The Battle of Seattle was fought by the pro-war “left” in Northern Syria

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Max Parry

 
 

The ongoing series of protests, riots and unrest following the death of George Floyd culminated in the establishment of a self-declared “autonomous zone” by activists in Seattle, Washington, after police abandoned a local precinct in the city’s Capitol Hill district. Lasting just three weeks until law enforcement retook the six block territory from occupants on July 1st, the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) — initially called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) — was a short-lived experiment which unfortunately exhibited all the contradictions of the so-called “left” that have become characteristic in the United States today. Although it is undeniable that American police have a brutality and racism problem (having been trained by Israel), within weeks it was clear that what began as spontaneous protests were hijacked for an establishment agenda. Meanwhile, the ill-fated demise of the Seattle commune should be understood as symptomatic of a larger problem within the U.S. left as a whole.

One of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre, who died 226 years ago this month, famously said that “the secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.” 
The insurrectionary Paris Commune was established after the storming of the Bastille fortress on July 14, 1789.

Unfortunately, this protest movement could not be any less educational and the siege of the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct was certainly no Bastille Day. Many have speculated as to why Mayor Jenny Durkan and the SPD seemingly allowed the protesters to occupy the neighborhood, while they enjoyed direct support from local politicians such as Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant of the Trotskyite Socialist Alternative organization who fancies herself the first “socialist” to win an election in the city since Anna Louise Strong in 1916. However, the more meaningful question is what has this movement accomplished besides recoiling the U.S. working class further away from progressive politics?

The biggest misconception across the political spectrum, especially on the right, is that this leaderless and haphazard movement is somehow “Marxist.” Karl Marx, whose entire worldview was based on a material and scientific understanding of history, focused on the class system and would be spinning in his grave knowing what a mess identity politics has made in his name. In contrast, the ‘wokist’ cult at the center of these marches ignores both science and class with no political vision beyond destruction, vindictiveness, and the stifling of free speech. This is why the U.S. political establishment, which has been completely unable to implement the most elementary measures in providing healthcare and securing employment to Americans during the pandemic, is quite happy to jump on board a narrative that pits divisions of the working class against each other based on race while wealth surges up to the 1%.

The CHOP/CHAZ occupants reportedly established a reverse hierarchical social structure where whites self-flagellated by performing quasi-religious rituals of atonement for the sins of slavery. There was also a diversity quota of “centering” certain individuals based on their ethnic background, gender and sexual orientation to cede leadership roles at the co-op, with white participants coerced into overcoming their “fragility” (or sensitivity in discussing racism). Concurrent with the protests, corporate consultant and University of Washington professor Robin DiAngelo’s intellectually fraudulent book White Fragility shot to the top of The New York Times bestseller list and is a perfect example of how such identity politics fails in dealing with social issues. Collective punishment is never a suitable guiding principle in addressing social problems, nor is using a conception akin to the religious idea of original sin where “white privilege” is the root cause of racism. There were even mini-reparations demanded of repenting white protesters reminiscent of the collection plate passed around by worshippers in a church. This sort of bizarre and self-indulgent identity politics is much like what was widely mocked in a viral video of a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention collapsing into infighting last year.

What began as protests against police brutality were not only derailed into efforts to set-up communes in major cities but a nationwide debate on statues, after the wave of demonstrations and rioting across the country led to the Taliban-style destruction of historical monuments perceived as glorifying racism. As a result, the toxic political atmosphere which surrounded the events in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 was reignited. While the calls for the removal of Confederate statues erected during the Reconstruction era is long overdue, more debatable is the removal of those honoring slave-owning Founding Fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson which were toppled in Portland, Oregon. This was followed by a statue of Union General Ulysses S. Grant being knocked over in San Francisco and calls to remove the Lincoln Memorial in D.C., two men who victoriously led the North in the Civil War. Regrettably, the prioritization of such iconoclastic gestures has not only defanged the protests but diverted them from bringing real change to social inequities in the immediate future.

This is not the first time we have witnessed these phenomena. Last year, a more troublesome example were the calls to remove a historic mural at George Washington High School in San Francisco that were capitulated to by the city school board. The thirteen panel mural, Life of Washington, painted in 1936 by Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff was commissioned as part of the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) which employed visual artists to create public works during the Great Depression. One controversial panel depicts George Washington pointing to a group of armed colonizers standing over the corpse of a Native American, while another fresco portrays two colonizers surveying land as slaves toil in a field. It would seem obvious to anyone that the mural is not only explicitly anti-racist but representative of an important period in U.S. history where art was a force for social change and progressive politics was at the center of American life. Arnautoff was a Russian immigrant who was an assistant to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, while the WPA and its art program were dominated by communists such as the two men. Still, no matter the context or intent — the unflinching depiction of American history was deemed “offensive to certain communities” because students were “triggered” by the harsh realities illustrated.

This might seem unrelated, but the same illogic is behind the vigilantism of the statue removals. While the Arnautoff mural is clearly anti-racist and certain monuments may glorify slavery, the distinction is indecipherable to the social justice sect which needs its “safe space” from the uncomfortable truths of American history. The differentiation between a left-wing WPA mural opposing racism and colonial statue commending it is illegible to them. The entire purpose behind the Arnautoff mural is to make one uncomfortable because its subject matter is something no one should ever be at ease with. Yet its undeniable educational and artistic value did not prevent the San Francisco school board from voting to paint over it, while articles were published in The New York Times and even The Nation magazine applauding their decision. What on earth is happening to the left when it is censoring anti-racist art in the name of fighting racism?  

It is no coincidence that in the manifesto listing the demands of the sit-in in Seattle, nowhere to be found is the defunding of the Pentagon — the primary supplier through the 1033 Program of the militarized police violence being protested. The same cognitively dissonant left calling to “defund the police”, which will almost certainly be used as a pretext to privatize them, completely ignores endless U.S. wars abroad and opposed efforts by the Trump administration to scale back expansionism in Syria
The whole point of education at a high school is to teach students to analyze and interpret subjects like art and history, not just emotionally react to them. When the very fabric of culture and society like a historic mural or statue can be torn down simply because people are upset by them, the next plausible step is book burning. San Francisco High School completely failed to educate its students when they decided upon the most backwards way of interpreting the mural, just as the protesters tearing down these statues did not use their faculties to understand them in a historical context. Genocide and slavery are indeed the foundations of the U.S., but we should learn from our tragic history to grasp the equivalent injustices happening today. Simply eradicating murals and statues that remind us of it, whether they oppose or elevate them, is totally ineffectual.

