The US Government and its "prestitute" mainstrem media now utter nothing but lies. And now that the American people begin to wise up, the goverment is beginning to redefine a truth-teller as a terrorist. George Orwell may be turning over in his grave.

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Truth Is Washington’s Enemy — Paul Craig Roberts

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April 21, 2015 | Original Here                                            Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter

Truth Is Washington’s Enemy

Paul Craig Roberts

US Representative Ed Royce (R, CA) is busy at work destroying the possibility of truth being spoken in the US. On April 15 at a hearing before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of which Royce is chairman, Royce made use of two minor presstitutes to help him redefine all who take exception to Washington’s lies as “threats” who belong to a deranged pro-Russian propaganda cult. http://www.prisonplanet.com/bloggers-compared-to-isis-during-congressional-hearing.html

Washington’s problem is that whereas Washington controls the print and TV media in the US and its vassal states in Europe, Canada, Australia, Ukraine, and Japan, Washington does not control Internet sites, such as this one, or media, such as RT, of non-vassal states. Consequently, Washington’s lies are subject to challenge, and as people lose confidence in Western print and TV media because of the propaganda content, Washington’s agendas, which depend on lies, are experiencing rougher sledding.

Truth is bubbling up through Washington’s propaganda. Confronted with the possibility of a loss of control over every explanation, Hillary Clinton, Ed Royce, and the rest are suddenly complaining that Washington is “losing the information war.” Huge sums of taxpayers’ hard earned money will now be used to combat the truth with lies.

What to do? How to suppress truth with lies in order to remain in control? The answer says Andrew Lack, Royce, et alia, is to redefine a truth-teller as a terrorist. Thus, the comparison of RT and “dissident” Internet bloggers to the Islamist State and the designated terror group, Boko Haram.

Royce expanded the definition of terrorist to include dissident bloggers, such as Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Glenn Greenwald and the rest of us, who object to the false reality that Washington creates in order to serve undeclared agendas. For example, if Washington wants to pour profits into the military/security complex in exchange for political campaign contributions, the politicians cannot say that. Instead, they claim to protect America from a dangerous enemy or from weapons of mass destruction by starting a war. If politicians want to advance American financial or energy imperialism, they have to do so in the name of “bringing freedom and democracy.” If the politicians want to prevent the rise of other countries, such as Russia, President Obama has to depict Russia as a threat comparable to the Ebola virus and the Islamist State.

Noam Chomsky summed it up when he said that Washington regards any information that does not repeat Washington’s propaganda to be intolerable.

Washington’s assault on truth as a threat helps to make sense of the gigantic National Security Agency spy system exposed by William Binney and Edward Snowden. One of the purposes of the spy network is to identify all “dissidents” who challenge Big Brother’s “Truth.”

There is, or will be, a dossier on every “dissident” with all of the dissident’s emails, Internet searches, websites visited, phone calls, purchases, travels. The vast amount of information on each dissident can be combed for whatever can be taken out of context to make a case against him, if a case is even needed. Washington has already successfully asserted its power over the Constitution to indefinitely detain without charges and to torture and to murder US citizens.

It was a couple of years ago that Janet Napolitano, head of Homeland Security, said that the department’s focus had shifted from terrorists to domestic extremists. Lumped into the category of domestic extremists are environmental activists, animal rights activists, anti-war activists which includes disillusioned war veterans, and people who believe in states’ rights, limited government and accountable government. Consequently, many dissidents, America’s best citizens, will qualify as domestic extremists on several accounts. Chris Hedges, for example, is an advocate for animals (see http://www.opednews.com/articles/Choosing-Life-by-Chris-Hedges-Animals_Cattle_Corporate_Dairy-150420-878.html ) as well as concerned about the environment and Washington’s never-ending wars.

The spying and the coming crackdown on “dissidents” might also explain the $385 million federal contract awarded to a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s firm, Halliburton, to build detention camps in the US. Few seem to be concerned with who the camps are to detain. There is no media or congressional investigation. It seems unlikely that the camps are for hurricane or forest fire evacuees. Concentration camps are usually for people regarded as unreliable. And as Lack, Royce, et alia have made clear, unreliable people are those who do not support Washington’s lies.

A perceived need by Washington, and the private power structure that Washington serves, to protect themselves from truth could also be the reason for the very strange military exercises in various of the states to infiltrate, occupy, and round-up “threats” among the civilian population. (see http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-16/signs-elites-are-feverishly-preparing-something-big ) Even the presstitute CNN reported that the National Guard troops sent to Ferguson, Missouri, were programmed to view the civilian protesters as “enemy forces” and “adversaries,” and we know that the state and local militarized police are trained to view US citizens as threats.

As far as I can discern, not many Americans, whether Democrat or Republican, liberal, conservative, or super-patriot, educated or not, understand that Washington with the cooperation of its presstitute media has defined truth as a threat. In Washington’s opinion, truth is a greater threat than Ebola, Russia, China, terrorism, and the Islamic State combined.

A government that cannot survive truth and must resort to stamping out truth is not a government that any country wants. But such an undesirable government is the government that Clinton-Bush-Cheney-Obama-Hillary-Lack-Royce have given us.

Does it satisfy you? Are you content that in your name and with taxes on your hard-earned and increasingly scarce earnings, Washington in the 21st century has murdered, maimed, and displaced millions of peoples in eight countries, has set America on the path to war with Russia and China, and has declared truth to be an enemy of the state?

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"What Americans must understand, what we have chosen to ignore, what we have fearfully turned a blind eye to lest the reality prove too jarring is the fact that we no longer live in the “city on the hill,” a beacon of freedom for all the world." Instead, "[w]e live in a state of undeclared martial law. We have become the enemy." -- John W. Whitehead

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America Is a War Zone where the People Are the Enemy — John W. Whitehead

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August 22, 2014 | Original Here                                              Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter

Guest Column by John W. Whitehead, Rutherford Institute

Turning America Into a War Zone, Where ‘We the People’ Are the Enemy

By John W. Whitehead
August 20, 2014

“If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?” — Sunil Dutta, an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department for 17 years

Life in the American police state is an endless series of don’ts delivered at the end of a loaded gun: don’t talk back to police officers, don’t even think about defending yourself against a SWAT team raid (of which there are 80,000 every year), don’t run when a cop is nearby lest you be mistaken for a fleeing criminal, don’t carry a cane lest it be mistaken for a gun, don’t expect privacy in public, don’t let your kids walk to the playground alone, don’t engage in nonviolent protest near where a government official might pass, don’t try to grow vegetables in your front yard, don’t play music for tips in a metro station, don’t feed whales, and on and on.

