This article from 2002 shows the Bush era expansion of CIA inside US using terrorism as the excuse for diminishing privacy and freedom. What was occurring at this time was MOVING FORWARD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE policies from privatizing US Ports to expanding global labor pool distribution in US cities building density for global corporate campuses and global factories coming back to US -----this is when immigrant population exploded with Obama following suit.
This is what a Foreign Economic Zone looks like. It is militarized----securitized-----global labor being shifted constantly from one nation to another so CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency----DIA fills our US cities and ports.
IT HAS VERY LITTLE TO DO WITH ANGRY SOVEREIGN CITIZENS OVERSEAS---IT IS PREPARING FOR US CITIZENS TO BECOME THOSE ANGRY SOVEREIGN CITIZENS.
Here in Maryland we come out to protest and there are undercover police taking pictures and creating files on PEACEFUL PROTESTORS-----this has always been illegal and an infringement on citizens' privacy rights. In US Foreign Economic Zones those US citizens' rights do not exist.
CIA moved to Denver and into every US city these few decades.
CIA Is Expanding Domestic Operations
By Dana Priest October 23, 2002
The Central Intelligence Agency is expanding its domestic presence, placing agents with nearly all of the FBI's 56 terrorism task forces in U.S. cities, a step that law enforcement and intelligence officials say will help overcome some of the communications obstacles between the two agencies that existed before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In many cities, according to local FBI special agents, the CIA employees help plan daily operations and set priorities, as well as share information about suspected foreigners and groups. They do not, however, take part in operations or make arrests.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III recently described the new arrangement as his answer to MI5, Britain's internal security service. Unlike the CIA, MI5 is empowered to collect intelligence within Britain and to act to disrupt domestic threats to British national security. "It goes some distance to accomplishing what the MI5 does," Mueller told a House-Senate intelligence panel last week in describing the new CIA role in the FBI task forces.
Separately, the CIA is undertaking what one intelligence official called a "concerted effort" to increase the number of case officers working in the agency's domestic field offices. Those offices, directed by the National Resources Division, are staffed by officers from the clandestine service.
The CIA's domestic field offices recruit foreigners living temporarily in the United States -- for example, scientists at universities, diplomats at embassies and business executives -- to work as agents for the CIA when they return home. They also conduct voluntary debriefings of Americans, mainly business executives and academics, who have recently returned from abroad. The division also is responsible for handling some defectors and for limited counterintelligence targeting.
In the mid-1980s, the agency maintained close to 35 field stations in the United States. But over the last decade, budget cuts and operational restrictions reduced the agency's domestic effort by about 30 percent, according to one former high-ranking CIA official. "They were in bad shape."
Since Sept. 11, the National Resources Division has been given more money and some of its domestic offices have been reopened to bring the number close to 30. "There is a concerted effort to enhance that," said one administration official said.
The CIA's domestic division was created in 1963 to conduct clandestine operations within the United States against foreign targets, usually foreign spies and organizations. But the CIA no longer conducts clandestine operations at home, in part because of the 1973 intelligence overhaul that curbed spying on U.S. citizens and enacted stricter oversight of covert operations. Since then, too, the FBI has strictly limited the information it accepts from the CIA, for fear of "tainting" ongoing domestic investigations with information it is not allowed to use or, in some cases, even possess.
While the new growth in the CIA's domestic work does not involving spying, it does represent a significant step in integrating the CIA's analytical capabilities with U.S. law enforcement efforts to find and apprehend terrorist suspects.
"We are stepping into an area that is fraught with peril," said Frederick Hitz, a former inspector general at the CIA. But Hitz and other analysts applauded the effort.
The CIA's work on the FBI task forces "is a sign of the times," said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee. "The idea is to get all the intel and law enforcement agencies that might be able to contribute to a coherent and comprehensive plan against terrorist activities."
None of the growth in the CIA's domestic work has required changes in law.
Under Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan, the CIA is permitted to secretly collect "significant" foreign intelligence within the United States if the collection effort is not aimed at the domestic activities of U.S. citizens and corporations.
Ellen Knowlton, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Las Vegas field office, called the CIA officers in her office "full and active participants" in day-to-day operations. The exchange of ideas among the FBI, the CIA and local law enforcement "is very interactive," she said.
"You balance how you use them" with the potential for compromising officers still under cover, said Joseph Billy Jr., special agent in charge of the FBI's New York field office. "We reserve the right for the CIA to make that call."
For this reason, the identities of CIA officers are often not shared with local law enforcement officials who are detailed, part-time, to work on the task forces. The CIA officers also usually work in special parts of the larger task force building, behind walls impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping.
In Oregon, Portland Police Chief Mark Kroeger said there remains a deep distrust toward giving law enforcement or the CIA expanded powers. Although he approves of the CIA presence, he said he purposefully stays clear of the CIA officers.
"I know very little about them and I chose to keep it that way," he said. "The CIA is not a dirty word," he said. "They have roles and responsibilities that certainly have shifted. I have a lot of admiration for the organization."
While the CIA presence is new in many cities, the agency has worked with local police departments for years in New York, New Jersey and a handful of other locations. The New York joint terrorism task force of 300 people from 21 agencies has had more a dozen CIA officers for years.
The CIA is reluctant to talk about its new task force role, or its domestic field offices. "This increased cooperation is critical in the fight against terrorism," said CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield. "It's critical to establish more and better linkages."
___________________________________________
Meanwhile, yet another massive intelligence network, the DIA expanded as well. The retooling of DOD to asymmetric warfare came with drones and spies. There has always been espionage but when a nation doubles-down its modus operandus to infiltrating and circumventing most nations' sovereignty around the world---it is not a leader in democratic principles---freedom or liberty----and what goes around overseas comes around inside US.
Meanwhile, our US citizens are being pushed towards careers all tied to military and surveillance. Our candidates for elected office at all levels are former DIA and CIA....THIS IS WHAT BRINGS DEEP STATE.
Please guide young adults AWAY FROM THESE CAREERS-----for many especially our poor citizens these are the only pathways to employment and in the game of DEEP STATE the poor are used as FODDER.
All far-right corporate fascism comes with these elements----society is soaked in secret societies, spying, and surveillance----remember our description of old world VENETIAN EMPIRE-----these are the old world global 1% bringing back those DARK AGES.
DIA as well as CIA fill our US cities and everyone is being made to be afraid to speak -----freedom of assembly is corrupted-----our ability to organize as a 99% is undermined---which is the goal.
DIA as well as CIA fill our US cities and everyone is being made to be afraid to speak -----freedom of assembly is corrupted-----our ability to organize as a 99% is undermined---which is the goal.
I hear Baltimore citizens telling people new to the city----DON'T LOOK PEOPLE IN THE EYE BECAUSE THEN YOU HAVE TO SPEAK TO THEM------immigrants brought to Baltimore are told not to speak to anyone......all citizens in Baltimore assume someone else is with another secret society and do not talk with one another-------this is now being MAIN STREAMED................
'Baltimore voted 10th most unfriendly city in America
by Kathleen Cairns
Tuesday, November 3rd 2015'
Baltimore is ground zero for all that is global defense corporation and CIA and all the spying and surveillance that goes with it because of global Johns Hopkins-----Bush/Cheney
DIA to send hundreds more spies overseas
Islamist militant groups in Africa, weapons transfers by North Korea and Iran and military modernization in China are among the Pentagon’s top intelligence priorities, officials say. (File/AFP/Getty Images)
By Greg Miller December 1, 2012
The Pentagon will send hundreds of additional spies overseas as part of an ambitious plan to assemble an espionage network that rivals the CIA in size, U.S. officials said.
The project is aimed at transforming the Defense Intelligence Agency, which has been dominated for the past decade by the demands of two wars, into a spy service focused on emerging threats and more closely aligned with the CIA and elite military commando units.
When the expansion is complete, the DIA is expected to have as many as 1,600 “collectors” in positions around the world, an unprecedented total for an agency whose presence abroad numbered in the triple digits in recent years.
The total includes military attachés and others who do not work undercover. But U.S. officials said the growth will be driven over a five-year period by the deployment of a new generation of clandestine operatives. They will be trained by the CIA and often work with the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, but they will get their spying assignments from the Department of Defense.
Among the Pentagon’s top intelligence priorities, officials said, are Islamist militant groups in Africa, weapons transfers by North Korea and Iran, and military modernization underway in China.
Islamist militants in West Africa
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring revolts, the fight against militant Islam in this moderate swath of Africa has gained fresh urgency.
“This is not a marginal adjustment for DIA,” the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, said at a recent conference, during which he outlined the changes but did not describe them in detail. “This is a major adjustment for national security.”
The sharp increase in DIA undercover operatives is part of a far-reaching trend: a convergence of the military and intelligence agencies that has blurred their once-distinct missions, capabilities and even their leadership ranks.
Through its drone program, the CIA now accounts for a majority of lethal U.S. operations outside the Afghan war zone. At the same time, the Pentagon’s plan to create what it calls the Defense Clandestine Service, or DCS, reflects the military’s latest and largest foray into secret intelligence work.
The DIA overhaul — combined with the growth of the CIA since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — will create a spy network of unprecedented size. The plan reflects the Obama administration’s affinity for espionage and covert action over conventional force. It also fits in with the administration’s efforts to codify its counterterrorism policies for a sustained conflict and assemble the pieces abroad necessary to carry it out.
Unlike the CIA, the Pentagon’s spy agency is not authorized to conduct covert operations that go beyond intelligence gathering, such as drone strikes, political sabotage or arming militants.
But the DIA has long played a major role in assessing and identifying targets for the U.S. military, which in recent years has assembled a constellation of drone bases stretching from Afghanistan to East Africa.
The expansion of the agency’s clandestine role is likely to heighten concerns that it will be accompanied by an escalation in lethal strikes and other operations outside public view. Because of differences in legal authorities, the military isn’t subject to the same congressional notification requirements as the CIA, leading to potential oversight gaps.
U.S. officials said that the DIA’s realignment won’t hamper congressional scrutiny. “We have to keep congressional staffs and members in the loop,” Flynn said in October, adding that he believes the changes will help the United States anticipate threats and avoid being drawn more directly into what he predicted will be an “era of persistent conflict.”
U.S. officials said the changes for the DIA were enabled by a rare syncing of personalities and interests among top officials at the Pentagon and CIA, many of whom switched from one organization to the other to take their current jobs.
“The stars have been aligning on this for a while,” said a former senior U.S. military official involved in planning the DIA transformation. Like most others interviewed for this article, the former official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the program.
The DIA project has been spearheaded by Michael G. Vickers, the top intelligence official at the Pentagon and a veteran of the CIA.
Agreements on coordination were approved by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, a former CIA director, and retired Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who resigned abruptly as CIA chief last month over an extramarital affair.
The Pentagon announced the DCS plan in April but details have been kept secret. Former senior Defense Department officials said that the DIA now has about 500 “case officers,” the term for clandestine Pentagon and CIA operatives, and that the number is expected to reach between 800 and 1,000 by 2018.
Pentagon and DIA officials declined to discuss specifics. A senior U.S. defense official said the changes will affect thousands of DIA employees, as analysts, logistics specialists and others are reassigned to support additional spies.
The plan still faces some hurdles, including the challenge of creating “cover” arrangements for hundreds of additional spies. U.S. embassies typically have a set number of slots for intelligence operatives posing as diplomats, most of which are taken by the CIA.
The project has also encountered opposition from policymakers on Capitol Hill, who see the terms of the new arrangement as overly generous to the CIA.
The DIA operatives “for the most part are going to be working for CIA station chiefs,” needing their approval to enter a particular country and clearance on which informants they intend to recruit, said a senior congressional official briefed on the plan. “If CIA needs more people working for them, they should be footing the bill.”
Pentagon officials said that sending more DIA operatives overseas will shore up intelligence on subjects that the CIA is not able or willing to pursue. “We are in a position to contribute to defense priorities that frankly CIA is not,” the senior Defense Department official said.
The project was triggered by a classified study by the director of national intelligence last year that concluded that key Pentagon intelligence priorities were falling into gaps created by the DIA’s heavy focus on battlefield issues and CIA’s extensive workload. U.S. officials said the DIA needed to be repositioned as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan give way to what many expect will be a period of sporadic conflicts and simmering threats requiring close-in intelligence work.
“It’s the nature of the world we’re in,” said the senior defense official, who is involved in overseeing the changes at the DIA. “We just see a long-term era of change before things settle.”
The CIA is increasingly overstretched. Obama administration officials have said they expect the agency’s drone campaign against al-Qaeda to continue for at least a decade more, even as the agency faces pressure to stay abreast of issues including turmoil across the Middle East. Meanwhile, the CIA hasn’t met ambitious goals set by former president George W. Bush to expand its own clandestine service.
CIA officials including John D. Bennett, director of the National Clandestine Service, have backed the DIA’s plan. It “amplifies the ability of both CIA and DIA to achieve the best results,” said CIA spokesman Preston Golson.
Defense officials stressed that the DIA has not been given any new authorities or permission to expand its total payroll. Instead, the new spy slots will be created by cutting or converting other positions across the DIA workforce, which has doubled in the past decade — largely through absorption of other military intelligence entities — to about 16,500.
Vickers has given the DIA an infusion of about $100 million to kick-start the program, officials said, but the agency’s total budget is expected to remain stagnant or decline amid mounting financial pressures across the government.
The DIA’s overseas presence already includes hundreds of diplomatic posts — mainly defense attachés, who represent the military at U.S. embassies and openly gather information from foreign counterparts. Their roles won’t change, officials said. The attachés are part of the 1,600 target for the DIA, but such “overt” positions will represent a declining share amid the increase in undercover slots, officials said.
The senior Defense official said the DIA has begun filling the first of the new posts.
For decades, the DIA has employed undercover operatives to gather secrets on foreign militaries and other targets. But the Defense Humint Service, as it was previously known, was often regarded as an inferior sibling to its civilian counterpart.
Previous efforts by the Pentagon to expand its intelligence role — particularly during Donald H. Rumsfeld’s time as defense secretary — led to intense turf skirmishes with the CIA.
Those frictions have been reduced, officials said, largely because the CIA sees advantages to the new arrangement, including assurances that its station chiefs overseas will be kept apprised of DIA missions and have authority to reject any that might conflict with CIA efforts. The CIA will also be able to turn over hundreds of Pentagon-driven assignments to newly arrived DIA operatives.
“The CIA doesn’t want to be looking for surface-to-air missiles in Libya” when it’s also under pressure to assess the opposition in Syria, said a former high-ranking U.S. military intelligence officer who worked closely with both spy services. Even in cases where their assignments overlap, the DIA is likely to be more focused than the CIA on military aspects — what U.S. commanders in Africa might ask about al-Qaeda in Mali, for example, rather than the broader questions raised by the White House.
U.S. officials said DIA operatives, because of their military backgrounds, are often better equipped to recruit sources who can answer narrow military questions such as specifications of China’s fifth-generation fighter aircraft and its work on a nuclear aircraft carrier. “The CIA would like to give up that kind of work,” the former officer said.
The CIA has agreed to add new slots to its training classes at its facility in southern Virginia, known as the Farm, to make room for more military spies. The DIA has accounted for about 20 percent of each class in recent years, but that figure will grow.
The two agencies have also agreed to share resources overseas, including technical gear, logistics support, space in facilities and vehicles. The DIA has even adopted aspects of the CIA’s internal structure, creating a group called “Persia House,” for example, to pool resources on Iran.
The CIA’s influence extends across the DIA’s ranks. Flynn, who became director in July, is a three-star Army general who worked closely with the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq. His deputy, David R. Shedd, spent the bulk of his career at the CIA, much of it overseas as a spy.
Several officials said the main DIA challenge will be finding ways to slip so many spies into position overseas with limited space in embassies. “There are some definite challenges from a cover perspective,” the senior defense official said.
Placing operatives in conventional military units means finding an excuse for them to stay behind when the unit rotates out before the end of the spy’s job.
Having DIA operatives pose as academics or business executives requires painstaking work to create those false identities, and it means they won’t be protected by diplomatic immunity if caught.
Flynn is seeking to reduce turnover in the DIA’s clandestine service by enabling military members to stay with the agency for multiple overseas tours rather than return to their units. But the DIA is increasingly hiring civilians to fill out its spy ranks.
The DIA has also forged a much tighter relationship with JSOC, the military’s elite and highly lethal commando force, which also carries out drone strikes in Yemen and other countries.
Key aspects of the DIA’s plan were developed by then-Director Ronald L. Burgess, a retired three-star general who had served as intelligence chief to JSOC.
The DIA played an extensive and largely hidden role in JSOC operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, sending analysts into war zones and turning a large chunk of its workforce and computer systems in Virginia into an ana-lytic back office for JSOC.
The head of U.S. Special Operations Command, Adm. William H. McRaven, who directed the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, has pledged to create between 100 and 200 slots for undercover DIA operatives to work with Special Forces teams being deployed across North Africa and other trouble spots, officials said.
“Bill McRaven is a very strong proponent of this,” the senior Defense official said.
________________________________________
And of course here is the DIA with the CIA in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones.
In Baltimore with growing poverty and long-term unemployment a career path in the military and these FBI and CIA agencies are the only game in town. When this happens are EDUCATION SYSTEM reflects these changes and indeed we are filling with corporate K-12 and career college vocational pathways tied to these skill sets. So now our US education system becomes more and more tied to educating for a military---a security----a financialized global Wall Street all of which is DEEP STATE.
Global Wall Street likes to say-----THE US HAS BEEN CAPTURED BY GLOBAL CORPORATIONS because of just this----both major political parties are captured by global Wall Street pols pretending to be conservative Republicans or left social Democrats---and they appoint global Wall Street 5% of players to governing positions all while RIGGING OUR ELECTIONS WITH FRAUD. It sounds like they have WE THE PEOPLE---but know what? All these DEEP STATE infrastructure tied to SMART CITIES has not been installed---and 600,000 citizens in Baltimore coming out in rolling protests for weeks and months CAN GET RID OF CRONY GLOBAL WALL STREET POLS AND PLAYERS.
When we say global Wall Street Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations----those global NGOs filling our cities ---these are the growing 5% to the 1%----we don't want this future for our children and grandchildren.
MOVING FORWARD TO DEEP, DEEP, DEEP STATE is not what the 99% want to do.
Military Expands Intelligence Role in U.S.
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MARK MAZZETTIJAN. 14, 2007
James J. Yee, a former Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was suspected in 2003 of aiding terror suspects imprisoned at the facility, but the military’s espionage case against him soon collapsed. Credit Chris Hondros/Getty Images
WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.
The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say.
Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving the letters usually have turned over documents voluntarily, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American military personnel and civilians, officials say.
The F.B.I., the lead agency on domestic counterterrorism and espionage, has issued thousands of national security letters since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, provoking criticism and court challenges from civil liberties advocates who see them as unjustified intrusions into Americans’ private lives.
But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.