While some activists have expressed concern that the protests have deviated from their original purpose, the right has fixated on the presence among the marches of “Antifa” which Trump wants to designate as a “terrorist organization”, a reckless idea given the completely decentralized nature of the group. The original Antifa movement in the 1930s had been part of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in its effort to form a popular front against fascism, but the dilettantes in the modern incarnation are closely associated with black bloc anarchism and other amateurish orientations. Two decades ago, Seattle had been the site of the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), often referred to as the ‘Battle of Seattle’, which saw 40,000 march against globalization. Some may recall this was where the black bloc first became notorious for injecting vandalism and senseless violence into peaceful demonstrations and were widely thought to have been infiltrated by law enforcement. In 2016, the current embodiment of Antifa first came to attention during protests on college campuses against speaking appearances by far right media personalities during the U.S. presidential election, including at the University of California at Berkeley which had ironically been the site of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.

Following Trump’s election, the stage was set in Charlottesville during the Unite the Right rally and counter-protests over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in August 2017 for ‘Antifa’ to be crowned as heroes shadowboxing the historical ghost of fascism. When the likes of The New York Times is suddenly promoting the black bloc, that’s your first clue something else is afoot. In order to prevent the emergence of a truly progressive movement in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, a false narrative was concocted by the political establishment about the significance of Trump’s victory, which we were told was the result of alleged Russian meddling and the racism of “deplorable” Trump voters. Instantly, any critique of the system which produced Trump disappeared and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party was able to neutralize the Bernie Sanders-led opposition in its ranks.

As a result, the vast majority of the left became convinced by the interpretation that Trump’s election was purely the outcome of a resurgence of “fascism”, thus making Trump the singular, most immediate danger — while U.S. imperialism and endless war continue unopposed, including the support for actual fascists in Ukraine. It should be understood that what Trump and the wave of pro-Zionist, Islamophobic right-wing populists in the EU represent is something qualitatively different. Still, anyone on the left who dares oppose U.S. imperialism today is risking being branded a ‘red-brown’ collaborator. The Democratic Party, which spearheaded the Orwellian idea of “humanitarian interventionism” used to justify the wholesale destruction of uncooperative nations by the American war machine in recent decades, has since tricked the majority of the left into unwittingly backing U.S. imperialism to unseat “dictators.” Even when the left today ostensibly opposes war, it is often forced to qualify its objections by repeating the same talking points about countries attacked by Washington used to justify it.

The U.S. foray in the Syrian war is a perfect example. Trump’s idea to designate Antifa as a terrorist group would be especially ironic considering that many American leftists who self-identify using the “Antifa” black and red standard have thrown their support behind the creation of another infamous “autonomous zone” in Northeast Syria established by mostly-Kurdish militias known as Rojava — with the help of none other than the U.S. military. There is even a self-proclaimed International Freedom Battalion of American and European volunteers fighting to defend the enclave that purports to be in the tradition of the International Brigades which defended the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. These “Antifa” conscripts fight alongside the YPG (People’s Protection Units), a Kurdish-majority militia which has been rebranded by the Pentagonas the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). These leftists are apparently in serious need of a history lesson, considering it was the Soviet Union alone which intervened to defend the Spanish Republic from fascism, not the United States. From Washington’s perspective, CHOP/CHAZ should be considered blowback from this policy.

The U.S. creation of the SDF has not been without controversy, as the YPG is widely regarded as the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey which Washington’s NATO ally regards as a terrorist organization. While the Kurds and their Western volunteers may believe they are creating an anarchist utopia, in reality they are infantryman for the Zionist plan to balkanize Syria and prevent Damascus from accessing it own resources. So it makes perfect sense that they would try to replicate what they learned in Afrin in an American city using Rojava as a model. When Trump tried to follow through on his anti-interventionist pledges as a candidate and pull U.S. troops out of Syria, it sparked outrage from the pro-war “left” which glorifies Rojava as a ‘libertarian socialist’ and ‘direct democracy’ experiment, even though non-Kurds such as Arabs and Assyrian Christians face ethnic cleansing at hands of Kurdish nationalists in their efforts to create an ethno-state.

The ideological inspiration for the Rojava federation is the Jewish-American Zionist anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin who was especially influential to PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan. Unbeknownst to many, Bookchin was also a noted Zionist — but this is not as unlikely a paradox as it may seem. After all, Israel itself was initially established with the settlement of communes and the Zionist form of “autonomous zones” known as kibbutz (“gathering” in Hebrew). Even prior to WWII, European Zionists and early kibbutniks came to Mandatory Palestine as illegal immigrants and began living in their communes while fusing Jewish nationalism and their own conception of socialism, an amalgamation not unlike what the Kurds are practicing in Syria today. One other highly influential thinker in the anarchist community who purports to be a ‘libertarian socialist’, Noam Chomsky, was himself part of the Zionist kibbutz movement in his youth. This explains why Chomsky would call for a continuation of the U.S. occupation of northern Syria on the basis of “protecting the Kurds“, who are trying to repeat the formula used to found Israel to create a Syrian Kurdistan as another U.S. protectorate in the Middle East.

It is no coincidence that in the manifesto listing the demands of the sit-in in Seattle, nowhere to be found is the defunding of the Pentagon — the primary supplier through the 1033 Program of the militarized police violence being protested. The same cognitively dissonant left calling to “defund the police”, which will almost certainly be used as a pretext to privatize them, completely ignores endless U.S. wars abroad and opposed efforts by the Trump administration to scale back expansionism in Syria. The focus on the tearing down of statues from America’s colonial ‘past’ has also coincided with Israel’s preparations in colonizing what remains of Palestinian territory with the annexation of the West Bank — where are the mass protests to stop that? If Black Lives Matter dared focus on AIPAC, it would be shut down very quickly. In 2016, when BLM endorsed the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign to boycott Israel, their previously enjoyed benefits suddenly were in jeopardy and was revealed to be the direct result of sabotage by the Zionist lobby.

In the last several decades, there has been a retreat of class conscious forces in U.S. political life, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. The degenerate form of the left that exists today is an unfortunate result of the academization of social issues and the influence of the Frankfurt School critical theorists whose bourgeoisification of Marxism reduced it to a lens by which to critique culture and the arts while removing its class politics. The politically correct obsession with the policing of language by the postmodern cult of identity politics is excluding the working class from the conversation and counteracting its revolutionary potential. The CIA fronts in the Open Society, Ford, and Kellogg Foundations of the non-profit industrial complex have successfully corralled the protests while no substantial change has been made to the real ills in U.S. society where the 1% has made trillions during the pandemic and subsequent economic depression. While the masses are busy tipping over statues and monuments in a crusade to purify history, the ruling class is laughing all the way to the bank.

Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached at maxrparry@live.com


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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
 


Seriously, Get The Hell Out Of Afghanistan

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Caitlin Johnstone

Seriously, Get The Hell Out Of Afghanistan

With overwhelming bipartisan support, the House Armed Services Committee has added a Liz Cheney-spearheaded amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which throws severe roadblocks in the Trump administration’s proposed scale-down of US military presence in Afghanistan and Germany.

As The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald notes, both parties advancing the amendment cited in their arguments the completely unsubstantiated intelligence leak that was recently published by credulous mass media reporters alleging that Russia has paid bounties to Taliban fighters for killing the occupying forces in Afghanistan. Yet another western imperialist agenda once again facilitated by unforgivably egregious journalistic malpractice in the mass media.

