TBR News February 7, 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. February 7, 2017:  “There is no question that there is a real plot to destabilize the American government and force President Trump to resign. Here is a sampling of captive media headlines anyone can see on the internet today:

• Meet the men who could topple Donald Trump
• Why Trump wants to disempower institutions that protect the truth
• Fake news for liberals: misinformation starts to lean left under Trump
• Hillary Clinton First post-inauguration statement: ‘The future is female’
• Can’t make the protest? Here are eight small acts of resistance
• Even if you can’t attend every march against Donald Trump, Brexit or human rights abuses, you can still engage in the counter-revolution
• Trump’s pick for labor secretary admits to employing illegal immigrant
• Democrats question independence of Trump Supreme Court nomine
• Islamic State sees chance to revive fortunes in Trump presidency

None of these stories are spontaneous and the riots and threats to the life of the President, loudly and openly expressed, are the work of one man, someone known as the Puppet Master. This person hates Trump and Putin, supports massive immigration, was a significant factor in the Kiev rebellion, has a hand in almost every social protest against the government, hires professional agitators to riot, loot and burn and is sure that with their money behind them , are invulnerable. A Federal judge of our acquaintance reviewed a large file we were given from the German BND relating to the rigged social uproar, and sent us the following copy of a current Federal law:

 

18 U.S. Code § 2385 – Advocating overthrow of Government

1.U.S. Code › Title 18 › Part I › Chapter 115 › § 2385

Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or

Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or

Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

If two or more persons conspire to commit any offense named in this section, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

As used in this section, the terms “organizes” and “organize”, with respect to any society, group, or assembly of persons, include the recruiting of new members, the forming of new units, and the regrouping or expansion of existing clubs, classes, and other units of such society, group, or assembly of persons.

(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 808; July 24, 1956, ch. 678, § 2, 70 Stat. 623; Pub. L. 87–486, June 19, 1962, 76 Stat. 103; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(N), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)

 

Table of Contents

• Moral Supremacy and Mr. Putin
• Soros War Chest Funding Legal Battle Against Trump Administration
• Trump Is President, And Now The Left Justifies Political Violence
• Soros-backed group pays protestors to ‘fight against Trump’
• U.S. and Russian ministries must restore direct links: Russian diplomat
• SECRECY NEWS
• Fictions Fuel Resistance
• San Francisco Police Department Kicks FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force To The Curb
• Iraqi forces wage psychological war with jihadist corpses
• DoJ challenges ‘overbroad’ order suspending Trump’s travel ban, says US security at risk

 Moral Supremacy and Mr. Putin

February 7, 2017

by Patrick J. Buchanan,

AntiWar

Is Donald Trump to be allowed to craft a foreign policy based on the ideas on which he ran and won the presidency in 2016?

Our foreign policy elite’s answer appears to be a thunderous no.

Case in point: U.S. relations with Russia.

During the campaign Trump was clear. He would seek closer ties with Russia and cooperate with Vladimir Putin in smashing al-Qaida and ISIS terrorists in Syria, and leave Putin’s ally Bashar Assad alone.

With this diplomatic deal in mind, President Trump has resisted efforts to get him to call Putin a “thug” or a “murderer.”

Asked during his taped Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly whether he respected Putin, Trump said that, as a leader, yes.

O’Reilly pressed, “But he’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.”

To which Trump replied, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

While his reply was clumsy, Trump’s intent was commendable.

If he is to negotiate a modus vivendi with a nation with an arsenal of nuclear weapons sufficient to end life as we know it in the USA, probably not a good idea to start off by calling its leader a “killer.”

Mitch McConnell rushed to assure America he believes Putin is a “thug” and any suggestion of a moral equivalence between America and Russia is outrageous.

Apparently referring to a polonium poisoning of KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, Marco Rubio tweeted, “When has a Democratic political activist ever been poisoned by the GOP? Or vice versa?”

Yet, as we beat our chests in celebration of our own moral superiority over other nations and peoples, consider what Trump is trying to do here, and who is really behaving as a statesmen, and who is acting like an infantile and self-righteous prig.

When President Eisenhower invited Nikita Khrushchev to the United States, did Ike denounce him as the “Butcher of Budapest” for his massacre of the Hungarian patriots in 1956?

Did President Nixon, while negotiating his trip to Peking to end decades of hostility, speak the unvarnished truth about Mao Zedong – that he was a greater mass murderer than Stalin?

