TBR News July 10, 2016

Jul 10 2016

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. July 9, 2016: “Returning from a long trip, we find our mailbox filled with interesting comments and several important contributions. The attached document is the most outstanding one. It runs to a total of 75 pages and we are publishing it in sections. A number of readers have expressed a desire to communicate with Dr. Harry von Johnston and we had someone search the Internet for a contact point. We were given a telephone number and told that this was a contact point and that it was found on the Internet. We have never met Dr. von Johnston and his postings are sent in via a European site. Here is the number: 706 782-4398. Read on!

Domestic Military Control in the United States

An important 2016 position paper

via Harry von Johnston, PhD

What is the role of the military?

While military forces may be the most visible sign of U.S. military involvement, especially in the early phases of an American domestic counterinsurgency, they should  play a supporting role to the political and economic initiatives designed to enhance the effectiveness legitimacy, and authority, of the sitting government.

Establishing a secure environment for these initiatives is normally a primary objective of military forces and can take many forms.

This can be a minimal requirement to support pro-sitting government supporters with advisors and equipment or it can mean a large scale- commitment of U.S. forces to carry out the preponderance of operations.

In addition to providing a secure environment, U.S. military forces may also be called upon to support infrastructure development, provide health services, conduct police functions, or directly target insurgent cells.

Given the wide range of potential military contributions, it is imperative that all military personnel understand how their actions and decisions must support the overall campaign design to de-legitimize the domestic insurgency in the eyes of the population. Significantly, successful counterinsurgencies are normally measured in years or even decades and require a unity of effort across the spectrum of U.S. agencies.

ARMY SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES

Within a joint force, ARSOF assets (less PSYOP and CA units) are ordinarily attached to and under OPCON of a designated joint special operations task force (JSOTF) commander.

The special operations command and control element (SOCCE) assists the JSOTF commander in fulfilling the supporting or supported commander responsibilities. A SOCCE is based on a special forces operational detachment-B and is augmented with a special communications package and personnel as required. It may include a ranger liaison officer, PSYOP and CA representatives, and special operations aviation personnel. The SOCCE is normally collocated at corps level and above, with smaller liaison teams operating at division level and below. The supported unit provides the SOCCE administrative and logistic support.

The SOCCE is the focal point for ARSOF coordination and synchronization with conventional forces. At corps level, the SOCCE coordinates with the corps operations center, fire support element, deep operations coordination cell, and battlefield coordination detachment to deconflict targets and operations. It provides ARSOF locations through personal coordination and provides overlays and other friendly order of battle data to the fire support element and battlefield coordination detachment. The SOCCE can exercise C2 of designated ARSOF units when the JSOTF commander determines the need.

………..

Internet usage for domestic control purposes

1 Internet access can be controlled or its use directed according to the server configuration, thus creating an excellent disinformation weapon.  In previous times, a national media report that was deemed to be offensive or problematical to the government could be censored, or removed at governmental request. Now, however, the government cannot control the present Internet in the same manner in which it has previously controlled the public media. The Internet permits uncensored and unfiltered versions of events, personalities and actions to be disseminated worldwide in seconds and the so-called “blogs,” chat rooms and websites are almost completely uncontrolled and uncontrollable. This unfortunate situation permits versions of events to find a far wider and far more instantaneous audience than the standard print and, to a lesser degree, the television mediums ever could.

  1. The Internet can be used to send coded messages that cannot be interdicted by any government or law-enforcement agency. If man has devised a code or protection program that is supposed to be unbreakable, it is axiomatic that another man can break it. Even the DoD’s algorithmic field codes were easily broken by the Russian GRU during the initial stages of the Iraqi war and it is now known that CIA/USIA codes were also broken, allowing hostile entities to read Top Secret messages. In unfortunately many cases, individual computer experts are more skilled than their counterparts in the government and while, indeed, their encryptions can be broken, they can only be done so by exerting a great deal of effort and when this happens, new encryptions and firewalls can be almost instantly reerected.

3.The Internet can be utilized to steal and disseminate highly damaging, sensitive government or business data. Although highly sensitive official websites are routinely put under strict control, it seems that intruders always seem to succeed in breaking into them. Once this has happened, highly sensitive, and even damaging, information can, and has, been removed and put out on the Internet without any form of control

4.The Internet permits anti-government groups or individuals with few resources to offset the efforts of far larger, and far better funded, government and its national media sources. This is known as the ‘David and Goliath’ syndrome and is a subject of constant concern to all government agencies. Hitherto secure systems can be broken into, information can be extracted or the site (s) can be infected with malicious viruses and destroyed. All it takes to do this is a relatively inexpensive computer, programs that unfortunately are available to individuals seeking them. The best and most effective manner to deal with this kind of threat is the dummy site, designed to lure potential dissidents into joining with it. Skillful questioning of new members has been known to develop important leads to be followed up by conventional law enforcement methods.

5.The Internet can be used to create serious disruptions of governmental agencies and the business communities. It is known that certain dissidents, either as individuals or as groups, have developed devastating computer viruses. These viruses, which are capable of destroying large banks of computer information, both governmental or business. These rumors are very persistent and it is strongly believed that they exist as a dormant entity that can lie concealed in a target system until activated by some kind of a trigger mechanism.

  1. The Internet can serve as an excellent tool for organizing groups of anti-government individuals. (Redacted)
  2. The Internet can be used to expose government actions and military operations in advance of said actions. The immense proliferation of Internet sites has made it possible for adverse elements to break into hitherto secure systems, extract highly sensitive information and either supply it to foreign intelligence agencies such as the Russian SVR or the Israeli Mossad or simply to either publish it or mail it out. A discussion of foreign-based official U.S. computer hacking can be found elsewhere and this study deals solely with ad hoc domestic dissidents.
  3. The Internet is capable of hiding the identities of those launching attacks on the actions and personnel of various government agencies. (Redacted)

9.The Internet can materially assist an underfunded, anti-government group to raise money for continued operations. The use of such firms as PayPal facilitate the relatively secure transfer of money. Again, although it is possible to pressure such firms officially, if one agrees to cooperate, it is only a matter of time that this information will be leaked. We have once had excellent cooperation from SBC, ATT and AOL in conducting overview of millions of system users but lawsuits and Internet activists have published this information, rendering this valuable cooperation null and void.

