This video will be watched in schools and Universities for generations to come, when people will ask the question: did we know what was really happening and why, and what did we say about it as it was happening? pic.twitter.com/9DgvGSN5F4
kenklippenstein | The U.S. government hears the student protests and is responding — but not in the way you might hope.
For
the feds, it is all about turning protests into a national security
crisis, with imagined foreign influence, sympathy for Hamas and other
terrorist groups, and a threat to the government itself.
It’s
widely known that local law enforcement agencies like the NYPD have
been responding to the Gaza protests sweeping across the country; but
less well known are the federal agencies that are quietly watching and
preparing. Instead of addressing the issues raised – civilian casualties
and the plight of the Palestinian people, divestment from Israel,
demilitarization of universities and colleges – President Biden himself
bluntly dismisses the students.
“Mr. President, have the protests
forced you to reconsider any of the policies with regard to the
region?,” a reporter asked at Biden’s press conference on Thursday.
Without hesitation, Biden answered: “No.”
Those are the marching
orders. So while the students continue to speak out, and so many are
clearly unhappy with American policy, the federal government has wasted
no time in surging resources from all across the country as it colors
the students as threats to national security.
Here are just some of the federal agencies that have now become involved:
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
Federal
Protective Service (FPS) – the Department of Homeland Security law
enforcement agency that protects federal buildings and other assets, and
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the Department of Homeland Security’s investigative arm.
Under the Biden’s administration’s 2023 National Strategy
to Counter Antisemitism, a gaggle of additional agencies are called
upon to take action. These include the Department of the Interior, whose
rangers and guides are directed to “identify and counter antisemitism
and other forms of hate”; and the Department of Agriculture, through its
law enforcement agents assigned to the Forest Service, who have been
directed “to learn how to identify and counter antisemitic,
Islamophobic, and related forms of discrimination.”
The
Pentagon, through its various investigative arms – Army CID, Navy NCIS,
Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) – and other agencies,
also manages FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Forces which are active
throughout the country.
Slate |What do you mean by the “weaponization of safety”?
The language is about wanting to make Jewish students feel safe. But there isn’t that other side of the conversation, which is: Are Palestinian students feeling safe? Some students are afraid of doxing, and there aren’t conversations about that.
OK, so the school policies have changed. Are there any other ways things have changed in recent years for student activists?
I
do think that one of the things that has changed is that there are ways
universities are, for example, deactivating access cards, taking
students out of dorms, and rapidly creating material
consequences—consequences relating to housing, tuition, fees, expulsion,
etc. Those move much faster, in large part because of technology.
You can, by a click of a button, deactivate students’ cards. It’s
increased the speed at which universities can respond.
And
then, for example, with things like Twitter or TikTok now, there’s the
difference between a university president making a statement that’s
posted online, versus in the past, when that might have just been an
email or in a student newspaper.
What does that conversation occurring publicly mean for this whole dynamic?
It
allows for more scrutiny. So when colleges and universities, for
example, created statements in 2015 and 2016 about anti-Blackness and
police brutality, a lot of those statements were about standing against
hate, etc. And then in 2020, as colleges and universities were once
again creating the statements, there were student groups that brought up
the 2015, 2016 statements being like, What have you done since then? Students are able to say, “You posted about this, and we’re trying to hold you accountable to that.”
What
do you think drove schools like Columbia to take such a dramatic
disciplinary step in these cases? Do you think this situation was
specific to the Israel-Palestine conflict, or standard for any kind of
protest?
I
think colleges and universities feel like this is very complicated.
There’s less of a desire to make a stance, and colleges and universities
are wary of making statements; often, statements are 500 words or less,
and there needs to be, like, a book. So, I think that that’s part of
what makes universities nervous.
Looking
at Columbia, as an example, this is a PR nightmare for them. To arrest
students now, when there’s so much scrutiny, and then to do it in such a
cruel way—students have been talking about only having 15 minutes to
collect their belongings, that their belongings were thrown in the trash
immediately. And to do that on a scale of 100 students, and then to
double down on that, and then say that they’re doing it for safety,
doesn’t make a lot of sense. So what that tells you is that Columbia is
likely facing a lot of pressure from people who do not want students to
be protesting. To the point where they’re making what seems like a very
irrational decision.
nakedcapitalism | This measures is so far under the radar that so far, only Friedman and Matthew Petti at Reason seem to have noticed it. And Petti has pointed out that the Secretary of the Treasury can designate any organization to be “terrorist-supporting organization,” so the does not think, as Friedman seems to, that any other measures are needed to allow an Administration to try to financially cripple not-for-profits engaging in wrong speech.