For those who resist, who dare to act independently, think for themselves, march to the beat of a different drummer, the consequences are invariably a one-way trip to the local jail or death.

What Americans must understand, what we have chosen to ignore, what we have fearfully turned a blind eye to lest the reality prove too jarring is the fact that we no longer live in the “city on the hill,” a beacon of freedom for all the world.

Far from being a shining example of democracy at work, we have become a lesson for the world in how quickly freedom turns to tyranny, how slippery the slope by which a once-freedom-loving people can be branded, shackled and fooled into believing that their prisons walls are, in fact, for their own protection.

Having spent more than half a century exporting war to foreign lands, profiting from war, and creating a national economy seemingly dependent on the spoils of war, we failed to protest when the war hawks turned their profit-driven appetites on us, bringing home the spoils of war—the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.—to be distributed for free to local police agencies and used to secure the homeland against “we the people.”

It’s not just the Defense Department that is passing out free military equipment to local police. Since the early 1990s, the Justice Department has worked with the Pentagon to fund military technology for police departments. And then there are the billions of dollars’ worth of federal grants distributed by the Department of Homeland Security, enabling police departments to go on a veritable buying spree for highly questionable military-grade supplies better suited to the battlefield.

Is it any wonder that we now find ourselves in the midst of a war zone?

We live in a state of undeclared martial law. We have become the enemy.

In a war zone, there are no police—only soldiers. Thus, there is no more Posse Comitatus prohibiting the government from using the military in a law enforcement capacity. Not when the local police have, for all intents and purposes, already become the military.

In a war zone, the soldiers shoot to kill, as American police have now been trained to do. Whether the perceived “threat” is armed or unarmed no longer matters when police are authorized to shoot first and ask questions later.

In a war zone, even the youngest members of the community learn at an early age to accept and fear the soldier in their midst. Thanks to funding from the Obama administration, more schools are hiring armed police officers—some equipped with semi-automatic AR-15 rifles—to “secure” their campuses.

In a war zone, you have no rights. When you are staring down the end of a police rifle, there can be no free speech. When you’re being held at bay by a militarized, weaponized mine-resistant tank, there can be no freedom of assembly. When you’re being surveilled with thermal imaging devices, facial recognition software and full-body scanners and the like, there can be no privacy. When you’re charged with disorderly conduct simply for daring to question or photograph or document the injustices you see, with the blessing of the courts no less, there can be no freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances. And when you’re a prisoner in your own town, unable to move freely, kept off the streets, issued a curfew at night, there can be no mistaking the prison walls closing in.

This is not just happening in Ferguson, Missouri. As I show in my book, A Government of Wolves, it’s happening and will happen anywhere and everywhere else in this country where law enforcement officials are given carte blanche to do what they like, when they like, how they like, with immunity from their superiors, the legislatures, and the courts.

You see, what Americans have failed to comprehend, living as they do in a TV-induced, drug-like haze of fabricated realities, narcissistic denial, and partisan politics, is that we’ve not only brought the military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan home to be used against the American people. We’ve also brought the very spirit of the war home.

This is what it feels like to be a conquered people. This is what it feels like to be an occupied nation. This is what it feels like to live in fear of armed men crashing through your door in the middle of the night, or to be accused of doing something you never even knew was a crime, or to be watched all the time, your movements tracked, your motives questioned. This is what it’s like to be a citizen of the American police state. This is what it’s like to be an enemy combatant in your own country.

So if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, by all means, stand down. Cower in the face of the police, turn your eyes away from injustice, find any excuse to suggest that the so-called victims of the police state deserved what they got.

But remember, when that rifle finally gets pointed in your direction—and it will—when there’s no one left to stand up for you or speak up for you, remember that you were warned.

It works the same in every age. Martin Niemoller understood this. A German pastor who openly opposed Hitler and spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in a concentration camp, Niemoller warned:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/turning_america_into_a_war_zone_where_we_the_people_are_the_enemy

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"American taxpayers have built an entire city in Virginia so that the Pentagon can practice occupying American cities and putting down protests by US citizens." "Lecturers in the training courses describe constitutionalists as 'domestic extremists'." "Does this make the President of the United States, whose oath of office is to defend the US Constitution against enemies domestic and foreign, a domestic extremist? Is the fear of arrest by Homeland Security as a domestic extremist the reason Obama refuses to defend the Constitution of the United States?" -- Paul Craig Roberts

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» Amerikan Stasi Police State Staring Us In The Face — Paul Craig Roberts

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February 18, 2014 | Original Here                                              Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter

Amerikan Stasi Police State Staring Us In The Face

American sheeple stick heads in the sand, pretend to be ostriches

Paul Craig Roberts

Note: The Lorde story is likely a hoax, but it nevertheless captures the truth of the situation.


American taxpayers have built an entire city in Virginia so that the Pentagon can practice occupying American cities and putting down protests by US citizens. http://www.prisonplanet.com/u-s-army-builds-fake-city-in-virginia-to-practice-military-occupation.html This fake city is the training ground for the doctrine outlined in a leaked US Army document http://info.publicintelligence.net/USAMPS-CivilDisturbanceOps.pdf that describes how soldiers are to be trained to put down domestic disturbances and process prisoners through detainment camps where prisoners will be re-educated to appreciate US policies. In situations of “extreme necessity” the training embraces deadly force: “Warning shot will not be fired. When a firearm is discharged it will be fired with the intent of rendering the person(s) at whom it is discharged incapable of continuing that activity or course of behavior.” Lecturers in the training courses describe constitutionalists as “domestic extremists.”

Does this make the President of the United States, whose oath of office is to defend the US Constitution against enemies domestic and foreign, a domestic extremist? Is the fear of arrest by Homeland Security as a domestic extremist the reason Obama refuses to defend the Constitution of the United States?