10.The Internet can be utilized to locate and publicize the personnel of government agencies. It is routine practice in the CIA to have the DoS Passport Division issue official U.S. passports to our operatives working outside the country in names other than their own. The discovery of the real names of the passport holders could result in this material being maliciously posted on the Internet and this could not only subject the agent to serious compromise in the country they are operating in but can also subject them to local exposure and often contempt and harassment.The Internet is capable of limiting the risk of identification of the members of anti-government groups. The FBI, which is responsible for overview and action against counter-terrorism inside the United States. With the advent of the Internet, identification and penetration of anti-government groups has proven to be nearly impossible. The main cause of this failure is due almost entirely to the Internet which has proven a haven for dissidents of all kinds. Given that all domestic telephone calls and all Internet email is readily available to various domestic law enforcement agencies, it is still a monumental task to track and identify possible activists and other anti-government individuals or groups. We have assisted in setting up dummy anti-government sites, peopled them with professionals and provided them with almost-believable information to post for the purpose of establishing importance and also in disseminating disinformation. Persons viewing these sites can readily be identified and tracked, Further, we have an ongoing relationship with several information sites, such as Google, and whenever any viewer seeks information on subjects we deem as potentially negative, this information is automatically forwarded to the concerned agency.

  1. The Internet, while impossible to control, is also an excellent recruiting ground for sympathetic or easily-convinced “bloggers” who will quickly disseminate official dissemination for pay or public acclaim. It is invaluable to distract the public from questioning various governmental actions, both domestic and foreign. For this reason, our organization, and others, have “disinformation” centers that prepare information of a sensational nature which is then released to paid sources who, in turn, disseminate it onto the Internet. The purpose of this is to create a cloaking movement that will point the curious into innocuous areas. As a case in point, it was imperative to prevent the public sector from looking too deeply into the origins of the 9/11 attacks. To prevent exposure of the actions of members of the top levels of government in this attack, many stories were released, over a long period, to the public through wholly-controlled sites. Claims of devious plots, mystery methodologies, and often laughable conclusions have proven to be extraordinarily effective in constructive diversion. The collapse of the WTC buildings have been attributed to Thermite bombs, clouds of plasmoid gas and other nonsense but a very gullible American public has easily swallowed all of the fictions. As another example, the DoD has always under-declared its casualty rates in Iraq and Afghanistan because a full accounting could easily lead to public discomfiture and resulting action.

13.The Internet can be utilized to create an atmosphere of fear or of compliancy in furtherance of official policy. This is a particular ploy that worked very effectively during the two Bush administrations. A constant, on-going threat of vague “terrorist” actions inside the United States was material in gaining, and keeping, public support for the actions of the aforesaid administration. However, it must be noted, that threats must occasionally be proven to be true or too many “duds” tend to dull the public sense and, if continued, will lead to disillusion and anger. ……..

. (to be continued)

The Müller Washington Journals   1948-1951

At the beginning of December, 1948, a German national arrived in Washington, D.C. to take up an important position with the newly-formed CIA. He was a specialist on almost every aspect of Soviet intelligence and had actively fought them, both in his native Bavaria where he was head of the political police in Munich and later in Berlin as head of Amt IV of the State Security Office, also known as the Gestapo.

His name was Heinrich Müller.

Even as a young man, Heini Müller had kept daily journals of his activities, journals that covered his military service as a pilot in the Imperial German air arm and an apprentice policeman in Munich. He continued these journals throughout the war and while employed by the top CIA leadership in Washington, continued his daily notations.

This work is a translation of his complete journals from December of 1948 through September of 1951.

When Heinrich Müller was hired by the CIA¹s station chief in Bern, Switzerland, James Kronthal in 1948, he had misgivings about working for his former enemies but pragmatism and the lure of large amounts of money won him over to what he considered to be merely an extension of his life-work against the agents of the Comintern. What he discovered after living and working in official Washington for four years was that the nation¹s capital was, in truth, what he once humorously claimed sounded like a cross between a zoo and a lunatic asylum. His journals, in addition to personal letters, various reports and other personal material, give a very clear, but not particularly flattering, view of the inmates of both the zoo and the asylum.

Müller moved, albeit very carefully, in the rarefied atmosphere of senior policy personnel, military leaders, heads of various intelligence agencies and the White House itself. He was a very observant, quick-witted person who took copious notes of what he saw. This was not a departure from his earlier habits because Heinrich Müller had always kept a journal, even when he was a lowly Bavarian police officer, and his comments about personalities and events in the Third Reich are just as pungent and entertaining as the ones he made while in America.

The reason for publishing this phase of his eventful life is that so many agencies in the United States and their supporters do not want to believe that a man of Müller¹s position could ever have been employed by their country in general or their agency in specific.

 

Monday, 18. June, 1951

I have dug out some material for Hoover on the people I listed recently. Three of them are in my files. I don’t know what good this will do because the American courts keep dismissing the charges against these assholes but one tries.

I came across a most interesting file this morning and will try to abstract some of it for my records. It seems that in 1948 when the Jews were desperately attempting to get Truman to recognize their state in Palestine, a politician (Teddy Kolleck, later mayor of Jerusalem, ed.) offered to have the Zionist world intelligence organ work for the Americans and British in return for recognition! There was a very interesting set of lists in the file setting forth the extent of this world intelligence agency. They are located today in Russia, England, Sweden, Holland, France, Italy, of course the Near East and also in the United States! All the information they gather goes straight to Israel and, from what I find in the notes, also most of it straight to Moscow (except for material on Russia which does not go anywhere.) This offer was turned down immediately by both Truman, Military Intelligence and the CIA because all of them dislike the Jews and do not trust them at all. They have as an example the large, overwhelmingly large, number of Zionists engaged in espionage here during the war for Russia. They also have the terrible, bloody behavior of the Zionist groups in Palestine between 1944 and 1948, replete with assassinations, torture, bank robbery, train derailments, murder of unarmed Arab civilians, atrocities committed against their own people for lack of support and money, extortion, explosive outrages and so on. Truman, after he discovered the murder plot of the Stern Gang, said he would never use the Zionists under any circumstances. Now, we have to watch Angleton who is very friendly with them and has a Jewish mother. Dulles has the East Coast establishment contempt for Jews but others in the CIA do not. Many here are very much left and for that reason, were high in the OSS which was stuffed full of communists and communist sympathizers.