Note that the messaging depicting Hamas as somehow behind the campus protests has increased:
And Aljazeera has already produced evidence of Zionist groups trying to stoke confrontations at the demonstrations (hat tip Erasmus):
Mind you, not-for-profits are already subject to mission and censorship pressures by large donors, witness the billionaires who loudly said they would halt donations to Ivy League schools if they “tolerated anti-Semitism,” as in did not quash criticism of Israel. But as you will see, this is a whole different level of censorship.
First, we are hoisting Friedman’s entire tweetstorm. She stresses that not only does this bill create a star chamber when existing laws allow for crackwdowns on terrorist supports, but that it could be easily extended to other types of establishment-threatening speech.
A bipartisan bill would give the secretary of the treasury unilateral power to classify any charity as a terrorist-supporting organization, automatically stripping away its nonprofit status….
In theory, the bill is a measure to fight terrorism financing…
Financing terrorism is already very illegal. Anyone who gives money, goods, or services to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization can be charged with a felony under the Antiterrorism Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. And those terrorist organizations are already banned from claiming tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. Nine charities have been shut down since 2001 under the law.
The new bill would allow the feds to shut down a charity without an official terrorism designation. It creates a new label called “terrorist-supporting organization” that the secretary of the treasury could slap onto nonprofits, removing their tax exempt status within 90 days. Only the secretary of the treasury could cancel that designation.
In other words, the bill’s authors believe that some charities are too dangerous to give tax exemptions to, but not dangerous enough to take to court. Although the label is supposed to apply to supporters of designated terrorist groups, nothing in the law prevents the Department of the Treasury from shutting down any 501(c)(3) nonprofit, from the Red Cross to the Reason Foundation.
Petti explains that an initial target appears to be Students for Justice in Palestine, which he says have not had enough of an attack surface to be targeted under current law; in fact, Florida governor DeSantis had to shelve a plan to shut down Students for Justice in Palestine when confronted with a lawsuit.
Petti explains that his concerns are not unwarranted:
Under the proposed bill, murky innuendo could be enough to target pro-Palestinian groups. But it likely wouldn’t stop there. After all, during the Obama administration, the IRS put aggressive extra scrutiny on nonprofit groups with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their names. And under the Biden administration, the FBI issued a memo on the potential terrorist threat that right-wing Catholics pose.
The Charity and Security Network, a coalition of charities that operate in conflict zones, warned that its own members could be hindered from helping the neediest people in the world.
“Charitable organizations, especially those who work in settings where designated terrorist groups operate, already undergo strict internal due diligence and risk mitigation measures and…face extra scrutiny by the U.S. government, the financial sector, and all actors necessary to operate and conduct financial transactions in such complex settings,” the network declared in November. “This legislation presents dangerous potential as a weapon to be used against civil society in the context of Gaza and beyond.”
I urge readers, and particularly donors, to alert the fundraising and executive staff at not-for-profits, particularly the journalistic sort, so they can object to this legislation. It would likely not survive a Supreme Court challenge in its current form, but that’s an awfully heavy load to have to carry, plus the legislation might not be subject to an injunction in the meantime.
stanford | In a special episode recorded in front of a live audience, Dean Lloyd
Minor welcomes Chelsea Clinton, a bestselling author and an advocate for
public health and early childhood education. They discuss the
importance of accountability for scaling global health initiatives, and
the power of storytelling to counter misinformation in science and
health. They also talk about finding motivation through conscious
optimism and rebuilding public trust through support of individuals,
families, and communities. Along the way, they share memories
of Chelsea’s time as a Stanford undergraduate and their overlapping
memories of their home state of Arkansas.
Chelsea Clinton is vice chair of the Clinton Foundation and
the Clinton Health Access Initiative, working to improve lives, inspire
emerging leaders, and increase awareness around public health issues. At
the foundation, she is active in the early child initiative Too Small
to Fail, which supports families with resources to promote early brain
and language development; and the Clinton Global Initiative University, a
global program that empowers student leaders to turn their ideas into
action. A longtime public health advocate, Chelsea uses her platform at
the Clinton Health Access Initiative to address vaccine hesitancy,
childhood obesity, and health equity. In addition to her foundation
work, Chelsea also teaches at Columbia University’s Mailman School of
Public Health and has written several books for young readers, including
the #1 New York Times bestseller She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World. She is also the co-author of The Book of Gutsy Women and Grandma’s Gardens with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and of Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why? with Devi Sridhar. Chelsea’s podcast, In Fact with Chelsea Clinton,
premiered in 2021, and she is a co-founder of HiddenLight
Productions. Chelsea holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford, a master
of public health degree from Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health,
and both a master of philosophy degree and a doctorate in international
relations from Oxford University.