The military and the C.I.A. have long been restricted in their domestic intelligence operations, and both are barred from conducting traditional domestic law enforcement work. The C.I.A.’s role within the United States has been largely limited to recruiting people to spy on foreign countries.
Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said intelligence agencies like the C.I.A. used the letters on only a “limited basis.”
Pentagon officials defended the letters as valuable tools and said they were part of a broader strategy since the Sept. 11 attacks to use more aggressive intelligence-gathering tactics — a priority of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The letters “provide tremendous leads to follow and often with which to corroborate other evidence in the context of counterespionage and counterterrorism,” said Maj. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman.
Government lawyers say the legal authority for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. to use national security letters in gathering domestic records dates back nearly three decades and, by their reading, was strengthened by the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.
Pentagon officials said they used the letters to follow up on a variety of intelligence tips or leads. While they would not provide details about specific cases, military intelligence officials with knowledge of them said the military had issued the letters to collect financial records regarding a government contractor with unexplained wealth, for example, and a chaplain at Guantánamo Bay erroneously suspected of aiding prisoners at the facility.
Usually, the financial documents collected through the letters do not establish any links to espionage or terrorism and have seldom led to criminal charges, military officials say. Instead, the letters often help eliminate suspects.
“We may find out this person has unexplained wealth for reasons that have nothing to do with being a spy, in which case we’re out of it,” said Thomas A. Gandy, a senior Army counterintelligence official.
But even when the initial suspicions are unproven, the documents have intelligence value, military officials say. In the next year, they plan to incorporate the records into a database at the Counterintelligence Field Activity office at the Pentagon to track possible threats against the military, Pentagon officials said. Like others interviewed, they would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
Military intelligence officers have sent letters in up to 500 investigations over the last five years, two officials estimated. The number of letters is likely to be well into the thousands, the officials said, because a single case often generates letters to multiple financial institutions. For its part, the C.I.A. issues a handful of national security letters each year, agency officials said. Congressional officials said members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been briefed on the use of the letters by the military and the C.I.A.
Some national security experts and civil liberties advocates are troubled by the C.I.A. and military taking on domestic intelligence activities, particularly in light of recent disclosures that the Counterintelligence Field Activity office had maintained files on Iraq war protesters in the United States in violation of the military’s own guidelines. Some experts say the Pentagon has adopted an overly expansive view of its domestic role under the guise of “force protection,” or efforts to guard military installations.
“There’s a strong tradition of not using our military for domestic law enforcement,” said Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, a former general counsel at both the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. who is the dean at the McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific. “They’re moving into territory where historically they have not been authorized or presumed to be operating.”
Similarly, John Radsan, an assistant general counsel at the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004 and now a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, said, “The C.I.A. is not supposed to have any law enforcement powers, or internal security functions, so if they’ve been issuing their own national security letters, they better be able to explain how they don’t cross the line.”
The Pentagon’s expanded intelligence-gathering role, in particular, has created occasional conflicts with other federal agencies. Pentagon efforts to post American military officers at embassies overseas to gather intelligence for counterterrorism operations or future war plans has rankled some State Department and C.I.A. officials, who see the military teams as duplicating and potentially interfering with the intelligence agency.
In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has complained about military officials dealing directly with local police — rather than through the bureau — for assistance in responding to possible terrorist threats against a military base. F.B.I. officials say the threats have often turned out to be uncorroborated and, at times, have stirred needless anxiety.
The military’s frequent use of national security letters has sometimes caused concerns from the businesses receiving them, a counterterrorism official said. Lawyers at financial institutions, which routinely provide records to the F.B.I. in law enforcement investigations, have contacted bureau officials to say they were confused by the scope of the military’s requests and whether they were obligated to turn the records over, the official said.
Companies are not eager to turn over sensitive financial data about customers to the government, the official said, “so the more this is done, and the more poorly it’s done, the more pushback there is for the F.B.I.”
The bureau has frequently relied on the letters in recent years to gather telephone and Internet logs, financial information and other records in terrorism investigations, serving more than 9,000 letters in 2005, according to a Justice Department tally. As an investigative tool, the letters present relatively few hurdles; they can be authorized by supervisors rather than a court. Passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001 lowered the standard for issuing the letters, requiring only that the documents sought be “relevant” to an investigation and allowing records requests for more peripheral figures, not just targets of an inquiry.
Some Democrats have accused the F.B.I. of using the letters for fishing expeditions, and the American Civil Liberties Union won court challenges in two cases, one for library records in Connecticut and the other for Internet records in Manhattan. Concerned about possible abuses, Congress imposed new safeguards in extending the Patriot Act last year, in part by making clear that recipients of national security letters could contact a lawyer and seek court review. Congress also directed the Justice Department inspector general to study the F.B.I.’s use of the letters, a review that is continuing.
Unlike the F.B.I., the military and the C.I.A. do not have wide-ranging authority to seek records on Americans in intelligence investigations. But the expanded use of national security letters has allowed the Pentagon and the intelligence agency to collect records on their own. Sometimes, military or C.I.A. officials work with the F.B.I. to seek records, as occurred with an American translator who had worked for the military in Iraq and was suspected of having ties to insurgents.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld directed military lawyers and intelligence officials to examine their legal authorities to collect intelligence both inside the United States and abroad. They concluded that the Pentagon had “way more” legal tools than it had been using, a senior Defense Department official said.
Military officials say the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978, which establishes procedures for government access to sensitive banking data, first authorized them to issue national security letters. The military had used the letters sporadically for years, officials say, but the pace accelerated in late 2001, when lawyers and intelligence officials concluded that the Patriot Act strengthened their ability to use the letters to seek financial records on a voluntary basis and to issue mandatory letters to obtain credit ratings, the officials said.
The Patriot Act does not specifically mention military intelligence or C.I.A. officials in connection with the national security letters.
Some F.B.I. officials said they were surprised by the Pentagon’s interpretation of the law when military officials first informed them of it. “It was a very broad reading of the law,” a former counterterrorism official said.
While the letters typically have been used to trace the financial transactions of military personnel, they also have been used to investigate civilian contractors and people with no military ties who may pose a threat to the military, officials said. Military officials say they regard the letters as one of the least intrusive means to gather evidence. When a full investigation is opened, one official said, it has now become “standard practice” to issue such letters.
One prominent case in which letters were used to obtain financial records, according to two military officials, was that of a Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who was suspected in 2003 of aiding terror suspects imprisoned at the facility. The espionage case against the chaplain, James J. Yee, soon collapsed.
Eugene Fidell, a defense lawyer for the former chaplain and a military law expert, said he was unaware that military investigators may have used national security letters to obtain financial information about Mr. Yee, nor was he aware that the military had ever claimed the authority to issue the letters.
Mr. Fidell said he found the practice “disturbing,” in part because the military does not have the same checks and balances when it comes to Americans’ civil rights as does the F.B.I. “Where is the accountability?” he asked. “That’s the evil of it — it doesn’t leave fingerprints.”
Even when a case is closed, military officials said they generally maintain the records for years because they may be relevant to future intelligence inquiries. Officials at the Pentagon’s counterintelligence unit say they plan to incorporate those records into a database, called Portico, on intelligence leads. The financial documents will not be widely disseminated, but limited to investigators, an intelligence official said.
“You don’t want to destroy something only to find out that the same guy comes up in another report and you don’t know that he was investigated before,” the official said.
The Counterintelligence Field Activity office, created in 2002 to better coordinate the military’s efforts to combat foreign intelligence services, has drawn criticism for some domestic intelligence activities.
The agency houses an antiterrorist database of intelligence tips and threat reports, known as Talon, which had been collecting information on antiwar planning meetings at churches, libraries and other locations. The Defense Department has since tightened its procedures for what kind of information is allowed into the Talon database, and the counterintelligence office also purged more than 250 incident reports from the database that officials determined should never have been included because they centered on lawful political protests by people opposed to the war in Iraq.
____________________________________________
We will see very soon a K-12 'public charter' tied to vocational tracking of children specifically for these DIA/CIA/Homeland Security agencies------we see a CIA as venture capitalist creating and selling products designed to spy----and to teach the skills of spying to our US children.
Now remember the biggest expansion overseas has made the CIA more DIVERSE as CIA director Brennan stated alluding to US black, brown citizens as well as white but actually referring to global labor pool citizens for assignments around the world. This is to what all our Federal funding is going that used to be Federal agency funding for our communities---our public schools----our public services and public works departments. It also represents the designation of great amounts of HIGH-SPEED TECHNOLOGY AIRWAVES --GREAT MEGA-DATA STORAGE----pushing 99% of citizens to WIFI----see why all our K-12 public schools are starting students on coding in 3rd grade?
US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones do not have to look this way------it is our Baltimore City Hall and Maryland Assembly pols with a Governor Larry Hogan and Mayor PUGH which allows these conditions to exist-----THEY COULD BE ENFORCED US RULE OF LAW AND PROTECTING CIVIL LIBERTIES AND US CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF CITIZENS BUT THEY ARE NOT..........
'The decision to cut the company’s access to data also followed reports that Geofeedia was used by five police departments in Maryland to monitor and store citizens’ public social media posts'.
Maryland probably bugs people's hearing aid----a citizen calls all this INSIDIOUS----and it is.
CIA-backed surveillance software was marketed to public schools
Dell Cameron--
Oct 18 at 9:40AM | Last updated Oct 18 at 12:12PM
Photo via dolgachov / GettyImages Remix by Jason Reed
High school students in Illinois were monitored for a year using Geofeedia’s platform.
An online surveillance tool that enabled hundreds of U.S. law enforcement agencies to track and collect information on social media users was also marketed for use in American public schools, the Daily Dot has learned.
Geofeedia sold surveillance software typically bought by police to a high school in a northern Chicago suburb, less than 50 miles from where the company was founded in 2011. An Illinois school official confirmed the purchase of the software by phone on Monday.
In the fall of 2014, the Lincolnshire-Prairie School District paid Geofeedia $10,000 to monitor the social media posts of children at Adlai E. Stevenson High School.
“We did have for one year a contract with Geofeedia,” said Jim Conrey, a spokesperson for Lincolnshire-Prairie School District. “We were mostly interested in the possibility of trying to prevent any kind of harm, either that students would do to themselves or to other students.”
Conrey said the district simply wanted to keep its students safe. “It was really just about student safety; if we could try to head off any potential dangerous situations, we thought it might be worth it,” he said.
Ultimately, the school found little use for the platform, which was operated by police liaison stationed on school grounds, and chose not to renew its subscription after the first year, citing cost and a lack of actionable information. “A lot of kids that were posting stuff that we most wanted, they weren’t doing the geo-tagging or making it public,” Conrey said. “We weren’t really seeing a lot there.”
“It was really just about student safety.”
The school’s experience, added Conrey, was that more often than not students would approach school administrators with sensitive issues, as opposed to the school unearthing problems affecting students using Geofeedia. “Quite frankly, we found that it wasn’t worth the money,” Conrey said.
Geofeedia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It is not clear how many other schools may have purchased Geofeedia’s software.
Outwardly presenting its product as a tool for location-based marketing—and counting among its clients companies such as Dell and CNN—Geofeedia derives a significant portion of its revenue from U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. More than 500 police departments reportedly use Geofeedia, which received an investment this year from the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm.
Three of Geofeedia’s top sources for data--Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter—recently suspended its developer access to user posts, allegedly rendering its platform worthless for the time being. In statements to the Daily Dot, the three companies cited Geofeedia’s unauthorized use of their data. In February, Twitter instituted new policies designed to safeguard against surveillance targeting its users.
The decision to cut the company’s access to data also followed reports that Geofeedia was used by five police departments in Maryland to monitor and store citizens’ public social media posts. According to the Baltimore Sun, police once utilized Geofeedia’s surveillance software to intercept “chatter from a local high school about kids who planned to walk out of class” and join a protest in the wake of a police shooting.
Police records reviewed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) show that officers in Northern California have used Geofeedia to collect information on citizens who used the hashtags “#BlackLivesMatter” and “#PoliceBrutality.” Police records reviewed by the Daily Dot showed a police officer in Sacramento saying his department was “recording the whole city 24/7” with Geofeedia.
The Daily Dot also reported exclusively last month that the Denver Police Department paid Geofeedia $30,000 in confiscated funds for access to its software. In doing so, according to ACLU of Colorado, police may have violated a long-standing agreement regulating how and when Denver P.D. is allowed to conduct surveillance, which was instituted in 2003 after police were caught amassing secret files on residents.
“Discovering that Geofeedia was not only being used by social media sites to help police spy on activists of color was disturbing enough,” said Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice. “But then to find out this third-party vendor is also helping to police public school students is beyond disturbing, it’s a terrifying bypass of the most basic rights of some of the most vulnerable, and most dissident, voices in the country: activists of color and students.”
In response to the bad press, Geofeedia has touted its software’s use during the Boston Marathon bombing and, more recently, during recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Matthew. In an online statement, the company asserted its commitment to “the principles of personal privacy, transparency, and both the letter and spirit of the law when it comes to individual rights.”
Dozens of internal police emails reviewed by the Daily Dot, however, show that Geofeedia has actively worked with law enforcement to subvert the privacy controls offered users by companies like Facebook. In late 2014, around the time it began servicing Stevenson High School, Geofeedia released a feature that enabled police to integrate undercover accounts.
According to a source familiar with the program’s operation, police often target persons of interest using fake Facebook accounts with the goal of gaining access to the target’s private posts.
The fake accounts might depict images of attractive women, or in some cases, a person known by the target. If the ruse is successful, the source said, the fake account could be used by Geofeedia to amass a wealth of data on the target’s prior activities. Analysis might also be run to determine which “friends” a target most often engages with.
These capabilities and others—which are also currently available through Geofeedia competitors whose access to Twitter and Facebook user data has yet to be severed--reportedly won the startup a round of funding this year from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, according to documents published the Intercept.
The CIA declined to comment for this story.
___________________________________________
This is ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE DEEP STATE------where a global 1% puts a global 99% UNDER ITS THUMB.
All this is not PATRIOTIC-----it is not about protecting FREEDOM AND LIBERTY for Americans-----the global 1% are taking the US to COLONIAL STATUS----so please remember IT IS NOT JUST ANY JOB.
These 17 Agencies Make Up The Most Sophisticated Spy Network In The World
The U.S. intelligence community is vast, composed of 17 distinct organizations each operating under its own shroud of secrecy.
Oversight of these agencies generally falls to the Department of Defense or Congress, leaving the average citizen with precious little knowledge of how they operate.
Funded by largely classified budgets, it's difficult to assess how much the U.S. annually spends on these clandestine operations, but one 2012 estimate pegs the cost at about $75 billion.
The following slides highlight the expansive reach of the U.S. intelligence community.
Click here to see the spy network > »View As: One Page Slides
__________________________________________
Here is the other arm of DEEP STATE-----our national media. This happened because we allowed MONOPOLIES when our US Constitution and Federal laws do not allow monopolies. What happened during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA? Our media filled with CIA----DIA-----grads tied to secret societies and VOILA----WE HAVE NATIONAL FAKE NEWS.
'Operation Mockingbird, revealed by Carl Bernstein in 1977, is also briefly mentioned. Mockingbird saw the CIA place agents and connections in virtually every major mainstream news outlet, going right to the top'.
This was just the beginning----here in Baltimore all our media is filled with this culture. This is why WE THE PEOPLE must WAKE UP to our national media being FAKE NEWS----it literally has become PROPAGANDA.
We are watching today in the US media our political news as seen in any third world developing nation....
Our media is called THE 4TH ESTATE because of the separation of powers built by our founding fathers to protect us from TYRANNY OF A FEW. Guess what? WE THE PEOPLE asleep at the wheel allowed those global 1% grab control of all separation of powers---including our national media. THIS IS DEEP, DEEP STATE.
Here we see why I shout-----we can respect our national writers but not see them as populist leaders----just as with our national actors and music stars-----global Wall Street has indeed controlled our culture through a captured media. Start a new business---be a local hard copy print media for the 99% !
Web Only / Culture » February 7, 2017
Don’t Be Fooled By the Trump Spat—The CIA Is Not Your Friend
A new book reminds us that the CIA is one of history’s great purveyors of fake news.
BY Branko Marcetic
Through covert funding and well-placed assets, the CIA helped create, keep alive and exert editorial control over a range of seemingly independent entities.
Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, a history of the CIA’s decades-spanning attempts to co-opt and outright recruit writers and intellectuals for its own ends, is the fruit of at least 15 years of research. Yet by some cosmic happenstance, it’s only now being released, when it’s more relevant than ever.
Joel Whitney’s book comes amidst weeks of CIA-dominated headlines as the intelligence community butts heads with President Donald Trump over allegations he owes his victory to—and is perhaps in the thrall of—the Kremlin. After a heated public exchange, Trump tried to make nice with the agency with a speech in front of the CIA memorial in Langley, Virginia. Rather than paying tribute to the agency’s fallen, however, he used the opportunity to criticize the media and insist on the tremendous size of his inauguration audience, leaving a sour taste in the mouths of some CIA personnel.
All of this has led some progressives to view the agency as a possible savior, an ally in ousting Trump. Presumably taking the standpoint that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, Democrats have suddenly flipped from being at least relatively critical of the CIA and its oversteps to stalwartly defending the agency. At least one pro-CIA sign even made it into the massive Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration.
It’s in this environment that Finks hits bookshelves, serving as a timely refresher that the CIA is hardly to be trusted, and in fact has a long history of using the press to shape public opinion.
Whitney outlines how over 18 or so years, starting as early as 1948, the CIA, in concert with some of its foreign counterparts, covertly funded and directed a host of propaganda ventures. While on their face, these projects—from literary magazines and book series to films and student groups—appeared far from jingoistic, beneath the surface was a campaign to wage the Cold War on the sly, combating anti-Americanism and spreading anti-Soviet, pro-U.S. messages.
Through covert funding and well-placed assets, the CIA helped create, keep alive and exert editorial control over a range of seemingly independent entities. Some were explicitly liberal, like the National Student Association in the late 1960s. Others, such as literary magazines like Encounter and The Paris Review, were cloaked in a veneer of apoliticism that left readers unaware they were being subtly manipulated. In Latin America, the CIA sponsored more than half a dozen magazines for the purpose of covertly swaying local intellectuals. “The two things these magazines had in common was that they tended to defend US foreign policy at its most egregious, facing censorship when they didn’t, and that they learned to disguise this defense,” writes Whitney.
One of the CIA’s major projects was publishing and disseminating Boris Pasternek’s opus Dr. Zhivago, which had been banned by the Soviet Union for its portrayal of post-revolutionary disillusionment. The CIA did this not out of love for literature, but because it would be a propaganda coup for the agency. When Pasternak turned down the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature for the novel, presumed by many to be a result of Soviet pressure, the Paris Review—one of the supposedly neutral literary magazines funded by the CIA and founded and run by its operatives—built an entire issue around the incident.