The Army is being trained for domestic police duties that are in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act that prevents the use of the military for domestic law enforcement, another indication that Washington has no respect for the country’s laws and that Obama and his “Justice” Department have no intention of enforcing the laws of the land or abiding by the Constitution.

Where is the media outcry? Where are the law schools? Where is Congress? A government that disregards the laws of the land is both treasonous and tyrannical. Yet, not a peep from “the free and the brave.”

The US government and its puppet auxiliary, the UK government, have turned with vengeance against whistleblowers and their attorneys. Bradley Manning is in prison, Julian Assange is confined to the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, and Edward Snowden is under Russian protection from a tyrannical US government. Jessellyn Radack, an attorney who represented Snowden was recently detained and questioned in an intimidating way at London’s Heathrow Airport. http://rt.com/news/snowden-lawyer-heathrow-airport-346/ Washington has taught its British puppet state how to mimic Washington’s Gestapo ways.

The latest revelations of the criminal activities of the Amerikan National Stasi Agency
comes from a leaked NSA document that shows that the Stasi agency considers WikiLeaks Julian Assange to be a “malicious foreign actor” and launched “an international effort to focus the legal element of national power upon non-state actor Assange, and the human network that supports WikiLeaks.” Clearly, the Gestapo is upon us.

RT reports: “The NSA was not alone in its sweeping espionage on the whistle-blowing organization. It also enlisted its partners in the Five Eyes spying network (UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada) as well as other nations. In documents dating back from August 2010, the US urged 10 other countries with forces in Afghanistan to consider pressing criminal charges against Julian Assange -- ‘founder of the rogue WikiLeaks internet website and responsible for the unauthorized publication of over 70,000 classified documents covering the war in Afghanistan.’” http://rt.com/news/wikileaks-assange-calls-prosecutor-526/

In other words, freedom of the press? We don’t need no stinking freedom of the press. We have the presstitute press--the TV networks, the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and all the rest of the officially sanctioned state Ministry of Propaganda.

Julian Assange stated, correctly, “The NSA and its UK accomplices show no respect for the rule of law.”

WikiLeaks’ attorney, Judge Baltasar Garzon, the pursuer of Pinochet, had this to say:
“The paradox is that Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks organization are being treated as a threat instead of what they are: a journalist and a media organization that are exercising their fundamental right to receive and impart information in its original form, free from omission and censorship, free from partisan interests, free from economic or political pressure.”

What has happened that explains the transformation of the UK and all of its former English colonies--the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand--into Gestapo Stasi states? These are the countries best known historically for their domestic civil liberties and rule of law, irrespective of their treatment of their indigenous populations and in the case of England her non-white colonies. The original dispossession was of indigenous peoples. Now these governments have turned on their own.Today the governments of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (the Five Eyes) see civil liberty and the accountability of government to law as threats to themselves, and the governments are determined to stamp out the threats. The historical lands of liberty have abandoned liberty and become Stasi states.

What has occurred in the US and UK is that the criminal and treasonous acts of both governments have become so extreme that the governments must destroy civil liberty in order to protect themselves from exposure. Whenever you hear “national security” invoked, you know that government is covering up its crimes and its lies.

The criminal character of both US and UK governments is now recognized by the rest of the world, even by the bought-and-paid-for NATO puppet states, France and Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande are discussing the creation of an European communication network in order to protect Europeans’ communications from the NSA and from Google, Facebook, and other US communication companies that shamelessly cooperate with NSA’s spy network as junior members of the Stasi. Brazil and South America are facing the same challenge of protecting their communications from Washington’s National Stasi Agency.

NSA spies on foreign companies for the benefit of American ones, and it spies on US law firms representing clients against the US government. The New York Times recently reported that the corrupt Australian puppet state has been working with NSA to steal the private communications of US lawyers with their clients in the Indonesian government involved in a trade dispute with Washington.” http://on.rt.com/vw8d8v In other words, NSA spying helps the US government to prevail in economic lawsuits against it, but the spying is justified in the name of the nonexistent “terrorist threat.” The terrorist is NSA.

And you thought Washington was only spying on “terrorists” to prevent them from “killing us over here.”

It is impossible to paint a picture of a more lawless government than Washington has
painted of itself.

If it is not a hoax, it took a pop singer, Lorde, to declare in her Grammy Award acceptance speech last month that the emperor has no clothes: “Planet Earth is run by psychopaths that hide behind slick marketing, ‘freedom’ propaganda and ‘economic growth’ rhetoric, while they construct a global system of corporatized totalitarianism. As American journalist Chris Hedges has identified, a corporate totalitarian core thrives inside a fictitious democratic shell. This core yields an ‘inverted’ totalitarian state that few recognize because it does not look like the Orwellian world of Nineteen Eighty-four.This corporate totalitarian core is spreading outward from America. Planet Earth is being rapidly militarized by the world’s major and significant states, including their police forces. Meanwhile, state surveillance is becoming universal and torture is outsourced to gulags.” http://snoopman.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/lordes-suppressed-grammy-award-acceptance-speech-full-transcript-26-january-2014/ The TV channels censored her speech and cut it off by substituting pre-recorded content. http://snoopman.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/clipping-queen-bees-wings-lordes-real-grammy-speech-suppressed/ See also
http://snoopman.wordpress.com/author/snoopman/ and http://snoopman.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/royal-pencil-in-print-lordes-suppressed-grammy-speech-makes-front-page-news-in-far-flung-new-zealand/

This is a very large production for a hoax. An amazing amount of creativity and production effort went into it. Increasingly, our reality is composed of invented news, whether from the government or the Internet.

By cutting off Lorde’s speech, the media moguls are shown proving the truth of her words. Americans must not hear. The dolts might wake up.

Americans should take note that in fact the media is on guard, prepared at an instance’s notice to suppress free speech. Washington is ever so pleased to support protesters in Ukraine, who are witlessly helping Washington to subvert their country, but no protests at home thank you.

If the Lorde story is a hoax, it nevertheless captures the truth of the situation. And in more ways than one. As one reader put it, "the content of that non-speech may be truthful, but, you see, that is what 'they' do -  conflate truth, fiction & satire all into one ball of wax so we look like fools and no longer know what to believe."