Today an overheard comment by Dulles about Wallenberg. I have learned that Dulles was a friend of Marcus Wallenberg, the uncle of the one we shot. Dulles gave Raoul (who had been educated in this country) a job with the OSS. We did not know this background but I most certainly did know that young Wallenberg worked for the OSS because we had penetrated their Swiss operation and knew everything they did.

I did not know until later that young Wallenberg also worked for the Russians but it was certainly prudent for me to have had him shot. Viktor now says that his people will be blamed for this. Of course they will. Dulles has set a campaign going towards this very end. It would never occur to him that his precious operation in Switzerland was as full of holes as their cheese and is using Wallenberg as disinformation against Stalin.

I am getting ready for my trip and now, Bunny wants to go too! I have told her repeatedly, as has her doctor, that it is simply not a good idea considering the advanced state of her pregnancy. Sophie was not pleasant when she was pregnant and neither is Bunny. One day they are at your throat and the next, at your feet. She is simply not going and that is the end of the matter. Weeping and breaking china gets nowhere with me but I try to be patient with her. I am certain she thinks I am taking a whole harem of large- breasted women with me but that is not true. Business and pleasure but not the pleasure of the mattress but of seeing old friends and going to some fine concerts. Dulles has been screwing Toscanini’s daughter and someone thought that he was actually a cultured man but from his conversations, I doubt if he knows anything more than popular ballads. I once heard him singing, off key, a terrible song about blacks called “Nigger Doodle Dandy” which apparently was popular after the American Civil War. There are no blacks in the CIA and Dulles doesn’t like women agents either.

He is involved with an elitist group called the Council for Foreign Relations that sit around in a fancy club in New York, get drunk and pretend to run the country. The convicted Hiss is still a member. There are no women permitted in that establishment either.

 

Thursday, 21. June 1951

An extremely funny, and very typical American, incident here. Hoover told me about a senior staff member in the CIA whom he discovered was involved with a weird cult in California and whom H. suspected had been embezzling CIA funds.

Of course high-level embezzlement is nothing strange to me. Congress has repeatedly given the CIA enormous sums of money for “secret operations,” money that does not have to be accounted for. Naturally, these tweed-wearing Harvard and Yale men have no problem stuffing their pockets with this money but, of course, this is limited to the higher officials. The lower ones have to find other means of enriching themselves.

So, this California cult, was first conceived by a manic writer of what they call “science fiction.” (Stories about mythical creatures from the planet Gorba in the Corn Flakes Galaxy). His name is (L. Ron. ed) Hubbard and the basic thesis of his strange cult is that anyone can go back in their life, even to the moment of birth, and discover all kinds of strange things that explain why they wet their beds, beat their wives, have sexual encounters with elderly sheep and so on. Hoover said the founder is a “complete maniac” with a penchant for young women and a history of practicing some kind of demonology in secret meetings of like-minded fools.

According to H., this Hubbard has tried to get rid of his perceived enemies by telling the FBI that they (the enemies) are “all Communists” who should be immediately arrested. Hoover gave me a file on this man, more or less as a joke, and I spent several hours really laughing. Even Bunny, who is now very moody, screamed with laughter, especially since she knows a society lady in Washington who paid money to get “clear” or free from her inhibitions. According to Bunny, this feeble-minded woman now believes that she was jumped on by a heavy dog while in utero and this explains her aversion to dogs. She also enthusiastically told Bunny, and her other friends, that the Dianetic program instantly cleared up her bad complexion and stopped her chronic farting! I can attest to both faults and I will not allow the woman in the house. She is guilty of visual pollution, her face looking like a dish of fresh mulberries covered with cream, and the stench in the house after her wind-passing beggars description! Windows have to be opened and I am sure the paint on the ceiling suffers accordingly.

Bunny assures me that her face is still bespotted, though covered with a thick paste of makeup, and she has apparently learned how to fart more quietly. I think she still burns holes in upholstered chairs but her friends now profess to admire her perfect complexion (which Bunny tells me looks like a mummer’s mask) and pretend that the farts smell like 4711 Cologne water.

And this Hubbard fellow is making enormous amounts of money with his instant psychiatry and is said to spend it on drink and young women. I have never been to California and if this weird cult is any example of its citizens, I prefer not to.

The CIA man who has been looting to pay for these trips back in time to when he was swimming around in his father’s testicles will be dealt with in-house. After all, Angleton who takes with both hands and his feet, cannot have such adverse publicity.

Maybe they can pair him off with Wisner and send them to England. They think all Americans are completely mad and without taste so why not send Wisner and sticky- fingers over to London to confirm their worst fears?

https://www.amazon.com/DC-Diaries-Translated-Heinrich-Chronicals-ebook/dp/B00SQDU3GE?ie=UTF8&keywords=The%20DC%20Diaries&qid=1462467839&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1

British government rejects petition calling for second EU referendum

July 9, 2016

by Estelle Shirbon

Reuters

The British government has rejected an online petition signed by 4.1 million people calling for a new referendum on whether to leave the European Union.

Britons voted by 52 to 48 percent, or 17.4 million votes to 16.1 million, to leave the EU in a June 23 referendum, a result which most politicians have said should be respected but which some who voted “remain” are struggling to accept.

The petition called for the government to enact a rule that there should be another referendum if the vote for “remain” or “leave” was less than 60 percent based on a turnout of less than 75 percent.

The Foreign Office, the ministry that had steered through parliament the EU Referendum Act setting out the rules, responded that the legislation did not set a threshold for the result or for minimum turnout.

“The Prime Minister and Government have been clear that this was a once in a generation vote and, as the Prime Minister has said, the decision must be respected,” it said.

“We must now prepare for the process to exit the EU and the Government is committed to ensuring the best possible outcome for the British people in the negotiations.”

Both candidates to replace David Cameron as leader of the ruling Conservative Party and prime minister have said the result of the referendum should not be questioned and Brexit should be delivered.

“Brexit means Brexit,” front-runner Theresa May, the interior minister, said in a speech announcing her bid. May had advocated staying in the bloc, but was not a leading figure in the “remain” campaign.

Her rival, junior energy minister Andrea Leadsom, was one of the most passionate advocates of Brexit ahead of the referendum and has said that Britain would flourish outside the EU.

Despite such assurances, some who voted “remain” have continued to hope that there could be a way for Britain to stay in the EU despite the referendum result, and there has been international speculation that Brexit may not materialize.