sonar21 | Americans are by-and-large decent, genial folks. But when it comes to
history, most have the memory of an Alzheimer’s patient. Sam Cooke was
speaking for most Americans when he crooned, “Don’t know much about
history …”. So I will make this simple — America’s hatred of Russia has
its roots in the U.S. Government’s post-WW II embrace of Nazis. Tim
Weiner writes about this in his essential book, Legacy of Ashes.
In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Berlin, U.S. Army
intelligence recruited and relied on German General Reinhard Gehlen:
“During World War II, General Gehlen had tried to spy on the Soviets
from the eastern front as a leader of the Abwehr, Hitler’s military
intelligence service. He was an imperious and cagey man who swore he had
a network of “good Germans” to spy behind Russian lines for the United
States.
“From the beginning,” Gehlen said, “I was motivated by the following
convictions: A showdown between East and West is unavoidable. Every
German is under the obligation of contributing his share, so that
Germany is in a position to fulfill the missions incumbent on her for
the common defense of Western Christian Civilization.” The United States
needed “the best German men as co-workers…if Western Culture is to be
safeguarded.” The intelligence network he offered to the Americans was a
group of “outstanding German nationals who are good Germans but also
ideologically on the side of the Western democracies.”. . .
“But in July 1949, under relentless pressure from the army, the CIA
took over the Gehlen group. Housed in a former Nazi headquarters outside
Munich, Gehlen welcomed dozens of prominent war criminals into his
circle. As Helms and Sichel feared, the East German and Soviet
intelligence services penetrated the Gehlen group at the highest levels.
The worst of the moles surfaced long after the Gehlen group had
transformed itself into the national intelligence service of West
Germany. Gehlen’s longtime chief of counterintelligence had been working
for Moscow all along.”
In the wake of this debacle, the CIA failed to recruit and run any
significant sources in the Soviet Government. The CIA had very few
officers who spoke Russian and swallowed whole hog the belief that the
Soviets were intent on conquering the world and that it was up to the
United States — relying heavily on the CIA — to stop the Soviets. That
became the cornerstone of American foreign policy and explains the CIA’s
obsession with regime change. No one in the intelligence hierarchy was
encouraged or permitted to raise the alternative view — i.e., the
Soviets, fearful of a Western invasion, took firm control of the
European nations on its western border and installed governments that
would served the Soviet interest. The CIA started its life as a new
bureaucracy in Washington firmly committed to destroying the Soviet
Union.
One of its first projects was recruiting and funding an insurgency
with Ukrainians who had sided with the Nazis. While that effort was
crushed by the Soviets, it served to further convince Stalin and others
in the Soviet hierarchy that the West was in bed with Nazi survivors and
could not be trusted.
The failure of the CIA to predict critical world events was an early
distinguishing feature of the CIA from the start. The Soviets detonated
their first nuke on August 29, 1949. Three weeks later a U.S. Air Force
crew flying out of Alaska detected traces of radiation beyond normal
levels. Weiner recounts what happened next:
“On September 20, the CIA confidently declared that the Soviet Union
would not produce an atomic weapon for at least another four years.”
The CIA’s leaders knack for getting it wrong continued with the
failure to heed warnings that China was going to intervene on behalf of
North Korea in 1950. Here is Weiner’s account:
“The president left for Wake Island on October 11, 1950. The CIA
assured him that it saw “no convincing indications of an actual Chinese
Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in
Korea…barring a Soviet decision for global war.” The agency reached that
judgment despite two alarms from its three-man Tokyo station. First the
station chief, George Aurell, reported that a Chinese Nationalist
officer in Manchuria was warning that Mao had amassed 300,000 troops
near the Korean border. Headquarters paid little heed. Then Bill Duggan,
later chief of station in Taiwan, insisted that the Chicoms soon would
cross into North Korea. General MacArthur responded by threatening to
have Duggan arrested. The warnings never reached Wake Island.