While Nixon was in Peking, Mao was conducting his infamous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that resulted in millions of deaths, a years-long pogrom that dwarfed the two-day Kristallnacht. Yet Mao’s crimes went unmentioned in Nixon’s toast to America and China starting a “long march” together.

John McCain calls Putin a KGB thug, “a murderer, and a killer.”

Yet, Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador in Budapest who engineered the slaughter of the Hungarian rebels with Russian tanks, became head of the KGB. And when he rose to general secretary of the Communist Party, Ronald Reagan wanted to talk to him, as he had wanted to talk to every Soviet leader.

Why? Because Reagan believed the truly moral thing he could do was negotiate to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

He finally met Gorbachev in 1985, when the USSR was occupying Afghanistan and slaughtering Afghan patriots.

The problem with some of our noisier exponents of “American exceptionalism” is that they lack Reagan’s moral maturity.

Undeniably, we were on God’s side in World War II and the Cold War. But were we ourselves without sin in those just struggles?

Was it not at least morally problematic what we did to Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki where hundreds of thousands of women and children were blasted and burned to death?

How many innocent Iraqis have perished in the 13 years of war we began, based on falsified or fake evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction?

In Russia, there have been murders of journalists and dissidents. Yes, and President Rodrigo Duterte, our Philippine ally, has apparently condoned the deaths of thousands of drug dealers and users since last summer.

The Philippine Catholic Church calls it “a reign of terror.”

Should we sever our treaty ties to the Duterte regime?

Have there been any extrajudicial killings in the Egypt of our ally Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi since he overthrew the elected government?

Has our Turkish ally, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, killed no innocents in his sweeping repression since last summer’s attempted coup?

Some of us remember a Cold War in which Gen. Augusto Pinochet dealt summarily with our common enemies in Chile, and when the Savak of our ally the Shah of Iran was not a 501(c)(3) organization.

Sen. Rubio notwithstanding, the CIA has not been a complete stranger to “wet” operations or “terminating with extreme prejudice.”

Was it not LBJ who said of the Kennedys, who had arranged multiple assassination attempts of Fidel Castro, that they had been “operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean”?

If Trump’s talking to Putin can help end the bloodshed in Ukraine or Syria, it would appear to be at least as ethical an act as pulpiteering about our moral superiority on the Sunday talk shows.

Soros War Chest Funding Legal Battle Against Trump Administration

Leftists and Islamists once again team up against America.

February 7, 2017

by Joseph Klein

FrontPage Magazine

The leftist multi-billionaire George Soros is the financier behind multiple progressive organizations including ACORN, Apollo Alliance, National Council of La Raza, Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Tides Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, People for the American Way, Media Matters, and Moveon.org. Among Soros’s leftwing causes is the eradication of national sovereignty in favor of open borders. “Insofar as there are collective interests that transcend state boundaries, the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions,” Soros said nearly 20 years ago.

Soros and his Open Society Foundations had lobbied the Obama administration to sharply increase the admission of refugees to a total of at least 100,000 annually. President Trump wants to cut that total back to 50,000 once the admission of refugees to the United States resumes. Through Soros’s front group, the Open Society Foundations, he is now bankrolling various progressive organizations that are challenging President Trump’s anti-terrorist immigration executive order in court.

The president’s executive order was in reality rather modest in scope. It temporarily suspended entry into the United States of non-U.S. residents from seven countries previously identified by the Obama administration as countries of “concern” because of their proneness to terrorism – Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen. The order also suspended for a period of time the entry of refugees. These measures did not constitute a permanent bar to refugees or visitors from the seven selected countries. Nor did they constitute an anti-Muslim bar. Out of the ten countries with the largest Muslim population, only one country – Iran – is on the executive order’s list of seven. Moreover, the suspension is not limited to Muslims. All people from those countries who are not legal U.S. residents are potentially affected. The executive order, in the interest of protecting national security, was intended simply to provide a period of review for relevant agencies to evaluate current vetting procedures and to propose and implement new procedures.

Leftists have no regard for the security and well-being of the American people. To the contrary, they have been busy filing lawsuits around the country in an attempt to thwart the president’s attempt to keep Americans safe from radical Islamic terrorists. And Soros is keeping the money train going.