(Editing by Gareth Jones)

Prosecutors: Virginia Man Photographed Arlington Landmarks for ISIS Video

July 8, 2016

ARL

A 25-year-old man from Burke, Virginia took photos of various landmarks in Arlington and D.C. for inclusion in a video that would encourage “lone wolf” terrorist attacks, according to federal prosecutors.

Haris Qamar has been charged with attempting to provide material support and resources to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIL or ISIS. He’s due in federal court in Alexandria this afternoon.

According to a press release, below, the Pentagon was among the targets suggested by Qamar, who had been previously tried to join ISIS but was prevented from doing so because his father took his passport.

Haris Qamar, 25, of Burke, was arrested this morning on charges of attempting to provide material support and resources to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a designated foreign terrorist organization. Qamar is scheduled to have his initial appearance today in front of Magistrate Judge John F. Anderson at 2 p.m. at the federal courthouse in Alexandria.

According to the affidavit in support of the criminal complaint, on May 26, Qamar and FBI confidential witness (CW) discussed ISIL’s need of photos of possible targets in and around Washington, D.C., for use in a video that ISIL was purportedly making to encourage lone wolf attacks in the Washington, D.C., area.  Qamar allegedly offered CW ideas of where to take these photographs, including the Pentagon and numerous landmarks in Arlington and Washington, D.C., which could be targeted for terrorist attacks.  On June 3, a conversation was audio and video recorded when CW picked up Qamar in a vehicle and they drove to area landmarks on the list Qamar had developed.  Qamar allegedly said “bye bye DC, stupid ass kufar, kill’em all”.  Qamar and CW met again on June 10 and drove to a location in Arlington to take additional photos for the ISIL video.

The FBI first learned of Qamar as he operated over 60 variations of the Twitter handle “newerajihadi”, which Qamar used to express his support of ISIL and share videos and photos of extreme violence, including beheadings and mass shootings. For example, after terrorists murdered employees of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris in January 2015, Qamar tweeted his prayer for another similar attack with even more casualties.

According to the allegations, during numerous conversations with CW, Qamar expressed his interest and excitement in the extreme violence ISIL is known for.  Qamar said he loved the bodies, blood and beheadings, and he recalled watching a video of a Kurdish individual being slaughtered, and liked the cracking sound made when the individual’s spinal cord was torn. On several occasions Qamar allegedly said he could slaughter someone and described how he would do it.  Qamar also stated that he admired lone wolf attackers because they love Islam so much that they are willing to die as martyrs for Islam and in the same conversation, Qamar and CW allegedly discussed suicide bombings. CW said that he did not believe in suicide bombings, but Qamar allegedly responded “I believe in it 100 percent.”

On Sept. 11, 2015, terrorists connected with ISIL posted a “kill list” to the internet containing the names and addresses of U.S. military members.  A few days later, Qamar allegedly told CW that the residences of several service members who appeared on the “kill list” were near Qamar’s own home, and that Qamar had observed undercover police cars near those residences.  According to the affidavit, on Sept. 16, 2015, Qamar tweeted his prayer that Allah “give strength to the mujahideen to slaughter every single US military officer.”

Additionally, the affidavit alleges that on Sept. 25, 2015, Qamar told CW that he tried to join the ISIL in 2014, but that his parents prevented him from going by controlling his passport.  Qamar allegedly said that his parents threatened to notify law enforcement authorities and said that he fought with his father and called his father a traitor to Islam.  According to the allegations, on Nov. 18, 2015, CW asked Qamar if his father gave him back his passport would he go and join ISIL, and in response, Qamar said if that happened, “I’m done, I leave.”

Qamar faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison if convicted. The maximum statutory sentence is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes, as the sentencing of the defendant will be determined by the court based on the advisory Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

Dana J. Boente, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia; and Paul M. Abbate, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Division, made the announcement after the charges were unsealed.  Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon D. Kromberg is prosecuting the case with assistance from the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section.

Court ruling could make sharing Netflix and Spotify passwords a federal crime

US court rules in favor of a new criminal act designed to counter cases of hacking, but decision may have consequences for ‘innocuous’ password sharers

July 8, 2016

by Nigel M Smith

The Guardian

Sharing passwords to access streaming sites such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO Go could be a federal crime, according to a new ruling.

Three judges from the US court of appeals from the ninth circuit issued a ruling on Tuesday that such activity now constitutes a criminal act, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

The ruling came from the ongoing United States v Nosal case, filed against David Nosal, a former employee of the recruitment firm Korn/Ferry. Nosal left the recruitment firm in 2004 to launch a competitor, and allegedly used a former co-worker’s password to access a work computer after his personal access was revoked.

Nolan was charged in 2008 with hacking under the CFAA and the court concluded that he acted “without authorization” in violation of the law.

According to the outcome of Nosal’s case, no person giving their password to someone else constitutes authorization – the company that issued it has to allow it.

Judge Margaret McKeown, in the majority opinion, stated that the “appeal is not about password sharing”, adding that it was about an employee who “accessed trade secrets in a proprietary database through the back door when the front door had been firmly closed”.

However, Stephen Reinhardt, a judge in the case, noted that the decision “threatens to criminalize all sorts of innocuous conduct engaged in daily by ordinary citizens”, apparently including those who share passwords for streaming sites.

Despite the outcome, it’s unlikely that companies such as Netflix and Hulu will come after password-trading customers.

Technically, the majority consider password sharing a violation of their terms of service (HBO Go states that you must be a “subscriber with an account in good standing with an authorized distributor of HBO” to use the service). But both HBO and Netflix have gone on the record to say that their companies don’t see password sharing as a major cause for concern, even though Variety reports that the sector lost upwards of $500m worldwide due to the practice.

In 2014, HBO’s CEO, Richard Plepler, told BuzzFeed that the trading of information “has no impact on the business”, adding that it serves as a “terrific marketing vehicle for the next generation of viewers”.

Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hasting, said in January that the act is “a positive thing, not a negative thing”. Though as the Daily Dot points out, it’s unclear if his comments were aimed solely at family password sharing.

Whose Century Is It?

Life on an Increasingly Improbable Planet

July 7, 2016

by Tom Engelhardt

TomDispatch

Vladimir Putin recently manned up and admitted it. The United States remains the planet’s sole superpower, as it has been since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. “America,” the Russian president said, “is a great power. Today, probably, the only superpower. We accept that.”

Think of us, in fact, as the default superpower in an ever more recalcitrant world.