At headquarters, the agency kept advising Truman that China would not
enter the war on any significant scale. On October 18, as MacArthur’s
troops surged north toward the Yalu River and the Chinese border, the
CIA reported that “the Soviet Korean venture has ended in failure.” On
October 20, the CIA said that Chinese forces detected at the Yalu were
there to protect hydroelectric power plants. On October 28, it told the
White H ouse that those Chinese troops were scattered volunteers. On
October 30, after American troops had been attacked, taking heavy
casualties, the CIA reaffirmed that a major Chinese intervention was
unlikely. A few days later, Chinese-speaking CIA officers interrogated
several prisoners taken during the encounter and determined that they
were Mao’s soldiers. Yet CIA headquarters asserted one last time that
China would not invade in force. Two days later 300,000 Chinese troops
struck with an attack so brutal that it nearly pushed the Americans into
the sea.
Are you beginning to see a pattern here? While it is true there were
some solid intelligence officers in the ranks of the CIA, any attempt to
raise a warning that flew against conventional wisdom or defied what
the leaders wanted to hear was ignored or punished. The failures of the
CIA leadership to correctly predict the Soviets producing a nuclear bomb
and the Chinese invasion of Korea are not isolated incidents. When it
comes to big, critical issues — e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Tet
offensive, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Shah
of Iran and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeni, Saddam’s 1990 invasion
of Kuwait, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9-11 plot, weapons of
“Mass Destruction in Iraq” and Russia’s ability to survive western
sanctions and spin up its defense industry to outpace the U.S. and NATO
countries combined — the CIA missed them all.
racket |Hopkins reached out to me after listening in disgust to the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme
Court hearing Monday. Standing was a big issue: our government said
plaintiffs like Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Aaron Kheriaty lacked definite
proof that the government was responsible for suppressing their speech.
No such issue exists in CJ’s case, as you can see.
Hopkins
also wanted Americans who might be up in arms about the specter of
legalized censorship in their own country to see that the phenomenon has
also spread to virtually every Western democracy, often in more extreme
forms than we’ve seen so far in the United States.
CJ’s unique
insight involves his ludicrous German case, which as you’ll read in the
Q&A below has taken bizarre turns since we last checked and will now
go to trial yet again. As an expat following the American situation
from afar, he’s seen how the authoritarian tide is rising in similar or
worse ways all around the globe.
Hopkins is facing the business end of the German version, among the worst. As detailed last June,
he was charged with “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which
are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist
organization.” The crime? Using a barely detectible Swastika in the
cover image of his book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich.
Far from “furthering the aims” of Nazism, he was criticizing them by
comparing Nazi methods and laws to those of modern health authorities.
The offending image:
Hopkins went to trial in January and delivered an impassioned plea
to the court. “Every journalist that has covered my case, everyone in
this courtroom, understands what this prosecution is actually about,” he
said. “It has nothing to do with punishing people who actually
disseminate pro-Nazi propaganda. It is about punishing dissent, and
making an example of dissidents in order to intimidate others into
silence.”
Though the judge was clearly not a fan of Hopkins — a courtroom account by Aya Velázquez, which
I recommend reading, described how the judge said CJ’s statements were
“ideological drivel,” just “not punishable by law” — he won on the law.
After
acquittal, he was made aware that technically the case wasn’t over,
because thanks to a quirk of German jurisprudence, the prosecutor had a
week to file an appeal. Hopkins was unconcerned. “I doubt he will
[re-file]. He made a total fool of himself in front of a large audience
yesterday,” he wrote. “I can’t imagine that he will want to do that again.”
Bzzt! Wrong.
The prosecutor re-filed charges. The prosecutorial theory in the
Hopkins case was based on a bizarre interpretation of hate crime,
essentially asserting that if you have to think about an image to
realize it’s satire, it can’t be allowed. If that idea spreads, it would
make comedy or even sharp commentary impossible. This is why his
indictment, and the similar investigation of Roger Waters,
are really serious moments. Not to be heavy-handed, but eliminating the
loophole for satire or mockery is exactly what Waters meant by “Another Brick in the Wall.” Before you know it, it’ll be toohigh to see over.
thehill | Channeling Tennessee Williams in his play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Judge Scott McAfee wrote that, after their testimony, there remained “an odor of mendacity.”
That odor was particularly strong after the hearings indicated that
Wade may have committed perjury in his earlier divorce case, and that
both Willis and Wade were credibly accused of lying on the stand about
when their relationship began.
Yet, that distinct odor noted by Judge McAfee goes beyond the sordid affairs of Willis and Wade.