“It shouldn’t surprise anyone that pressure groups funded by George Soros are litigating to keep U.S. ports-of-entry wide open to terrorists and other people who hate America,” Matthew Vadum, senior vice president of the Capital Research Center, told LifeZette. “Soros has said he wants to bring America down. Flooding the country with Muslim aliens who won’t assimilate is one way to do that.”

For example, the Soros organization has contributed at least $35.5 million to the American Civil Liberties Union, which was one of the first leftwing groups to represent plaintiffs in a challenge to the executive order. “President Trump’s war on equality is already taking a terrible human toll. This ban cannot be allowed to continue,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.

Jamil Dakwar, Director, ACLU Human Rights Program, wrote an article originally appearing in the Qatar government-owned Al-Jazeera, which made the baseless charge that “President Trump’s un-American and unconstitutional action doesn’t just violate the Refugee Convention – it flies in the face of other sources of international law that bind us.” It is the ACLU which is un-American, financed by an ungrateful émigré to the United States who is funding his adopted country’s radical transformation into his dream of a global, borderless society.

The International Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center and the National Immigration Law Center, also Soros donees, have participated in the litigation. Taryn Higashi, executive director of the Center’s International Refugee Assistance Project, is an Advisory Board Member of the Open Society Foundation’s International Migration Initiative.

“The International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) at the Urban Justice Center is outraged at the executive order signed by President Trump that suspends all refugee resettlement for 120 days, bans refugees from Syria indefinitely, and reduces the number of refugees to be resettled this Fiscal Year to 50,000,” the progressive advocacy group stated in a press release. “Denying thousands of the most persecuted refugees the chance to reach safety is an irresponsible and dangerous move that undermines American values and imperils our foreign relations and national security.”

This is the kind of hysteria the left traffics in. Why didn’t these bleeding hearts cry out when only a very tiny percentage of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States by the Obama administration were the truly persecuted religious minorities who were the victims of genocide? These religious minorities included Christians and Yazidis, whom were virtually ignored by the Obama administration.

Leftists are instead allying themselves with the Muslim Brotherhood-tied Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), who falsely labeled President Trump’s executive order the “Muslim Exclusion Order” in a lawsuit CAIR filed on behalf of a number of radical Islamists. It won’t be the first time that CAIR has teamed up with a Soros-funded organization. For example, representatives from CAIR, the George Soros-funded New America Foundation and Hamas attended an Al-Jazeera Forum in Doha, Qatar in 2011.

In addition to the Soros-funded progressive groups challenging President Trump’s executive order, the Democratic attorneys general of Washington and Minnesota sued to halt its implementation.  “Attorneys in my office were working around the clock for six days to make this happen,” Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson said on CNN. With the taxpayers in Washington State paying all the legal costs, the attorney general did not need a handout from Soros to fund his pet project. For now, his gambit is succeeding, as a federal district court judge in Seattle, Washington took it upon himself to at least temporarily block the implementation of the executive order nationwide. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is reviewing the Department of Justice’s request to immediately reverse what Judge James L. Robart had done and restore President Trump’s executive order.

Once again, the left and radical Islamists have joined forces to use open borders and the Islamophobia canard as rallying cries against the country they both despise. What rankles them the most is that President Trump will not be cowered into surrendering his resolve to protect the American people.

Trump Is President, And Now The Left Justifies Political Violence

January 23, 2017

by Scott Greer

the dailycaller

Women around the world put on their pussy hats and marched around this weekend to tell Donald Trump to keep his tiny hands away from their genitalia.

The non-violent Women’s March drew in hundreds of thousands of participants in America alone and hyped as a major world-historical event by the press, in spite of its lack of a coherent message excpet for “we hate Trump.” Many saw it as a sign of the coming age of progressive activism that will ultimately bring down Trump.

However, other left-wing demonstrations may prove to be better indicators of what’s to come in Trump’s America than the pink hat ladies walking around with ridiculous signs. That’s the prospect of left-wing political violence becoming both common and morally justified in the United States.

During Trump’s inauguration Friday, anarchists ran wild in downtown D.C., smashing store front windows and setting trashcans and a limo on fire. These actions were roundly condemned by several liberals and most of the Left was in agreement that the destruction was not to be tolerated. But there was one violent act of the black bloc anarchists liberals were ecstatic over

White nationalist and alt-right coiner Richard Spencer was giving a TV interview right near the chaos unfolding in D.C. on Friday. Right in the middle of it, an anarchist punched him in the face, and the the video of it became a viral sensation.

