalists who have formed militias to take the fight against the separatists that the Ukrainian army is not keen to undertake–unless there was a plan to frame Russia.

One Russian general familiar with the weapon system offered his opinion that it was a mistake made by the Ukrainian military untrained in the weapon’s use. The general said that although Ukraine has a few of the weapons, Ukrainians have had no training in their use in the 23 years since Ukraine separated from Russia. The general thinks it was an accident due to incompetence.

This explanation makes a certain amount of sense and far more sense than Washington’s propaganda. The problem with the general’s explanation is that it does not explain why the Buk anti-aircraft missile system was deployed near or in a separatist territory. The separatists have no aircraft. It seems odd for Ukraine to have an expensive missile system in an area in which it is of no military use and where the position could be overrun and captured by separatists.

As Washington, Kiev, and the presstitute media are committed to the propaganda that Putin did it, we are not going to get any reliable information from the US media. We will have to figure it out for ourselves.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Washington plotted against and overthrew an elected legitimate government and then lost control to neo-nazis who are threatening the large Russian population in southern and eastern Ukraine.

Gerald Celente calls the Western media “presstitutes,” an ingenuous term that I often use. Presstitutes sell themselves to Washington for access and government sources and to keep their jobs. Ever since the corrupt Clinton regime permitted the concentration of the US media, there has been no journalistic independence in the United States except for some Internet sites.

Glenn Greenwald points out the independence that RT, a Russian media organization, permits Abby Martin who denounced Russia’s alleged invasion of Ukraine, compared to the fates of Phil Donahue (MSNBC) and Peter Arnett (NBC), both of whom were fired for expressing opposition to the Bush regime’s illegal attack on Iraq. The fact that Donahue had NBC’s highest rated program did not give him journalistic independence. Anyone who speaks the truth in the American print or TV media or on NPR is immediately fired.

Russia’s RT seems actually to believe and observe the values that Americans profess but do not honor.

I agree with Greenwald. You can read his article. Greenwald is entirely admirable. He has intelligence, integrity, and courage. He is one of the brave to whom my just published book, How America Was Lost, is dedicated. As for RT’s Abby Martin, I admire her and have been a guest on her program a number of times.

My criticism of Greenwald and Martin has nothing to do with their integrity or their character. I doubt the claims that Abby Martin grandstanded on “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” in order to boost her chances of moving into the more lucrative “mainstream media.” My point is quite different. Even Abby Martin and Greenwald, both of whom bring us much light, cannot fully escape Western propaganda.

For example, Martin’s denunciation of Russia for “invading” Ukraine is based on Western propaganda that Russia sent 16,000 troops to occupy Crimea. The fact of the matter is that those 16,000 Russian troops have been in Crimea since the 1990s. Under the Russian-Ukrainian agreement, Russia has the right to base 25,000 troops in Crimea. Apparently, neither Abby Martin nor Glenn Greenwald, two intelligent and aware people, knew this fact. Washington’s propaganda is so pervasive that two of our best reporters were victimized by it.

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Stephen Lendman

The Damn Fool in the White House

Geopolitical conditions today are incendiary. Obama's war on Syria rages. No end in sight looms. Washington manipulated peace talks to fail. Odds favor full scale US intervention. Doing so risks regional war. In late February, Israel bombed Hezbollah targets. It did so along Lebanon's border with Syria. Hezbollah vowed to respond "at the appropriate time." It justifiably denounced "blatant" Israeli "aggression." Washington and Israel partner in regional adventurism. Do Obama and Netanyahu want war on Lebanon? Are they planning regional conflict? Will Iran be targeted? Will US-orchestrated violence in Venezuela continue? Will other nations be targeted for regime change? The damn fool in the White House risks global war. Ukraine is a major flashpoint. Conditions today are the most dangerous since the 1962 missiles of October crisis.

Jack Kennedy was a real president. Early in his administration he changed from cold warrior to peacemaker. He wanted all nuclear weapons abolished. He favored "general and complete disarmament." He wanted all US forces out of Vietnam by December 1965. He wanted to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." After resolving the 1962 crisis, he said he "never had the slightest intention" of confronting Cuba or Soviet Russia aggressively. - The damn fool in the White House is no Jack Kennedy. Neocons infest his administration. Rogue elements make policy.

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Justin Raimondo

One common reaction to Edward Snowden’s exposure of the National Security Agency’s pervasive surveillance of Americans and people around the world has been: Well, at least they aren’t doing what US government agents did in the 1960s and 1970s – targeting dissident political activists, spying on and disrupting their constitutionally-protected activities, and seeking to discredit them with programs like Cointelpro.

Except they are, as it turns out.

The latest revelations and newly-released documents, detailed by Glenn Greenwald in a shocking piece for his new outlet, The Intercept, show that’s exactly what they’re doing. Whereas J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI used old-fashioned methods – primitive bugging devices, poison pen letters, and physical infiltration of "suspect" groups – today’s Thought Police use the Internet to, as Greenwald puts it, "control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the Internet itself."

In a presentation by the British spy agency GCHQ to the NSA, and the Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand intelligence agencies, the top-secret JTRIG unit instructed their allies in the methodology of targeting and destroying political dissidents, and countering their influence on the Internet. Their approach is oh-so-"scientific," citing social science theories about human motivation, giving the whole document the aura of an academic study – albeit one written by someone with a sensibility that veers from the playful to the downright sinister.

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Bill Van Auken

The former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden appeared Sunday night in his first extended television interview. Citing published statements by unnamed US intelligence and military operatives calling for his assassination, he warned that he faces “significant threats” to his life and that US “government officials want to kill me.”

The interview, broadcast by the German television network ARD, was largely blacked out by the US media. The New York Times carried not a word of what Snowden said, while the cable and broadcast news programs treated the interview with near total silence.

The American media’s reaction stood in stark contrast to that of both broadcast and print media in Germany, where the interview conducted with Snowden in Russia was treated as a major political event.

The interview itself was preceded by a segment dedicated to Snowden on Germany’s most popular news talk show, with commentary delivered before a sizable live television audience. Those who spoke out in Snowden’s defense received enthusiastic applause, while the defenders of Washington’s spying operations, including a right-wing German journalist and a former US ambassador to Germany, were treated coolly or with outright derision.

Polls conducted in Germany have shown six out of ten surveyed expressing admiration for Snowden, with only 14 percent regarding him as a criminal. The public is evenly divided over whether he should be granted asylum in Germany. Anger over NSA spying on German telephone and Internet communications—including Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal cell phone—is widespread.

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Paul Craig Roberts

In my last column I emphasized that it was important for American citizens to demand to know what the real agendas are behind the wars of choice by the Bush and Obama regimes. These are major long term wars each lasting two to three times as long as World War II.

Forbes reports that one million US soldiers have been injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. RT reports that the cost of keeping each US soldier in Afghanistan has risen from $1.3 million per soldier to$2.1 million per soldier.

Matthew J. Nasuti reports in the Kabul Press that it cost US taxpayers $50 million to kill one Taliban soldier. That means it cost $1 billion to kill 20 Taliban fighters.

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have estimated that the current out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars is at least $6 trillion.

In other words, it is the cost of these two wars that explain the explosion of the US public debt and the economic and political problems associated with this large debt. What has America gained in return for $6 trillion and one million injured soldiers, many very severely? — This is a war that can be won only at the cost of the total bankruptcy of the United States.

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