For many citizens, mendacity, or dishonesty, is wafting from various
courtrooms around the country. The odor is becoming intolerable for many
Americans as selective prosecution is being raised in a wide array of
cases.
The problem is that courts have made it virtually impossible to use
this claim to dismiss counts. Yet there is a disturbing level of merit
to some of these underlying objections.
For years, conservatives have objected that there is a two-tier
system of justice in this country. I have long resisted such claims, but
it has become increasingly difficult to deny the obvious as selective
prosecution in a variety of recent cases and opinions.
I have long stated that the charges against Trump over documents at
Mar-a-Lago are strong and based on established precedent. However, the
recent decision of Special Counsel Robert Hur not to bring criminal
charges against President Joe Biden has undermined even that case.
Hur described four decades of Biden serially violating laws governing
classified documents. The evidence included Biden telling a third party
that he had classified material in his house and actually reading from a
classified document to his non-cleared ghostwriter. There is evidence
of an effort to destroy evidence and later an effort of the White House
to change the report. There is also Biden’s repeated denial of any
knowledge or memory of the documents found in nine locations where he
worked or lived.
Hur ultimately had to justify the lack of charges based on a belief
that he could not secure a conviction from a D.C. jury with an elderly
defendant with diminished mental faculties.
Although Special Counsel Jack Smith could still proceed on
obstruction counts, his prosecution of Trump for the retention and
mishandling of national security documents is absurdly in conflict with
the treatment Biden is receiving.
In New York, the legislature changed the statute of limitations to
allow Trump to be sued while New York Attorney General Letitia James
effectively ran on a pledge of selectively prosecuting him. She never
specified any particular crime, just promising to bag Trump.
declassified | Jack Smith's Florida case. "[Judge Aileen] Cannon repeatedly asked both sides for examples of criminal prosecution for 'other officials who did the same.' She questioned the 'arbitrary enforcement' of the espionage statute, forcing the government to admit that no other former president or vice president has faced criminal prosecution for keeping similar documents and failing to return them.
'This speaks to the arbitrary enforcement...featuring in this case,' Cannon told Bratt. Cannon also pushed back on claims Trump should have expected to face prosecution for storing classified files. Once again noting no former president or vice president-Mike Pence also discovered classified records after Trump was indicted in 2023-has been charged, Cannon suggested it was fair for Trump to expect the same treatment since 'no historical precedent' is on the books. 'Given that landscape,' Cannon continued, Trump could argue he has been unfairly targeted. Which his team already has.
In a motion emailed to the court and the government last month, Trump's attorneys asked to dismiss the case based on 'selective and vindictive prosecution.' Although the motion is not public, Jack Smith quickly responded to defend the Department of Justice's choice to pursue Trump and not Biden. 'Trump, unlike Biden, is alleged to have engaged in extensive and repeated efforts to obstruct justice and thwart the return of documents bearing classification markings, which provides particularly strong evidence of willfulness and is a paradigmatic aggravating factor that prosecutors routinely rely on when making charging decisions,' Smith wrote in a March 7 response. 'Second, the evidence concerning the two men's intent-whether they knowingly possessed and willfully retained such documents-is starkly different.'
In an almost comical passage, Smith admits Biden unlawfully retained classified records-just not as many as Trump. 'Biden possessed 88 documents bearing classification markings, including 18 marked Top Secret. By contrast, Trump possessed 337 documents bearing classification markings, including 64 marked Top Secret.
unherd | The US Supreme Court has been hearing arguments today
on what could be one of the most consequential rulings related to free
speech in decades. The case, Murthy v. Missouri, revolves around efforts
by US Government agencies, including the CDC and the FBI, to influence
the narrative around major events, such as Covid-19, by leaning on
social media platforms to censor posts, topics and accounts.
The case — brought by two states, Missouri and Louisiana, as well as
five individuals against the federal government — was in part animated
by Elon Musk’s decision to publish the Twitter Files, a trove of emails,
text and other company correspondence which showed the extent to which
Government agencies ranging from the CDC to the CIA were in contact with
managers at social media platforms over issues such as claims about the
vaccine and the effectiveness of lockdowns.
The case could not be more significant for American society as far as
freedom of speech is concerned. The reason is that at the heart of the
case is what constitutes disinformation and what steps governments can
take to combat it. In this case, many of the claims censored by social
media companies at the behest of the Government turned out to be true.
This includes widespread censorship of social media posts claiming that
the Covid-19 vaccines carry health risks and that the lockdowns were not only ineffective but also damaging.