Seventy-five years ago, at the edge of a global conflagration among rival great powers and empires, Henry Luce first suggested that the next century could be ours.  In February 1941, in his magazine LIFE, he wrote a famous essay entitled “The American Century.”  In it, he proclaimed that if only Americans would think internationally, surge into the world, and accept that they were already at war, the next hundred years would be theirs.  Just over nine months later, the Japanese attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, plunging the country into World War II.  At the time, however, Americans were still riven and confused about how to deal with spreading regional conflicts in Europe and Asia, as well as the rise of fascism and the Nazis.

That moment was indeed a horrific one, and yet it was also just a heightened version of what had gone before.  For the previous half-millennium, there had seldom been a moment when at least two (and often three or more) European powers had not been in contention, often armed and violent, for domination and for control of significant parts of the planet.  In those many centuries, great powers rose and fell and new ones, including Germany and Japan, came on the scene girded for imperial battle. In the process, a modern global arms race was launched to create ever more advanced and devastating weaponry based on the latest breakthroughs in the science of war.  By August 1945, this had led to the release of an awesome form of primal energy in the first (and thus far only) use of nuclear weapons in wartime.

In the years that followed, the United States and the Soviet Union grew ever more “super” and took possession of destructive capabilities once left, at least in the human imagination, to the gods: the power to annihilate not just one enemy on one battlefield or one armada on one sea but everything.  In the nearly half-century of the Cold War, the rivalry between them became apocalyptic in nature as their nuclear arsenals grew to monstrous proportions.  As a result, with the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, they faced off against each other indirectly in “limited” proxy wars that, especially in Korea and Indochina, were of unparalleled technological ferocity.

Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union imploded and, for the first time in historical memory, there was only one power that mattered.  This was a reality even Henry Luce might have found farfetched.  Previously, the idea of a single power so mighty that it alone loomed over the planet was essentially relegated to fictional fantasies about extraordinary evil.  And yet so it was — or at least so it seemed, especially to the leadership that took power in Washington in the year 2000 and soon enough were dreaming of a planetary Pax Americana.

In a strange way, something similarly unimaginable happened in Europe.  On that continent laid waste by two devastating twentieth-century wars, a single “union” was formed, something that not so long before would have been categorized as a madly utopian project.  The idea that centuries of national rivalries and the rabid nationalism that often went with it could somehow be tamed and that former great powers and imperial contenders could be subsumed in a single peaceful organization (even if under the aegis of American global power) would once have seemed like the most absurd of fictions.  And yet so it would be — or so it seemed, at least until recently.

A Planetary Brexit?

We seldom take in the strangeness of what’s happened on this curious planet of ours.  In the years after 1991, we became so inured to the idea of a single superpower globe and a single European economic and political union that both, once utterly inconceivable, came to seem too mundane to spend a lot of time thinking about.  And yet who would have believed that 75 years after Luce urged his country into that American Century, there would, in military terms, be no genuine rivals, no other truly great powers (only regional ones) on Planet Earth?

So many taken-for-granted things about our world were considered utterly improbable before they happened.  Take China.  I recall well the day in 1972 when, after decades of non-contact and raging hostility, we learned that President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were in Beijing meeting congenially with Communist leader Mao Zedong.  A friend called to tell me the news.  I thought he was joking and it struck me as a ridiculously lame joke at that.

There’s almost no way now to capture how improbable this seemed at the time — the leading communist revolutionary on the planet chatting cheerily with the prime representative of anti-communism.  If, however, you had told me then that, in the decades to come, China would undergo a full-scale capitalist revolution and become the economic powerhouse of the planet, and that this would be done under the leadership of Mao’s still regnant communist party, I would have considered you mad.

And mind you, that’s just to begin to mention the improbabilities of the present moment.  After all, in what fantasies — ever — about a globe with a single dominant power, would anyone have imagined that it might fail so utterly to bring the world to anything approximating heel? If you had told Henry Luce, or me, or anyone else, including the masters of the universe in Washington in 1991, that the only superpower left on Earth, with the best-funded, mightiest, most technologically destructive and advanced military imaginable, would, on September 11, 2001, be goaded by a group so modest in size and power as to be barely noticeable into a series of never-ending wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa, we would have found that beyond improbable.

Who would have believed a movie or novel in which that same power, without national enemies of any significance in any of the regions where the fighting was taking place, would struggle unsuccessfully, year after year, to subdue scattered, lightly armed insurgents (aka “terrorists”) across a disintegrating region?  Who could have imagined that every measure Washington took to assert its might only seemed to blow back (or blow somewhere, anyway)?  Who would have believed that its full-scale invasion of one weak Middle Eastern country, its “mission accomplished” moment, would in the end prove a trip through “the gates of hell”?  Who would have imagined that such an invasion could punch a hole in the oil heartlands of the region that, 13 years later, is still a bleeding wound, now seemingly beyond repair, or that it would set loose a principle of chaos and disintegration that seems to be spreading like a planetary Brexit?

And what if I told you that, after 15 years of such behavior, the only thing the leaders of that superpower can now imagine doing in the increasingly wrecked lands where they carry on their struggles is yet more of everything that hasn’t worked in all that time?  Meanwhile — how improbable is this? — in its “homeland,” there is essentially no one, neither a movement in the streets, nor critical voices in the corridors of power protesting what’s happening or even exploring or suggesting other paths into the future.

Imagine that, wherever you looked, except in the borderlands of (and waters off) Russia and China, that single superpower was essentially unopposed and yet its ability to apply its unique status effectively in these years has been in eternal free-fall — even in perfectly peaceable areas to which it was closely allied.  As an example, consider this: the president of that sole superpower flies to London and, in an England that (like much of Europe) hasn’t said no to Washington about anything of genuine significance in decades, strongly urges the British not to exit (or “Brexit”) the European Union (EU).  He backs up his suggestion with a clearly stated threat.  If they do so, he says, our closest trans-Atlantic partner will find itself at “the back of the queue” when it comes to future trade deals with Washington.

Remember, we’re talking about a country that has, in these years, seconded the U.S. endlessly.  As David Sanger of the New York Times recently (and delicately) put it:

“No country shares Washington’s worldview quite the way Britain does, [American officials] say; it has long been the United States’ most willing security ally, most effective intelligence partner and greatest enthusiast of the free-trade mantras that have been a keystone of America’s internationalist approach. And few nations were as willing to put a thumb as firmly on the scales of European debates in ways that benefit the United States.”