With the Pentagon building fake cities for soldiers to demolish while practicing the unconstitutional occupation practices that are in store for us in the homeland, Alex Jones’ predictions move out of the realm of conspiracy theory. Washington has finally noticed that the result of moving middle class jobs offshore is an American population without a future. As Gerald Celente says, when people have nothing left to lose, they lose it. The US military is gearing up for when Americans can’t take it any more.

Meanwhile Washington continues the pretense of America as the land of “freedom and democracy” and “concern for human rights,” blah-blah-blah. People all over the world, with the exception of the paid protesters in western Ukraine, are no longer listening to the bullshit flowing from Washington and its presstitute media.

Note: This from a reader in Germany: "Last year the Green Party complained about Germany's own training field and city.  It's near Magdeburg and, as of last year, they were planning to add a subway station and expect to have 500 buildings built by 2017, including high rises, poor neighborhoods and industrial districts.Its official name is Gefechtsübungszentrum, GÜZ, or Combat Training Center. It's located on 232 square kilometers of practice grounds (30 km long by 12 km wide) and cost 100,000,000 Euros!  or $40,000,000 more than the U.S. version."

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If you don't have the time to read the whole article, fast forward to the short video at the end (where the 2006 version of Joe Biden debates the 2013 version of Barack Obama)!

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On Prism, partisanship and propaganda
Addressing many of the issues arising from last week's NSA stories

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Glenn Greenwald 
guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 June 2013 20.17 BST
 

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James Clapper, on Saturday decried the release of the information and said media reports about it have been inaccurate Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

(Updated below - Update II - Update III)

I haven't been able to write this week here because I've been participating in the debate over the fallout from last week's NSA stories, and because we are very busy working on and writing the next series of stories that will begin appearing very shortly. I did, though, want to note a few points, and particularly highlight what Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez said after Congress on Wednesday was given a classified briefing by NSA officials on the agency's previously secret surveillance activities:

"What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today. . . . I can't speak to what we learned in there, and I don't know if there are other leaks, if there's more information somewhere, if somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it's the tip of the iceberg . . . . I think it's just broader than most people even realize, and I think that's, in one way, what astounded most of us, too."

The Congresswoman is absolutely right: what we have reported thus far is merely "the tip of the iceberg" of what the NSA is doing in spying on Americans and the world. She's also right that when it comes to NSA spying, "there is significantly more than what is out in the media today", and that's exactly what we're working to rectify.

But just consider what she's saying: as a member of Congress, she had no idea how invasive and vast the NSA's surveillance activities are. Sen. Jon Tester, who is a member of the Homeland Security Committee, said the same thing, telling MSNBC about the disclosures that "I don't see how that compromises the security of this country whatsoever" and adding: "quite frankly, it helps people like me become aware of a situation that I wasn't aware of before because I don't sit on that Intelligence Committee."

How can anyone think that it's remotely healthy in a democracy to have the NSA building a massive spying apparatus about which even members of Congress, including Senators on the Homeland Security Committee, are totally ignorant and find "astounding" when they learn of them? How can anyone claim with a straight face that there is robust oversight when even members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are so constrained in their ability to act that they are reduced to issuing vague, impotent warnings to the public about what they call radical "secret law" enabling domestic spying that would "stun" Americans to learn about it, but are barred to disclose what it is they're so alarmed by? Put another way, how can anyone contest the value and justifiability of the stories that we were able to publish as a result of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing: stories that informed the American public - including even the US Congress - about these incredibly consequential programs? What kind of person would think that it would be preferable to remain in the dark - totally ignorant - about them?

I have a column in the Guardian's newspaper edition tomorrow examining the fallout from these stories. That will be posted here and I won't repeat that now. I will, though, note the following brief items:

(1) Much of US politics, and most of the pundit reaction to the NSA stories, are summarized by this one single visual from Pew:

 

The most vocal media critics of our NSA reporting, and the most vehement defenders of NSA surveillance, have been, by far, Democratic (especially Obama-loyal) pundits. As I've written many times, one of the most significant aspects of the Obama legacy has been the transformation of Democrats from pretend-opponents of the Bush War on Terror and National Security State into their biggest proponents: exactly what the CIA presciently and excitedly predicted in 2008 would happen with Obama's election.

Some Democrats have tried to distinguish 2006 from 2013 by claiming that the former involved illegal spying while the latter does not. But the claim that current NSA spying is legal is dubious in the extreme: the Obama DOJ has repeatedly thwarted efforts by the ACLU, EFF and others to obtain judicial rulings on their legality and constitutionality by invoking procedural claims of secrecy, immunity and standing. If Democrats are so sure these spying programs are legal, why has the Obama DOJ been so eager to block courts from adjudicating that question?

More to the point, Democratic critiques of Bush's spying were about more than just legality. I know that because I actively participated in the campaign to amplify those critiques. Indeed, by 2006, most of Bush's spying programs - definitely his bulk collection of phone records - were already being conducted under the supervision and with the blessing of the FISA court. Moreover, leading members of Congress - including Nancy Pelosi - were repeatedly briefed on all aspects of Bush's NSA spying program. So the distinctions Democrats are seeking to draw are mostly illusory.

To see how that this is so, just listen to then-Senator Joe Biden in 2006 attack the NSA for collecting phone records: he does criticize the program for lacking FISA court supervision (which wasn't actually true), but also claims to be alarmed by just how invasive and privacy-destroying that sort of bulk record collection is. He says he "doesn't think" that the program passes the Fourth Amendment test: how can Bush's bulk record collection program be unconstitutional while Obama's program is constitutional? But Biden also rejected Bush's defense (exactly the argument Obama is making now) - that "we're not listening to the phone calls, we're just looking for patterns" - by saying this:

I don't have to listen to your phone calls to know what you're doing. If I know every single phone call you made, I'm able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. . . . If it's true that 200 million Americans' phone calls were monitored - in terms of not listening to what they said, but to whom they spoke and who spoke to them - I don't know, the Congress should investigative this."

Is collecting everyone's phone records not "very intrusive" when Democrats are doing it? Just listen to that short segment to see how every defense Obama defenders are making now were the ones Bush defenders made back then. Again, leading members of Congress and the FISA court were both briefed on and participants in the Bush telephone record collection program as well, yet Joe Biden and most Democrats found those programs very alarming and "very intrusive" back then.