The respectable Left couldn’t get enough of it.

The euphoria over Spencer’s punch prompted The New York Times to publish an article entitled, “Attack on Alt-Right Leader Has Internet Asking: Is It O.K. to Punch a Nazi?” The piece admitted “[t]here was little substantive debate online about the ethics of punching Mr. Spencer,” because it all occurred on Twitter. People, of course, answered in the affirmative on Twitter that it is perfectly right to punch a Nazi in response to the article.

A more in-depth argument for why it’s okay to punch fascists came from British comic book writer Warren Ellis. Ellis believes it is always correct to punch Nazis — and you shouldn’t just stop there.

“[Nazis] lost the right to not be punched in the face when they started spouting genocidal ideologies that in living memory killed millions upon millions of people. And anyone who stands up and respectfully applauds their perfect right to say these things should probably also be punched, because they are clearly surplus to human requirements,” Ellis wrote in his newsletter.

That argument was widely praised on social media, even though it expanded who you should punch to basically anyone who stands up for free speech. Not surprising for a comic book guy to have such a childish view, but it is for respectable liberals who tweeted out their support of it.

The Nation, a prominent left-wing outlet, published a breathless paean to the anarchists who caused havoc downtown and assaulted Spencer. The article offered another defense of political violence against right-wing political opponents because it can amount to a glorious act of “resistance.”

The problem with all this cheering of violence towards a political opponent is that gives encouragement to any individual who wants to attack anyone they see as a “Nazi” to do so. There’s already an example of this mentality going very wrong.

Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos spoke at the University of Washington last weekend amid tumultuous protests at his presence. Yiannopoulos is frequently called an alt-right nationalist by mainstream publications and liberals, even though he is certainly not one

Outside of his event, a man was shot in the middle of the raucous anti-Milo demonstration. But no Milo supporters were involved in the altercation.

The person shot was actually an anti-fascist protester, and the non-white shooter attacked him because he thought his victim was a Nazi. The man who suffered a life-threatening gunshot wound voted for Bernie Sanders, has an anti-Nazi tattoo and was at the event to express his disgust for Yiannopoulos.

However, that evidence appears to have been discarded by police who decided to not press charges against the shooter because he claimed the man he shot was a “white supremacist.”

This shows the dangerous slippery slope you embark upon when you say it’s morally justifiable to attack Nazis. Considering the pervasive arguments that Trump, his advisers and even all of his supporters are fascists, this opens up the possibility that it’s perfectly fine to assault anyone on the political Right.

Anti-Trump violence was justified on similar grounds when the future president held rallies that were disrupted by riots and attacks on his supporters.

Since calling anyone you disagree a Nazi is very common in our political discourse, who would be subject to attack could be endless. Hell, if you really agree Jonah Goldberg’s famous book “Liberal Fascism,” conservatives could justify their attacks on liberals because they’re the “real Nazis.”

But, of course, very few people would defend a conservative doing such a thing because the institutions that increasingly determine what’s morally good — the media, entertainment, academia, even several churches — in our society are dominated by the Left. Everyone would condemn the Trump supporter who would punch a liberal in the face because he thought he was a Nazi.

Not so much if it was the other way around, as we’ve seen with last weekend’s events.

When the Trump administration starts to implement its most controversial policies — such as increasing the number of deportations of illegal immigrants — it’s likely that the demonstrations against such actions will resemble the violence of the anarchists rather than that of the pussy hat brigades.

And instead of smashing the windows of progressive-friendly businesses like Starbucks, the leftists could direct their energy towards hunting down anyone they deem a “Nazi.”

That’s a great way of turning America into the Weimarian nightmare the Left dreads to see again.

Soros-backed group pays protestors to ‘fight against Trump’

Attractive paycheck looks good to college students

February 7,2017

by Caleb Stephen –

intellhub

Any “broke-as-a-joke” radical leftist college student would happily snap up the offer to make quick cash by protesting something that hurts their feelings. And what better way to earn a few bucks while protesting the democratic election of Donald Trump?

One organization’s doing just that and the paycheck sure looks attractive.

The nefarious group, which claims to be the “largest private grassroots support organization in the United States,” posted an ad on the classifieds website Backpage.com less than a week ago.

“We pay people already politically motivated to fight for the things they believe. You were going to take action anyways, why not do so with us!” the ad says.

“We are currently seeking operatives to help send a strong message at upcoming inauguration protests.”