By now, of course, we all know how the populace of our most loyal ally, the other side of that “special relationship,” reacted — with anger at the president’s intervention and with a vote to exit the European Union not long after.  In its wake, fears are rising of further Frexits and Nexits that might crack the EU open and usher in a new era of nationalist feeling in Europe.

Failed World?

As goes Britain, so, it seems, goes the world.  Give Washington real credit for much of this.  Those post-9/11 dreams of global domination shared by the top leadership of the Bush administration proved wildly destructive and it’s gotten no better since.  Consider the vast swath of the planet where the devastation is most obvious: the Greater Middle East and North Africa.  Then ask yourself: Are we still in the American Century?  And if not, whose (or what) century are we in?

If you had told me in 1975, when the Vietnam War finally ended some 34 years after Luce wrote that essay and 28 years before the U.S. invaded Iraq that, in 1979, Washington would become involved in a decade-long war in Afghanistan, I would have been stunned.  If you had told me in 1975 that, in 2001, it would invade that same country and launch a second Afghan War, still underway 15 years later with no end in sight, I wouldn’t have believed you.  A quarter-century of American wars and still counting in a country that, in 1975, most Americans might not have been able to locate on a map.  If you had added that, starting in 1990, the U.S. would be involved in three successive wars in Iraq, the third of which is still ongoing, I might have been speechless.  And that’s not to mention interventions of various sorts, also ongoing, in Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria — none, by the way, by any normal standards successful.

If you were to do a little tabulation of the results of these years of American Century-ism across the Greater Middle East, you would discover a signature kind of chaos.  In the early years of this century, officials of the Bush administration often referred to the region from China’s western border to northern Africa as an “arc of instability.”  That phrase was meant to embody their explanation for letting the U.S. military loose there: to bring order and, of course, democracy to those lands.  And with modest exceptions, it was indeed true that most of the Greater Middle East was then ruled by repressive, autocratic, or regressive regimes of various sorts.  It was, however, still a reasonably orderly region.  Now, it actually is an arc of instability filled with states that are collapsing left and right, cities and towns that are being leveled, and terror outfits, each worse than the last, that are spreading in the regional rubble.  Religious and ethnic divisions of every sort are sharpening and conflicts within countries, or what’s left of them, are on the rise.

Most of the places where the U.S. has let its military and its air power loose — Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Syria – are now either failed or failing states.  Under the circumstances, it might be reasonable to suggest that the very term “failed state” is outdated, and not just because it places all the blame for what’s happened on the indigenous people of a country.  After all, if the arc of instability is now in any way “united,” it’s mainly thanks to spreading terror groups and perhaps the Islamic State brand.

Moreover, in the stunted imagination of present-day Washington, the only policies imaginable in response to all this are highly militarized and call for more of the same: more air power in the skies over distant battlefields, more boots on the ground, more private contractors and hired guns, more munitions and weaponry (surprising amounts of which have, in these years, ended up in the hands not of allied forces, but of Washington’s enemies), more special operations raids, more drone assassination campaigns, and at home, more surveillance, more powers for the national security state, more… well, you know the story.

For such a world, a new term is needed.  Perhaps something like failed region.  This, it seems, is one thing that the American Century has come to mean 75 years after Henry Luce urged it into existence.  And perhaps lurking in the undergrowth as well is another phrase, one not quite yet imaginable but thoroughly chilling: failed world.

With this in mind, imagine what the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia could mean in the long run, or the recent U.S.-NATO pivot to the Baltics and Eastern Europe.  If huge swaths of the planet have begun to disintegrate in an era when the worst the U.S. faced in the way of opponents has been minority insurgencies and terror outfits, or more recently a terror caliphate, consider for a moment what kinds of chaos could come to regions where a potentially hostile power remains.  And by the way, don’t for a second think that, even if the Islamic State is finally defeated, worse can’t emerge from the chaos and rubble of the failed region that it will leave behind.  It can and, odds on, it will.

All of this gives the very idea of an American Century new meaning.  Can there be any question that this is not the century of Henry Luce, nor the one that American political and military leaders dreamed of when the Soviet Union collapsed?  What comes to mind instead is the sentiment the Roman historian Tacitus put in the mouth of Calgacus, a chieftain in what is now Scotland, speaking of the Roman conquests of his time: “They make a desert and call it peace.”

Perhaps this is no longer really the American century at all, despite the continuing status of the U.S. as the planet’s sole superpower.  A recent U.N. report estimates that, in 2015, a record 65 million people were uprooted, mainly in the Greater Middle East.  Tens of millions of them crossed borders and became refugees, including staggering numbers of children, many separated from their parents.  So perhaps this really is the century of the lost child.

What could be sadder?

Astronomers spy giant planet, three stars in odd celestial ballet

July 7, 2016

by Irene Klotz

Reuters

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Astronomers have discovered a planet unlike any other ever found, one that loops widely around one star that is locked in a gravitational embrace with two others in a triple-star system, creating a curious celestial ballet.

The findings, published on Thursday in the journal Science, challenge current notions about what makes a planetary system viable.

With three stars in the system, the massive planet would experience triple sunrises and triple sunsets during one season and all daylight in another. Since the planet’s orbit is very long, each season lasts for hundreds of years.

“Depending on which season you were born in, you may never know what nighttime is like,” lead researcher Kevin Wagner of the University of Arizona said.

The planet, called HD 131399Ab, is about four times bigger than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, and is orbiting in a three-star system located about 340 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

Scientists are not sure how HD 131399Ab came to exist. It orbits its parent star about twice as far as Pluto circles the sun, needing 550 years to complete a single orbit.

Astronomers have previously discovered planets in multi-star systems, but never one that circles a parent star with such a wide berth. It also is one of the few extrasolar planets – those outside our solar system – to be directly imaged by telescope.

The planet’s orbit is akin to the distance more typically seen when a star orbits another star, not a planet orbiting a star.

“This is the first planet that we’ve found with an orbit that is comparable to that of the stars,” Wagner said.

If HD 131399Ab’s orbit was just a bit wider, computer simulations show it could be gravitationally elbowed out of the system by the pair of smaller stars that orbit each other and the main star, which is about 80 percent bigger than the sun.

Though the planet is relatively young, around 16 million years old compared to the 4.5-billion-year-old Earth, it likely has had an eventful life. Scientists suspect it may have started off in a much closer orbit around two parent stars before it was gravitationally bounced to its extreme distance.