The CIA’s mission was often one of “soft power,” well before the term ever existed. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)—the CIA front which funded the Paris Review and other magazines—paid up to three times the money for interviews with Russian writers who it could use as anti-Communist symbols. White, Russian authors, Latin Americans and Eastern bloc writers filled the Review’s pages. By contrast, black writers—and the topic of segregation—received next to no attention form CCF-directed magazines. The CCF also maintained veto power over articles, ensuring that nothing viewed as overly critical of or negative toward American society would be published.
Whitney recounts how the CCF worked to undermine the career of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, deemed an unacceptable cultural influence for his leftist views. Learning that Neruda was in the running for the 1964 Nobel Prize for literature, the CCF launched a smear campaign to discredit the poet. This campaign “traumatize[d] those closest to Neruda for decades,” Whitney writes, linking Neruda to Stalin and alleging that he was involved in trying to assassinate Trotsky in 1940. At the same time, the CCF gladly used Neruda’s poetry for one of its Latin-American magazines, utilizing him to mask the CIA’s reactionary politics even as the agency worked to destroy his life.
The CIA’s use of Neruda was part of a broader approach of using largely left-wing writers to carry out its bidding. Readers—along with many of the contributors themselves—were unaware of the CIA ties of the various enterprises they were involved in, and that left-wing figures were being “used to disguise the United States’ reactionary politics with a more liberal face,” as Whitney puts it. Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, one of those who had been unwittingly “weaponized,” told his friend he felt like a “cuckold” when, in the mid-1960s, the New York Times revealed the CIA’s patronage of dozens of literary magazines, one of which--Mundo Nuevo—he had written for.
Other participants were more willing. At the center of Finks is the aforementioned Paris Review, a literary magazine founded in 1953 by Harold “Doc” Humes, Peter Matthiessen and literary darling George Plimpton.
Matthiessen was eventually outed as a CIA asset, while Plimpton remained cagey through his final days on his exact connection to the agency. Whitney draws on documents, however, that suggest Plimpton was well aware of the CIA’s role in the magazine he was running. Humes was not. He was riven with (ultimately justified) paranoia about being spied on, and the revelation of Matthiessen’s CIA ties contributed to his psychological breakdown.
These are not the only famous names to make their appearance in the book as CIA employees. Others include Irving Kristol, father of Bill and a founding father of neoconservatism; Arthur Schlesinger, the Kennedys’ “court historian”; and William F. Buckley, Jr., pre-eminent conservative, TV personality and founder of the National Review.
There are also some tantalizing, lesser-known threads Whitney alludes to, though they deserve further pulling. These include the book’s coda, examining Paris Review co-founder John Train’s role as a conduit for CIA money in Afghanistan during the 1980s Soviet invasion, financing various propaganda ventures and embedding the media with stories favorable to the agency’s chosen narrative.
Another enticing diversion is a segment on Operation Chaos, for instance, a covert war on the independent antiwar press, with CIA agents infiltrating magazines like the feminist, pro-LGBT antiwar paper Quicksilver Times, and sowing discord within them.
Operation Mockingbird, revealed by Carl Bernstein in 1977, is also briefly mentioned. Mockingbird saw the CIA place agents and connections in virtually every major mainstream news outlet, going right to the top. Some, like the New York Times’ Arthur Sulzberger, signed secrecy agreements with the agency, while others had more informal, social ties to the agency that didn’t require legal documentation. The CIA operated a network of (by one estimate) 900 foreign journalists paid to spread propaganda anywhere in the world at any time, propaganda which two former agents claimed regularly found its way into U.S. media.
While Whitney’s book ends in early-1980s Afghanistan, we know that such efforts continued. In 1986, it was revealed that the Reagan administration had engaged in a “deception” campaign against 1980s-era bogeyman Moammar Gadhafi, selectively feeding the media with false information—one might say, fake news—to make him believe he would be imminently attacked by the United States or even toppled. This involved spreading false or exaggerated reports about the disloyalty of his underlings or internal opposition within Libya.
In December 1991, a now-declassified CIA report noted the CIA’s deep connections in the worlds of business, academia and the media, including “relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and television network” (the CIA’s emphasis). This, the report boasted, allowed the agency to turn “intelligence failure” stories into “intelligence success” ones, plus “postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests.”
While it may be decades before we know the exact scope of the CIA’s collusion with the media today, there are suggestions that the agency continues to enjoy a cozy relationship with members of the media. In 2014, Ken Silverstein reported that one Los Angeles Times reporter habitually sent drafts and summaries of his stories to the CIA, assured the agency of positive coverage and wrote stories that intentionally offered a positive slant toward the agency. The CIA also regularly invites reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox News and NPR to its headquarters for briefings.
Finks, then, is invaluable reading material in the present moment. It’s an excellent overview of the information war launched and fought by the CIA since its inception, and presents a detailed look into how such “soft” propaganda was made and operated.
All of which brings us to the current stoush between the agency and Trump. At a moment when liberals and Democrats raise the alarm over “fake news,” yet happily run with second-hand testimony of intelligence officials or unverified rumors leaked to the press, Whitney’s work should provide us with a sobering dose of caution. Reports suggest the Trump campaign is currently being investigated for its alleged connections to the Kremlin, and perhaps at the end of it all we’ll see evidence that confirms the most explosive allegations are true. Until that time, we should think of Whitney’s book and remember that intelligence agencies have never been strangers to using the press to manipulate public opinion.
____________________________________________
Here is what happens when a free media is captured by a global Wall Street-----REAL news that holds power accountable becomes gagged whether from inside media our by our very government.
Obama was one of the worst in suppressing whistle-blowers inside government and US press freedom. So, DEEP STATE has CIA embedded in our national media chilling free speech and holding power accountable. Of course this is a definite when the owners of all US media outlets become that global 1%.
The publishing houses have always been tied to local or regional wealthy families but because they were not global---because they were not national -----they used to be REGIONAL ---they worked to hold power accountable. It was merger and acquisition that ended that regional ownership and local media competitors.
The CIA has always been an Executive Branch agency so whether CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA----the goal is protect and expand empire-building of global corporations which today are not American---they are multi-national.
'My favorite quotation cited in Secrets and Leaks: “[A]n increase in the secrecy of governmental action may be taken as an index of the draft for the garrison state in America.”'
The top spook’s stupid gag order
By Jack Shafer
April 21, 2014
The nation’s top spy has prohibited all of his spies from talking with reporters about “intelligence-related information” unless officially authorized to speak. Intelligence Community Directive 119, signed by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper last month and made public Monday in a report by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, threatens to reduce the flow of information from the national security establishment to the press — and hence the public.
As Aftergood notes, Directive 119 does not merely bar intelligence community employees from sharing classified intelligence information with reporters. It also bars the discussion with the media of unclassified intelligence information “related” to intelligence. Under Directive 119, any and all conversations between spooks and reporters not explicitly authorized by top officials will be criminalized at the worst or potentially put intelligence employees out of a job at the least. The same discussion of unclassified matters between an intelligence community employee and a non-reporter would be allowed, Aftergood further notes.
Directive 119 increases the insularity of the national security state, making the public less safe, not more. Until this directive was issued, intelligence community employees could provide subtext and context for the stories produced by the national security press without breaking the law. Starting now, every news story about the national security establishment that rates disfavor with the national security establishment — no matter how innocuous — will rate a full-bore investigation of sources by authorities.
Directive 119 achieves through executive order much of what the spooks tried to accomplish legislatively in the summer of 2012, when the Senate Intelligence Committee approved a measure that would have banned background briefings between reporters and all intelligence officials except “press officers and agency directors or deputy directors,” as Reuters correspondent Mark Hosenball reported. Such briefings have been routine during most recent presidential administrations, Hosenball wrote. An avalanche of protests smothered the measure, killing it until Clapper resurrected elements of it in Directive 119.
The tussle between secret-keepers in government and the secret-sharers in the press goes back to the founding of the republic, as Rahul Sagar delineates in his recent book Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy, which I reviewed earlier this year. Efforts like Directive 119 — designed to restrict the flow of information — can lead to unintended results, Sagar found. By tightening the normal circle of secrecy, a president automatically reduces the number of advisers he can draw on to make decisions, and this reduces the amount of brainpower that can shine on an intelligence issue or a foreign crisis and increases conformity. Administrations that “turn inward” tend to exclude dissidents and doubters — emboldening loyalists and suck-ups, and hindering oversight and debate.
One excessively ingrown presidential administration, as you may recall, acted on its excessively ingrown intelligence information and analysis to invade a foreign land to capture diabolical biological and chemical weapons that didn’t exist. If ever we needed more unauthorized leaks to neutralize all the authorized leaks of bogus information to gullible reporters, it was during the prelude to that war.
Congress would have little idea of what the White House was doing if not for news reports based on leaks of classified information, Sagar writes, making the leaks and the press reports essential to governance and the avoidance of an imperial presidency. He quotes former Representative Norman Mineta, who as a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence once said, “We are like mushrooms. They keep us in the dark and feed us a lot of manure.”
But don’t weep for Congress. They’re the ones who criminalized leaks of classified information in the first place. This paradox, noted by Sagar, means Congress prohibits the very sustenance required to keep itself informed about the executive branch. As an executive order, Directive 119 impinges on the authority of Congress to police the president: In a perfect world Congress would refuse the manure being fed to it, demand real information, and legislate a reversal of Directive 119. On the other hand, if you liked the war in Iraq, you’ll love Directive 119.
Another of Sagar’s findings, worthy of mention in the Directive 119 discussion, is that extreme state-secrecy tends to short-circuit the checks and balancing process that keeps the president from vectoring off in a dictatorial direction. Members of Congress who criticize an administration’s national security policies can find themselves marginalized in debates by a strong-armed president, as was the case with Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). As a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Wyden knew much about the National Security Agency’s runaway surveillance programs. But owing to the position of trust he occupied, he could not inform the public of those programs in a way that would allow them to be debated. Not until NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked his stash to reporters Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman (talk about unauthorized contact between an intelligence community employee and the press!) was an honest and needed debate about domestic surveillance possible.
Directive 119 might make sense if the administration could point to a pattern of unauthorized discussions that has done lasting damage to national security. But that it does not do. Instead, it tightens the circle. And it feeds us all another helping of dung.
******
My favorite quotation cited in Secrets and Leaks: “[A]n increase in the secrecy of governmental action may be taken as an index of the draft for the garrison state in America.” Send your favorites to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and watch my Twitter feed for quotations from the work of Ben Hecht. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.
PHOTOS: Director of U.S. National Intelligence James Clapper appears before the House Intelligence Committee on “Worldwide Threats” in Washington February 4, 2014. REUTERS/Gary Cameron
Accused government whistleblower Edward Snowden is seen on a screen as he speaks via video conference with members of the Committee on legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe during a hearing on “mass surveillance” at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, April 8, 2014. REUTERS/Vincent Kessler
___________________________________________
This is why we shout that main stream news IS FAKE NEWS.
The 4th Estate once directed to hold power accountable is now controlled by global Wall Street and nothing but propaganda.
Taking our national media creates A DEEP, DEEP, DEEP STATE if allowed to MOVE FORWARD.
So when national news media were EMBEDDED into our Desert Storm or War in Afghanistan were they there to hold power accountable or were they there holding our soldiers who overwhelmingly did not want to end GENEVA CONVENTION and engage in Bush/Cheney kind of warfare?
The Fourth Estate
In the "democratic age" news and information have been transformed. The way politics is covered has changed radically. Papers don't "report" news, they quite often present it according to their preferences and prejudices, reports the guardian. The role of the 'fourth estate' is in jeopardy...
Outside of the three branches of government, The Fourth Estate, the news media, through fair and impartial investigative journalism, has always been a regulating mechanism for the federal government. Until now that is! Now the news is controlled by the wealthy Progressive Elite who shape the news American voters receive and shape it with their Progressive agenda.
In 1841, Thomas Carlyle wrote, “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” (On Heroes and Hero Worship). Four years earlier, Carlyle had used the phrase in his French Revolution: “A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up, increases and multiplies; irrepressible, incalculable.” Carlyle saw the press as instrumental to the birth and growth of democracy, spreading facts and opinions and sparking revolution against tyranny – journalism in the digital age.
OPSEC Radio host Jamie Williamson, a retired Special Forces Colonel, and cohost DW Wilber, a former CIA intelligence officer and contributing writer for Town Hall, have an in-depth discussion of the impact of the Fourth Estate and how Mainstream Media is shaping American politics.
Jamie Williamson, OPSEC Cofounder & President: Jamie is a retired Army Special Forces colonel with over 33 years of service. He is a combat veteran and has served in Iraq, the Balkans, and Afghanistan with various command and staff assignments in the infantry and in Special Operations. He is currently a small business owner.
DW, Former CIA Case Officer: DW was an Intelligence and Counterterrorism Officer with the CIA and the Department of Defense – with a focus on technical and human intelligence collection activities, as well as counterterrorism operations in Eastern and Western Europe, and the Middle East.
_____________________________________________
When global citizens no longer know who to trust everyone is in danger because people in fear act out often without the knowledge needed and VOILA----we get the conditions of war and civil unrest as during WW2 that the GENEVA CONVENTION was written to end.
Bush knew that -----Obama knew that-----when Trump says he is going to build a military that makes the world too scared to act out against ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE---this is what he means----no hold's bar and our rank-and-file soldiers----those CIA/DIA are the pawns simply protecting KINGS AND QUEENS.
Make no mistake Trump as CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA is building these structures in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones not just to protect WE THE PEOPLE from those pesky overseas terrorists---they are preparing to see WE THE PEOPLE as those pesky sovereign citizen terrorists---black, white, or brown citizen!
WE NEED TO STOP MOVING FORWARD WITH US CITIES AS FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES AND END DESIGNATIONS THAT ALLOW OUR US CITIES TO BECOME MILITARIZED AND SECURITIZED-----it is not just any job.
This article was written in 2002----and more were written after Bush left office and Obama continued a CIA - driven warfare.
Op-Ed:U.S.
Violates Geneva Conventions
by members of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
On January 11, 2002, the United States announced that it was refusing to abide by the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. The Third Geneva Convention, which provides specific guidelines for treatment of prisoner combatants, is a part of the "law of nations" and is a mainstay of international humanitarian law. The United States explained that the prisoners taken in Afghanistan and Pakistan were not actually prisoners of war, but were in fact "unlawful combatants."
The first prisoners arrived in the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on January 11, 2002. According to the Washington Post, prisoners were hooded and shackled during the 27-hour flight. The United States defended these practices as appropriate security measures. Media on site in Cuba reported that the prisoners were fitted with goggles that were blacked out, for "security reasons" necessary to prevent them from using their eyes. In a public letter to Donald Rumsfeld , Amnesty International expressed concern that the prisoners' conditions of transport violated international norms.
The prisoners are being housed in outdoor 6 foot-by-8 foot open-air chain link cages, with concrete floors and wooden roofs, and contain a mat and a plastic bucket. The U.S. demanded that media not show photographs of the prisoners in these conditions, explaining, without apparent irony at the inconsistency, that the photos would deprive the prisoners of their rights under the Geneva Convention. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, any photographs of the prisoners in the United States-imposed conditions would be "humiliating" and "debasing." Several outlets have not complied with the Pentagon's demand.
The Bush Administration's refusal to abide by the world's humanitarian laws stands in stark contrast to the justifications advanced for U.S. military actions. On September 20, 2001, in a televised speech, George W. Bush justified the waging of war as necessary to defend the values of "civilization" against "evil": "This is not, however, just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight." On November 8, 2001, in his prime-time speech to the nation, President Bush declared the bombing of Afghanistan to be "a war to save civilization itself."
Article 4 of the Geneva Convention defines the categories of persons who may be considered as "prisoners of war." According to Article 5, "should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal." No competent tribunal has adjudicated this matter.
Among the provisions of the Third Geneva Convention regarding humane treatment of prisoners of war, which the U.S. is refusing to apply, are:
- Article 13: Humane treatment required; No reprisals allowed
- Article 14: Respect for persons and honour; No gender discrimination
- Article 16: No discrimination based on race, nationality, religious belief or political opinions
- Article 17: No physical or mental torture; No coercion to obtain information; Prisoners who decline to provide information may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment
- Article 18: Clothing, articles of personal use, to remain with prisoners
- Article 20: Evacuation or transfer to be under same conditions as afforded Detaining Power
- Article 21: Internment in camp allowed; Close confinement prohibited
- Article 22: Internment in penitentiaries prohibited; Every guarantee of hygiene and healthfulness required
- Article 25: Condition of quarters must be as favorable for POWs as for the forces of the Detaining Power; Accommodations for habits and customs of POWs required; Protection from dampness, adequate heat and lighting required
- Article 26: Food must be in sufficient quantity, quality and variety to maintain good health and weight
- Article 27: Adequate clothing, underwear and footwear required
- Article 28: Canteens must be installed; Fairly priced food, soap, tobacco and ordinary items must be stocked
- Articles 29 - 32: Proper hygiene and medical attention, including monthly health inspections, required
- Articles 34 - 37: Prisoners must be afforded complete latitude in the exercise of religion, including attendance at services, on condition they comply with disciplinary routine
- Article 38: Provisions for physical, intellectual and recreational activities
- Article 70: Prisoners must be allowed to write to family, others
The authors are members of the national steering committee of the A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition. www.internationalanswer.org.
_________________________________________
We must remember that Obama came to office with voters demanding Bush war crimes be given justice and to assure the US returned to being A DEMOCRATIC, RULE OF LAW, FREEDOM AND JUSTICE world leader-----instead we got a third Bush term with more violations of human rights inside US and around the world.
With Bush it was the CIA often tied to these breaches of war----our soldiers spoke of orders from our military leaders these soldiers knew violated rules of war. The global military corporations are being called MERCENARY----these are those CIA-----DIA----INTEL-DRIVEN DEEP STATE structures we are allowing to MOVE FORWARD coming to our US cities.
THESE ARE THE ISSUES THAT MUST HAVE ENGAGED CITIZENS AND MASS PROTESTS----CITIZENS NOT STANDING FOR FRAUDULENT PRIMARIES KEEPING THESE SAME GLOBAL WALL STREET CANDIDATES AS THE ONLY CHOICE----VOTE FOR THE LEAST WORST VOTERS ARE TOLD.
All of this is what comes to our US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones like Baltimore with militarized police training and lots of black citizens killed in zero tolerance deadly force coming to all Americans black, white, and brown citizens!
REAGAN-era CIA
'Torture was taught by CIA; Declassified manual details the methods used in Honduras; Agency denials refuted
By Gary Cohn, Ginger Thompson, and mark Matthews, The Baltimore Sun, Monday 27 January 1997, Final Edition
WASHINGTON -- A newly declassified CIA training manual details torture methods used against suspected subversives in Central America during the 1980s, refuting claims by the agency that no such methods were taught there'.