(2) Notwithstanding the partisan-driven Democratic support for these programs, and notwithstanding the sustained demonization campaign aimed at Edward Snowden from official Washington, polling data, though mixed, has thus far been surprisingly encouraging.

A Time Magazine poll found that 54% of Americans believe Snowden did "a good thing", while only 30% disagreed. That approval rating is higher than the one enjoyed by both Congress and President Obama. While a majority think he should be nonetheless prosecuted, a plurality of young Americans, who overwhelmingly view Snowden favorably, do not even want to see him charged. Reuters found that more Americans see Snowden as a "patriot" than a "traitor". A Gallup poll this week found that more Americans disapprove (53%) than approve (37%) of the two NSA spying programs revealed last week by the Guardian.

(3) Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower who was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the Obama DOJ, writes in the Guardian that as a long-time NSA official, he saw all of the same things at the NSA that Edward Snowden is now warning Americans about. Drake calls Snowden's acts "an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience." William Binney, the mathematician who resigned after a 30-year career as a senior NSA official in protest of post-9/11 domestic surveillance, said on Democracy Now this week that Snowden's claims about the NSA are absolutely true.

Meanwhile, Daniel Ellsberg, writing in the Guardian, wrote that "there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago." He added: "Snowden did what he did because he recognized the NSA's surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity."

Listen to actual experts and patriots - people who have spent their careers inside the NSA and/or who risked their liberty for the good of the country - and the truth of Snowden's claims and the justifiability of his acts become manifest.

(4) As we were about to begin publishing these NSA stories, a veteran journalist friend warned me that the tactic used by Democratic partisans would be to cling to and then endlessly harp on any alleged inaccuracy in any one of the stories we publish as a means of distracting attention away from the revelations and discrediting the entire project. That proved quite prescient, as that is exactly what they are attempting to do.

Thus far we have revealed four independent programs: the bulk collection of telephone records, the Prism program, Obama's implementation of an aggressive foreign and domestic cyber-operations policy, and false claims by NSA officials to Congress. Every one of those articles was vetted by multiple Guardian editors and journalists - not just me. Democratic partisans have raised questions about only one of the stories - the only one that happened to be also published by the Washington Post (and presumably vetted by multiple Post editors and journalists) - in order to claim that an alleged inaccuracy in it means our journalism in general is discredited.

They are wrong. Our story was not inaccurate. The Washington Post revised parts of its article, but its reporter, Bart Gellman, stands by its core claims ("From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for Prism access may 'task' the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company's staff").

The Guardian has not revised any of our articles and, to my knowledge, has no intention to do so. That's because we did not claim that the NSA document alleging direct collection from the servers was true; we reported - accurately - that the NSA document claims that the program allows direct collection from the companies' servers. Before publishing, we went to the internet companies named in the documents and asked about these claims. When they denied it, we purposely presented the story as one of a major discrepancy between what the NSA document claims and what the internet companies claim, as the headline itself makes indisputably clear:

The NSA document says exactly what we reported. Just read it and judge for yourself (Prism is "collection directly from the servers of these US service providers"). It's endearingly naive how some people seem to think that because government officials or corporate executives issue carefully crafted denials, this resolves the matter. Read the ACLU's tech expert, Chris Soghoian, explain why the tech companies' denials are far less significant and far more semantic than many are claiming.

Nor do these denials make any sense. If all the tech companies are doing under Prism is providing what they've always provided to the NSA, but simply doing it by a different technological means, then why would a new program be necessary at all? How can NSA officials claim that a program that does nothing more than change the means for how this data is delivered is vital in stopping terrorist threats? Why does the NSA document hail the program as one that enables new forms of collection? Why would it be "top secret" if all this was were just some new way of transmitting court-ordered data? How is Prism any different in any meaningful way from how the relationship between the companies and the NSA has always functioned?

As a follow-up to our article, the New York Times reported on extensive secret negotiations between Silicon Valley executives and NSA officials over government access to the companies' data. It's precisely because these arrangements are secret and murky yet incredibly significant that we published our story about these conflicting claims. They ought to be resolved in public, not in secret. The public should know exactly what access the NSA is trying to obtain to the data of these companies, and should know exactly what access these companies are providing. Self-serving, unchecked, lawyer-vetted denials by these companies don't remotely resolve these questions.

In a Nation post yesterday, Rick Perlstein falsely accuses me of not having addressed the questions about the Prism story. I've done at least half-a-dozen television shows in the last week where I was asked about exactly those questions and answered fully with exactly what I've written here (see this appearance with Chris Hayes as just the latest example); the fact that Perlstein couldn't be bothered to use Google doesn't entitle him to falsely claim I haven't addressed these questions. I have done so repeatedly, and do so here again.

I know that many Democrats want to cling to the belief that, in Perlstein's words, "the powers that be will find it very easy to seize on this one error to discredit [my] NSA revelation, even the ones he nailed dead to rights". Perlstein cleverly writes that "such distraction campaigns are how power does its dirtiest work" as he promotes exactly that campaign.

But that won't happen. The documents and revelations are too powerful. The story isn't me, or Edward Snowden, or the eagerness of Democratic partisans to defend the NSA as a means of defending President Obama, and try as they might, Democrats won't succeed in making the story be any of those things. The story is the worldwide surveillance apparatus the NSA is constructing in the dark and the way that has grown under Obama, and that's where my focus is going to remain.

(5) NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen examines complaints that my having strong, candidly acknowledged opinions on surveillance policies somehow means that the journalism I do on those issues is suspect. It is very worth reading what he has to say on this topic as it gets to the heart about several core myths about what journalism is.

(6) Last week, prior to the revelation of our source's identity, I wrote that "ever since the Nixon administration broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office, the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message" and "that attempt will undoubtedly be made here."

The predictable personality assaults on Snowden have begun in full force from official Washington and their media spokespeople. They are only going to intensify. There is nobody who political officials and their supine media class hate more than those who meaningfully dissent from their institutional orthodoxies and shine light on what they do. The hatred for such individuals is boundless.

There are two great columns on this dynamic. This one by Reuters' Jack Shafer explores how elite Washington reveres powerful leakers that glorify political officials, but only hate marginalized and powerless leakers who discredit Washington and its institutions. And perhaps the best column yet on Snowden comes this morning from the Daily Beast's Kirsten Powers: just please take the time to read it all, as it really conveys the political and psychological rot that is driving the attacks on him and on his very carefully vetted disclosures.