Scientists plan additional observations to determine if the planet’s orbit is actually stable.

“It is not clear how this planet ended up on its wide orbit in this extreme system … but it shows there is more variety out there than many would have deemed possible,” Wagner said.

The planet was detected using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in northern Chile.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by Will Dunham)

Kremlin says NATO talk of Russian threat absurd, short-sighted

July 8, 2016

by Dmitry Solovyov

Reuters

MOSCOW -The Kremlin said on Friday it regarded NATO’s suggestion that Russia posed a threat as absurd, saying it hoped that common sense would prevail at the military alliance’s summit in Warsaw.

The Kremlin spoke out after U.S. President Barack Obama urged NATO leaders to stand firm against a resurgent Russia over its 2014 seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea.

Friday’s summit is expected to formally agree to deploy four battalions in the Baltic states and eastern Poland, a move the alliance says is meant to deter possible Russian aggression.

“It is absurd to talk about any threat coming from Russia at a time when dozens of people are dying in the center of Europe and when hundreds of people are dying in the Middle East daily,” Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, told reporters.

“You have to be an absolutely short-sighted organization to twist things in that way,” said Peskov, saying Russia hoped common sense and an understanding of the need to avoid confrontation would prevail.

Russia was open for talks and cooperation with NATO, Peskov added, and did not want to cast the alliance as an enemy. But he complained of NATO soldiers and planes operating close to Russia’s borders.

“We aren’t the ones getting closer to NATO’s borders,” he said.

(Reporting by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

Trump looks at retired general Flynn as possible running mate

July 9, 2016

by Steve Holland

Reuters

WASHINGTON-Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is giving consideration to retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn as a potential vice presidential running mate, a Republican source familiar with the process said on Saturday.

For weeks Trump has conducted a high-profile canvassing of Republican political stalwarts as part of his running mate search, but he has also made clear he is looking at what a military leader would bring to the ticket.

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Flynn has emerged as a possibility, confirming reports in the New York Post and The Washington Post. The Trump campaign had no comment.

The thinking is that Flynn, who has been a foreign policy adviser to Trump, would be able to help Trump in the area of national security at a time of challenges abroad like the threat from Islamic State militants.

Trump is also considering a more conventional political choice for his running mate, such as former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich, Indiana Governor Mike Pence or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Flynn was chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama from 2012-2014.

He has spoken in the past about wanting the United States to work more closely with Russia to resolve global security issues.

Flynn told Russia Today in an interview published on Dec. 10 that the United States and Russia should work together to resolve the Syrian civil war and defeat Islamic State.

Flynn has a book coming out next week, co-written with Michael Ledeen, titled: “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.”

(Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Background Files

July 10, 2016

by Ethelred Minge

TZR

President Barack Obama, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, is no longer a “lawyer”. He surrendered his license back in 2008 in order to escape charges he lied on his bar application

Michelle Obama “voluntarily surrendered” her law license in 1993. after a   Federal Judge gave her the choice between surrendering her license or standing trial for Insurance fraud!

Source: http://jdlong.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/pres-barack-obama-editor-of-the-Harvard-law-review-has-no-law-license/

https://www.iardc.org (Stands for Illinois Attorney Registration And Disciplinary Committee).

Barack Obama was NOT a Constitutional Law Professor at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago released a statement in March 2008 saying Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) “served as a professor” in the law school-but that is a title Obama, who taught courses there part-time, never held the title of Professor of Law,” said Marsha Ferziger Nagorsky, an Assistant Dean for Communications and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago School of Law

The Illinois Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission lists President Obama’s registration status as “voluntarily retired.”

It lists Michelle Obama’s status as “voluntarily inactive.”

It’s true that although both President Obama and the University of Chicago have stated at various times that he was a “professor of law” or “professor of constitutional law” at the U.C. Law School, he never officially held that title. He was first a Lecturer (1992-1996) and then a Senior Lecturer (1996-2004) until elected to the Senate in 2004.

It’s true that neither the president nor the first lady holds an active license to practice law. A search on the website of the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois shows that Barack Obama is listed as “voluntarily retired and not authorized to practice law,” and Michelle Obama is listed as “voluntarily inactive and not authorized to practice law.”

President Obama graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991 and was admitted as a lawyer by the Supreme Court of Illinois on Dec. 17, 1991. Prior to being elected to the Illinois state Senate in 1996, he worked as a civil rights lawyer at the firm formerly known as Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. Four days after Obama announced that he would run for president in February 2007, he voluntarily elected to have his law license placed on “inactive” status, according to Grogan. Then, after becoming president, he elected to change his status to “retired” in February 2009.

Michelle Obama graduated from Harvard Law School in 1988, and was admitted as a lawyer by the Supreme Court of Illinois on May 12, 1989. Following graduation, she joined Sidley Austin, a corporate law firm in Chicago. But a few years later, in 1994, while working for the Public Allies project in Chicago, Obama voluntarily had her license placed on “inactive” status.

Islamic State lost quarter of its Iraq, Syria territory in 18 months: IHS

July 10, 2016

by Maher Chmaytelli and Lisa Barrington

Reuters

Islamic State lost an area the size of Ireland – a quarter of its territory – to hostile forces in the last 18 months in Iraq and Syria and is likely to further step up attacks on civilians in coming months, IHS said in a report on Sunday.

The territory controlled by the ultra-hardline Sunni group shrank from 90,800 sq km (35,000 square miles) in January 2015, six months after it declared a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, to 68,300 sq km (26,370 square miles), the research firm said.

This has led the group to step up attacks on civilian targets in the Middle East and in Europe and this is likely to intensify, IHS said.

“As the Islamic State’s caliphate shrinks and it becomes increasingly clear that its governance project is failing, the group is re-prioritizing insurgency,” said Columb Strack, senior analyst at IHS and lead analyst for the IHS Conflict Monitor.

“As a result, we unfortunately expect an increase in mass casualty attacks and sabotage of economic infrastructure, across Iraq and Syria, and further afield, including Europe.”

The Iraqi military’s recapture of Falluja, an Islamic State stronghold just west of Baghdad, last month has led the insurgents to step up bombings on Shi’ite Muslim targets.

Nearly 300 people died when an Islamic State suicide bomber struck in a busy shopping district in Baghdad a week ago, in one of the worst such attacks by the group to date.