Every aspect of this development is enraging.

The mass media have continued to add to their mountain of Gish gallop fallacies promoting this narrative with a new Daily Beast report citing former senior Taliban figure Mullah Manan Niazi who asserts that “The Taliban have been paid by Russian intelligence for attacks on U.S. forces—and on ISIS forces—in Afghanistan from 2014 up to the present.” The Beast’s own article admits that its source has severe conflicts of interest and is believed to be a CIA asset by Taliban leadership, and that Niazi provided no evidence of any kind for his claim or any further details whatsoever.

These flimsy, poorly-sourced allegations are being hammered into mainstream liberal consciousness on a daily basis now in the exact same way the discredited Russiagate psyop was, and just like with Russiagate the narrative they are being used to shape helps advance military expansionism and new cold war escalations which just so happen to fit perfectly into pre-existing geostrategic agendas of planetary domination.

The way mainstream news outlets consistently refuse to account for a fact so obvious and indisputable as intelligence agencies being known liars should by itself be enough to discredit the entire institution of mass news reporting. Yet here we are with these reports being treated as established fact throughout the entire political/media class and down through the entire population of propagandized rank-and-file citizenry.


The Afghanistan Papers established conclusively that the occupation has been unwinnable and without a clear picture of what winning would even look like from the very beginning, and that this fact has been hidden from the world by systematic deceit for two decades. The revelation was in the news for a day and then quickly memory holed without having any meaningful impact on the dominant narrative about Afghanistan, and now the mainstream consensus is that even trying to reduce the number of troops there is a hazardous and outlandish notion.

This is because the mainstream consensus is shaped not by facts, but by narrative. We see this in the way the fact-filled Afghanistan Papers have played no role in shaping the dominant narrative about what should be done about the nineteen-year occupation, and we see it in the way the fact-free “bounty” narrative is shaping public opinion and determining US foreign policy. The propagandists who manufacture consent for imperialist agendas understand that truth and facts play far less of a role in what the propagandized consider important than does mindless repetition and emotion.

The Empire Files has an absolutely phenomenal mini-documentary on the Afghanistan occupation which came out the other day, and everyone should watch it. Abby Martin quickly breaks down the geostrategic, resource control, and military-industrial complex agendas which are advanced by this interminable war, the deceit and depravity which went into initiating and maintaining it, and the devastating toll it has taken on the Afghan people. I strongly encourage my readers to give it a view when you get the chance.


The continued Afghanistan occupation is like if the police stormed a house, shot a bunch of people, realized they got the wrong house and they’d never find the guy they were looking for by staying there, stayed anyway, moved in, and then years later said they can’t move out because they heard a rumor that the neighbors are trying to make them leave.

In a sane world it would be the violent invasion and occupation of sovereign nations which elicits outrage and opposition from elected officials and intense skepticism and critical reporting from prominent journalists. In today’s propaganda-maddened society we get the exact opposite: the invasions and occupations are treated as the normal default position and any attempt to end them is regarded as outlandish.

This cannot continue. We must find a way to awaken from the brainwashing and force it to end. Anyone who works to prevent this from happening is an enemy of human progress. 

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician. 
 
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 NOTE : ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.






This Russia-Afghanistan Story Is Western Propaganda At Its Most Vile

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Caitlin Johnstone

"There is no reason to believe Taliban fighters would require any bounty to attack an illegitimate occupying force...."

NYTimes building: a tower of malignant mendacity.

All western mass media outlets are now shrieking about the story The New York Times first reported, citing zero evidence and naming zero sources, claiming intelligence says Russia paid out bounties to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for attacking the occupying forces of the US and its allies in Afghanistan. As of this writing, and probably forevermore, there have still been zero intelligence sources named and zero evidence provided for this claim.

As we discussed yesterday, the only correct response to unsubstantiated claims by anonymous spooks in a post-Iraq invasion world is to assume that they are lying until you’ve been provided with a mountain of hard, independently verifiable evidence to the contrary. The fact that The New York Times instead chose to uncritically parrot these evidence-free claims made by operatives within intelligence agencies with a known track record of lying about exactly these things is nothing short of journalistic malpractice. The fact that western media outlets are now unanimously regurgitating these still 100 percent baseless assertions is nothing short of state propaganda.

The consensus-manufacturing, Overton window-shrinking western propaganda apparatus has been in full swing with mass media outlets claiming on literally no basis whatsoever that they have confirmed one another’s “great reporting” on this completely unsubstantiated story.


"All parties involved in spreading this malignant psyop are absolutely vile, but a special disdain should be reserved for the media class who have been entrusted by the public with the essential task of creating an informed populace and holding power to account..."

 “The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have confirmed our reporting,” the NYT story’s co-author Charlie Savage tweeted hours ago.

“We have confirmed the New York Times’ scoop: A Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan,” tweeted The Washington Post‘s John Hudson.

“We matched The New York Times’ great reporting on how US intel has assessed that Russians paid Taliban to target US, coalition forces in Afg which is a pretty stunning development,” tweeted Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Lubold.

All three of these men are lying.

John Hudson’s claim that the Washington Post article he co-authored “confirmed the New York Times’ scoop” twice uses the words “if confirmed” with regard to his central claim, saying “Russian involvement in operations targeting Americans, if confirmed,” and “The attempt to stoke violence against Americans, if confirmed“. This is of course an acknowledgement that these things have not, in fact, been confirmed.

The Wall Street Journal article co-authored by Gordon Lubold cites only anonymous “people”, who we have no reason to believe are different people than NYT’s sources, repeating the same unsubstantiated assertions about an intelligence report. The article cites no evidence that Lubold’s “stunning development” actually occurred beyond “people familiar with the report said” and “a person familiar with it said“.

The fact that both Hudson and Lubold were lying about having confirmed the New York Times‘ reporting means that Savage was also lying when he said they did. When they say the report has been “confirmed”, what they really mean is that it has been agreed upon. All the three of them actually did was use their profoundly influential outlets to uncritically parrot something nameless spooks want the public to believe, which is the same as just publishing a CIA press release free of charge. It is unprincipled stenography for opaque and unaccountable intelligence agencies, and it is disgusting.

None of this should be happening. The New York Times has admitted itself that it was wrong for uncritically parroting the unsubstantiated spook claims which led to the Iraq invasion, as has The Washington Post. There is no reason to believe Taliban fighters would require any bounty to attack an illegitimate occupying force. The Russian government has denied these allegations. The Taliban has denied these allegations. The Trump administration has denied that the president or the vice president had any knowledge of the spook report in question, denouncing the central allegation that liberals who are promoting this story have been fixated on.

Yet this story is being magically transmuted into an established fact, despite its being based on literally zero factual evidence.