The short blurb also requires participants – whom they call “operatives” – to attend an in-person workshop and sign the organization’s “standard non-disclosure” agreement.

“As a Demand Protest operative, you will receive a monthly retainer of $2,500 on top of our standard per-event pay of $50/hr, as long as you participate in at least 6 events a year.”

“We are extremely flexible and can work with almost any existing work schedule. Full-time operatives receive health, vision and dental insurance for families, flexible vacations, and paid trainings. Travel expenses are always paid.”

“All operatives have access to our 24/7 phone helpdesk in addition to in-person support at events.” The phone number listed is a San Francisco number.

Interested individuals are then directed to a recruitment page on the Demand Protest website in order to apply.

4Chan users say Demand Protest is linked to elite billionaire globalist George Soros, who is notorious for funding radical left-wing disruption groups such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, but there is no way of knowing from the limited information on their website.

However, it should be noted that so-called “grassroots” groups are almost never funded out of the pockets of broke SJW college student members. Paid and trained activists – better described as “operatives” – are almost always used.

“We are strategists mobilizing millennials across the globe with seeded audiences and desirable messages. With absolute discretion a top priority, our operatives create convincing scenes that become the building blocks of massive movements. When you need the appearance of outrage, we are able to deliver it at scale while keeping your reputation intact,” the ‘About’ section of the website says.

This startling revelation comes in the wake of liberal TV political pundit and film director Michael Moore’s call for “100 days of resistance” against Trump as well as leaked plans of mass disruptions and protests of the presidential inauguration on January 20th. Such disruptive activities include the Women’s March on Washington, a chemical attack plot at the National Press Club and the crashing of celebratory parties held by Trump supporters.

 

SECRECY NEWS

From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2017, Issue No. 10

February 7, 2017

WHAT IS MANUFACTURING?, AND MORE FROM CRS

“What is Manufacturing?” is not the title of a lost work of Heidegger, but of a new report from the Congressional Research Service. The CRS report delves into the shifting meaning of “manufacturing” and the implications for economic analysis.

“Changes in the structure of manufacturing make it difficult to design government policies that support manufacturing-related value added and employment in the United States. Many federal laws adopted with the goal of supporting manufacturing do not take into account the increasingly blurred lines between manufacturing and other types of economic activity,” the report said.

See What Is Manufacturing? Why Does the Definition Matter?, February 6, 2017.

Other noteworthy new and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following.

Gun Control, Mental Incompetency, and Social Security Administration Final Rule, February 2, 2017

Army Corps Easement Process and Dakota Access Pipeline Easement Status, CRS Insight, February 2, 2017

EPA’s and BLM’s Methane Rules, CRS Insight, February 3, 2017

Supreme Court Appointment Process: President’s Selection of a Nominee, updated February 6, 2017

The Islamic State and U.S. Policy, updated February 2, 2017

Conventional Prompt Global Strike and Long-Range Ballistic Missiles: Background and Issues, updated February 3, 2017

Navy Force Structure and Shipbuilding Plans: Background and Issues for Congress, updated February 2, 2017

The United States Withdraws from the TPP, CRS Insight, February 3, 2017

“El Chapo” Guzmán’s Extradition: What’s Next for U.S.-Mexican Security Cooperation?, CRS Insight, updated February 3, 2017

Cabo Verde: Background and U.S. Relations, February 6, 2017

Cuba Sanctions: Legislative Restrictions Limiting the Normalization of Relations, updated February 3, 2017

The Pacific Islands: Policy Issues, February 2, 2017

Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), February 3, 2017

Why Did March 2016 U.N. Sanctions Not Curb China’s Imports of Coal from North Korea?, CRS Insight, February 3, 2017

 

U.S. and Russian ministries must restore direct links: Russian diplomat

February 6, 2017

Reuters

One of Russia’s top diplomats said on Monday that government ministries in the United States and Russia should restore direct communications channels with each other as part of a first step to rebuild bilateral ties.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have both said they would like to try to mend U.S.-Russia relations that slid to a post-Cold War low after Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea.

Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, told the Moscow-based Security Index Journal in an interview published on Monday that restoring inter-ministerial and inter-agency ties between the two countries was now essential.

“A reset in contacts between ministries and agencies in one form or another has long been needed,” said Ryabkov, saying contacts had been frozen since 2014.

Ryabkov, in the same interview, said a Russian proposal to discuss cyber security issues at an inter-agency level with the United States was still on the table.