Republicans have alleged that the same dynamic was at play when social media giants censored the New York Post’s
reporting on the now infamous Hunter Biden laptop story, arguing that
deep state actors leant on the platform to block the coverage. Twitter
executives involved in the decisions denied this, with one of them, Yoel
Roth, saying “I believe Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.”
The irony, of course, is that “the mistakes of 2016” refers to the
widespread allegations that Trump colluded with the Russian government
to sway that year’s election, including on Facebook. None of these
claims have been proved true — and some, like the effect of “fake news”
on the election, have been debunked.
Nevertheless, the “Russiagate” narrative — itself one of the most sweeping disinformation campaigns of recent years
— took a firm hold in American public life, in large part thanks to
claims of disinformation that lay at the heart of the campaign.
This speaks to the central challenge of the case: while the
Government’s critics argue that disinformation is a cudgel to silence
dissent, proponents argue that a core Government function is to police
information, especially during times of emergency.
scheerpost | The New York Times on February 25 published an explosive story of
what purports to be the history of the CIA in Ukraine from the Maidan
coup of 2014 to the present. The story, “The Spy War: How the CIA
Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” is one of initial bilateral
distrust, but a mutual fear and hatred of Russia, that progresses to a
relationship so intimate that Ukraine is now one of the CIA’s closest
intelligence partners in the world.
At the same time, the Times’ publication of the piece, which
reporters claimed relied on more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, the US,
and “several European countries,” raises multiple questions: Why did
the CIA not object to the article’s publication, especially with it
being in one of the Agency’s preferred outlets? When the CIA approaches
a newspaper to complain about the classified information it contains,
the piece is almost always killed or severely edited. Newspaper
publishers are patriots, after all. Right?
Was the article published because the CIA wanted the news out there?
Perhaps more important was the point of the article to influence the
Congressional budget deliberations on aid to Ukraine? After all, was
the article really just meant to brag about how great the CIA is? Or
was it to warn Congressional appropriators, “Look how much we’ve
accomplished to confront the Russian bear. You wouldn’t really let it
all go to waste, would you?”
The Times’ article has all the hallmarks of a deep, inside look at a
sensitive—possibly classified—subject. It goes into depth on one of the
intelligence community’s Holy of Holies, an intelligence liaison
relationship, something that no intelligence officer is ever supposed to
discuss. But in the end, it really isn’t so sensitive. It doesn’t
tell us anything that every American hasn’t already assumed. Maybe we
hadn’t had it spelled out in print before, but we all believed that the
CIA was helping Ukraine fight the Russians. We had already seen
reporting that the CIA had “boots on the ground” in Ukraine and that the U.S. government was training Ukrainian special forces and Ukrainian pilots, so there’s nothing new there.
The article goes a little further in detail, although, again, without
providing anything that might endanger sources and methods. For
example, it tells us that:
There is a CIA listening post in the forest along the Russian
border, one of 12 “secret” bases the US maintains there. One or more of
these posts helped to prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. That’s great. But the revelation exposes
no secrets and tells us nothing new.
Ukrainian intelligence officials helped the Americans “go after” the
Russian operatives “who meddled in the 2016 US presidential election.”
I have a news flash for the New York Times: The Mueller report found that there was no meaningful Russian meddling in the 2016 election. And what does “go after” mean?
Beginning in 2016, the CIA trained an “elite Ukrainian commando
force known as Unit 2245, which captured Russian drones and
communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them
and crack Moscow’s encryption systems.” This is exactly what the CIA is
supposed to do. Honestly, if the CIA hadn’t been doing this, I would
have suggested a class action lawsuit for the American people to get
their tax money back. Besides, the CIA has been doing things like this for decades. The CIA was able to obtain important components of Soviet tactical weapons from ostensibly pro-Soviet Romania in the 1970s.
Ukraine has turned into an intelligence-gathering hub that has
intercepted more Russian communications than the CIA station in Kiev
could initially handle. Again, I would expect nothing less. After all,
that’s where the war is. So of course, communications will be
intercepted there. As to the CIA station being overwhelmed, the Times
never tells us if that is because the station was a one-man operation at
the time or whether it had thousands of employees and was still
overwhelmed. It’s all about scale.
And lest you think that the CIA and the U.S. government were on the
offensive in Ukraine, the article makes clear that, “Mr. Putin and his
advisers misread a critical dynamic. The CIA didn’t push its way into
Ukraine. U.S. officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing
that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about
provoking the Kremlin.”