Outlets like CNN are running the story with the headline “Russia offered bounties to Afghan militants to kill US troops“, deceitfully presenting this as a verified fact. Such dishonest headlines are joined by UK outlets like The Guardian who informs headline-skimmers that “Russia offered bounty to kill UK soldiers“, and the Murdoch-owned Sky News which went with “Russia paid Taliban fighters to attack British troops in Afghanistan” after “confirming” the story with anonymous British spooks.

Western propagandists are turning this completely empty story into the mainstream consensus, not with facts, not with evidence, and certainly not with journalism, but with sheer brute force of narrative control. And now you’ve got Joe Biden once again attacking Trump for being insufficiently warlike, this time because “he failed to sanction or impose any kind of consequences on Russia for this egregious violation of international law”.

You’ve also got former George W Bush lackey Richard Haas promoting “a proportionate response” to these baseless allegations.

“Russia is carrying out covert wars vs US troops in Afghanistan and our democracy here at home,” Haas tweeted with a link to the New York Times story. “A proportionate response would increase the costs to Russia of its military presence in Ukraine and Syria and, using sanctions and cyber, to challenge Putin at home.”

Haas is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a wildly influential think tank with its fingers in most major US news outlets.

And indeed, the unified campaign to shove this story down people’s throats in stark defiance of everything one learns in journalism school does appear to be geared toward advancing pre-existing foreign policy agendas which have nothing to do with any concern for the safety of US troops. Analysts have pointed out that this new development arises just in time to sabotage the last of the nuclear treaties between the US and Russia, the scaling down of US military presence in Afghanistan, and, as Haas already openly admitted, any possibility of peace in Syria.

“This story is published just in time to sabotage US-Russia arms control talks,” Antiwar‘s Dave DeCamp noted on Twitter. “As the US is preparing for a new arms race — and possibly even live nuclear tests — the New York Times provides a great excuse to let the New START lapse, making the world a much more dangerous place. Russiagate has provided the cover for Trump to pull out of arms control agreements. First the INF, then the Open Skies, and now possibly the New START. Any talks or negotiations with Russia are discouraged in this atmosphere, and this Times story will make things even worse.”

“US ‘intelligence’ agencies (ie, organized crime networks run by the state) want to sabotage the (admittedly very inadequate) peace talks in Afghanistan,” tweetedjournalist Ben Norton. “So they get best of both worlds: blame the Russian bogeyman, fueling the new cold war, while prolonging the military occupation. It’s not a coincidence these dubious Western intelligence agency claims about Russia came just days after a breakthrough in peace talks. Afghanistan’s geostrategic location (and trillions worth of minerals) is too important to them.”

All parties involved in spreading this malignant psyop are absolutely vile, but a special disdain should be reserved for the media class who have been entrusted by the public with the essential task of creating an informed populace and holding power to account. How much of an unprincipled whore do you have to be to call yourself a journalist and uncritically parrot the completely unsubstantiated assertions of spooks while protecting their anonymity? How much work did these empire fluffers put into killing off every last shred of their dignity? It boggles the mind.

It really is funny how the most influential news outlets in the western world will uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of self-awareness that Russia and China are bad because they have state media.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh.

Part 2

Seriously, Get The Hell Out Of Afghanistan

With overwhelming bipartisan support, the House Armed Services Committee has added a Liz Cheney-spearheaded amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which throws severe roadblocks in the Trump administration’s proposed scale-down of US military presence in Afghanistan and Germany.

As The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald notes, both parties advancing the amendment cited in their arguments the completely unsubstantiated intelligence leak that was recently published by credulous mass media reporters alleging that Russia has paid bounties to Taliban fighters for killing the occupying forces in Afghanistan. Yet another western imperialist agenda once again facilitated by unforgivably egregious journalistic malpractice in the mass media.

Every aspect of this development is enraging.

The mass media have continued to add to their mountain of Gish gallop fallaciespromoting this narrative with a new Daily Beast report citing former senior Taliban figure Mullah Manan Niazi who asserts that “The Taliban have been paid by Russian intelligence for attacks on U.S. forces—and on ISIS forces—in Afghanistan from 2014 up to the present.” The Beast’s own article admits that its source has severe conflicts of interest and is believed to be a CIA asset by Taliban leadership, and that Niazi provided no evidence of any kind for his claim or any further details whatsoever.

These flimsy, poorly-sourced allegations are being hammered into mainstream liberal consciousness on a daily basis now in the exact same way the discredited Russiagate psyop was, and just like with Russiagate the narrative they are being used to shape helps advance military expansionism and new cold war escalations which just so happen to fit perfectly into pre-existing geostrategic agendas of planetary domination.

The way mainstream news outlets consistently refuse to account for a fact so obvious and indisputable as intelligence agencies being known liars should by itself be enough to discredit the entire institution of mass news reporting. Yet here we are with these reports being treated as established fact throughout the entire political/media class and down through the entire population of propagandized rank-and-file citizenry.


The Afghanistan Papers established conclusively that the occupation has been unwinnable and without a clear picture of what winning would even look like from the very beginning, and that this fact has been hidden from the world by systematic deceit for two decades. The revelation was in the news for a day and then quickly memory holed without having any meaningful impact on the dominant narrative about Afghanistan, and now the mainstream consensus is that even trying to reduce the number of troops there is a hazardous and outlandish notion.

This is because the mainstream consensus is shaped not by facts, but by narrative. We see this in the way the fact-filled Afghanistan Papers have played no role in shaping the dominant narrative about what should be done about the nineteen-year occupation, and we see it in the way the fact-free “bounty” narrative is shaping public opinion and determining US foreign policy. The propagandists who manufacture consent for imperialist agendas understand that truth and facts play far less of a role in what the propagandized consider important than does mindless repetition and emotion.

The Empire Files has an absolutely phenomenal mini-documentary on the Afghanistan occupation which came out the other day, and everyone should watch it. Abby Martin quickly breaks down the geostrategic, resource control, and military-industrial complex agendas which are advanced by this interminable war, the deceit and depravity which went into initiating and maintaining it, and the devastating toll it has taken on the Afghan people. I strongly encourage my readers to give it a view when you get the chance.


The continued Afghanistan occupation is like if the police stormed a house, shot a bunch of people, realized they got the wrong house and they’d never find the guy they were looking for by staying there, stayed anyway, moved in, and then years later said they can’t move out because they heard a rumor that the neighbors are trying to make them leave.

In a sane world it would be the violent invasion and occupation of sovereign nations which elicits outrage and opposition from elected officials and intense skepticism and critical reporting from prominent journalists. In today’s propaganda-maddened society we get the exact opposite: the invasions and occupations are treated as the normal default position and any attempt to end them is regarded as outlandish.

This cannot continue. We must find a way to awaken from the brainwashing and force it to end. Anyone who works to prevent this from happening is an enemy of human progress. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician. 

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 NOTE : ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.





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Mapping The State’s Strategy Of Repression Against The Rebellion

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ITSGOINGDOWN.ORG

Dateline: Jun 18, 2020

It's Going Down

While the recent rebellion against the police and white supremacy has been historical, it has also been coupled by an attempt by the State to drown the uprising in a sea of tear-gas and rubber bullets. While demonstrations and actions continue, the State is now gearing up for a more long-term strategy of repression, as a vast network of FBI agents, attorneys, and local police comb through hours of footage and social media, looking for targets.