UPDATE

The New York Times reports today that Yahoo went to court in order to vehemently resist the NSA's directive that they join the Prism program, and joined only when the court compelled it to do so. The company specifically "argued that the order violated its users' Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures."

If, as NSA (and Silicon Valley) defenders claim, Prism is nothing more than a harmless little drop-box mechanism for delivering to the government what these companies were already providing, why would Yahoo possibly be in court so vigorously resisting it and arguing that it violates their users' Fourth Amendment rights? Similarly, how could it possibly be said - as US government officials have - that Prism has been instrumental in stopping terrorist plots if it did not enhance the NSA's collection capabilities? The denials from the internet companies make little sense when compared to what we know about the program. At the very least, there is ample reason to demand more disclosure and transparency about exactly what this is and what data-access arrangements they have agreed to.

UPDATE II

My column that is appearing in the Guardian newspaper, on the fallout from the NSA stories, is now posted here.

UPDATE III

Underscoring all of these points, please take two minutes to watch this amazing video, courtesy of EFF, in which the 2006 version of Joe Biden aggressively debates the 2013 version of Barack Obama on whether the US government should be engaged in the bulk collection of American's phone records:



That's the kind of debate we need more of.

A Reagan presidential appointee and former Wall Street Journal Editor finds hope in those who visit his blog, because they are looking for explanations of current events that unlike the mainstream media are not agenda-driven, are not BS, are not right-wing or left-wing, conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. Case in point: The Boston "suspention of civil liberty is a greater threat than the bombing."

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You Are The Hope — Paul Craig Roberts

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May 1, 2013 | Original Here                                                         Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter

Dear Readers:

If there is hope, you are it. You are motivated to find truth. You can think outside the box. You can see through propaganda. You are the remnant with the common sense that once was a common American virtue. You come to this site, because you get explanations that are not agenda-driven, that are not BS, that are not right-wing or left-wing, conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. You get explanations based on my lifetime of unique education and experience. Some of you are young enough to be equipped with the energy and courage to organize whatever resistance there may be to the Gestapo State that is descending on the United States of America. This is your site. Support it.

Until the George W. Bush Regime, I never thought that it could happen here. I could not imagine law professors and Department of Justice (sic) officials writing legal memos justifying, in the name of a hyped “war on terror,” the termination of civil rights for United States Citizens. We were the land of the free. The Constitution was our bedrock. Yet, the Constitution and Bill of Rights were easily taken away from the inattentive American people.

The Constitution did not protect native inhabitants and slaves who were not considered part of the American population, but the universal suppression in the US of non-whites’ rights produced in the end the civil rights movement that brought moral awareness of the wrongs and successfully hitched its cause to the founding documents of the country.

Where today is moral awareness as Washington bombs civilian populations around the globe? Where is the moral conscience of the the civil rights movement as the First Black President, the first member of the oppressed class to sit in the Oval Office, validates the Bush Regime’s assertion of the right of the unaccountable executive to ignore habeas corpus and due process? Not satisfied with this crime, Obama asserted the right of the executive branch to murder any citizen suspected, without proof being offered to a court, of undefined “support of terrorism.” Today all Americans have fewer rights than blacks had prior to the Civil Rights Act.

Anything, including a column critical of war and the police state, can be declared to be “in support of terrorism.” As the tyrant Bush put it: “You are with us, or you are against us.”

The print and TV media and many Internet sites got the message: Serve Washington’s agenda, and will you will prosper. Advertisers and the CIA will pump money into your coffers. Challenge us and you will be demonized and could face a military tribunal, indefinite detention, or assassination. Bradley Manning and Julian Assange are being persecuted for telling the truth.

So far, Washington has convinced the public that Washington’s terror is mainly limited to Muslims, who are obligingly demonized by print, TV, and much of the Internet media. However, if Muslim American citizens lack civil liberty, so do all other American citizens. Those who are safe are those who ally with the tyrant and remain subservient.

To ally with the tyrant, a United States citizen must have no moral conscience, no sense of justice, no compassion for the innocent and dispossessed. These are the worst kind of Americans; yet, they are the only ones who can succeed in the present environment.

Every time I write a column that is the truth or the truth as I am able to discover it, instead of hawking the propaganda line, I move up on the list of those who are persona non grata in the Empire.

A writer can find himself demonized and declared a kook simply by reporting findings from distinguished scientists, high-rise architects, structural engineers, first responders, and an international collection of high government officials. Not too long ago a writer or reporter for the Huffington Post discovered to his surprise that Pat Buchanan and I disagreed with all the wars that had been launched to protect us from terrorism. He asked me for an interview, and I agreed.

An hour or so after the interview was posted on the Huffington Post, I received an emergency call or email. He had been criticized for interviewing me, “for giving you a forum when you are a 9/11 sceptic.” He was unsure that it was possible for a Reagan presidential appointee to be a 9/11 sceptic and asked if I was.

I replied that I had reported the findings of scientists, architects, engineers, and the public testimony of first responders, because I thought these were qualified people whose opinions at least ranked equally with the politicians on the 9/11 Commission and the talking heads on Fox “News” and CNN, none of whom could pass a high school test in the laws of physics, much less high-rise architecture and structural engineering.

The Huffington Post writer panicked. Instead of taking down the interview, he felt impelled to assure readers and his boss that he had been deceived. He wrote at the beginning and ending of the interview that he did not know he was interviewing someone about the Iraq War who had given ink to those conspiracy theorists who raised questions about the truthfulness of the US government. He wrote that my views on the wars should be disregarded, because I wrote that scientists, architects, engineers, and first responders provided evidence contrary to the government’s claims.

And there you have it.

The Huffington Post has far more readers than I do, and far more money. There is no limit on the ability of the Huffington Post to tell and sell the lies of the Agenda.

I can remember when I was a Wall Street Journal editor and columnist, a Business Week columnist, a Scripps Howard News Service columnist and appeared regularly in the major mainstream print media and even from time to time on TV talking head programs. Today, the editor or producer who gave me a forum would be fired instantly, and they all know it.