It’s at this point in the article that the Times reveals what I
believe to be the buried lead: “Now these intelligence networks are more
important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more
dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies
far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: “If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kiev, the CIA may have to scale back.” (Emphasis mine.)
scheerpost | We can start, logically enough, with that desperation evident among
those dedicated to prolonging the war. The outcome of the war, in my
read and in the view of various military analysts, does not depend on
the $61 billion in aid that now hangs in the balance. But the Biden
regime seems to think it does, or pretends to think it does. The Times’s
most immediate intent, so far as one can make out from the piece, is to
add what degree of urgency it can to this question.
Entous and Schwirtz report that the people running Ukrainian
intelligence are nervous that without a House vote releasing new funds
“the CIA will abandon them.” Good enough that it boosts the case to cite
nervous Ukrainians, but we should recognize that this is a
misapprehension. The CIA has a very large budget entirely independent of
what Congress votes one way or another. William Burns, the CIA
director, traveled to Kyiv two weeks ago to reassure his counterparts
that “the U.S. commitment will continue,” as Entous and Schwirtz quote
him saying. This is perfectly true, assuming Burns referred to the
agency’s commitment.
More broadly, The Times piece appears amid flagging enthusiasm for
the Ukraine project. And it is in this circumstance that Entous and
Schwirtz went long on the benefits accruing to the CIA in consequence of
its presence on the ground in Ukraine. But read these two reporters
carefully: They, or whoever put their piece in its final shape, make it
clear that the agency’s operations on Ukrainian soil count first and
most as a contribution to Washington’s long campaign to undermine the
Russian Federation. This is not about Ukrainian democracy, that figment
of neoliberal propagandists. It is about Cold War II, plain and simple.
It is time to reinvigorate the old Russophobia, thus—and hence all the
baloney about Russians corrupting elections and so on. It is all there
for a reason.
To gather these thoughts and summarize, This piece is not journalism
and should not be read as such. Neither do Entous and Schwirtz serve as
journalists. They are clerks of the governing class pretending to be
journalists while they post notices on a bulletin board that pretends to
be a newspaper.
■
Let’s dolly out to put this piece in its historical context and
consider the implications of its appearance in the once-but-fallen
newspaper of record. Let’s think about the early 1970s, when it first
began to emerge that the CIA had compromised the American media and
broadcasters.
Jack Anderson, the admirably iconoclastic columnist, lifted the lid
on the agency’s infiltration of the media by way of a passing mention of
a corrupted correspondent in 1973. A year later a former Los Angeles
Times correspondent named Stuart Loory published the first extensive
exploration of relations between the CIA and the media in the Columbia
Journalism Review. Then, in 1976, the Church Committee opened its famous
hearings in the Senate. It took up all sorts of agency
malfeasance—assassinations, coups, illegal covert ops. Its intent was
also to disrupt the agency’s misuse of American media and restore the
latter to their independence and integrity.
The Church Committee is still widely remembered for getting its job
done. But it never did. A year after Church produced its six-volume
report, Rolling Stone published “The CIA and the Media,”
Carl Bernstein’s well-known piece. Bernstein went considerably beyond
the Church Committee, demonstrating that it pulled its punches rather
than pull the plug on the CIA’s intrusions in the media. Faced with the
prospect of forcing the CIA to sever all covert ties with the media, a
senator Bernstein did not name remarked, “We just weren’t ready to take
that step.”
We should read The Times’s piece on the righteousness of the CIA’s
activities in Ukraine—bearing in mind the self-evident cooperation
between the agency and the newspaper—with this history in mind.
America was just emerging from the disgraces of the McCarthyist
period when Stuart Loory opened the door on this question, the Church
Committee convened, and Carl Bernstein filled in the blanks. In and out
of the profession there was disgust at the covert relationship between
media and the spooks. Now look. What was then viewed as top-to-bottom
objectionable is now routinized. It is “as usual.” In my read this is
one consequence among many of the Russiagate years: They again plunged
Americans and their mainstream media into the same paranoia that
produced the corruptions of the 1950s and 1960s.
Alas, the scars of the swoon we call Russiagate are many and run deep
#Israel official states: "I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza, and that every baby, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did."
— May Golan, Israeli Minister of Social Equality & Women's Advancement
AA | Israeli Minister of Social Equality May Golan said she is "proud" of the destruction caused by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip.
Speaking during a session held by the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) Wednesday evening, Golan threatened Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, with decapitation or arrest.