Obama, Bush, and the Geneva Conventions
Today, 12 August, is the 61st anniversary of the signing of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the international treaties designed to protect soldiers and civilians during armed conflicts. The treaties became the focus of international attention in 2002 when the Bush administration controversially concluded that al Qaeda and the Taliban were not entitled to their protections. President Obama has reaffirmed America’s "commitment" to the Geneva Conventions but has not been specific about how the Conventions apply to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees. To re-assert U.S. leadership with respect to the laws of war, the Obama administration should announce that the United States accepts specific provisions of the Conventions and engage other countries to develop new rules where the Geneva Conventions do not apply.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions consist of four separate treaties originally signed by 59 countries in Geneva, Switzerland. In light of the horrific experiences of World War II, the first three agreements revised previous treaties dating from 1864, 1906, and 1929 that provided humanitarian protections for sick or wounded soldiers on land, sailors at sea, and prisoners of war. The fourth agreement, added in 1949, establishes protections for civilians in conflict zones. The best known of the agreements is the Third Geneva Convention, which provides detailed articles of protection for those who qualify as Prisoners of War (POWs).
The Geneva Conventions apply to conflicts between the 194 countries that are now party to them. Since 1949, three Additional Protocols have been added to the Conventions to provide further protections in light of changes in modern warfare. The United States has long objected to certain provisions in the First Protocol, although it has stated its support for others. President Reagan submitted the Second Protocol to the Senate in 1987, but the Senate has not acted on it. The Bush administration was a driving force behind (and signed and ratified) the Third Protocol, which created an alternative protective symbol (a Red Diamond) for countries (primarily Israel) that do not use the Red Cross or Red Crescent.
Together, the four 1949 Conventions and the three protocols form the bedrock of the international laws of war.
The United States applied the Geneva Conventions in the Korean, Vietnam, and first Gulf Wars. After the September 11 attacks, however, President Bush concluded that the Conventions did not apply to the United States conflict with al Qaeda because al Qaeda was not a party to the Conventions. He also determined that while Afghanistan was a party to the Conventions, the Taliban were not entitled to POW protections. The Bush administration’s refusal to apply the Geneva Conventions (and certain provisions in human rights treaties) was condemned by U.S. allies and human rights groups as an effort to place al Qaeda and Taliban detainees into a "legal black hole." In its second term, the Bush administration made significant efforts to clarify the legal rules applicable to detention and engage U.S. allies in discussions on international legal issues. But the administration still resisted application of the Geneva Conventions.
In 2006, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s arguments and held that even if the Geneva Conventions did not apply in their entirety, at least one provision — Common Article 3, which prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees — applies to the conflict between the United States and al Qaeda.
President Obama entered office pledging to "restore" U.S. respect for international law. He immediately banned coercive interrogation methods and rescinded the Bush administration’s strained interpretations of Common Article 3. Last December, Obama reaffirmed the U.S. "commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions" in his Nobel Prize remarks. These statements have helped improve America’s image internationally. But the Obama administration has yet to apply the Geneva Conventions as a legal framework differently than the Bush administration. The administration continues to hold hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees as enemy combatants in Guantanamo and Afghanistan but has not determined that they are POWs under the Third Convention or civilian "protected persons" under the Fourth Convention.
The Obama administration has been studying for nearly twenty months whether to give additional Geneva protections to these detainees. Although al Qaeda detainees clearly are not entitled to POW status, the administration should agree to be bound by Article 75 of the First Protocol to the Conventions, which specifies minimum protections for detained persons, such as the right to be told the reasons for one’s detention. The administration should also urge the Senate to approve the Second Protocol to the Conventions, which spells out rules for internal wars such as in Afghanistan today. Applying these provisions from the First and Second Protocols would demonstrate the U.S. commitment to holding detainees under an internationally recognized set of rules.
For more than a hundred years, the United States has been a respected leader in developing the international laws of war. The Bush administration stumbled by straining to avoid application of the Geneva Conventions as a whole and refusing to adopt even the minimum international standards set forth in Common Article 3 and Article 75. But it is true that the Conventions, and even the Additional Protocols, do not provide clear guidance for countries engaged in conflicts with terrorist groups like al Qaeda, such as who qualifies as a combatant and what legal process should be given. The Obama administration should continue to engage our allies in dialogue about which existing rules of international humanitarian and human rights law apply and where additional rules should be developed. The administration should use its considerable political capital in the international community to clarify and expand the international law applicable to modern warfare.
John B. Bellinger III is a partner with the Washington law firm of Arnold & Porter and an adjunct senior fellow in International and National Security Law at the Council on Foreign Relations. As the legal adviser for Department of State from 2005 to 2009, he headed the U.S. delegation for the negotiation of the Third Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions.
_______________________________________________
There are a percentage of our US and global population ----mostly men-----who think mercenary life is cool and exciting---they are into the war games. We are shouting very loudly that this is coming to our US cities and US citizens will be identified as those pesky terrorists because they do not like MOVING FORWARD COLONIZATION OF US TO ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE.
Think of families and future---if you are a NEW CITIZEN or still immigrant status----please consider how the making of America into that third world DEEP STATE kill any status of democratic republic having citizens with rights. That 5% to the 1% includes those immigrant citizens! COME TOGETHER AS A 99% VS 1%!
CIA University: Where spies get schooled
By Drew Dwyer 03.22.2016
One of the cooler things about being in the CIA is the opportunity for extra training available to staff employees. The agency calls it CIA University. Courses offered include lock-picking, money laundering, offensive double-agent operations, live-tissue labs, chemical-weapons manufacturing…you get the point. Just about anything a person can conceive, the agency offers instruction on it.
As a new employee in the CIA, it’s required to complete specific training courses that correlate to your main job function. After completing your mandatory training, you can choose from over 300 courses on the agency’s internal computer system. All you have to do is click on the app, find the course, and choose from pre-selected dates when the training is offered.
__________________________________________
I like this article because it rightly identifies China as authoritarian naked capitalist corporate fascism with a fleeting reference to a pretend communism under MAO------MAO was simply a Yale University grad from a wealthy Chinese family tasked with using GREAT LEAP FORWARD to centralize land ownership in moving to an industrial society---the fake communism allowed MAO to collectivize land owned for centuries by rural peasant families.
The far-right wing global Wall STreet CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA love authoritarianism----love militarism----love secret services----and love media propaganda. MOVING FORWARD US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones is indeed taking the US to a Chinese-style governance which is that ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE. The march to militarization and securitization steadily engulfs more citizens and then brings children into this loop. This is what we will see this coming decade as the economic crash brings a broader and deeper poverty to US.
People made desperate for work are easier to MOVE FORWARD into these VISTA/CHILD AND FAMILY fascist structures as we have in Baltimore and indeed are being installed in all US cities. It is the real deal ---it can be stopped and reversed but WE THE PEOPLE must act now because another decade will see more and more of DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE infrastructure installed!
'Paxton provides a useful definition of fascism as "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."'
As we said-----the images of Trump tied to a Putin and Russia is that move to identify the far-right global Wall Street with USSR Stalinist socialism. There is as well the same imagery tying Trump to the Chinese communist symbols pushing for installing the MAOIST corporate fascism......both come from the global Wall STreet 5% to the 1%-----but
MOVING FORWARD WILL BE A GREAT LEAP FORWARD TO DEEP STATE.
TruthOut is a Clinton global Wall Street media outlet and that is why they make it seem it will be China who moves the US towards this corporate fascist socialism when it was the US and global Wall Street who installed Foreign Economic Zones and created the excuse of communism to centralize control of land and governance. Global Wall Street pols have been MOVING FORWARD taking US to these same overseas Foreign Economic Zone structures under the same authoritarian MARXISM.
Chinese Fascism's Global ConsequencesSunday, February 05, 2012 By Roland Farris, Truthout |A smoggy morning exercise drill in China. (Photo: Anonymous friend of Farris)
I wake up this morning to the sun slicing warm, golden slits through the barred windows of my little apartment in Dali Old Town, one of southern China's most beautiful and relaxing cities. It isn't the ample sunshine that wakes me up, however, it's the rousing military band music that wafts in from across several courtyards and makes its way into our otherwise quiet corner of existence. The music itself wouldn't be so remarkable, even given its oddly archaic marching-band sound, like some fragment of mid-20th century authoritarianism that got trapped in the stratosphere and recently settled down back into my ear.
What is remarkable is its ubiquity. It is the same music I battle to suppress from my on-campus apartment in one of China's major cities. It is the same music that blasts every morning at precisely 7 AM and again at 4 PM on my top-level university campus. To me, it is increasingly the sound of China.
Accompanying the music is a voice calling out callisthenic exercises in a cadence that would be almost cheery if it didn't carry such grim undertones of mindless conformity. "Yi, Er, San, Si, Wu, Liu, Qi, Ba, Er, Er, San, Si, Wu, Liu, Qi, Ba," the high-pitched male voice encourages the often-absent students. This is a real-life equivalent of the "physical jerks" in Orwell's "1984." Twice a day, on the mark, speakers across the campus blast out this music. Students at my university are obliged to participate at least once a week. There seems to be a club for those who want to show particular enthusiasm. I am told that these exercises along with their uniform marching music are obligatory daily routines on all school campuses up until the end of high school. Failure to show sufficient enthusiasm in one's daily jerks is grounds for academic penalties. This aspect of living and studying in China is something that it seems is often missed in the excessively positive and business-oriented coverage given by the mainstream media, and it is part of a troubling trend that I am most able to witness in the education system - but which extends to every facet of life in the Middle Kingdom.
There was a time when China was referred to as a society which was Communist or Post-Communist; today, the terms Authoritarian Capitalist or Capitalist with Asian/Chinese Characteristics are more common. However, there is a new term that appears to be increasingly applicable to the operation of the Chinese state and its impact on the lives of Chinese people and, above all, the education of Chinese youth born in the 1990s. It is increasingly clear that China is the most powerful, mature and internationally accepted fascist state in global history and its status as such should cause us all a great deal of concern.
To call China a fascist state is nothing particularly novel. In March 2010, the Taipei Times published an editorial by a J. Michael Cole, which refers to the writings of Umberto Eco and Robert Paxton to match accepted definitions of fascism with the socio-political realities in China. Cole points to the realities of emphasizing the role of the nation in all matters, including sports; a sense of national grievance as the core of national identity; the paranoid control of any potential opposition; and the rise of Han Chinese racism. Cole is right in much of his analysis. But for all its correctness, his analysis from Taipei cannot compare to the horror that is the lived reality of watching this fascist state unfold before one's very eyes in the center of Chinese power in Beijing.
Paxton provides a useful definition of fascism as "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
As an educator trying to inculcate a sense of global citizenship in young Chinese, these characteristics are far too common in my encounters with the minds of Chinese youth. The most succinct example of such indoctrination came when one of my "International Education" students became angry about a discussion concerning global environmental degradation. Despite the fact that the documentary which framed our discussion focused on a wide range of global environmental issues and that it in fact made no reference to China, she insisted that I was shaming Chinese people by talking about the environment. She followed on to insist that since China had been humiliated by foreign powers with advanced weaponry, they had no choice but to develop as quickly as possible better weapons so that they could regain their dignity and territorial integrity. The rapidity with which a discussion of global environmental issues jumped to a rant on Chinese national humiliation is telling: As anyone who has spent time face to face with regular Chinese people is aware, one never knows exactly what will trigger such mental leaps.
It becomes clear very early on to those who venture outside the venues of the rich, powerful and tactful, that the education system is rife with lessons in national humiliation, social Darwinism and the cult of the nation. Students are taught that, prior to recent history, China was the dominant power in the world, with 5,000 years of uninterrupted power and prosperity. Any attempt to engage in a discussion concerning the correctness of referring to the various pre-national ethno-cultural entities that contended for the territory of what is now called the People's Republic of China in nation-state terms is met with hostility. Never mind that, until 1949, the geographic nation-state known as "China" today had not really existed, that a series of different ethnic and cultural groups, coexisting in separate kingdoms, speaking different languages and carrying on different customs, competed for supremacy much the same way that various European nations competed until recent times. When I try to impress that arguing for an imagined 5,000-year-old Chinese empire which must be re-established is akin to Italians insisting on the restoration of the Roman Empire, I am met with a wall of stubborn and often hostile refusal.
Social Darwinism has reached the level of state religion in modern Chinese society, with the ubiquitous phrases expounding the importance of "developing oneself" and "using one's advantage" to prove one's fitness over others. There is usually a racial overtone to such talk, with the Han Chinese cast as the dominant race in the globe that - due to national complacency - were recently overtaken by hairy barbarians from the West, but will eventually reinstate their domination over the globe. Those of other ethnic origins, particularly of African descent, are often spoken of in condescending, almost sub-human terms, as a kind of hapless helper race to be valued for their physical strength and musical talents, but otherwise to be "managed" by one of the superior, more "developed" races. Such views are not implicitly conveyed, but explicitly, in the form of an overtly racist natural history taught in the school system wherein Chinese physical characteristics of reduced body hair and physical size are taken to indicate a higher level of racial development over hairier and supposedly more physically robust Europeans and Africans who only recently became civilized and so bear the characteristics of a harsher lifestyle. My students unflinchingly express a condescending affection for Africans, with statements such as, "I like black people, because, since they are closer to animals, they are really good at sports." There is a widespread belief among average Chinese that Africans and Chinese are not able to produce offspring together and, therefore, effectively constitute separate species.
Another key indicator of fascist state organization is the militarization of the youth, which is an integral part of the Chinese education system - and indeed of Chinese working life. All university students in their freshman year are obliged to enroll in five weeks of military training and indoctrination, most of which consists in standing still for long periods of time, marching for hours on end from 5 AM until 1 AM, shouting, "Yi! Er!" over and over and mass-rehearsed and largely useless hand-to-hand combat drills. While some schools provide riflery and first-aid training, the purpose of the training is largely to inculcate in the students a sense that their education is part of the nation's strength rather than their individual personal aspirations. Such training begins in middle school and is a yearly event all the way up until the first year of university, after which it ceases. There truly is nothing scarier than 18-year-old boys dressed up in ill-fitting military uniforms running around with plastic truncheons.
While Chinese rarely express an open desire for imperialist expansion, an ideological sense of the inevitability of such expansion is a hidden part of national political consciousness. Rather than being self-admitted expansionists, Chinese expansion is instead expressed by characterizing foreign nations as "part of China" which must one day be reconquered and brought into the fold of the motherland to redress the historic injustices of foreign domination by restoring territorial integrity. The fact that these Asian nations are not part of the People's Republic of China (PRC), as they are supposed to be, is yet further ammunition for a sense of national grievance and humiliation. Press university students on the matter and one will quite easily be told that not only Taiwan and Tibet, but Mongolia, the Koreas, much or all of South-East Asia, Japan and most of the Philippines are somehow "part of China." The argument relies on obscure racial and cultural connections that somehow make these independent nations part of a larger Han empire that - while never having existed in the past as a national entity and, even on a cultural level, has no basis in linguistic and genetic links - must one day be re-established for Chinese dignity and territorial integrity. So, while Chinese will say that China is a "peaceful country" which does not have imperialist aims, such peace and nonaggression is contingent upon the restoration of the territorial integrity of an imagined (Han) Chinese empire that would consume a significant amount of the nations surrounding the PRC. I learned of this while discussing Chinese history with some students, who, after vigorously extolling the truth of what they were taught, then insisted they were "not nationalists," since such desire for "reintegration" is a return to an (imagined) historic norm rather than a national expansion into new territory.
Fascist states have long relied upon their competitive advantage in attracting foreign investment. Authoritarian control of the labor force and national policymaking makes good business sense. Such was the case with Italy and Germany during the inter-war period and such is the case with China's dizzyingly rapid rise today. The ability of a totalitarian fascist state to control the labor force, suppress dissent and put investment over social welfare makes such states highly attractive to businesses. Such is the case today with China. Coca-Cola's CEO inadvertently demonstrated the fascist nature of the Chinese state when he lauded the "one-stop shop in terms of the Chinese foreign investment agency," wherein the federal and local Chinese government agencies are competing for investment, with their population paying the cost in terms of reduced labor rights and environmental protections.
Chinese will often accept this as a necessary part of their national development, a development which seems increasingly to benefit only those with power and connections and to increasingly marginalize the common people. One need not look merely at the statements of business leaders, but much mainstream media attention has praised the "efficiency" of the Chinese fascist regime while deriding the clumsiness and inconvenience of states which remain nominal liberal democracies.
The issue of Chinese fascism is one which the people of the world must pay much greater attention than they have to date. Too much emphasis is placed on the economic power of China without thought to the origins of this power and the long-term sociopolitical consequences it may have for the globe. The very effective media and information control mechanisms of the CCP, yet another indicator of a fascist state, exacerbates this issue. Only those such as myself, who operate in the education system and other front-line social roles, have the contact with life in China to see through the smoke and mirrors deployed by the government against any legitimate mainstream information-collection system, be it journalists or business people. Both of these groups are carefully watched and have their information pre-packaged, with stringent and well-documented efforts to prevent access to undesirable information and coercive measures to discourage its dissemination where it is found. Only those teachers, students and volunteers unimportant enough to go under the radar, such as myself, are able to get the real story and get it out without significant danger to ourselves. It is high time the world started paying attention to these stories below the gloss and sheen of state-sponsored and state-monitored mainstream media outlets which, for various reasons, are unable or unwilling to suffer the consequences of getting and reporting the truth about the Chinese state.
If the Chinese fascist regime is permitted by the international community to continue its rise to prominence, then the consequences will be borne by the people of democratic nations and we have already seen the early stages of this global trend. A powerful fascist state of such maturity and size in the world will increasingly come to determine political debate in nominally democratic countries as the economic advantages of such a regime draws more and more financial resources away from less "efficient" political systems. If China continues to be able to use its fascist state apparatus to attract investment at the cost of liberal democratic nations, then the characteristics of these nations will tend toward increasing fascism in an imitative defensive response.
This trend is already far advanced and if it remains unchecked by the active engagement and protest of constituent peoples in the form of actively entrenching our essential social and political norms of individual rights and egalitarian application of the rule of law, then we will witness the slow erosion of the democratic freedoms that were fought for nearly 70 years ago. It is no longer adequate to harp on about "human rights." The necessity of economically isolating regimes which fail to meet certain normative political and legal standards is of paramount importance to the long-term survival of the idea of pluralist government which protects a measure of individual freedom.
Failure to do so will result in an inevitable process of socio-cultural decline which will prove hard to reverse in the short to medium term. Democracy is messy and individual freedoms are inconvenient for the operation of the socioeconomic system we use to organize the globe. That we recognize this does not logically lead to the conclusion that we should submit to the dilution of those freedoms out of a misplaced desire for expediency. The reason we pursued increasing market freedoms in the past 70 years was ostensibly to spread democratic and individual freedoms.
OH, REALLY?????
If we now find that the means have come into conflict with the end, it is time to come back to the drawing board, lest in our pursuit of the material well-being that underpins a society which can afford educated, independent individual life, we end up creating the conditions for subsuming all individual freedom and development to fascist ideals of national power and undo all the achievements of 70 years of struggle and sacrifice.