Already, over 10,000 people have been arrested across the so-called US and around 75 currently have federal charges; many of which carry extensive prison sentences. Moreover, there are reports of FBI door-knocks and visits to those that have recently been arrested. Often times people are being asked if they are involved in “antifa” while some are even propositioned with becoming informants.

As the Pentagon readies for the rebellions to come, its important for us to begin to map out and prepare a strategy of long-term movement defense of all rebels swept up during the uprising. Reaching out to our legal correspondent, we sat down to discuss just what is happening and what we can expect.

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IGD: Broadly speaking, what has happened, repression wise, since the rebellion? We know that there has been a slew of federal charges and lots of door knocks by the FBI, can you talk about both? 

So much has happened. Across the country, police have unleashed incredible violence against protesters, rebels, journalists, and bystanders. Countless people have been arrested and are facing all sorts of state charges in local courts. I read that the number was over 10,000 arrests nationally.

Additionally, at least 74 people across the country are facing federal charges for their alleged roles in the uprisings. This is particularly concerning because federal charges tend to carry much more severe penalties than comparable state charges, and are less likely to get lenient plea bargains. So that’s 74 uprising participants who are facing very serious prison time, just in a couple weeks. Countless more people have been visited or contacted by federal agents, usually FBI or ATF but also Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, ICE, or DEA.

There’s a long history of this repression, especially against Black liberation movements and to a lesser extent anarchist movements. The FBI has always been a political police force. Their headquarters is named for J. Edgar Hoover who founded the FBI to fight communists and anarchists, and then orchestrated COINTELPRO to destroy the Black freedom movement for close to three decades. Crushing this uprising, this movement, is in their very DNA.

But the more we understand their repression, the better we can fight back against it. So I started compiling information about all the uprising-related federal prosecutions and sharing it with other people involved in legal support and anti-repression efforts around the country.

IGD: How are these investigations unfolding? What tactics and strategies are being used to identify people?

Most of the cases I first reviewed seemed like pretty low-hanging fruit, prosecutions of opportunity. But this week I’ve seen cases where the feds together with local law enforcement put in quite a bit of effort to investigate and identify people. One example was a case out of Philly where a woman is accused of burning two cop cars. The lengths they went to in order to connect this unidentified person at the protest to an identifiable person through online shopping records, social media accounts, promo videos from work, government and commercial databases, etc. surprised even me.

I think this is where we see a significant connection to the J20 inauguration prosecutions in 2017-2018. The government is willing to invest a lot of resources into scouring the internet for photos and videos from protests, analyzing them in excruciating detail to find any unique identifying features that they can, and then scouring social media and other sources for a match. This is the full weight of the surveillance state bearing down.

Other ways they’ve been able to allegedly identify people recently include:

  • cell phone location data to corroborate someone’s location at a given time
  • many people who were caught at or near the scene. 

We should also consider the possibility that the FBI is using illegal electronic surveillance of some sort to track and identify people, and then reverse engineering the identification so they don’t have to disclose the surveillance. We know this is a tactic that is sometimes used.

Another thing we’ve seen is rarely used federal laws from the 1960’s being used more widely. These are laws that were created specifically to criminalize and punish Black and indigenous resistance movements in particular, and other resistance movements generally.

One is the Anti-Riot Act, which was passed as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 during the riots that followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Notably, part of the reasoning behind the federal Anti-Riot Act was the belief that “outside agitators” like H. Rap Brown (now Jalil Al-Amin) of SNCC were traveling state to state to incite riots. The law was sometimes even referred to as the “Rap Brown law.” So this is all a very old playbook in some respects. The law hadn’t been used much since the early 1970s, but then was recently tested against the neo-Nazi Rise Above Movement and is now being used in the George Floyd uprisings.

The other law is the Civil Disorder law, another product of 1968.  It’s a law that also hasn’t been used a whole lot historically. The two exceptions were against the American Indian Movement in the 1970s after the occupation of Wounded Knee, and then in 2016-2017 against indigenous Water Protectors at Standing Rock. Of the many hundreds of criminal cases that came out of Standing Rock, the only federal prosecutions were against indigenous people. Now, like the Anti-Riot Act, it is also being used against uprising participants.

IGD: Why are these charges coming from a federal level?

The biggest reason is that Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr have taken a particular interest in the uprisings and promised a federal crack down. I assume each FBI field office in the country and each U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO) got specific instructions to begin or intensify investigations around the uprisings and select appropriate cases for prosecution. The government has always reacted extremely harshly to Black resistance movements, both in the streets and in the courts.

Federal prosecution tends to carry much more significant penalties, and the feds have more resources to invest in the cases they select than do overburdened local prosecutors. So in terms of punishing people for rising up and fighting back against the racist police state, federal prosecutions are very effective for that.

Usually the feds pick cases for prosecution based on a variety of factors. Sometimes there is a particular federal interest. For example, one person is charged with destroying federal property for allegedly spray painting on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., and in Oakland, two followers of the right-wing Boogaloo movement shot two Federal Protective Service officers (killing one) outside the federal courthouse, in close proximity to the protests.

Sometimes a case is exceptionally complex and only the feds have the resources to effectively investigate and prosecute it, such as big white collar crimes or complex organized crime cases.

Other factors tend to be a bit more political and arbitrary, such as wanting someone to face a particularly serious punishment based on their background or actions. A lot of the arson and Molotov cocktail cases fall in this category to some degree. The feds have always taken a keen interest in Molotov cocktail cases, whether or not the Molotovs are used.

Finally, there are those cases where they just want to send a message to the public–the legal equivalent of a shock and awe campaign. Anytime someone is prosecuted for political activities, this factor is somewhat, if not entirely, at play. Here we are seeing a lot of unexceptional crimes by unexceptional people that the feds have decided to make a public example of in retaliation for the rebellions. One person is charged with Civil Disorder and facing a sentence up to 5 years in prison for allegedly trying to push through police lines with his body and then going limp in an act of passive resistance when the police arrested him. This is piddly shit but the feds have decided this person needs to go to federal prison for a couple years. The only real purpose is collective intimidation.

Other examples are the feds charging Civil Disorder for allegedly throwing a brick through a police car window. In most places that would be a misdemeanor, but not in federal court. Another person supposedly threw a water bottle at police, then ran when police tried to apprehend him. When police tackled him, they supposedly found a concealed handgun and about 1g of marijuana. Now the feds are charging him with Possession of a Firearm by a Prohibited Person under 18 U.S.C. 922(g) which prohibits people who unlawfully use or are addicted to a controlled substance from possessing a firearm and carries a penalty up to 10 years in prison. Further reading about this statute here.