U.S. intelligence agencies accused Moscow of sponsoring computer hackers to try to influence last year’s U.S. election in Trump’s favor, allegations Russia denies.

Ryabkov said Moscow had many questions on cyber security for U.S. officials, citing hacker attacks on Russian web sites.

He also dismissed the idea of Moscow agreeing to make nuclear arms cuts in exchange for sanctions relief.

Trump, in a newspaper interview last month, floated the possibility that U.S. sanctions on Russia imposed over Crimea could be lifted as part of a deal involving nuclear cuts.

Ryabkov said the idea was “a non-starter.”

“We don’t discuss the sanctions and won’t discuss them,” said Ryabkov.

(Reporting by Denis Pinchuk; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

Fictions Fuel Resistance

February 7, 2017

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

In an age when a growing dissatisfaction with systems of governance, the public has become more and more interested in conspiracy theories that purport to expose various misdeeds of governance and its various organs and purported accomplices and its various organs and accomplices.

We have seen an enormous body of revisionist literature arise, dealing with the assassination of President Kennedy, and as that topic slid down from public interest, another issue rose to prominence speculation and fictive writing. This was the September 11, 2001 attack by Saudi terrorists on various targets in the United State.

Invented stories about “robot aircraft,”  “’Nano thermite’ controlled explosions,” and other theories, many verging on the lunatic, sprang up and proliferated. While most of these entertainments were the product of inventive minds and eagerly accepted by a public that felt betrayed by their government and the upper levels of the national economic structure, a number of stories were very obviously clever insertions of deliberate disinformation from the very same power elite.

One of the recurring themes of the conspiracy claques is that of the existence of a secret society, or organization, that is somehow able to exert powerful but behind-the-scenes control over all aspects of governance. One of the favorites has been the Illuminati. This was originally a German association, formed in 1776 by one Adam Weishaupt, a Freemason and law professor at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria.

The original Illuminati, then called the Order of Perfectibilists, and became a secret society dedicated to the overthrow of both established governments and religions, specifically the Catholics. Eventually, Weishaubt made enough noise that the Bavarian Elector, Karl Theodor, outlawed them and forced Weishaupt to move to Gotha where he finished his life by writing books and abstaining from anti-establishment activities.

Weishaupt’s disbanded organization has become the inspiration for several generations of conspiracy inventors and because Weishaupt spoke of a single world government, ruled by men of honor and intellect (obviously impossible in any age), the conspiracy people have talked about a New World Order which might be satisfying and even desired but would be impossible of execution. To this mythic entity is ascribed all manner of manipulations and plottings

In addition to the Illuminati, fiction theorists have also targeted the Rothschild banking house and the Bilderburger banker’s association as being the controlling forces behind all the governments of the world. In the United States, one can add the Council on Foreign Relations, the fraternal Skull and Bones society, the Federal Reserve and a legion of quite harmless associations to the conspiracy mix.

But in the present propagandized “grasss-roots” movements designed to cripple the Trump presidency and, even more disturbing, loosing violence upon the domestic scene to further the anti-Trump movement, there is a genuine secret leadership at work to thoroughly polarize the domestic scene. But when one realizes that “secret emails” manipulating the paid rioters are not secret and are being read at the highest levels, the Puppet Master would do well to pack his bags and move to a safer area before men in suits knock on his door; bright and shiny handcuffs evident.

San Francisco Police Department Kicks FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force To The Curb

February 7, 2017

TechDirt

In the wake of President Trump’s travel ban, the San Francisco Police Department has offered up an unprecedented response: it’s breaking up with the FBI.

On Wednesday, San Francisco officers took a bold stance against Trump’s new immigration laws. In response to Trump’s Muslim ban, they are cutting ties between the police department and an FBI task force.

The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) has worked with the FBI on a Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) since 2007, with the purpose of investigating terrorism threats, collecting intel, and making arrests.

Generally speaking, federal partnerships are forever… especially in Forever Wars. Local law enforcement agencies have been working side-by-side with federal agencies since the Drug War began. The same goes for the War on Terror. Wars keep government agencies in good health, awash in perpetual funding and repurposed military gear. Local governments are seldom interested in ending these lucrative arrangements, whether or not the underlying activity is productive.