This is what a Foreign Economic Zone looks like. It is militarized----securitized-----global labor being shifted constantly from one nation to another so CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency----DIA fills our US cities and ports.
IT HAS VERY LITTLE TO DO WITH ANGRY SOVEREIGN CITIZENS OVERSEAS---IT IS PREPARING FOR US CITIZENS TO BECOME THOSE ANGRY SOVEREIGN CITIZENS.
Here in Maryland we come out to protest and there are undercover police taking pictures and creating files on PEACEFUL PROTESTORS-----this has always been illegal and an infringement on citizens' privacy rights. In US Foreign Economic Zones those US citizens' rights do not exist.
CIA moved to Denver and into every US city these few decades.
CIA Is Expanding Domestic Operations
By Dana Priest October 23, 2002
The Central Intelligence Agency is expanding its domestic presence, placing agents with nearly all of the FBI's 56 terrorism task forces in U.S. cities, a step that law enforcement and intelligence officials say will help overcome some of the communications obstacles between the two agencies that existed before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In many cities, according to local FBI special agents, the CIA employees help plan daily operations and set priorities, as well as share information about suspected foreigners and groups. They do not, however, take part in operations or make arrests.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III recently described the new arrangement as his answer to MI5, Britain's internal security service. Unlike the CIA, MI5 is empowered to collect intelligence within Britain and to act to disrupt domestic threats to British national security. "It goes some distance to accomplishing what the MI5 does," Mueller told a House-Senate intelligence panel last week in describing the new CIA role in the FBI task forces.
Separately, the CIA is undertaking what one intelligence official called a "concerted effort" to increase the number of case officers working in the agency's domestic field offices. Those offices, directed by the National Resources Division, are staffed by officers from the clandestine service.
The CIA's domestic field offices recruit foreigners living temporarily in the United States -- for example, scientists at universities, diplomats at embassies and business executives -- to work as agents for the CIA when they return home. They also conduct voluntary debriefings of Americans, mainly business executives and academics, who have recently returned from abroad. The division also is responsible for handling some defectors and for limited counterintelligence targeting.
In the mid-1980s, the agency maintained close to 35 field stations in the United States. But over the last decade, budget cuts and operational restrictions reduced the agency's domestic effort by about 30 percent, according to one former high-ranking CIA official. "They were in bad shape."
Since Sept. 11, the National Resources Division has been given more money and some of its domestic offices have been reopened to bring the number close to 30. "There is a concerted effort to enhance that," said one administration official said.
The CIA's domestic division was created in 1963 to conduct clandestine operations within the United States against foreign targets, usually foreign spies and organizations. But the CIA no longer conducts clandestine operations at home, in part because of the 1973 intelligence overhaul that curbed spying on U.S. citizens and enacted stricter oversight of covert operations. Since then, too, the FBI has strictly limited the information it accepts from the CIA, for fear of "tainting" ongoing domestic investigations with information it is not allowed to use or, in some cases, even possess.
While the new growth in the CIA's domestic work does not involving spying, it does represent a significant step in integrating the CIA's analytical capabilities with U.S. law enforcement efforts to find and apprehend terrorist suspects.
"We are stepping into an area that is fraught with peril," said Frederick Hitz, a former inspector general at the CIA. But Hitz and other analysts applauded the effort.
The CIA's work on the FBI task forces "is a sign of the times," said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee. "The idea is to get all the intel and law enforcement agencies that might be able to contribute to a coherent and comprehensive plan against terrorist activities."
None of the growth in the CIA's domestic work has required changes in law.
Under Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan, the CIA is permitted to secretly collect "significant" foreign intelligence within the United States if the collection effort is not aimed at the domestic activities of U.S. citizens and corporations.
Ellen Knowlton, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Las Vegas field office, called the CIA officers in her office "full and active participants" in day-to-day operations. The exchange of ideas among the FBI, the CIA and local law enforcement "is very interactive," she said.
"You balance how you use them" with the potential for compromising officers still under cover, said Joseph Billy Jr., special agent in charge of the FBI's New York field office. "We reserve the right for the CIA to make that call."
For this reason, the identities of CIA officers are often not shared with local law enforcement officials who are detailed, part-time, to work on the task forces. The CIA officers also usually work in special parts of the larger task force building, behind walls impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping.
In Oregon, Portland Police Chief Mark Kroeger said there remains a deep distrust toward giving law enforcement or the CIA expanded powers. Although he approves of the CIA presence, he said he purposefully stays clear of the CIA officers.
"I know very little about them and I chose to keep it that way," he said. "The CIA is not a dirty word," he said. "They have roles and responsibilities that certainly have shifted. I have a lot of admiration for the organization."
While the CIA presence is new in many cities, the agency has worked with local police departments for years in New York, New Jersey and a handful of other locations. The New York joint terrorism task force of 300 people from 21 agencies has had more a dozen CIA officers for years.
The CIA is reluctant to talk about its new task force role, or its domestic field offices. "This increased cooperation is critical in the fight against terrorism," said CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield. "It's critical to establish more and better linkages."
___________________________________________
Meanwhile, yet another massive intelligence network, the DIA expanded as well. The retooling of DOD to asymmetric warfare came with drones and spies. There has always been espionage but when a nation doubles-down its modus operandus to infiltrating and circumventing most nations' sovereignty around the world---it is not a leader in democratic principles---freedom or liberty----and what goes around overseas comes around inside US.
Meanwhile, our US citizens are being pushed towards careers all tied to military and surveillance. Our candidates for elected office at all levels are former DIA and CIA....THIS IS WHAT BRINGS DEEP STATE.
Please guide young adults AWAY FROM THESE CAREERS-----for many especially our poor citizens these are the only pathways to employment and in the game of DEEP STATE the poor are used as FODDER.
All far-right corporate fascism comes with these elements----society is soaked in secret societies, spying, and surveillance----remember our description of old world VENETIAN EMPIRE-----these are the old world global 1% bringing back those DARK AGES.
DIA as well as CIA fill our US cities and everyone is being made to be afraid to speak -----freedom of assembly is corrupted-----our ability to organize as a 99% is undermined---which is the goal.
DIA as well as CIA fill our US cities and everyone is being made to be afraid to speak -----freedom of assembly is corrupted-----our ability to organize as a 99% is undermined---which is the goal.
I hear Baltimore citizens telling people new to the city----DON'T LOOK PEOPLE IN THE EYE BECAUSE THEN YOU HAVE TO SPEAK TO THEM------immigrants brought to Baltimore are told not to speak to anyone......all citizens in Baltimore assume someone else is with another secret society and do not talk with one another-------this is now being MAIN STREAMED................
'Baltimore voted 10th most unfriendly city in America
by Kathleen Cairns
Tuesday, November 3rd 2015'
Baltimore is ground zero for all that is global defense corporation and CIA and all the spying and surveillance that goes with it because of global Johns Hopkins-----Bush/Cheney
DIA to send hundreds more spies overseas
Islamist militant groups in Africa, weapons transfers by North Korea and Iran and military modernization in China are among the Pentagon’s top intelligence priorities, officials say. (File/AFP/Getty Images)
By Greg Miller December 1, 2012
The Pentagon will send hundreds of additional spies overseas as part of an ambitious plan to assemble an espionage network that rivals the CIA in size, U.S. officials said.
The project is aimed at transforming the Defense Intelligence Agency, which has been dominated for the past decade by the demands of two wars, into a spy service focused on emerging threats and more closely aligned with the CIA and elite military commando units.
When the expansion is complete, the DIA is expected to have as many as 1,600 “collectors” in positions around the world, an unprecedented total for an agency whose presence abroad numbered in the triple digits in recent years.
The total includes military attachés and others who do not work undercover. But U.S. officials said the growth will be driven over a five-year period by the deployment of a new generation of clandestine operatives. They will be trained by the CIA and often work with the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, but they will get their spying assignments from the Department of Defense.
Among the Pentagon’s top intelligence priorities, officials said, are Islamist militant groups in Africa, weapons transfers by North Korea and Iran, and military modernization underway in China.
Islamist militants in West Africa
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring revolts, the fight against militant Islam in this moderate swath of Africa has gained fresh urgency.
“This is not a marginal adjustment for DIA,” the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, said at a recent conference, during which he outlined the changes but did not describe them in detail. “This is a major adjustment for national security.”
The sharp increase in DIA undercover operatives is part of a far-reaching trend: a convergence of the military and intelligence agencies that has blurred their once-distinct missions, capabilities and even their leadership ranks.
Through its drone program, the CIA now accounts for a majority of lethal U.S. operations outside the Afghan war zone. At the same time, the Pentagon’s plan to create what it calls the Defense Clandestine Service, or DCS, reflects the military’s latest and largest foray into secret intelligence work.
The DIA overhaul — combined with the growth of the CIA since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — will create a spy network of unprecedented size. The plan reflects the Obama administration’s affinity for espionage and covert action over conventional force. It also fits in with the administration’s efforts to codify its counterterrorism policies for a sustained conflict and assemble the pieces abroad necessary to carry it out.
Unlike the CIA, the Pentagon’s spy agency is not authorized to conduct covert operations that go beyond intelligence gathering, such as drone strikes, political sabotage or arming militants.
But the DIA has long played a major role in assessing and identifying targets for the U.S. military, which in recent years has assembled a constellation of drone bases stretching from Afghanistan to East Africa.
The expansion of the agency’s clandestine role is likely to heighten concerns that it will be accompanied by an escalation in lethal strikes and other operations outside public view. Because of differences in legal authorities, the military isn’t subject to the same congressional notification requirements as the CIA, leading to potential oversight gaps.
U.S. officials said that the DIA’s realignment won’t hamper congressional scrutiny. “We have to keep congressional staffs and members in the loop,” Flynn said in October, adding that he believes the changes will help the United States anticipate threats and avoid being drawn more directly into what he predicted will be an “era of persistent conflict.”
U.S. officials said the changes for the DIA were enabled by a rare syncing of personalities and interests among top officials at the Pentagon and CIA, many of whom switched from one organization to the other to take their current jobs.
“The stars have been aligning on this for a while,” said a former senior U.S. military official involved in planning the DIA transformation. Like most others interviewed for this article, the former official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the program.
The DIA project has been spearheaded by Michael G. Vickers, the top intelligence official at the Pentagon and a veteran of the CIA.
Agreements on coordination were approved by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, a former CIA director, and retired Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who resigned abruptly as CIA chief last month over an extramarital affair.
The Pentagon announced the DCS plan in April but details have been kept secret. Former senior Defense Department officials said that the DIA now has about 500 “case officers,” the term for clandestine Pentagon and CIA operatives, and that the number is expected to reach between 800 and 1,000 by 2018.
Pentagon and DIA officials declined to discuss specifics. A senior U.S. defense official said the changes will affect thousands of DIA employees, as analysts, logistics specialists and others are reassigned to support additional spies.
The plan still faces some hurdles, including the challenge of creating “cover” arrangements for hundreds of additional spies. U.S. embassies typically have a set number of slots for intelligence operatives posing as diplomats, most of which are taken by the CIA.
The project has also encountered opposition from policymakers on Capitol Hill, who see the terms of the new arrangement as overly generous to the CIA.
The DIA operatives “for the most part are going to be working for CIA station chiefs,” needing their approval to enter a particular country and clearance on which informants they intend to recruit, said a senior congressional official briefed on the plan. “If CIA needs more people working for them, they should be footing the bill.”
Pentagon officials said that sending more DIA operatives overseas will shore up intelligence on subjects that the CIA is not able or willing to pursue. “We are in a position to contribute to defense priorities that frankly CIA is not,” the senior Defense Department official said.
The project was triggered by a classified study by the director of national intelligence last year that concluded that key Pentagon intelligence priorities were falling into gaps created by the DIA’s heavy focus on battlefield issues and CIA’s extensive workload. U.S. officials said the DIA needed to be repositioned as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan give way to what many expect will be a period of sporadic conflicts and simmering threats requiring close-in intelligence work.
“It’s the nature of the world we’re in,” said the senior defense official, who is involved in overseeing the changes at the DIA. “We just see a long-term era of change before things settle.”
The CIA is increasingly overstretched. Obama administration officials have said they expect the agency’s drone campaign against al-Qaeda to continue for at least a decade more, even as the agency faces pressure to stay abreast of issues including turmoil across the Middle East. Meanwhile, the CIA hasn’t met ambitious goals set by former president George W. Bush to expand its own clandestine service.
CIA officials including John D. Bennett, director of the National Clandestine Service, have backed the DIA’s plan. It “amplifies the ability of both CIA and DIA to achieve the best results,” said CIA spokesman Preston Golson.
Defense officials stressed that the DIA has not been given any new authorities or permission to expand its total payroll. Instead, the new spy slots will be created by cutting or converting other positions across the DIA workforce, which has doubled in the past decade — largely through absorption of other military intelligence entities — to about 16,500.
Vickers has given the DIA an infusion of about $100 million to kick-start the program, officials said, but the agency’s total budget is expected to remain stagnant or decline amid mounting financial pressures across the government.
The DIA’s overseas presence already includes hundreds of diplomatic posts — mainly defense attachés, who represent the military at U.S. embassies and openly gather information from foreign counterparts. Their roles won’t change, officials said. The attachés are part of the 1,600 target for the DIA, but such “overt” positions will represent a declining share amid the increase in undercover slots, officials said.
The senior Defense official said the DIA has begun filling the first of the new posts.
For decades, the DIA has employed undercover operatives to gather secrets on foreign militaries and other targets. But the Defense Humint Service, as it was previously known, was often regarded as an inferior sibling to its civilian counterpart.
Previous efforts by the Pentagon to expand its intelligence role — particularly during Donald H. Rumsfeld’s time as defense secretary — led to intense turf skirmishes with the CIA.
Those frictions have been reduced, officials said, largely because the CIA sees advantages to the new arrangement, including assurances that its station chiefs overseas will be kept apprised of DIA missions and have authority to reject any that might conflict with CIA efforts. The CIA will also be able to turn over hundreds of Pentagon-driven assignments to newly arrived DIA operatives.
“The CIA doesn’t want to be looking for surface-to-air missiles in Libya” when it’s also under pressure to assess the opposition in Syria, said a former high-ranking U.S. military intelligence officer who worked closely with both spy services. Even in cases where their assignments overlap, the DIA is likely to be more focused than the CIA on military aspects — what U.S. commanders in Africa might ask about al-Qaeda in Mali, for example, rather than the broader questions raised by the White House.
U.S. officials said DIA operatives, because of their military backgrounds, are often better equipped to recruit sources who can answer narrow military questions such as specifications of China’s fifth-generation fighter aircraft and its work on a nuclear aircraft carrier. “The CIA would like to give up that kind of work,” the former officer said.
The CIA has agreed to add new slots to its training classes at its facility in southern Virginia, known as the Farm, to make room for more military spies. The DIA has accounted for about 20 percent of each class in recent years, but that figure will grow.
The two agencies have also agreed to share resources overseas, including technical gear, logistics support, space in facilities and vehicles. The DIA has even adopted aspects of the CIA’s internal structure, creating a group called “Persia House,” for example, to pool resources on Iran.
The CIA’s influence extends across the DIA’s ranks. Flynn, who became director in July, is a three-star Army general who worked closely with the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq. His deputy, David R. Shedd, spent the bulk of his career at the CIA, much of it overseas as a spy.
Several officials said the main DIA challenge will be finding ways to slip so many spies into position overseas with limited space in embassies. “There are some definite challenges from a cover perspective,” the senior defense official said.
Placing operatives in conventional military units means finding an excuse for them to stay behind when the unit rotates out before the end of the spy’s job.
Having DIA operatives pose as academics or business executives requires painstaking work to create those false identities, and it means they won’t be protected by diplomatic immunity if caught.
Flynn is seeking to reduce turnover in the DIA’s clandestine service by enabling military members to stay with the agency for multiple overseas tours rather than return to their units. But the DIA is increasingly hiring civilians to fill out its spy ranks.
The DIA has also forged a much tighter relationship with JSOC, the military’s elite and highly lethal commando force, which also carries out drone strikes in Yemen and other countries.
Key aspects of the DIA’s plan were developed by then-Director Ronald L. Burgess, a retired three-star general who had served as intelligence chief to JSOC.
The DIA played an extensive and largely hidden role in JSOC operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, sending analysts into war zones and turning a large chunk of its workforce and computer systems in Virginia into an ana-lytic back office for JSOC.
The head of U.S. Special Operations Command, Adm. William H. McRaven, who directed the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, has pledged to create between 100 and 200 slots for undercover DIA operatives to work with Special Forces teams being deployed across North Africa and other trouble spots, officials said.
“Bill McRaven is a very strong proponent of this,” the senior Defense official said.
________________________________________
And of course here is the DIA with the CIA in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones.
In Baltimore with growing poverty and long-term unemployment a career path in the military and these FBI and CIA agencies are the only game in town. When this happens are EDUCATION SYSTEM reflects these changes and indeed we are filling with corporate K-12 and career college vocational pathways tied to these skill sets. So now our US education system becomes more and more tied to educating for a military---a security----a financialized global Wall Street all of which is DEEP STATE.
Global Wall Street likes to say-----THE US HAS BEEN CAPTURED BY GLOBAL CORPORATIONS because of just this----both major political parties are captured by global Wall Street pols pretending to be conservative Republicans or left social Democrats---and they appoint global Wall Street 5% of players to governing positions all while RIGGING OUR ELECTIONS WITH FRAUD. It sounds like they have WE THE PEOPLE---but know what? All these DEEP STATE infrastructure tied to SMART CITIES has not been installed---and 600,000 citizens in Baltimore coming out in rolling protests for weeks and months CAN GET RID OF CRONY GLOBAL WALL STREET POLS AND PLAYERS.
When we say global Wall Street Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations----those global NGOs filling our cities ---these are the growing 5% to the 1%----we don't want this future for our children and grandchildren.
MOVING FORWARD TO DEEP, DEEP, DEEP STATE is not what the 99% want to do.
Military Expands Intelligence Role in U.S.
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MARK MAZZETTIJAN. 14, 2007
James J. Yee, a former Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was suspected in 2003 of aiding terror suspects imprisoned at the facility, but the military’s espionage case against him soon collapsed. Credit Chris Hondros/Getty Images
WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.
The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say.
Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving the letters usually have turned over documents voluntarily, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American military personnel and civilians, officials say.
The F.B.I., the lead agency on domestic counterterrorism and espionage, has issued thousands of national security letters since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, provoking criticism and court challenges from civil liberties advocates who see them as unjustified intrusions into Americans’ private lives.
But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.
The military and the C.I.A. have long been restricted in their domestic intelligence operations, and both are barred from conducting traditional domestic law enforcement work. The C.I.A.’s role within the United States has been largely limited to recruiting people to spy on foreign countries.
Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said intelligence agencies like the C.I.A. used the letters on only a “limited basis.”