Even when the alleged conduct is more serious, the feds have been pursuing extraordinary punishments that do not seem at all commensurate with the conduct alleged. Two people in New York are facing potential sentences of 45 years to life for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at an empty police car. Regardless of what you think about particular tactics, even the potential of a life sentence for one crispy cop car is ridiculous and draconian. But that’s exactly their point. 

Some people are surprised to learn that the feds are even allowed to prosecute these seemingly ordinary crimes. But the scope of federal prosecution expanded dramatically over the 20th century and can encompass almost anything now. If it involves interstate travel; facilities of interstate commerce (the internet, phones, interstate highways); items that pass in interstate commerce (literally everything these days); an entity that affects interstate commerce (again, almost anything); or targets an entity that receives any amount of federal funding (most police departments, local governments, universities, and many non-profits) some federal prosecutor can probably find a federal law that fits.

IGD: Attorney General Bill Barr, along with Trump, has made it a personal mission to push the ‘ANTIFA’ narrative, which is currently losing steam due to the FBI’s own reports, lack of evidence, and also the far-Right killing people left and right. What is your impression of the State’s rush to demonize anarchists and antifascists? 

This is the old trope that authorities always use to displace blame for popular rebellions. The specifics vary but the general narrative does not. It’s the classic “outside agitator” story, which was very popular during the Black freedom movement in the 1960s as well.  

Anarchists and antifascists make easy and politically convenient targets. Most people don’t know much about anarchism and the biggest connotation for it is scary: violence, chaos, disorder. Also, anarchists and antifascists have been a thorn in the side of the far-right, if not the Trump regime itself, for quite a while. Blaming “antifa” has been a central talking point for Trump’s base for at least three years now. So he gets approval from them and doesn’t risk anything.

IGD: In released documents, the FBI stated that they found no evidence of ‘ANTIFA’ involvement in the rioting on May 31, one of the most intense nights of the riots and subsequent reports have ruled the same thing. At the same time, we hear of more and more door knocks by the FBI. We also hear of people being asked about their thoughts on ‘fascism’ and if they identify as ‘antifa.’ What do we make if this seemingly contradictory evidence? 

In the minds of the Justice Department flunkies, just because they haven’t found any evidence doesn’t mean the evidence doesn’t exist; they just have to go find it! So they are shaking trees and seeing what falls out. If they can’t find the evidence of antifascist involvement, it’s likely they will manufacture some evidence. We should expect and prepare for more and escalating federal harassment and surveillance for a while. We should also expect and prepare for grand jury subpoenas.

IGD: Door knocks are becoming more and more of a fact of life. How should we view these encounters from the vantage point of the FBI? What are they hoping to get out of them; what messages are they looking to send, if at all?

Door knocks serve several purposes. First, despite all our efforts, sometimes people talk, and the FBI is very accustomed to having people talk to them. A not insignificant number of the uprising cases currently being prosecuted by the feds involve people who allegedly gave incriminating statements to the FBI after being told they have the right to remain silent and to an attorney.

The FBI has a few goals when talking to people. Sometimes they want specific information about a specific crime. It might even be information they already know and just want to hear you say it so they can hang you with it later. Other times they are just gathering general intelligence about movements, stuff they can use as background or leads for other investigations, vulnerabilities they can exploit, key points they can target. Creating social maps of people’s relationships and dynamics is extremely useful in campaigns of repression. The more they know the more effective they are.

Second, even when people don’t talk, they are still gathering intelligence. Who seemed confident and who seemed scared? Who lawyers up and who doesn’t? Who publicizes the visit and who doesn’t? What did they see in your house from the front window or in the second you opened the door before you realized it was the FBI? (Pro tip: FBI agents don’t usually look like Mulder and Skully from the X-Files; it’s a lot more un-tucked golf shirts and khakis, jeans, or cargo pants.)

Finally, they are intimidating people and disrupting lives. FBI knocks are scary and stressful and disruptive; even more so if they visit you at work or go to a family member’s house. Some people will take fewer risks if they believe the feds are watching. Some might step away from their movements or political communities altogether, either temporarily or permanently. Sometimes people get paranoid, not just about the FBI but about who around them might be careless or malicious and talk. All this can have a serious chilling effect on movement activity. They want us to police ourselves.

IGD: With doors knocks, what should people do if this happens to them? And what do you hear about people doing wrong that they shouldn’t? 

Most importantly do NOT let them in and do NOT answer questions or talk to them!

There’s a lot of resources out there, some of which get into a lot of detail, so I’ll just cover the basics here.

First, you are not required to answer the door (but if they are serving a warrant and you don’t answer they will kick your door in).

If you do answer, it is best to step outside and close your door behind you.

However you come face to face with an agent or officer of any sort (at home or work, in your car, in a jail interview room), it is very important that you say “I am not going to answer questions. I want to speak to a lawyer.” This invokes your legal rights. You don’t need to have a lawyer already to ask to speak to one.

They might threaten you, intimidate you, lie to you, pretend to be your friend or want to help, tell you your friends already snitched, show you incriminating evidence, show you exculpatory evidence, literally anything under the sun that they think might get you to talk. They might even physically abuse you. But it’s very important that the only words that ever leave your lips are “I am not going to answer questions. I want to speak to a lawyer.” You can’t talk your way out of trouble but you can talk your way into a lot trouble.

If they ask to search or “take a look” in your house, car, trunk, backpack, shed, purse, pocket, wallet, or anything else, say “No, I do not consent to a search.”  Repeat as necessary.

If they have a warrant, you can ask to see it and inspect it (like in those ACLU Know Your Rights trainings), but in all likelihood, they probably already have you in handcuffs with a couple guns pointed at you and are yelling commands. So mostly try to just stay cool and get your wits about you and say “I am not going to answer questions. I want to speak to a lawyer.”

If they serve you a subpoena, take it. Listen to whatever they have to say (or don’t! you’re not required to talk OR listen!). Wait for them to leave and then go back inside and lawyer up.

A nearby chapter of the National Lawyers Guild or a local anti-repression group might be able to help you find a lawyer. If that doesn’t exist where you are, you can review local attorney websites to see who seems more social justice oriented, or just start calling around and asking.

I recommend never physically resisting or interfering in any way, because it will likely just make your situation worse. Just say over and over, “I am not going to answer questions. I want to speak to a lawyer. I do not consent to a search.”

Also, don’t keep the visit a secret. I recommend being at least semi-public about it. If people find out you got visited and didn’t tell anyone, they will be suspicious of you. People also need to know so they can prepare and protect themselves. Perhaps there’s information you all can gain from connecting the dots about the FBI’s investigation. Their investigations thrive in secrecy, darkness, and isolation. Our weapons are solidarity, transparency, and support, but we can’t do that if people keep these things to themselves.

IGD: Will far-Right actors such as the “Boogaloo Boys” killing police officers push attention more towards the far-Right, or this simply doesn’t matter?