But San Francisco already sees its supply of federal funding drying up. President Trump has made it clear he’ll cut off this flow to cities that care more about immigrants than he does. So, there’s some gamemanship in this move — one that sends a message to Trump while expressing some resignation to the eventual fiscal punishment to come. The city of Austin, Texas is doing the same thing, but fighting the battle on two fronts, as its decision to call itself a “sanctuary city” has also earned it the displeasure of the state’s governor.

But the SFPD’s rejection of the FBI’s “assistance” in the War on Terror suggests a couple of things — neither of them complimentary — about the federal agency’s usefulness in this “war.”

The first is explained in the Think Progress article.

[T]he SFPD will no longer work with the JTTF on the grounds that the federal agency will likely increase efforts to surveil Muslims, following Trump’s recent executive order to prevent Muslims from entering the county.

The other part is implied. By telling the feds to beat it, the SFPD is suggesting the FBI isn’t doing much to acutally make San Francisco safer. The Joint Terrorism Task Force seems to be more about expanding surveillance and obtaining perpetual funding than preventing terrorist attacks or uncovering their conspiracies.

This much can be ascertained by the FBI’s counter-terrorism efforts to date. For the most part, the FBI’s terrorism busts have relied heavily on FBI informants being the brains, muscle, and wallet behind supposed future acts of terrorism. Undercover agents have pushed some of the weakest humans in the nation towards acts of violence — acts which would likely never have materialized on their own. The FBI has poked and prodded easily-influenced people — some elderly, some with mental problems — into professing their support for [Current Top Terrorist Organization], helped them plan trips to [Top Terrorist-Associated Foreign Country], and purchased everything from duct tape to latex gloves to weapons for would-be terrorists that seemingly would have difficulty opening a savings account, much less coordinating an act of terrorism.

The SFPD feels it will be fine without the FBI’s dubious assistance, which appears to be mostly limited to trampling civil liberties and ever-expanding surveillance with minimal oversight. The city can apparently handle the terrorism threat without federal intervention — suggesting it’s not much of a threat… and the FBI isn’t much of a counter-terrorism agency.

What the city’s rejection says about President Trump’s orders and directives is pretty damning. What it says about the FBI and its counter-terrorism efforts is even worse.

 Iraqi forces wage psychological war with jihadist corpses

February 6, 2017

by Michael Georgy

Reuters

MOSUL, Iraq-The flyblown corpses of Islamic State militants have been rotting along a main street in north Mosul for two weeks, a health risk for passersby. Suicide bombers’ belts beside the fighters can still explode, killing anyone nearby.

But the Iraqi army has no intention of burying the jihadists and hopes as many people as possible will get a good look at their blackened bodies, torn apart by bombs and bullets.

As Iraqi forces prepare to expand their offensive against Islamic State from east to west Mosul, they want to stamp out any sympathy that residents may have for the group, which won instant support when it seized the vast city in 2014.

“We will leave the terrorists there,” said Ibrahim Mohamed, a soldier who was standing near three dead jihadists, ignoring the stench.

His cousin suffered death by electrocution at the hands of jihadists during Islamic State’s harsh rule of Mosul because he was a policeman.

“The message is clear to Iraqis, to keep them from joining or supporting Daesh (Islamic State). This will be your fate. The Iraqi army will finish you off,” he said.

A suicide bomber’s belt, with its detonation pin still in place, lay in the street a few feet away, near some clothing once worn by a militant.

The Iraqi army has come a long way since it collapsed in the face of Islamic State’s lightning advance into northern Iraq. After retaking half of Mosul in three months of fighting, Iraqi forces are poised to enter the western side of the city.

Victory there would mean the end of Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, though Iraqi officials expect the group to fight on as insurgents in Iraq and inspire attacks in the West.

PSYCHOLOGICAL WEAPON

The corpses are left on view as a psychological weapon to deter Islamic State sleeper cells, which Iraqi officials say are highly effective and distributed across the country.

Islamic State has executed thousands of Iraqi soldiers and policemen, and their comrades are eager for revenge.

“We leave them in the street like that so the dogs eat them,” said soldier Asaad Hussein. “We also want the citizens to know there is a price for supporting terrorists.”

Sunni Mosul had accused the Shi’ite-led Baghdad government and army of widespread abuses, which they deny.

Islamic State exploited that resentment but started losing popularity after it imposed its radical version of Islam and shot or beheaded anyone deemed an enemy.