Pentagon officials defended the letters as valuable tools and said they were part of a broader strategy since the Sept. 11 attacks to use more aggressive intelligence-gathering tactics — a priority of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The letters “provide tremendous leads to follow and often with which to corroborate other evidence in the context of counterespionage and counterterrorism,” said Maj. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman.
Government lawyers say the legal authority for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. to use national security letters in gathering domestic records dates back nearly three decades and, by their reading, was strengthened by the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.
Pentagon officials said they used the letters to follow up on a variety of intelligence tips or leads. While they would not provide details about specific cases, military intelligence officials with knowledge of them said the military had issued the letters to collect financial records regarding a government contractor with unexplained wealth, for example, and a chaplain at Guantánamo Bay erroneously suspected of aiding prisoners at the facility.
Usually, the financial documents collected through the letters do not establish any links to espionage or terrorism and have seldom led to criminal charges, military officials say. Instead, the letters often help eliminate suspects.
“We may find out this person has unexplained wealth for reasons that have nothing to do with being a spy, in which case we’re out of it,” said Thomas A. Gandy, a senior Army counterintelligence official.
But even when the initial suspicions are unproven, the documents have intelligence value, military officials say. In the next year, they plan to incorporate the records into a database at the Counterintelligence Field Activity office at the Pentagon to track possible threats against the military, Pentagon officials said. Like others interviewed, they would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
Military intelligence officers have sent letters in up to 500 investigations over the last five years, two officials estimated. The number of letters is likely to be well into the thousands, the officials said, because a single case often generates letters to multiple financial institutions. For its part, the C.I.A. issues a handful of national security letters each year, agency officials said. Congressional officials said members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been briefed on the use of the letters by the military and the C.I.A.
Some national security experts and civil liberties advocates are troubled by the C.I.A. and military taking on domestic intelligence activities, particularly in light of recent disclosures that the Counterintelligence Field Activity office had maintained files on Iraq war protesters in the United States in violation of the military’s own guidelines. Some experts say the Pentagon has adopted an overly expansive view of its domestic role under the guise of “force protection,” or efforts to guard military installations.
“There’s a strong tradition of not using our military for domestic law enforcement,” said Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, a former general counsel at both the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. who is the dean at the McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific. “They’re moving into territory where historically they have not been authorized or presumed to be operating.”
Similarly, John Radsan, an assistant general counsel at the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004 and now a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, said, “The C.I.A. is not supposed to have any law enforcement powers, or internal security functions, so if they’ve been issuing their own national security letters, they better be able to explain how they don’t cross the line.”
The Pentagon’s expanded intelligence-gathering role, in particular, has created occasional conflicts with other federal agencies. Pentagon efforts to post American military officers at embassies overseas to gather intelligence for counterterrorism operations or future war plans has rankled some State Department and C.I.A. officials, who see the military teams as duplicating and potentially interfering with the intelligence agency.
In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has complained about military officials dealing directly with local police — rather than through the bureau — for assistance in responding to possible terrorist threats against a military base. F.B.I. officials say the threats have often turned out to be uncorroborated and, at times, have stirred needless anxiety.
The military’s frequent use of national security letters has sometimes caused concerns from the businesses receiving them, a counterterrorism official said. Lawyers at financial institutions, which routinely provide records to the F.B.I. in law enforcement investigations, have contacted bureau officials to say they were confused by the scope of the military’s requests and whether they were obligated to turn the records over, the official said.
Companies are not eager to turn over sensitive financial data about customers to the government, the official said, “so the more this is done, and the more poorly it’s done, the more pushback there is for the F.B.I.”
The bureau has frequently relied on the letters in recent years to gather telephone and Internet logs, financial information and other records in terrorism investigations, serving more than 9,000 letters in 2005, according to a Justice Department tally. As an investigative tool, the letters present relatively few hurdles; they can be authorized by supervisors rather than a court. Passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001 lowered the standard for issuing the letters, requiring only that the documents sought be “relevant” to an investigation and allowing records requests for more peripheral figures, not just targets of an inquiry.
Some Democrats have accused the F.B.I. of using the letters for fishing expeditions, and the American Civil Liberties Union won court challenges in two cases, one for library records in Connecticut and the other for Internet records in Manhattan. Concerned about possible abuses, Congress imposed new safeguards in extending the Patriot Act last year, in part by making clear that recipients of national security letters could contact a lawyer and seek court review. Congress also directed the Justice Department inspector general to study the F.B.I.’s use of the letters, a review that is continuing.
Unlike the F.B.I., the military and the C.I.A. do not have wide-ranging authority to seek records on Americans in intelligence investigations. But the expanded use of national security letters has allowed the Pentagon and the intelligence agency to collect records on their own. Sometimes, military or C.I.A. officials work with the F.B.I. to seek records, as occurred with an American translator who had worked for the military in Iraq and was suspected of having ties to insurgents.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld directed military lawyers and intelligence officials to examine their legal authorities to collect intelligence both inside the United States and abroad. They concluded that the Pentagon had “way more” legal tools than it had been using, a senior Defense Department official said.
Military officials say the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978, which establishes procedures for government access to sensitive banking data, first authorized them to issue national security letters. The military had used the letters sporadically for years, officials say, but the pace accelerated in late 2001, when lawyers and intelligence officials concluded that the Patriot Act strengthened their ability to use the letters to seek financial records on a voluntary basis and to issue mandatory letters to obtain credit ratings, the officials said.
The Patriot Act does not specifically mention military intelligence or C.I.A. officials in connection with the national security letters.
Some F.B.I. officials said they were surprised by the Pentagon’s interpretation of the law when military officials first informed them of it. “It was a very broad reading of the law,” a former counterterrorism official said.
While the letters typically have been used to trace the financial transactions of military personnel, they also have been used to investigate civilian contractors and people with no military ties who may pose a threat to the military, officials said. Military officials say they regard the letters as one of the least intrusive means to gather evidence. When a full investigation is opened, one official said, it has now become “standard practice” to issue such letters.
One prominent case in which letters were used to obtain financial records, according to two military officials, was that of a Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who was suspected in 2003 of aiding terror suspects imprisoned at the facility. The espionage case against the chaplain, James J. Yee, soon collapsed.
Eugene Fidell, a defense lawyer for the former chaplain and a military law expert, said he was unaware that military investigators may have used national security letters to obtain financial information about Mr. Yee, nor was he aware that the military had ever claimed the authority to issue the letters.
Mr. Fidell said he found the practice “disturbing,” in part because the military does not have the same checks and balances when it comes to Americans’ civil rights as does the F.B.I. “Where is the accountability?” he asked. “That’s the evil of it — it doesn’t leave fingerprints.”
Even when a case is closed, military officials said they generally maintain the records for years because they may be relevant to future intelligence inquiries. Officials at the Pentagon’s counterintelligence unit say they plan to incorporate those records into a database, called Portico, on intelligence leads. The financial documents will not be widely disseminated, but limited to investigators, an intelligence official said.
“You don’t want to destroy something only to find out that the same guy comes up in another report and you don’t know that he was investigated before,” the official said.
The Counterintelligence Field Activity office, created in 2002 to better coordinate the military’s efforts to combat foreign intelligence services, has drawn criticism for some domestic intelligence activities.
The agency houses an antiterrorist database of intelligence tips and threat reports, known as Talon, which had been collecting information on antiwar planning meetings at churches, libraries and other locations. The Defense Department has since tightened its procedures for what kind of information is allowed into the Talon database, and the counterintelligence office also purged more than 250 incident reports from the database that officials determined should never have been included because they centered on lawful political protests by people opposed to the war in Iraq.
____________________________________________
We will see very soon a K-12 'public charter' tied to vocational tracking of children specifically for these DIA/CIA/Homeland Security agencies------we see a CIA as venture capitalist creating and selling products designed to spy----and to teach the skills of spying to our US children.
Now remember the biggest expansion overseas has made the CIA more DIVERSE as CIA director Brennan stated alluding to US black, brown citizens as well as white but actually referring to global labor pool citizens for assignments around the world. This is to what all our Federal funding is going that used to be Federal agency funding for our communities---our public schools----our public services and public works departments. It also represents the designation of great amounts of HIGH-SPEED TECHNOLOGY AIRWAVES --GREAT MEGA-DATA STORAGE----pushing 99% of citizens to WIFI----see why all our K-12 public schools are starting students on coding in 3rd grade?
US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones do not have to look this way------it is our Baltimore City Hall and Maryland Assembly pols with a Governor Larry Hogan and Mayor PUGH which allows these conditions to exist-----THEY COULD BE ENFORCED US RULE OF LAW AND PROTECTING CIVIL LIBERTIES AND US CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF CITIZENS BUT THEY ARE NOT..........
'The decision to cut the company’s access to data also followed reports that Geofeedia was used by five police departments in Maryland to monitor and store citizens’ public social media posts'.
Maryland probably bugs people's hearing aid----a citizen calls all this INSIDIOUS----and it is.
CIA-backed surveillance software was marketed to public schools
Dell Cameron--
Oct 18 at 9:40AM | Last updated Oct 18 at 12:12PM
Photo via dolgachov / GettyImages Remix by Jason Reed
High school students in Illinois were monitored for a year using Geofeedia’s platform.
An online surveillance tool that enabled hundreds of U.S. law enforcement agencies to track and collect information on social media users was also marketed for use in American public schools, the Daily Dot has learned.
Geofeedia sold surveillance software typically bought by police to a high school in a northern Chicago suburb, less than 50 miles from where the company was founded in 2011. An Illinois school official confirmed the purchase of the software by phone on Monday.
In the fall of 2014, the Lincolnshire-Prairie School District paid Geofeedia $10,000 to monitor the social media posts of children at Adlai E. Stevenson High School.
“We did have for one year a contract with Geofeedia,” said Jim Conrey, a spokesperson for Lincolnshire-Prairie School District. “We were mostly interested in the possibility of trying to prevent any kind of harm, either that students would do to themselves or to other students.”
Conrey said the district simply wanted to keep its students safe. “It was really just about student safety; if we could try to head off any potential dangerous situations, we thought it might be worth it,” he said.
Ultimately, the school found little use for the platform, which was operated by police liaison stationed on school grounds, and chose not to renew its subscription after the first year, citing cost and a lack of actionable information. “A lot of kids that were posting stuff that we most wanted, they weren’t doing the geo-tagging or making it public,” Conrey said. “We weren’t really seeing a lot there.”
“It was really just about student safety.”
The school’s experience, added Conrey, was that more often than not students would approach school administrators with sensitive issues, as opposed to the school unearthing problems affecting students using Geofeedia. “Quite frankly, we found that it wasn’t worth the money,” Conrey said.
Geofeedia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It is not clear how many other schools may have purchased Geofeedia’s software.
Outwardly presenting its product as a tool for location-based marketing—and counting among its clients companies such as Dell and CNN—Geofeedia derives a significant portion of its revenue from U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. More than 500 police departments reportedly use Geofeedia, which received an investment this year from the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm.
Three of Geofeedia’s top sources for data--Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter—recently suspended its developer access to user posts, allegedly rendering its platform worthless for the time being. In statements to the Daily Dot, the three companies cited Geofeedia’s unauthorized use of their data. In February, Twitter instituted new policies designed to safeguard against surveillance targeting its users.
The decision to cut the company’s access to data also followed reports that Geofeedia was used by five police departments in Maryland to monitor and store citizens’ public social media posts. According to the Baltimore Sun, police once utilized Geofeedia’s surveillance software to intercept “chatter from a local high school about kids who planned to walk out of class” and join a protest in the wake of a police shooting.
Police records reviewed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) show that officers in Northern California have used Geofeedia to collect information on citizens who used the hashtags “#BlackLivesMatter” and “#PoliceBrutality.” Police records reviewed by the Daily Dot showed a police officer in Sacramento saying his department was “recording the whole city 24/7” with Geofeedia.
The Daily Dot also reported exclusively last month that the Denver Police Department paid Geofeedia $30,000 in confiscated funds for access to its software. In doing so, according to ACLU of Colorado, police may have violated a long-standing agreement regulating how and when Denver P.D. is allowed to conduct surveillance, which was instituted in 2003 after police were caught amassing secret files on residents.
“Discovering that Geofeedia was not only being used by social media sites to help police spy on activists of color was disturbing enough,” said Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice. “But then to find out this third-party vendor is also helping to police public school students is beyond disturbing, it’s a terrifying bypass of the most basic rights of some of the most vulnerable, and most dissident, voices in the country: activists of color and students.”
In response to the bad press, Geofeedia has touted its software’s use during the Boston Marathon bombing and, more recently, during recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Matthew. In an online statement, the company asserted its commitment to “the principles of personal privacy, transparency, and both the letter and spirit of the law when it comes to individual rights.”
Dozens of internal police emails reviewed by the Daily Dot, however, show that Geofeedia has actively worked with law enforcement to subvert the privacy controls offered users by companies like Facebook. In late 2014, around the time it began servicing Stevenson High School, Geofeedia released a feature that enabled police to integrate undercover accounts.
According to a source familiar with the program’s operation, police often target persons of interest using fake Facebook accounts with the goal of gaining access to the target’s private posts.
The fake accounts might depict images of attractive women, or in some cases, a person known by the target. If the ruse is successful, the source said, the fake account could be used by Geofeedia to amass a wealth of data on the target’s prior activities. Analysis might also be run to determine which “friends” a target most often engages with.
These capabilities and others—which are also currently available through Geofeedia competitors whose access to Twitter and Facebook user data has yet to be severed--reportedly won the startup a round of funding this year from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, according to documents published the Intercept.
The CIA declined to comment for this story.
___________________________________________
This is ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE DEEP STATE------where a global 1% puts a global 99% UNDER ITS THUMB.
All this is not PATRIOTIC-----it is not about protecting FREEDOM AND LIBERTY for Americans-----the global 1% are taking the US to COLONIAL STATUS----so please remember IT IS NOT JUST ANY JOB.
These 17 Agencies Make Up The Most Sophisticated Spy Network In The World
- May 11, 2013, 6:27 AM
The U.S. intelligence community is vast, composed of 17 distinct organizations each operating under its own shroud of secrecy.
Oversight of these agencies generally falls to the Department of Defense or Congress, leaving the average citizen with precious little knowledge of how they operate.
Funded by largely classified budgets, it's difficult to assess how much the U.S. annually spends on these clandestine operations, but one 2012 estimate pegs the cost at about $75 billion.
The following slides highlight the expansive reach of the U.S. intelligence community.
Click here to see the spy network > »View As: One Page Slides
__________________________________________
Here is the other arm of DEEP STATE-----our national media. This happened because we allowed MONOPOLIES when our US Constitution and Federal laws do not allow monopolies. What happened during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA? Our media filled with CIA----DIA-----grads tied to secret societies and VOILA----WE HAVE NATIONAL FAKE NEWS.
'Operation Mockingbird, revealed by Carl Bernstein in 1977, is also briefly mentioned. Mockingbird saw the CIA place agents and connections in virtually every major mainstream news outlet, going right to the top'.
This was just the beginning----here in Baltimore all our media is filled with this culture. This is why WE THE PEOPLE must WAKE UP to our national media being FAKE NEWS----it literally has become PROPAGANDA.
We are watching today in the US media our political news as seen in any third world developing nation....
Our media is called THE 4TH ESTATE because of the separation of powers built by our founding fathers to protect us from TYRANNY OF A FEW. Guess what? WE THE PEOPLE asleep at the wheel allowed those global 1% grab control of all separation of powers---including our national media. THIS IS DEEP, DEEP STATE.
Here we see why I shout-----we can respect our national writers but not see them as populist leaders----just as with our national actors and music stars-----global Wall Street has indeed controlled our culture through a captured media. Start a new business---be a local hard copy print media for the 99% !
Web Only / Culture » February 7, 2017
Don’t Be Fooled By the Trump Spat—The CIA Is Not Your Friend
A new book reminds us that the CIA is one of history’s great purveyors of fake news.
BY Branko Marcetic
Through covert funding and well-placed assets, the CIA helped create, keep alive and exert editorial control over a range of seemingly independent entities.
Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, a history of the CIA’s decades-spanning attempts to co-opt and outright recruit writers and intellectuals for its own ends, is the fruit of at least 15 years of research. Yet by some cosmic happenstance, it’s only now being released, when it’s more relevant than ever.
Joel Whitney’s book comes amidst weeks of CIA-dominated headlines as the intelligence community butts heads with President Donald Trump over allegations he owes his victory to—and is perhaps in the thrall of—the Kremlin. After a heated public exchange, Trump tried to make nice with the agency with a speech in front of the CIA memorial in Langley, Virginia. Rather than paying tribute to the agency’s fallen, however, he used the opportunity to criticize the media and insist on the tremendous size of his inauguration audience, leaving a sour taste in the mouths of some CIA personnel.
All of this has led some progressives to view the agency as a possible savior, an ally in ousting Trump. Presumably taking the standpoint that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, Democrats have suddenly flipped from being at least relatively critical of the CIA and its oversteps to stalwartly defending the agency. At least one pro-CIA sign even made it into the massive Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration.
It’s in this environment that Finks hits bookshelves, serving as a timely refresher that the CIA is hardly to be trusted, and in fact has a long history of using the press to shape public opinion.
Whitney outlines how over 18 or so years, starting as early as 1948, the CIA, in concert with some of its foreign counterparts, covertly funded and directed a host of propaganda ventures. While on their face, these projects—from literary magazines and book series to films and student groups—appeared far from jingoistic, beneath the surface was a campaign to wage the Cold War on the sly, combating anti-Americanism and spreading anti-Soviet, pro-U.S. messages.
Through covert funding and well-placed assets, the CIA helped create, keep alive and exert editorial control over a range of seemingly independent entities. Some were explicitly liberal, like the National Student Association in the late 1960s. Others, such as literary magazines like Encounter and The Paris Review, were cloaked in a veneer of apoliticism that left readers unaware they were being subtly manipulated. In Latin America, the CIA sponsored more than half a dozen magazines for the purpose of covertly swaying local intellectuals. “The two things these magazines had in common was that they tended to defend US foreign policy at its most egregious, facing censorship when they didn’t, and that they learned to disguise this defense,” writes Whitney.
One of the CIA’s major projects was publishing and disseminating Boris Pasternek’s opus Dr. Zhivago, which had been banned by the Soviet Union for its portrayal of post-revolutionary disillusionment. The CIA did this not out of love for literature, but because it would be a propaganda coup for the agency. When Pasternak turned down the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature for the novel, presumed by many to be a result of Soviet pressure, the Paris Review—one of the supposedly neutral literary magazines funded by the CIA and founded and run by its operatives—built an entire issue around the incident.
The CIA’s mission was often one of “soft power,” well before the term ever existed. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)—the CIA front which funded the Paris Review and other magazines—paid up to three times the money for interviews with Russian writers who it could use as anti-Communist symbols. White, Russian authors, Latin Americans and Eastern bloc writers filled the Review’s pages. By contrast, black writers—and the topic of segregation—received next to no attention form CCF-directed magazines. The CCF also maintained veto power over articles, ensuring that nothing viewed as overly critical of or negative toward American society would be published.