It is discouraging that after so many transparent lies and orchestrations–weapons of mass destruction, al-Qaeda connections, Iranian nukes–the majority of Americans still believe the government. Americans are even buying into the line that Syria is ruled by a brutal dictator whose overthrow justifies Washington’s alliance with its 9/11 enemy, al-Qaeda, in order to overthrow a secular ruler who constrains al-Qaeda.

Washington has come full circle. Its enemy is now its ally. Washington wasted trillions of dollars and countless lives in eleven years of war and constructed a domestic police state all in order to combat al Qaeda with whom Washington is now allied against the Syrian government.

The public’s response to the Boston Marathon Bombing is even more discouraging. Not even King George and his Redcoats could achieve what Homeland Security just pulled off–locking down 100 square miles of Boston and its suburbs with heavily armed troops tramping through citizens’ homes barking harsh orders, all justified by a hunt for one 19-year old suspect. It was the Third Reich’s Gestapo in operation right here in “freedom and democracy” America. Ron Paul is correct that the suspension of civil liberty is a greater threat than the bombing. Note the government’s euphemism for martial law–”shelter-in-place.”

Two brothers have been convicted in the media and by the Obama Regime, including the president’s own words, of a bombing without the public ever being presented with any evidence except anonymous unattributed reports and a film of the alleged brothers walking with backpacks, which were ubiquitous.

I am old enough to remember when it was impermissible for government and media to convict a person prior to the jury’s verdict. Americans once lived in a free country governed by the rule of law in which a person was innocent until proven guilty.

What was the reason or evidence for naming the brothers suspects? Was any reason given, or was the film of the two walking with backpacks simply shown over and over, hour after hour, day after day, with the media reporting that these are the suspects. In other words, was it beat into your brain that they were suspects because there they are in the film? If not, why was the same film shown repeatedly? Fox “News” was still showing the film on April 26, eleven days after the bombing and might still be showing it. Did you experience: “Here are the suspects. See them. They have backpacks. See. We know that they are suspects, because, see, there they are.”

When is the last time the media investigated anything? A good candidate for investigation is the post-bombing rampage the brothers allegedly went on, robbing a 7/11 store (later contradicted by local police), killing a campus policeman, shooting a transit cop, high-jacking a SUV and releasing the owner.

Why would terrorists seeking to escape in order to strike again call attention to themselves in such outlandish ways and release a car-jacked owner to alert the police of the tag number? If the brothers were willing to kill police with gunfire and innocents with bombs, why release the guy whose vehicle they stole so he could inform the police of the license plate and make the brothers’ capture easier? What is the evidence, other than “reports from authorities,” that these events occurred or had any more connection to the brothers than the falsely reported 7/11 robbery that local police disavowed? Why does the US media simply accept whatever government authorities say?

Where is the evidence of a first shoot-out and a second shoot-out? The second shoot- out consisted of the authorities bombarding a motionless youth bleeding from wounds in a boat with multiple volleys of stun grenades and then multiple gunshots. The unconscious 19 year old was unarmed and unable to respond to the boat owner who discovered him. As he lies there, he is shot many times, including through the throat, and is on life support. But the very next day, according to the presstitute media, he is providing hand-written confessions.

Was the purpose of the reports of a murderous rampage to create fear among the population so that they would accept martial law and home invasions by armed troops ordering American citizens out of their homes with hands over their heads on the pretext that they might be harboring the Boston Marathon Bomber?

The videos of the street celebration in which Bostonians thank the police and of the two Boston families, if not scripted by actors, shows Americans who far from opposing the police state welcome it. A father says that he with his daughter in his arms was forced out of his home by troops pointing automatic rifles at their heads, but that he was thankful for the safety the police provided him by violating every civil right that the Constitution gave him. A woman says it was scary but that “the police are just doing their jobs.” Are Americans now so brainwashed that they attribute their safety to the presence of a Gestapo Police State?

Why have detention facilities been built? Why did Homeland Security purchase a billion or more rounds of ammunition? Why does Homeland Security have 2,700 tanks and a para-military force? Why aren’t these questions being investigated?

The US Constitution is the product of 900 years of human efforts to restrain brutal government and to make government subject to law. It only took Bush and Obama eleven years to get rid of it.

This is my quarterly appeal for your support. If you want this site to continue, donate. Unless it brings you more enlightenment than it brings grief to me, there is no reason for it to exist.

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Dear fellow Americans, Stop believing everything you are told by the corporate-owned mainstream media and pay more attention to the news that they suppress. Orwell's "1984" will soon become reality if we fail to recognize and oppose it...

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Boston Marathon Bombing

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April 19, 2013 | Original Here

Boston Marathon Bombing
 
Dear Readers,

A number of you have asked me my take on the Boston Marathon Bombing and subsequent events.

I am flattered that so many look to me for leadership on so many issues. However,
I have not followed closely the Boston event. My website hasn’t the resources to field an investigative team, and in my opinion the TV and print news is part of the misinformation or disinformation. While driving (April 19) I listened to a NPR program on the Boston bombing and was disheartened by the absence of hard questions and any thought.

Alex Jones has made a definitive statement that I lack the information to verify or contest. (See here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axQtAFtmtVA )

The video shows numerous military type guys on the scene prior to the explosion in identical garb–black baseball hats with white insignia, black shirts or jackets, tan pants and combat boots with cell phones in their hands. All have identical backpacks.

The backpack straps match those on the remains of an exploded backpack, which the media has attributed to the backpack of one of the two brothers who are alleged to have committed the bombing. But they also match those of the guys who seem to move at ease among the police. No cop demands to search any of the backpacks.

The video also shows prior to the bombing bomb-sniffing dogs patrolling and the Boston Globe’s report that a mock bomb attack would be part of a drill at the marathon.

These documented facts have disappeared, to the extent that I have paid attention, from the media’s reports.

What strikes me about the event is the ease with which authorities were able to lockdown entire metropolitan areas, preventing US citizens from leaving their homes in order to go to their jobs, to doctor’s appointments, to the grocery store, or to walk their dogs. This is a precedent. It sets the stage for martial law, although it is not being called that, and for daylight curfews. Is this what Homeland Security meant two years ago when its leader said the agency had shifted its focus from terrorism to domestic extremists?

All of this is happening because of 4 or 5 deaths including one of the alleged perpetrators of the bombing. The response of the authorities is disproportionate to the crime.