Islamic State lost control of the city of Ramadi at the end of last year, another key stronghold for the group which captured large swathes of Iraq in 2014. The army is now gearing up to retake Mosul, the largest city in Iraq’s north and Islamic State’s de facto capital.

In Syria, the militants lost ground this year to both Russian and Iranian-backed forces supporting President Bashar al-Assad and to the U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance.

In February the SDF captured the town of al Shadadi, a major logistics hub for the militants, and in March Syrian and allied forces backed by Russian air strikes drove Islamic State out of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra and surrounding areas.

An SDF advance is underway to retake areas north of Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, Raqqa.

(Reporting by Maher Chmaytelli and Lisa Barrington; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

White America’s biggest nightmare: Black men who violently sow disillusionment

July 9, 2016

by Kevin B. Blackstone

Washington Post

America’s suddenly rapacious appetite for theater about the slave era — whet first in 2013 by that year’s winner of the Academy Award for best picture, “12 Years A Slave,” and fed most recently by the Broadway hit “Hamilton” — will be satisfied again in October. Hollywood is scheduled to serve us “The Birth of a Nation,” Nate Parker’s biopic of Nat Turner, the slave who led what turned out to be the deadliest slave rebellion in American history.

Turner experienced a vision that God chose him to lead enslaved Africans and their progeny to freedom. He sought to do God’s work by cutting a swath to the heavens painted with the blood of every white person he and his gang encountered after nightfall on Aug. 21, 1831. By midday the next day, Turner’s gang had slaughtered upward of 60 white people in rural Virginia. White mobs responded by killing at least 200 slaves.

Turner was eventually captured. After his execution, he was skinned.

Slavery was outlawed 34 years later, or 151 years ago. White America needn’t sweat another Nat Turner, another slave revolt.

But it still must worry about the aggrieved black man.

America witnessed him late Thursday in the form of Micah Xavier Johnson. Johnson was the black, 25-year-old former soldier who went on a murderous rampage specifically against white cops, as he admitted to police negotiators. This model of the revenge story has existed since 1900, when Robert Charles, a 35-year-old black man in New Orleans, felt so wronged by racial injustice that he went on a murderous rampage against that city’s white cops. Charles’s murders included four officers; Johnson’s counted five.

Charles and Johnson, though separated by six generations, are one and the same. Just as black slave insurrectionists like Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey were 18th- and 19th-century white America’s biggest nightmare, Charles and Johnson are that to 20th- and 21st-century white America — black men who violently sowed their disillusionment.

There were upward of 4 million Africans and their descendants enslaved in this country in the run-up to the Civil War. A century and a half later, half of black men are arrested by age 23, a study said, and they are locked behind bars at a disproportionate rate to whites, which damages their ability to continue schooling and be full participants in our society. In 2013, there were more than 1.2 million black men locked in chronic, or long-term, unemployment, according to a 2013 federal report, which noted that black men suffered unemployment at a greater rate than any other demographic group.

It was at this crowded intersection of race, societal order and emasculation that Johnson, like Charles, picked up his gun. Both men were exorcising pent-up frustration with historical and systemic injustice with horrific consequence for those nearby.

In the only book written exclusively about Charles, “Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900,” historian William Ivy Hair noted that Charles grew up as a sharecropper in Mississippi before migrating to New Orleans as a day laborer. But he pointed out that those who knew Charles described him as openly agitated by the violently repressive apartheid system of Jim Crow, under which black remnants of slavery were forced to live. Charles was known to keep himself armed with guns for which he manufactured his own ammunition.

What little we learned about Johnson the past few days is that he was a high school graduate from the Dallas suburb of Mesquite, Tex., and onetime private first class in the Army Reserve.

News reports said he was a carpenter and masonry specialist who served six years until April 2015, including a tour in Afghanistan from November 2013 to July 2014. In the wake of his rampage, it was reported that his Facebook account showed he liked pages for Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, the New Black Panther Party and the Black Riders Liberation Party, all of which the Southern Poverty Law Center deemed “black separatist hate groups.” Dallas police said a search of Johnson’s home “found bomb making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a personal journal of combat tactics.”

So Johnson, like Charles before him, metamorphosed into a monster, acting out in ultimate defiance against ultimate authority, white law enforcement.

After all, when Charles was found holed up in some building, police and military troops incinerated it and then riddled his body with what was reported to be 100 bullets after he appeared from the flames and smoke like some apparition. Johnson had to be stopped with a bomb.

But many white people among us don’t understand, as former House speaker Newt Gingrich admitted Friday, how it feels to watch the 136th and 135th black men killed by police this year likely because they shared your skin color: Philando Castile, 32, in Falcon Heights, Minn., on Wednesday; and Alton Sterling, 37, in Baton Rouge the day before.

They haven’t thought about what it is like to witness the deaths of black men so normalized by media — from 18th century lynching photographs, to the 1967 “Life” cover of a 12-year-old black boy in a pool of blood from a policeman’s bullet, to cellphone video of Castile and Sterling mortally wounded. It has become so common that everyone views it with all the empathy of witnessing a fender bender.

They struggle to believe that the human indignity of being seen, apparently, as only a close-range shooting target by so many of those entrusted to protect and serve, can produce such heinousness. They refuse to understand what it means to be shot by police at 2.5 times the rate of whites, as are black males, according the The Washington Post’s database.

They don’t, or maybe can’t, comprehend what it is like to know that you make up 24 percent of all deaths at the end of law enforcement’s muzzle despite being 12 percent of the population.

Instead, they’ve tried to find another reason Johnson could turn into a Charles. Maybe he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after his tour in Afghanistan? Maybe he was otherwise mentally disturbed? Maybe he was radicalized?

Especially for the families of the victims of Johnson’s outburst, he understandably will be seen forever as the madman he became. But as the best-selling white author of many sports books, Peter Golenbock, noted on Facebook on Friday: “For years we have seen the pictures of senseless murders of black men and children by white policemen. Afterwards, the cops are rarely indicted and never convicted.”

Golenbock continued, before knowing Johnson was the sole shooter: “After all these years a group of blacks, tired of this and obviously military trained, started shooting back in Dallas yesterday at white cops, and now everyone is scared to death. What is surprising is that this hasn’t occurred earlier.”

What is fortunate for America is that most black people, like those in the Black Lives Matter movement who marched that dreadful Thursday in downtown Dallas, just seek a fairer shake.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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