Iraqi citizens don’t seem to mind the gory sight of the bodies, with people walking past them every day as Mosul begins the work of rebuilding entire neighborhoods pulverized by Islamic State car bombs and U.S.-led air strikes.

Labourer Youssef Salim observed the corpses, still with army boots on their feet, and paused to reflect on life under Islamic State, which has lost ground in Iraq and other Arab countries. He said the bodies should not be moved.

“Do you know what smoking one, just one cigarette meant?” he asked. “Twenty-five lashes in a public square where people were forced to watch you suffer.

“If your beard length did not meet their requirements, that was a month in jail and 100 lashes in public.”

SPREADING FEAR

The militants are no longer in charge in east Mosul but they are still very capable of spreading fear.

Two men approached a soldier to complain that there were suspicious wires that may be attached to a bomb on a door at the factory where they work.

Minutes later, an increasingly familiar scene unfolded. Soldiers looked up and spotted a drone aircraft operated by Islamic State militants, located about 600 meters away across the Tigris River, which bisects Mosul.

Iraqi forces opened fired with their assault rifles, hoping to blast the small aircraft – an Islamic State weapon of choice – out of the sky before it could drop a bomb.

A few streets away, a group of young boys walked towards three more Islamic State corpses.

“The bodies should stay. Daesh killed lots of people so why should they be buried,” said Salem Jamil, 13, who was carrying a plastic bag filled with old electric wiring he hopes to sell.

But a man who approached said the bodies should be buried because that is everyone’s right.

The three militants were shot when they tried to sneak through some trees to kill soldiers.

One of the soldiers stood proudly over the dead men, including one still wearing a suicide belt. He smiled and pointed to a cigarette stuffed in one of the jihadist’s nostrils.

“We put it there because of the terrible things they did to Iraqis,” said the soldier, Asaad Najif. “The fate of any terrorist is clear. We will find you and kill you.”

(Editing by Giles Elgood)

 DoJ challenges ‘overbroad’ order suspending Trump’s travel ban, says US security at risk

February 7, 2017

RT

As the political backlash grows over President Trump’s travel ban, the US Department of Justice is set to face off with its opponents in a federal appeals court. Its lawyers will argue that suspending the executive order puts national security at risk.

“The Executive Order is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority over the entry of aliens into the United States and the admission of refugees,” reads the official 15-page argument filed by the DoJ on Monday.

A hearing in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco set for late Tuesday is to determine the legitimacy of the travel ban, after a federal judge angered the White House by blocking the controversial move nationwide last week. The Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to overturn the block over the weekend.

The DoJ says the president was “relying on his express statutory authority to suspend entry of any class of aliens to protect the national interest,” while maintaining that the order was “neutral with respect to religion.”

The administration’s official defense comes as almost 100 US firms have thrown their support behind a lawsuit that criticizes the executive order for its “significant departure from the principles of fairness and predictability” inherent in the US immigration system. The lawsuit was filed with a San Francisco-based appeals court by several US States.

In its filing with the Ninth Circuit appeals court, the DoJ argues that, “even if some relief were appropriate, the court’s sweeping nationwide injunction is vastly overbroad, extending far beyond the State’s legal claims to encompass numerous applications of the Order that the State does not even attempt to argue are unlawful.”

The DoJ lawyers warned against taking “the extraordinary step of second-guessing a formal national-security judgment made by the President himself pursuant to broad grants of statutory authority.”

The case could still go to the Supreme Court, regardless of the appeals court’s decision.

Late on Monday, Trump tweeted: “The threat from radical Islamic terrorism is very real, just look at what is happening in Europe and the Middle-East. Courts must act fast!”

Currently in his third week in office, the new US president has already made waves by making a series of highly controversial decisions that have split the nation in two. The move in question imposes a 90-day travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, including Syria, Iraq and Libya, as well as a 120-day refugee settlement ban, and a blanket ban on all Syrian refugees.

After the order was issued on January 25, great confusion ensued at the border and massive protests were staged at airports across the nation.

However, polls suggest that Americans are split almost down the middle on the matter. While former Secretaries of State John Kerry, Madeleine Albright and 10 other national security and foreign policy officials joined the chorus of discontent, pollsters emerged with data showing that nearly half of Americans (45 percent) are in favor of the travel ban, while 51 percent are against.

However, Trump has made the history books by securing the lowest approval rating of any US President in office for such a short time, according to a Gallup poll, which put him at 42 percent after his first two weeks in office.