Whitney recounts how the CCF worked to undermine the career of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, deemed an unacceptable cultural influence for his leftist views. Learning that Neruda was in the running for the 1964 Nobel Prize for literature, the CCF launched a smear campaign to discredit the poet. This campaign “traumatize[d] those closest to Neruda for decades,” Whitney writes, linking Neruda to Stalin and alleging that he was involved in trying to assassinate Trotsky in 1940. At the same time, the CCF gladly used Neruda’s poetry for one of its Latin-American magazines, utilizing him to mask the CIA’s reactionary politics even as the agency worked to destroy his life.
The CIA’s use of Neruda was part of a broader approach of using largely left-wing writers to carry out its bidding. Readers—along with many of the contributors themselves—were unaware of the CIA ties of the various enterprises they were involved in, and that left-wing figures were being “used to disguise the United States’ reactionary politics with a more liberal face,” as Whitney puts it. Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, one of those who had been unwittingly “weaponized,” told his friend he felt like a “cuckold” when, in the mid-1960s, the New York Times revealed the CIA’s patronage of dozens of literary magazines, one of which--Mundo Nuevo—he had written for.
Other participants were more willing. At the center of Finks is the aforementioned Paris Review, a literary magazine founded in 1953 by Harold “Doc” Humes, Peter Matthiessen and literary darling George Plimpton.
Matthiessen was eventually outed as a CIA asset, while Plimpton remained cagey through his final days on his exact connection to the agency. Whitney draws on documents, however, that suggest Plimpton was well aware of the CIA’s role in the magazine he was running. Humes was not. He was riven with (ultimately justified) paranoia about being spied on, and the revelation of Matthiessen’s CIA ties contributed to his psychological breakdown.
These are not the only famous names to make their appearance in the book as CIA employees. Others include Irving Kristol, father of Bill and a founding father of neoconservatism; Arthur Schlesinger, the Kennedys’ “court historian”; and William F. Buckley, Jr., pre-eminent conservative, TV personality and founder of the National Review.
There are also some tantalizing, lesser-known threads Whitney alludes to, though they deserve further pulling. These include the book’s coda, examining Paris Review co-founder John Train’s role as a conduit for CIA money in Afghanistan during the 1980s Soviet invasion, financing various propaganda ventures and embedding the media with stories favorable to the agency’s chosen narrative.
Another enticing diversion is a segment on Operation Chaos, for instance, a covert war on the independent antiwar press, with CIA agents infiltrating magazines like the feminist, pro-LGBT antiwar paper Quicksilver Times, and sowing discord within them.
Operation Mockingbird, revealed by Carl Bernstein in 1977, is also briefly mentioned. Mockingbird saw the CIA place agents and connections in virtually every major mainstream news outlet, going right to the top. Some, like the New York Times’ Arthur Sulzberger, signed secrecy agreements with the agency, while others had more informal, social ties to the agency that didn’t require legal documentation. The CIA operated a network of (by one estimate) 900 foreign journalists paid to spread propaganda anywhere in the world at any time, propaganda which two former agents claimed regularly found its way into U.S. media.
While Whitney’s book ends in early-1980s Afghanistan, we know that such efforts continued. In 1986, it was revealed that the Reagan administration had engaged in a “deception” campaign against 1980s-era bogeyman Moammar Gadhafi, selectively feeding the media with false information—one might say, fake news—to make him believe he would be imminently attacked by the United States or even toppled. This involved spreading false or exaggerated reports about the disloyalty of his underlings or internal opposition within Libya.
In December 1991, a now-declassified CIA report noted the CIA’s deep connections in the worlds of business, academia and the media, including “relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and television network” (the CIA’s emphasis). This, the report boasted, allowed the agency to turn “intelligence failure” stories into “intelligence success” ones, plus “postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests.”
While it may be decades before we know the exact scope of the CIA’s collusion with the media today, there are suggestions that the agency continues to enjoy a cozy relationship with members of the media. In 2014, Ken Silverstein reported that one Los Angeles Times reporter habitually sent drafts and summaries of his stories to the CIA, assured the agency of positive coverage and wrote stories that intentionally offered a positive slant toward the agency. The CIA also regularly invites reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox News and NPR to its headquarters for briefings.
Finks, then, is invaluable reading material in the present moment. It’s an excellent overview of the information war launched and fought by the CIA since its inception, and presents a detailed look into how such “soft” propaganda was made and operated.
All of which brings us to the current stoush between the agency and Trump. At a moment when liberals and Democrats raise the alarm over “fake news,” yet happily run with second-hand testimony of intelligence officials or unverified rumors leaked to the press, Whitney’s work should provide us with a sobering dose of caution. Reports suggest the Trump campaign is currently being investigated for its alleged connections to the Kremlin, and perhaps at the end of it all we’ll see evidence that confirms the most explosive allegations are true. Until that time, we should think of Whitney’s book and remember that intelligence agencies have never been strangers to using the press to manipulate public opinion.
____________________________________________
Here is what happens when a free media is captured by a global Wall Street-----REAL news that holds power accountable becomes gagged whether from inside media our by our very government.
Obama was one of the worst in suppressing whistle-blowers inside government and US press freedom. So, DEEP STATE has CIA embedded in our national media chilling free speech and holding power accountable. Of course this is a definite when the owners of all US media outlets become that global 1%.
The publishing houses have always been tied to local or regional wealthy families but because they were not global---because they were not national -----they used to be REGIONAL ---they worked to hold power accountable. It was merger and acquisition that ended that regional ownership and local media competitors.
The CIA has always been an Executive Branch agency so whether CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA----the goal is protect and expand empire-building of global corporations which today are not American---they are multi-national.
'My favorite quotation cited in Secrets and Leaks: “[A]n increase in the secrecy of governmental action may be taken as an index of the draft for the garrison state in America.”'
The top spook’s stupid gag order
By Jack Shafer
April 21, 2014
The nation’s top spy has prohibited all of his spies from talking with reporters about “intelligence-related information” unless officially authorized to speak. Intelligence Community Directive 119, signed by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper last month and made public Monday in a report by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, threatens to reduce the flow of information from the national security establishment to the press — and hence the public.
As Aftergood notes, Directive 119 does not merely bar intelligence community employees from sharing classified intelligence information with reporters. It also bars the discussion with the media of unclassified intelligence information “related” to intelligence. Under Directive 119, any and all conversations between spooks and reporters not explicitly authorized by top officials will be criminalized at the worst or potentially put intelligence employees out of a job at the least. The same discussion of unclassified matters between an intelligence community employee and a non-reporter would be allowed, Aftergood further notes.
Directive 119 increases the insularity of the national security state, making the public less safe, not more. Until this directive was issued, intelligence community employees could provide subtext and context for the stories produced by the national security press without breaking the law. Starting now, every news story about the national security establishment that rates disfavor with the national security establishment — no matter how innocuous — will rate a full-bore investigation of sources by authorities.
Directive 119 achieves through executive order much of what the spooks tried to accomplish legislatively in the summer of 2012, when the Senate Intelligence Committee approved a measure that would have banned background briefings between reporters and all intelligence officials except “press officers and agency directors or deputy directors,” as Reuters correspondent Mark Hosenball reported. Such briefings have been routine during most recent presidential administrations, Hosenball wrote. An avalanche of protests smothered the measure, killing it until Clapper resurrected elements of it in Directive 119.
The tussle between secret-keepers in government and the secret-sharers in the press goes back to the founding of the republic, as Rahul Sagar delineates in his recent book Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy, which I reviewed earlier this year. Efforts like Directive 119 — designed to restrict the flow of information — can lead to unintended results, Sagar found. By tightening the normal circle of secrecy, a president automatically reduces the number of advisers he can draw on to make decisions, and this reduces the amount of brainpower that can shine on an intelligence issue or a foreign crisis and increases conformity. Administrations that “turn inward” tend to exclude dissidents and doubters — emboldening loyalists and suck-ups, and hindering oversight and debate.
One excessively ingrown presidential administration, as you may recall, acted on its excessively ingrown intelligence information and analysis to invade a foreign land to capture diabolical biological and chemical weapons that didn’t exist. If ever we needed more unauthorized leaks to neutralize all the authorized leaks of bogus information to gullible reporters, it was during the prelude to that war.
Congress would have little idea of what the White House was doing if not for news reports based on leaks of classified information, Sagar writes, making the leaks and the press reports essential to governance and the avoidance of an imperial presidency. He quotes former Representative Norman Mineta, who as a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence once said, “We are like mushrooms. They keep us in the dark and feed us a lot of manure.”
But don’t weep for Congress. They’re the ones who criminalized leaks of classified information in the first place. This paradox, noted by Sagar, means Congress prohibits the very sustenance required to keep itself informed about the executive branch. As an executive order, Directive 119 impinges on the authority of Congress to police the president: In a perfect world Congress would refuse the manure being fed to it, demand real information, and legislate a reversal of Directive 119. On the other hand, if you liked the war in Iraq, you’ll love Directive 119.
Another of Sagar’s findings, worthy of mention in the Directive 119 discussion, is that extreme state-secrecy tends to short-circuit the checks and balancing process that keeps the president from vectoring off in a dictatorial direction. Members of Congress who criticize an administration’s national security policies can find themselves marginalized in debates by a strong-armed president, as was the case with Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). As a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Wyden knew much about the National Security Agency’s runaway surveillance programs. But owing to the position of trust he occupied, he could not inform the public of those programs in a way that would allow them to be debated. Not until NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked his stash to reporters Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman (talk about unauthorized contact between an intelligence community employee and the press!) was an honest and needed debate about domestic surveillance possible.
Directive 119 might make sense if the administration could point to a pattern of unauthorized discussions that has done lasting damage to national security. But that it does not do. Instead, it tightens the circle. And it feeds us all another helping of dung.
******
My favorite quotation cited in Secrets and Leaks: “[A]n increase in the secrecy of governmental action may be taken as an index of the draft for the garrison state in America.” Send your favorites to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and watch my Twitter feed for quotations from the work of Ben Hecht. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.
PHOTOS: Director of U.S. National Intelligence James Clapper appears before the House Intelligence Committee on “Worldwide Threats” in Washington February 4, 2014. REUTERS/Gary Cameron
Accused government whistleblower Edward Snowden is seen on a screen as he speaks via video conference with members of the Committee on legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe during a hearing on “mass surveillance” at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, April 8, 2014. REUTERS/Vincent Kessler
___________________________________________
This is why we shout that main stream news IS FAKE NEWS.
The 4th Estate once directed to hold power accountable is now controlled by global Wall Street and nothing but propaganda.
Taking our national media creates A DEEP, DEEP, DEEP STATE if allowed to MOVE FORWARD.
So when national news media were EMBEDDED into our Desert Storm or War in Afghanistan were they there to hold power accountable or were they there holding our soldiers who overwhelmingly did not want to end GENEVA CONVENTION and engage in Bush/Cheney kind of warfare?
The Fourth Estate
In the "democratic age" news and information have been transformed. The way politics is covered has changed radically. Papers don't "report" news, they quite often present it according to their preferences and prejudices, reports the guardian. The role of the 'fourth estate' is in jeopardy...
Outside of the three branches of government, The Fourth Estate, the news media, through fair and impartial investigative journalism, has always been a regulating mechanism for the federal government. Until now that is! Now the news is controlled by the wealthy Progressive Elite who shape the news American voters receive and shape it with their Progressive agenda.
In 1841, Thomas Carlyle wrote, “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” (On Heroes and Hero Worship). Four years earlier, Carlyle had used the phrase in his French Revolution: “A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up, increases and multiplies; irrepressible, incalculable.” Carlyle saw the press as instrumental to the birth and growth of democracy, spreading facts and opinions and sparking revolution against tyranny – journalism in the digital age.
OPSEC Radio host Jamie Williamson, a retired Special Forces Colonel, and cohost DW Wilber, a former CIA intelligence officer and contributing writer for Town Hall, have an in-depth discussion of the impact of the Fourth Estate and how Mainstream Media is shaping American politics.
Jamie Williamson, OPSEC Cofounder & President: Jamie is a retired Army Special Forces colonel with over 33 years of service. He is a combat veteran and has served in Iraq, the Balkans, and Afghanistan with various command and staff assignments in the infantry and in Special Operations. He is currently a small business owner.
DW, Former CIA Case Officer: DW was an Intelligence and Counterterrorism Officer with the CIA and the Department of Defense – with a focus on technical and human intelligence collection activities, as well as counterterrorism operations in Eastern and Western Europe, and the Middle East.
_____________________________________________
When global citizens no longer know who to trust everyone is in danger because people in fear act out often without the knowledge needed and VOILA----we get the conditions of war and civil unrest as during WW2 that the GENEVA CONVENTION was written to end.
Bush knew that -----Obama knew that-----when Trump says he is going to build a military that makes the world too scared to act out against ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE---this is what he means----no hold's bar and our rank-and-file soldiers----those CIA/DIA are the pawns simply protecting KINGS AND QUEENS.
Make no mistake Trump as CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA is building these structures in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones not just to protect WE THE PEOPLE from those pesky overseas terrorists---they are preparing to see WE THE PEOPLE as those pesky sovereign citizen terrorists---black, white, or brown citizen!
WE NEED TO STOP MOVING FORWARD WITH US CITIES AS FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES AND END DESIGNATIONS THAT ALLOW OUR US CITIES TO BECOME MILITARIZED AND SECURITIZED-----it is not just any job.
This article was written in 2002----and more were written after Bush left office and Obama continued a CIA - driven warfare.
Op-Ed:U.S.
Violates Geneva Conventions
by members of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
On January 11, 2002, the United States announced that it was refusing to abide by the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. The Third Geneva Convention, which provides specific guidelines for treatment of prisoner combatants, is a part of the "law of nations" and is a mainstay of international humanitarian law. The United States explained that the prisoners taken in Afghanistan and Pakistan were not actually prisoners of war, but were in fact "unlawful combatants."
The first prisoners arrived in the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on January 11, 2002. According to the Washington Post, prisoners were hooded and shackled during the 27-hour flight. The United States defended these practices as appropriate security measures. Media on site in Cuba reported that the prisoners were fitted with goggles that were blacked out, for "security reasons" necessary to prevent them from using their eyes. In a public letter to Donald Rumsfeld , Amnesty International expressed concern that the prisoners' conditions of transport violated international norms.
The prisoners are being housed in outdoor 6 foot-by-8 foot open-air chain link cages, with concrete floors and wooden roofs, and contain a mat and a plastic bucket. The U.S. demanded that media not show photographs of the prisoners in these conditions, explaining, without apparent irony at the inconsistency, that the photos would deprive the prisoners of their rights under the Geneva Convention. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, any photographs of the prisoners in the United States-imposed conditions would be "humiliating" and "debasing." Several outlets have not complied with the Pentagon's demand.
The Bush Administration's refusal to abide by the world's humanitarian laws stands in stark contrast to the justifications advanced for U.S. military actions. On September 20, 2001, in a televised speech, George W. Bush justified the waging of war as necessary to defend the values of "civilization" against "evil": "This is not, however, just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight." On November 8, 2001, in his prime-time speech to the nation, President Bush declared the bombing of Afghanistan to be "a war to save civilization itself."
Article 4 of the Geneva Convention defines the categories of persons who may be considered as "prisoners of war." According to Article 5, "should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal." No competent tribunal has adjudicated this matter.
Among the provisions of the Third Geneva Convention regarding humane treatment of prisoners of war, which the U.S. is refusing to apply, are:
- Article 13: Humane treatment required; No reprisals allowed
- Article 14: Respect for persons and honour; No gender discrimination
- Article 16: No discrimination based on race, nationality, religious belief or political opinions
- Article 17: No physical or mental torture; No coercion to obtain information; Prisoners who decline to provide information may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment
- Article 18: Clothing, articles of personal use, to remain with prisoners
- Article 20: Evacuation or transfer to be under same conditions as afforded Detaining Power
- Article 21: Internment in camp allowed; Close confinement prohibited
- Article 22: Internment in penitentiaries prohibited; Every guarantee of hygiene and healthfulness required
- Article 25: Condition of quarters must be as favorable for POWs as for the forces of the Detaining Power; Accommodations for habits and customs of POWs required; Protection from dampness, adequate heat and lighting required
- Article 26: Food must be in sufficient quantity, quality and variety to maintain good health and weight
- Article 27: Adequate clothing, underwear and footwear required
- Article 28: Canteens must be installed; Fairly priced food, soap, tobacco and ordinary items must be stocked
- Articles 29 - 32: Proper hygiene and medical attention, including monthly health inspections, required
- Articles 34 - 37: Prisoners must be afforded complete latitude in the exercise of religion, including attendance at services, on condition they comply with disciplinary routine
- Article 38: Provisions for physical, intellectual and recreational activities
- Article 70: Prisoners must be allowed to write to family, others
The authors are members of the national steering committee of the A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition. www.internationalanswer.org.
_________________________________________
We must remember that Obama came to office with voters demanding Bush war crimes be given justice and to assure the US returned to being A DEMOCRATIC, RULE OF LAW, FREEDOM AND JUSTICE world leader-----instead we got a third Bush term with more violations of human rights inside US and around the world.
With Bush it was the CIA often tied to these breaches of war----our soldiers spoke of orders from our military leaders these soldiers knew violated rules of war. The global military corporations are being called MERCENARY----these are those CIA-----DIA----INTEL-DRIVEN DEEP STATE structures we are allowing to MOVE FORWARD coming to our US cities.
THESE ARE THE ISSUES THAT MUST HAVE ENGAGED CITIZENS AND MASS PROTESTS----CITIZENS NOT STANDING FOR FRAUDULENT PRIMARIES KEEPING THESE SAME GLOBAL WALL STREET CANDIDATES AS THE ONLY CHOICE----VOTE FOR THE LEAST WORST VOTERS ARE TOLD.
All of this is what comes to our US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones like Baltimore with militarized police training and lots of black citizens killed in zero tolerance deadly force coming to all Americans black, white, and brown citizens!
REAGAN-era CIA
'Torture was taught by CIA; Declassified manual details the methods used in Honduras; Agency denials refuted
By Gary Cohn, Ginger Thompson, and mark Matthews, The Baltimore Sun, Monday 27 January 1997, Final Edition
WASHINGTON -- A newly declassified CIA training manual details torture methods used against suspected subversives in Central America during the 1980s, refuting claims by the agency that no such methods were taught there'.