We’ve already seen two high profile prosecutions for right-wing Boogaloo types coming out of the uprising. This is on the heels of the prosecutions against neo-Nazi groups Attomwaffen Division and The Base earlier this year. We’ve also seen unprecedented numbers of prosecutions of police officers recently. This will likely continue for a while, but the legitimacy the government gains, especially among liberals, from these prosecutions will inevitably be weaponized against our movements even harder.

For example, a year ago we talked about the federal prosecution of the neo-Nazi Rise Above Movement (RAM) under the Anti-Riot Act for their actions in Charlottesville. But now we are seeing the same Anti-Riot Act being used against at least six uprising participants. 

IGD: Assuming Trump is not elected in 2020 and Barr is removed as the Attorney General, what does that mean for any potential cases? 

Honestly, probably not much. Some people might get better plea deals. But a lot of federal cases could likely resolve before then (federal criminal cases tend to move a little faster). Even the ones that don’t resolve I would not expect to be dramatically affected by a new AG.

IGD: Does the popularity of the BLM movement and growing anger at police have any bearing over what the State thinks it can get away with? 

This moment feels rather unprecedented in a lot of ways, at least in my lifetime. I’ve heard a lot of comparisons to the 1960s. I can’t think of another social movement or uprising since then that has had this much widespread resonance, especially so quickly. We do know that, historically, public support for the people facing charges can help improve their outcomes.

Unfortunately, federal prosecutions remain more insulated from this popular sentiment. Unlike most local prosecutors who are elected, U.S. Attorneys are appointed so they are insulated from the political winds insofar as the president and Attorney General are backing them (and I don’t expect either of them to soften). Also, federal districts are much larger than individual counties and so draw a larger jury pool that includes more conservative suburban and rural areas.

IGD: Do you foresee the government pulling something like at the J20 inauguration protests and attempting to create some elaborate web of charges? 

The crux of the J20 prosecution was collective culpability based on mere presence at this one march. It didn’t matter if you were a journalist, medic, legal observer, bystander; if they thought you were involved in that march in any way, you were seen as guilty for the property destruction that happened.

But J20 was a disaster for the government. It was extremely costly for us too in a variety of ways. But legally and politically, we won that fight. So I don’t expect them to want a rematch just yet, especially when the political momentum is already against them.

Additionally, I think they can exact an equal or greater toll with a lot of selective, targeted prosecutions that are successful. Already our movement is faced with dozens of new political prisoners just in the federal system, some of whom could be doing significant time. So we are already looking at a huge and long term support effort for a lot of people all over the country. It’s honestly a little overwhelming.

IGD: What should we be doing in terms of getting ready for repression? What should our strategy be?

Here are some suggestions for building collective resiliency and resisting repression. If everyone takes a couple small steps in the right direction with this stuff, it can have a big impact.

Please, please, PLEASE stop posting photos and videos of protests publicly on the internet and social media. At the very least make it private. Those videos, pictures, and posts are sending people to prison, and it might be you or someone you care about next. Even the photos “away from action” are being used to identify people. It’s not too late to take stuff down or at minimum make your account private.

Next, don’t panic. Repression is scary, but it’s not new and we can fight back. It’s important to make a sober, honest assessment of your risks and vulnerabilities. This can be hard because once you start looking you can see risk and vulnerability everywhere. So it’s important to take a step back and keep perspective on things. Radical change is inherently unsafe, but there’s always reasonable things we can do to mitigate risks.

Related, I think education is incredibly important, for ourselves, the people around us, and our movements as a whole. Learning about the history of repression and how our movements have fought back can teach us valuable lessons and perspective. Educating ourselves and each other about what to do in certain scenarios is vital. It’s one way to emotionally prepare for repression.

It sounds silly but actually role playing a FBI visit or interrogation with your friends, family, or roommates can be really helpful. It’s one thing to read a meme about not talking to police, but it’s another to actually do it. Practice makes perfect.

It’s also helpful to study the cases of people who got caught. What did they do? How did they get caught? What tactics did the cops and FBI use? There’s a lot of lessons you can learn from it. It also helps demystify the FBI and federal prosecutions.

I’m really interested and curious about how to spread this education more widely. We’ve seen recently that all sorts of participants in the uprisings have quickly learned tactics for how to deal with chemical weapons. How do we disseminate anti-repression education just as widely?

In all our work, anti-repression or otherwise, we must prioritize care. State repression is a form of abuse and can cause similar emotional and physical reactions in people. We can’t resist the state and build a new world if we can’t take care of each other along the way, emotionally, materially, politically. Always ask people what they need and want. Get creative. Mobilize sympathetic people who are looking for ways to plug in.

Probably the biggest task is building strong networks of solidarity, even with liberals when possible. This is a long-term project and there are no shortcuts. Be trustworthy, up front, and consistent. Be humble and patient. Don’t compromise your principles but don’t draw yourself into a corner with hard lines. Avoid spreading rumors and conspiracy theories. The more you can build these relationships before the repression hits the better. But it’s never too late to start working on it either.

Usually the most obvious thing is to organize legal resources like raising money for bail and legal fees and mobilizing sympathetic lawyers. But the behind the scenes support infrastructure is just as important: the jail support, the prisoner support, the court support, the public support campaign. The best support doesn’t usually come from legal professionals or activist experts but rather your friends, family, comrades.

Write to political prisoners. If you haven’t before, read up on some guidelines about how to do it in a way that is safe for you and them. They are in there for us, we are out here for them.

Finally, I recommend making a really good anti-repression playlist. Many years ago my friend told me that Rhianna’s hit song “Umbrella” is actually about supporting your friends when they are facing grand jury subpoenas and federal investigations. That song has helped me through a lot of hard times ever since. But find what works for you.

IGD: Anything else?

We are stronger than they are and have a lot of history and momentum behind us. Keep fighting and find ways to retake the initiative. As Chelsea Manning says, we got this!

Resources

Legal Rights And Legal Support:

Tech And Social Media:

Building Resilience In Face Of Repression:

History Of Repression:

Groups:

 

 




Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License


ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
 


RAY McGOVERN: Russiagate’s Last Gasp

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News

One can read this most recent flurry of Russia, Russia, Russia paid the Taliban to kill GIs as an attempt to pre-empt the findings into Russiagate’s origins.

U.S. Army helicopter pilots fly near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, April 5, 2017. (U.S. Army, Brian Harris, Wikimedia Commons)

On Friday The New York Times featured a report based on anonymous intelligence officials that the Russians were paying bounties to have U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan with President Donald Trump refusing to do anything about it.  The flurry of Establishment media reporting that ensued provides further proof, if such were needed, that the erstwhile “paper of record” has earned a new moniker — Gray Lady of easy virtue.