Lockdowns of metropolitan areas because of a hunt for one guy that might be a patsy? This is a new development. It is ominous for our future as a free society.

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Blogger's Notes: (1) I embed below the video linked to in the third paragraph from the top. (2) the large type in the third paragraph from the bottom was not used by Paul Craig Roberts in his actual blog post but he did use it in his e-mail notification of this post.

IF THE OFFICIAL STORY IS TRUE THAT ON 9/11/2001 A HANDFUL OF MUSLIMS DEFEATED THE CIA, FBI, NSA, MOSSAD, NORAD, NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL, USAF, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, AND AIRPORT SECURITY FOUR TIMES IN ONE HOUR ON THE SAME MORNING, WHY HAVE THESE SUPER TERRORISTS NOT RETURNED EVEN ONCE IN THE PAST 11 YEARS TO SLAY THOSE AMERICANS WHO HAVE PUBLICALLY REVELED IN THEIR SUCCESSES IN TORTURING AND MURDERING MUSLIMS?

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The Case of the Missing Terrorists

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May 14, 2012 | Original here

If there were any real terrorists, Jose Rodriguez would be dead.

Who is Jose Rodriguez? He is the criminal who ran the CIA torture program. Most of his victims were not terrorists or even insurgents. Most were hapless individuals kidnapped by warlords and sold to the Americans as “terrorists” for the bounty paid.

If Rodriguez’s identity was previously a secret, it is no more. He has been on CBS “60 Minutes” taking credit for torturing Muslims and using the information allegedly gained to kill leaders of al Qaeda. If terrorists were really the problem that Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA claim, Rodriguez’s name would be a struck through item on the terrorists’ hit list. He would be in his grave.

So, also, would be John Yoo, who wrote the Justice (sic) Department memos giving the green light to torture, despite US and International laws prohibiting torture. Apparently, Yoo, a professor at the Boalt School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, was ignorant of US and international law. And so was the US Department of Justice (sic).

Notice that Rodriguez, “The Torturer of the Muslims,” doesn’t have to hide. He can go on national television, reveal his identity, and revel in his success in torturing and murdering Muslims. Rodriguez has no Secret Service protection and would be an easy mark for assassination by terrorists so capable as to have, allegedly, pulled off 9/11.

Another easy mark for assassination would be former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who staffed up the Pentagon with neoconservative warmongers such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who in turn concocted the false information used to justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Rumsfeld himself declared members of al Qaeda to be the most vicious and dangerous killers on earth. Yet Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Richard Perle, together with neoconservative media propagandists, such as William Kristol and Max Boot, have been walking around safe for years unmolested by terrorists seeking revenge or bringing retribution to those responsible for as many as 1,000,000 Muslim deaths.

Condi Rice, Colin Powell, who delivered the Speech of Lies to the UN inaugurating the invasion of Iraq, and Dick Cheney, whose minimal Secret Service protection could not withstand a determined assassination attempt, also enjoy lives unmolested by terrorists.

Remember the deck of cards that the Bush regime had with Iraqi faces? If terrorists had a similar deck, all of those named above would be “high value targets.” Yet, there has not been a single attempt on any one of them.

Strange, isn’t it, that none of the above are faced with a terrorist threat. Yet, the tough, macho Navy Seals who allegedly killed Osama bin Laden must have their identity kept hidden so that they don’t become terrorist targets. These American supermen, highly trained killers themselves, don’t dare show their faces, but Rodriguez, Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice can walk around unmolested. Indeed, the Seals’ lives are so endangered that President Obama gave up the enormous public relations political benefit of a White House ceremony with the heroic Navy Seals. Very strange behavior for a politician. A couple of weeks after the alleged bin Laden killing, the Seals unit, or most of it, was wiped out in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

If you were a Muslim terrorist seeking retribution for Washington’s crimes, would you try to smuggle aboard an airliner a bomb in your underwear or shoe in order to blow up people whose only responsibility for Washington’s war against Muslims is that they fell for Washington’s propaganda? If you wanted to blow up the innocent, wouldn’t you instead place your bomb in the middle of the mass of humanity waiting to clear airport security and take out TSA personnel along with passengers? Terrorists could coordinate their attacks, hitting a number of large airports across the US at the same minute. This would be real terror. Moreover, it would present TSA with an insolvable problem: how can people be screened before they are screened?

Or coordinated attacks on shopping malls and sports events?

Why should terrorists, if they exist, bother to kill people when it is easy to cause mayhem by not killing them? There are a large number of unguarded electric power substations. Entire regions of the country could be shut down. The simplest disruptive act would be to release large quantities of roofing nails in the midst of rush hour traffic in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. You get the picture: thousands and thousands of cars disabled with flat tires blocking the main arteries for days.

Before some reader accuses me of giving terrorists ideas, ask yourself if you really think people so clever as to have allegedly planned and carried out 9/11 couldn’t think of such simple tactics, plots that could be carried out without having to defeat security or kill innocent people?  My point isn’t what terrorists, if they exist, should do. The point is that the absence of easy-to-do acts of terrorism suggests that the terrorist threat is more hype than reality. Yet, we have an expensive, intrusive security apparatus that seems to have no real function except to exercise power over American citizens.

In place of real terrorists carrying out easy plots, we have “terrorist” plots dreamed up by FBI and CIA agents, who then recruit some hapless or demented dupes, bribing them with money and heroic images of themselves, and supplying them with the plot and fake explosives. These are called “sting operations,” but they are not. They are orchestrations by our own security agencies that produce fake terrorist plots that are then “foiled” by the security agencies that hatched the plots. Washington’s announcement is always: “The public was never in danger.” Some terrorist plot! We have never been endangered by one, but the airports have been on orange alert for 11.5 years.

The federal judiciary and brainwashed juries actually treat these concocted plots as real threats to American security despite the government’s announcements that the public was never in danger.

The announcements of the “foiled” plots keep the brainwashed public docile and amenable to intrusive searches, warrantless spying, the growth of an unaccountable police state, and endless wars.

The “War on Terror” is a hoax, one that has been successfully used to destroy the US Constitution and to complete the transformation of law from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of the state. By destroying habeas corpus, due process, and the presumption of innocence, the “War on Terror” has destroyed our security.