Obama, Bush, and the Geneva Conventions
- By John B. Bellinger III
- August 11, 2010 - 8:31 pm
Today, 12 August, is the 61st anniversary of the signing of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the international treaties designed to protect soldiers and civilians during armed conflicts. The treaties became the focus of international attention in 2002 when the Bush administration controversially concluded that al Qaeda and the Taliban were not entitled to their protections. President Obama has reaffirmed America’s "commitment" to the Geneva Conventions but has not been specific about how the Conventions apply to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees. To re-assert U.S. leadership with respect to the laws of war, the Obama administration should announce that the United States accepts specific provisions of the Conventions and engage other countries to develop new rules where the Geneva Conventions do not apply.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions consist of four separate treaties originally signed by 59 countries in Geneva, Switzerland. In light of the horrific experiences of World War II, the first three agreements revised previous treaties dating from 1864, 1906, and 1929 that provided humanitarian protections for sick or wounded soldiers on land, sailors at sea, and prisoners of war. The fourth agreement, added in 1949, establishes protections for civilians in conflict zones. The best known of the agreements is the Third Geneva Convention, which provides detailed articles of protection for those who qualify as Prisoners of War (POWs).
The Geneva Conventions apply to conflicts between the 194 countries that are now party to them. Since 1949, three Additional Protocols have been added to the Conventions to provide further protections in light of changes in modern warfare. The United States has long objected to certain provisions in the First Protocol, although it has stated its support for others. President Reagan submitted the Second Protocol to the Senate in 1987, but the Senate has not acted on it. The Bush administration was a driving force behind (and signed and ratified) the Third Protocol, which created an alternative protective symbol (a Red Diamond) for countries (primarily Israel) that do not use the Red Cross or Red Crescent.
Together, the four 1949 Conventions and the three protocols form the bedrock of the international laws of war.
The United States applied the Geneva Conventions in the Korean, Vietnam, and first Gulf Wars. After the September 11 attacks, however, President Bush concluded that the Conventions did not apply to the United States conflict with al Qaeda because al Qaeda was not a party to the Conventions. He also determined that while Afghanistan was a party to the Conventions, the Taliban were not entitled to POW protections. The Bush administration’s refusal to apply the Geneva Conventions (and certain provisions in human rights treaties) was condemned by U.S. allies and human rights groups as an effort to place al Qaeda and Taliban detainees into a "legal black hole." In its second term, the Bush administration made significant efforts to clarify the legal rules applicable to detention and engage U.S. allies in discussions on international legal issues. But the administration still resisted application of the Geneva Conventions.
In 2006, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s arguments and held that even if the Geneva Conventions did not apply in their entirety, at least one provision — Common Article 3, which prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees — applies to the conflict between the United States and al Qaeda.
President Obama entered office pledging to "restore" U.S. respect for international law. He immediately banned coercive interrogation methods and rescinded the Bush administration’s strained interpretations of Common Article 3. Last December, Obama reaffirmed the U.S. "commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions" in his Nobel Prize remarks. These statements have helped improve America’s image internationally. But the Obama administration has yet to apply the Geneva Conventions as a legal framework differently than the Bush administration. The administration continues to hold hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees as enemy combatants in Guantanamo and Afghanistan but has not determined that they are POWs under the Third Convention or civilian "protected persons" under the Fourth Convention.
The Obama administration has been studying for nearly twenty months whether to give additional Geneva protections to these detainees. Although al Qaeda detainees clearly are not entitled to POW status, the administration should agree to be bound by Article 75 of the First Protocol to the Conventions, which specifies minimum protections for detained persons, such as the right to be told the reasons for one’s detention. The administration should also urge the Senate to approve the Second Protocol to the Conventions, which spells out rules for internal wars such as in Afghanistan today. Applying these provisions from the First and Second Protocols would demonstrate the U.S. commitment to holding detainees under an internationally recognized set of rules.
For more than a hundred years, the United States has been a respected leader in developing the international laws of war. The Bush administration stumbled by straining to avoid application of the Geneva Conventions as a whole and refusing to adopt even the minimum international standards set forth in Common Article 3 and Article 75. But it is true that the Conventions, and even the Additional Protocols, do not provide clear guidance for countries engaged in conflicts with terrorist groups like al Qaeda, such as who qualifies as a combatant and what legal process should be given. The Obama administration should continue to engage our allies in dialogue about which existing rules of international humanitarian and human rights law apply and where additional rules should be developed. The administration should use its considerable political capital in the international community to clarify and expand the international law applicable to modern warfare.
John B. Bellinger III is a partner with the Washington law firm of Arnold & Porter and an adjunct senior fellow in International and National Security Law at the Council on Foreign Relations. As the legal adviser for Department of State from 2005 to 2009, he headed the U.S. delegation for the negotiation of the Third Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions.
_______________________________________________
There are a percentage of our US and global population ----mostly men-----who think mercenary life is cool and exciting---they are into the war games. We are shouting very loudly that this is coming to our US cities and US citizens will be identified as those pesky terrorists because they do not like MOVING FORWARD COLONIZATION OF US TO ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE.
Think of families and future---if you are a NEW CITIZEN or still immigrant status----please consider how the making of America into that third world DEEP STATE kill any status of democratic republic having citizens with rights. That 5% to the 1% includes those immigrant citizens! COME TOGETHER AS A 99% VS 1%!
CIA University: Where spies get schooled
By Drew Dwyer 03.22.2016
One of the cooler things about being in the CIA is the opportunity for extra training available to staff employees. The agency calls it CIA University. Courses offered include lock-picking, money laundering, offensive double-agent operations, live-tissue labs, chemical-weapons manufacturing…you get the point. Just about anything a person can conceive, the agency offers instruction on it.
As a new employee in the CIA, it’s required to complete specific training courses that correlate to your main job function. After completing your mandatory training, you can choose from over 300 courses on the agency’s internal computer system. All you have to do is click on the app, find the course, and choose from pre-selected dates when the training is offered.
__________________________________________
I like this article because it rightly identifies China as authoritarian naked capitalist corporate fascism with a fleeting reference to a pretend communism under MAO------MAO was simply a Yale University grad from a wealthy Chinese family tasked with using GREAT LEAP FORWARD to centralize land ownership in moving to an industrial society---the fake communism allowed MAO to collectivize land owned for centuries by rural peasant families.
The far-right wing global Wall STreet CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA love authoritarianism----love militarism----love secret services----and love media propaganda. MOVING FORWARD US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones is indeed taking the US to a Chinese-style governance which is that ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE. The march to militarization and securitization steadily engulfs more citizens and then brings children into this loop. This is what we will see this coming decade as the economic crash brings a broader and deeper poverty to US.
People made desperate for work are easier to MOVE FORWARD into these VISTA/CHILD AND FAMILY fascist structures as we have in Baltimore and indeed are being installed in all US cities. It is the real deal ---it can be stopped and reversed but WE THE PEOPLE must act now because another decade will see more and more of DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE infrastructure installed!
'Paxton provides a useful definition of fascism as "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."'
As we said-----the images of Trump tied to a Putin and Russia is that move to identify the far-right global Wall Street with USSR Stalinist socialism. There is as well the same imagery tying Trump to the Chinese communist symbols pushing for installing the MAOIST corporate fascism......both come from the global Wall STreet 5% to the 1%-----but
MOVING FORWARD WILL BE A GREAT LEAP FORWARD TO DEEP STATE.
TruthOut is a Clinton global Wall Street media outlet and that is why they make it seem it will be China who moves the US towards this corporate fascist socialism when it was the US and global Wall Street who installed Foreign Economic Zones and created the excuse of communism to centralize control of land and governance. Global Wall Street pols have been MOVING FORWARD taking US to these same overseas Foreign Economic Zone structures under the same authoritarian MARXISM.
Chinese Fascism's Global ConsequencesSunday, February 05, 2012 By Roland Farris, Truthout |A smoggy morning exercise drill in China. (Photo: Anonymous friend of Farris)
I wake up this morning to the sun slicing warm, golden slits through the barred windows of my little apartment in Dali Old Town, one of southern China's most beautiful and relaxing cities. It isn't the ample sunshine that wakes me up, however, it's the rousing military band music that wafts in from across several courtyards and makes its way into our otherwise quiet corner of existence. The music itself wouldn't be so remarkable, even given its oddly archaic marching-band sound, like some fragment of mid-20th century authoritarianism that got trapped in the stratosphere and recently settled down back into my ear.
What is remarkable is its ubiquity. It is the same music I battle to suppress from my on-campus apartment in one of China's major cities. It is the same music that blasts every morning at precisely 7 AM and again at 4 PM on my top-level university campus. To me, it is increasingly the sound of China.
Accompanying the music is a voice calling out callisthenic exercises in a cadence that would be almost cheery if it didn't carry such grim undertones of mindless conformity. "Yi, Er, San, Si, Wu, Liu, Qi, Ba, Er, Er, San, Si, Wu, Liu, Qi, Ba," the high-pitched male voice encourages the often-absent students. This is a real-life equivalent of the "physical jerks" in Orwell's "1984." Twice a day, on the mark, speakers across the campus blast out this music. Students at my university are obliged to participate at least once a week. There seems to be a club for those who want to show particular enthusiasm. I am told that these exercises along with their uniform marching music are obligatory daily routines on all school campuses up until the end of high school. Failure to show sufficient enthusiasm in one's daily jerks is grounds for academic penalties. This aspect of living and studying in China is something that it seems is often missed in the excessively positive and business-oriented coverage given by the mainstream media, and it is part of a troubling trend that I am most able to witness in the education system - but which extends to every facet of life in the Middle Kingdom.
There was a time when China was referred to as a society which was Communist or Post-Communist; today, the terms Authoritarian Capitalist or Capitalist with Asian/Chinese Characteristics are more common. However, there is a new term that appears to be increasingly applicable to the operation of the Chinese state and its impact on the lives of Chinese people and, above all, the education of Chinese youth born in the 1990s. It is increasingly clear that China is the most powerful, mature and internationally accepted fascist state in global history and its status as such should cause us all a great deal of concern.
To call China a fascist state is nothing particularly novel. In March 2010, the Taipei Times published an editorial by a J. Michael Cole, which refers to the writings of Umberto Eco and Robert Paxton to match accepted definitions of fascism with the socio-political realities in China. Cole points to the realities of emphasizing the role of the nation in all matters, including sports; a sense of national grievance as the core of national identity; the paranoid control of any potential opposition; and the rise of Han Chinese racism. Cole is right in much of his analysis. But for all its correctness, his analysis from Taipei cannot compare to the horror that is the lived reality of watching this fascist state unfold before one's very eyes in the center of Chinese power in Beijing.
Paxton provides a useful definition of fascism as "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
As an educator trying to inculcate a sense of global citizenship in young Chinese, these characteristics are far too common in my encounters with the minds of Chinese youth. The most succinct example of such indoctrination came when one of my "International Education" students became angry about a discussion concerning global environmental degradation. Despite the fact that the documentary which framed our discussion focused on a wide range of global environmental issues and that it in fact made no reference to China, she insisted that I was shaming Chinese people by talking about the environment. She followed on to insist that since China had been humiliated by foreign powers with advanced weaponry, they had no choice but to develop as quickly as possible better weapons so that they could regain their dignity and territorial integrity. The rapidity with which a discussion of global environmental issues jumped to a rant on Chinese national humiliation is telling: As anyone who has spent time face to face with regular Chinese people is aware, one never knows exactly what will trigger such mental leaps.
It becomes clear very early on to those who venture outside the venues of the rich, powerful and tactful, that the education system is rife with lessons in national humiliation, social Darwinism and the cult of the nation. Students are taught that, prior to recent history, China was the dominant power in the world, with 5,000 years of uninterrupted power and prosperity. Any attempt to engage in a discussion concerning the correctness of referring to the various pre-national ethno-cultural entities that contended for the territory of what is now called the People's Republic of China in nation-state terms is met with hostility. Never mind that, until 1949, the geographic nation-state known as "China" today had not really existed, that a series of different ethnic and cultural groups, coexisting in separate kingdoms, speaking different languages and carrying on different customs, competed for supremacy much the same way that various European nations competed until recent times. When I try to impress that arguing for an imagined 5,000-year-old Chinese empire which must be re-established is akin to Italians insisting on the restoration of the Roman Empire, I am met with a wall of stubborn and often hostile refusal.
Social Darwinism has reached the level of state religion in modern Chinese society, with the ubiquitous phrases expounding the importance of "developing oneself" and "using one's advantage" to prove one's fitness over others. There is usually a racial overtone to such talk, with the Han Chinese cast as the dominant race in the globe that - due to national complacency - were recently overtaken by hairy barbarians from the West, but will eventually reinstate their domination over the globe. Those of other ethnic origins, particularly of African descent, are often spoken of in condescending, almost sub-human terms, as a kind of hapless helper race to be valued for their physical strength and musical talents, but otherwise to be "managed" by one of the superior, more "developed" races. Such views are not implicitly conveyed, but explicitly, in the form of an overtly racist natural history taught in the school system wherein Chinese physical characteristics of reduced body hair and physical size are taken to indicate a higher level of racial development over hairier and supposedly more physically robust Europeans and Africans who only recently became civilized and so bear the characteristics of a harsher lifestyle. My students unflinchingly express a condescending affection for Africans, with statements such as, "I like black people, because, since they are closer to animals, they are really good at sports." There is a widespread belief among average Chinese that Africans and Chinese are not able to produce offspring together and, therefore, effectively constitute separate species.
Another key indicator of fascist state organization is the militarization of the youth, which is an integral part of the Chinese education system - and indeed of Chinese working life. All university students in their freshman year are obliged to enroll in five weeks of military training and indoctrination, most of which consists in standing still for long periods of time, marching for hours on end from 5 AM until 1 AM, shouting, "Yi! Er!" over and over and mass-rehearsed and largely useless hand-to-hand combat drills. While some schools provide riflery and first-aid training, the purpose of the training is largely to inculcate in the students a sense that their education is part of the nation's strength rather than their individual personal aspirations. Such training begins in middle school and is a yearly event all the way up until the first year of university, after which it ceases. There truly is nothing scarier than 18-year-old boys dressed up in ill-fitting military uniforms running around with plastic truncheons.
While Chinese rarely express an open desire for imperialist expansion, an ideological sense of the inevitability of such expansion is a hidden part of national political consciousness. Rather than being self-admitted expansionists, Chinese expansion is instead expressed by characterizing foreign nations as "part of China" which must one day be reconquered and brought into the fold of the motherland to redress the historic injustices of foreign domination by restoring territorial integrity. The fact that these Asian nations are not part of the People's Republic of China (PRC), as they are supposed to be, is yet further ammunition for a sense of national grievance and humiliation. Press university students on the matter and one will quite easily be told that not only Taiwan and Tibet, but Mongolia, the Koreas, much or all of South-East Asia, Japan and most of the Philippines are somehow "part of China." The argument relies on obscure racial and cultural connections that somehow make these independent nations part of a larger Han empire that - while never having existed in the past as a national entity and, even on a cultural level, has no basis in linguistic and genetic links - must one day be re-established for Chinese dignity and territorial integrity. So, while Chinese will say that China is a "peaceful country" which does not have imperialist aims, such peace and nonaggression is contingent upon the restoration of the territorial integrity of an imagined (Han) Chinese empire that would consume a significant amount of the nations surrounding the PRC. I learned of this while discussing Chinese history with some students, who, after vigorously extolling the truth of what they were taught, then insisted they were "not nationalists," since such desire for "reintegration" is a return to an (imagined) historic norm rather than a national expansion into new territory.
Fascist states have long relied upon their competitive advantage in attracting foreign investment. Authoritarian control of the labor force and national policymaking makes good business sense. Such was the case with Italy and Germany during the inter-war period and such is the case with China's dizzyingly rapid rise today. The ability of a totalitarian fascist state to control the labor force, suppress dissent and put investment over social welfare makes such states highly attractive to businesses. Such is the case today with China. Coca-Cola's CEO inadvertently demonstrated the fascist nature of the Chinese state when he lauded the "one-stop shop in terms of the Chinese foreign investment agency," wherein the federal and local Chinese government agencies are competing for investment, with their population paying the cost in terms of reduced labor rights and environmental protections.
Chinese will often accept this as a necessary part of their national development, a development which seems increasingly to benefit only those with power and connections and to increasingly marginalize the common people. One need not look merely at the statements of business leaders, but much mainstream media attention has praised the "efficiency" of the Chinese fascist regime while deriding the clumsiness and inconvenience of states which remain nominal liberal democracies.
The issue of Chinese fascism is one which the people of the world must pay much greater attention than they have to date. Too much emphasis is placed on the economic power of China without thought to the origins of this power and the long-term sociopolitical consequences it may have for the globe. The very effective media and information control mechanisms of the CCP, yet another indicator of a fascist state, exacerbates this issue. Only those such as myself, who operate in the education system and other front-line social roles, have the contact with life in China to see through the smoke and mirrors deployed by the government against any legitimate mainstream information-collection system, be it journalists or business people. Both of these groups are carefully watched and have their information pre-packaged, with stringent and well-documented efforts to prevent access to undesirable information and coercive measures to discourage its dissemination where it is found. Only those teachers, students and volunteers unimportant enough to go under the radar, such as myself, are able to get the real story and get it out without significant danger to ourselves. It is high time the world started paying attention to these stories below the gloss and sheen of state-sponsored and state-monitored mainstream media outlets which, for various reasons, are unable or unwilling to suffer the consequences of getting and reporting the truth about the Chinese state.
If the Chinese fascist regime is permitted by the international community to continue its rise to prominence, then the consequences will be borne by the people of democratic nations and we have already seen the early stages of this global trend. A powerful fascist state of such maturity and size in the world will increasingly come to determine political debate in nominally democratic countries as the economic advantages of such a regime draws more and more financial resources away from less "efficient" political systems. If China continues to be able to use its fascist state apparatus to attract investment at the cost of liberal democratic nations, then the characteristics of these nations will tend toward increasing fascism in an imitative defensive response.
This trend is already far advanced and if it remains unchecked by the active engagement and protest of constituent peoples in the form of actively entrenching our essential social and political norms of individual rights and egalitarian application of the rule of law, then we will witness the slow erosion of the democratic freedoms that were fought for nearly 70 years ago. It is no longer adequate to harp on about "human rights." The necessity of economically isolating regimes which fail to meet certain normative political and legal standards is of paramount importance to the long-term survival of the idea of pluralist government which protects a measure of individual freedom.
Failure to do so will result in an inevitable process of socio-cultural decline which will prove hard to reverse in the short to medium term. Democracy is messy and individual freedoms are inconvenient for the operation of the socioeconomic system we use to organize the globe. That we recognize this does not logically lead to the conclusion that we should submit to the dilution of those freedoms out of a misplaced desire for expediency. The reason we pursued increasing market freedoms in the past 70 years was ostensibly to spread democratic and individual freedoms.
OH, REALLY?????
If we now find that the means have come into conflict with the end, it is time to come back to the drawing board, lest in our pursuit of the material well-being that underpins a society which can afford educated, independent individual life, we end up creating the conditions for subsuming all individual freedom and development to fascist ideals of national power and undo all the achievements of 70 years of struggle and sacrifice.
RSS Feed