Over the weekend, the Times’ dubious allegations grabbed headlines across all media that are likely to remain indelible in the minds of credulous Americans — which seems to have been the main objective. To keep the pot boiling this morning, The New York Times’ David Leonhardt’s daily web piece, “The Morning” calls prominent attention to a banal article by a Heather Cox Richardson, described as a historian at Boston College, adding specific charges to the general indictment of Trump by showing “how the Trump administration has continued to treat Russia favorably.” The following is from Richardson’s newsletter on Friday:

— “On June 15, news broke that Trump has ordered the removal of 9,500 troops from Germany, where they support NATO against Russian aggression. …”

Historian Richardson added:

“All of these friendly overtures to Russia were alarming enough when all we knew was that Russia attacked the 2016 U.S. election and is doing so again in 2020.  But it is far worse that those overtures took place when the administration knew that Russia had actively targeted American soldiers. … this bad news apparently prompted worried intelligence officials to give up their hope that the administration would respond to the crisis, and instead to leak the story to two major newspapers.”

Hear the siren? Children, get under your desks!

The Tall Tale About Russia Paying for Dead U.S. Troops

Times print edition readers had to wait until this morning to learn of Trump’s statement last night that he was not briefed on the cockamamie tale about bounties for killing, since it was, well, cockamamie.

Late last night the president tweeted: “Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or the VP. …”

For those of us distrustful of the Times — with good reason — on such neuralgic issues, the bounty story had already fallen of its own weight. As Scott Ritter pointed out yesterday:

“Perhaps the biggest clue concerning the fragility of the New York Times’ report is contained in the one sentence it provides about sourcing — “The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals.” That sentence contains almost everything one needs to know about the intelligence in question, including the fact that the source of the information is most likely the Afghan government as reported through CIA channels. …”

And who can forget how “successful” interrogators can be in getting desired answers.

Attendees at the Taliban-U.S. peace signing ceremony in Doha, Qatar, on Feb. 29, 2020. (State Department/Ron Przysucha)

A Taliban spokesman called the story “baseless,” adding with apparent pride that “we” have done “target killings” for years “on our own resources.” 

Russia is no friend of the Taliban.  At the same time, it has been clear for several years that the U.S. would have to pull its troops out of Afghanistan.  Think back five decades and recall how circumspect the Soviets were in Vietnam.  Giving rhetorical support to a fraternal Communist nation was de rigueur and some surface-to-air missiles gave some substance to that support.

But Moscow recognized from the start that Washington was embarked on a fool’s errand in Vietnam. There would be no percentage in getting directly involved.  And so, the Soviets sat back and watched smugly as the Vietnamese Communists drove U.S. forces out on their “own resources.” As was the case with the Viet Cong, the Taliban needs no bounty inducements from abroad.

President Lyndon Johnson announces “retaliatory” strike against North Vietnam in response to the supposed attacks on U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 4, 1964. (LBJ Library)

Besides, the Russians knew painfully well — from their own bitter experience in Afghanistan, what the outcome of the most recent fool’s errand would be for the U.S.  What point would they see in doing what The New York Times and other Establishment media are breathlessly accusing them of?

Former CIA Director William Casey said:  “We’ll know when our disinformation program is complete, when everything the American public believes is false.”

Casey made that remark at the first cabinet meeting in the White House under President Ronald Reagan in early 1981, according to Barbara Honegger, who was assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser.  Honegger was there, took notes, and told then Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who in turn made it public.

If Casey’s spirit is somehow observing the success of the disinformation program called Russiagate, one can imagine how proud he must be.  But sustained propaganda success can be a serious challenge.  The Russiagate canard has lasted three and a half years.  This last gasp effort, spearheaded by the Times, to breathe more life into it is likely to last little more than a weekend — the redoubled efforts of Casey-dictum followers notwithstanding.

Russiagate itself has been unraveling, although one would hardly know it from the Establishment media.  No collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.  Even the sacrosanct tenet that the Russians hacked the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks has been disproven, with the head of the DNC-hired cyber security firm CrowdStrike admitting that there is no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked — by Russia or anyone else.

U.S. Attorney John Durham. (Wikipedia)

How long will it take the Times to catch up with the CrowdStrike story, available since May 7?

The media is left with one sacred cow: the misnomered “Intelligence Community” Assessment of Jan. 6, 2017, claiming that President Putin himself ordered the hacking of the DNC. That “assessment” done by “hand-picked analysts” from only CIA, FBI and NSA (not all 17 intelligence agencies of the “intelligence community”) reportedly is being given close scrutiny by U. S. Attorney John Durham, appointed by the attorney general to investigate Russiagate’s origins.

If Durham finds it fraudulent (not a difficult task), the heads of senior intelligence and law enforcement officials may roll.  That would also mean a still deeper dent in the credibility of Establishment media that are only too eager to drink the Kool Aid and to leave plenty to drink for the rest of us.

Do not expect the media to cease and desist, simply because Trump had a good squelch for them last night — namely, the “intelligence” on the “bounties” was not deemed good enough to present to the president. 

(As a preparer and briefer of The President’s Daily Brief  to Presidents Reagan and HW Bush, I can attest to the fact that — based on what has been revealed so far — the Russian bounty story falls far short of the PDB threshold.)

Rejecting Intelligence Assessments

Nevertheless, the corporate media is likely to play up the Trump administration’s rejection of what the media is calling the “intelligence assessment” about Russia offering — as Rachel Maddow indecorously put it on Friday — “bounty for the scalps of American soldiers in Afghanistan.”

I am not a regular Maddow-watcher, but to me she seemed unhinged — actually, well over the top.

In other words, we can expect no let up from the media and the national security miscreant leakers who have served as their life’s blood.  As for the anchors and pundits, their level of sophistication was reflected yesterday in the sage surmise of Face the Nation’s Chuck Todd, who Aaron Mate reminds us, is a “grown adult and professional media person.”  Todd asked guest John Bolton: “Do you think that the president is afraid to make Putin mad because maybe Putin did help him win the election, and he doesn’t want to make him mad for 2020?”

“This is as bad as it gets,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday, adding the aphorism she memorized several months ago: “All roads lead to Putin.”  The unconscionably deceitful performance of Establishment media is as bad as it gets, though that, of course, was not what Pelosi meant.  She apparently lifted a line right out of the Times about how Trump is too “accommodating” toward Russia.

One can read this most recent flurry of Russia, Russia, Russia as a reflection of the need to pre-empt the findings likely to issue from Durham and Attorney General William Barr in the coming months — on the theory that the best defense is a pre-emptive offense.  Meanwhile, we can expect the corporate media to continue to disgrace itself.

Vile

Caitlin Johnstone, typically, pulls no punches regarding the Russian bounty travesty: 

“All parties involved in spreading this malignant psyop are absolutely vile, but a special disdain should be reserved for the media class who have been entrusted by the public with the essential task of creating an informed populace and holding power to account. How much of an unprincipled whore do you have to be to call yourself a journalist and uncritically parrot the completely unsubstantiated assertions of spooks while protecting their anonymity? How much work did these empire fluffers put into killing off every last shred of their dignity? It boggles the mind.

It really is funny how the most influential news outlets in the Western world will uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of self-awareness that Russia and China are bad because they have state media.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh.”

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.  During his 27-years as a CIA analyst he led the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and prepared The President’s Daily Brief for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan.  In retirement, he co-created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

 

 

 




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