"We are not ashamed by saying that we want to see the soldiers of the IDF (Israeli army) catching Sinwar and his terrorists by their eyes and dragging them across the Gaza Strip on their way to the dungeons of the Prison Authority," she said in a widely circulated video of her speech.
"I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza, and that every baby, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did," she said. "No dove and no olive branch, only a sword to cut off Sinwar's head, that's what he will receive from us.”
Israel has pounded the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7 Hamas attack that Tel Aviv says killed nearly 1,200 people.
The ensuing Israeli bombardment has killed at least 29,410 victims and caused mass destruction and shortages of necessities. Nearly 70,000 people have been injured.
The Israeli war on Gaza has pushed 85% of the territory's population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
For the first time since its creation in 1948, Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, the highest judicial body of the United Nations.
An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.
Gonzalo Lira, Sr. says his son has died at 55 in a Ukrainian prison, where he was being held for the crime of criticizing the Zelensky and Biden governments. Gonzalo Lira was an American citizen, but the Biden administration clearly supported his imprisonment and torture. Several… https://t.co/F0nOG9qGvv
dailycaller | Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York warned colleges and
universities in a letter on Saturday that she would order legal action
against them if they fail to address antisemitism on campus.
Three
university presidents appeared before Congress on Dec. 5 to testify
about antisemitism on their campuses, after which they were heavily criticized for failing to say whether “calling for genocide against Jews” violated their institutions’ codes of conduct. Hochul wrote
to all colleges and universities in New York that a failure to address
antisemitism would result in legal action from the state under New York
State Human Rights Law and Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of
1964.
“I assure you that if any school in
New York State is found to be in violation, I will activate the State’s
Division of Human Rights to take aggressive enforcement action and will
refer possible Title VI violations to the federal government,” Hochul wrote in the letter, which was posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.
UPenn’s president and chairman of the board of trustees resigned on Saturday, while Harvard’s president issued a public apology amid calls for her removal.
“The moral lapses that were evidenced by the disgraceful answers to
questions posed during this week’s congressional testimony hearing
cannot and will not be tolerated here in the State of New York,” Hochul
wrote.
Hochul has previously dealt with fallout from an antisemitic controversy at a university in her own state. Police arrested Cornell University undergraduate student Patrick Dai on Oct. 31 for allegedly making violent threats to commit a mass shooting against Cornell’s Center for Jewish Living.
“Gov.
Hochul cannot command colleges and universities to violate the First
Amendment. Nor may she enforce state law to compel action against speech
protected by the First Amendment,” the Foundation for Individual Rights
and Expression told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Broad, vague
bans on ‘calls for genocide,’ absent more, would result in the censorship of protected expression.”
NYTimes | Richard M. Nixon
has long been the Freddy Krueger of American political life. You know in
your bones that he is destined to keep returning.
Sure
enough, though dead 16 years, Nixon is back onstage, with the release
of a fresh batch of tapes from his Oval Office days. They show him at
his omni-bigoted worst, offering one slur after another against the
Irish, Italians and blacks. Characteristically, he saved his most potent
acid for Jews. “The Jews,” he said, “are just a very aggressive and
abrasive and obnoxious personality.”
But
Nixon’s hard-wired anti-Semitism is an old story. What has caused many
heads to swivel is a recording of Henry A. Kissinger, his national
security adviser. Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that
helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a
totalitarian regime a huge issue at the time was “not an objective
of American foreign policy.”
“And if
they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “it is
not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
In New York, the
epicenter of Jewish life in the United States, some jaws are still not
back in place after dropping to the floor.
Bad
enough that any senior White House official would, without prodding,
raise the grotesque specter of Jews once again being herded into gas
chambers. But it was unbearable for some to hear that language come from
Mr. Kissinger, a Jew who as a teenager fled Nazi Germany with his
family, in 1938. Had he not found refuge in this country and in this
city the Kissingers settled in Washington Heights he might have
ended up in a gas chamber himself.
“Despicable,”
“callous,” “revulsion,” “hypocrite,” “chilling” and “shocking” were a
few of the words used this week by some leaders of Jewish organizations
and by newspapers that focus on Jewish matters.
Conspicuously, however, many groups and prominent individuals stayed
silent. They include people who would have almost certainly spoken up
had coldhearted talk of genocide come from the likes of Mel Gibson or
Patrick J. Buchanan, neither a stranger to provocative comments about
Jews.
Even some who
deplored Mr. Kissinger’s remarks tempered their criticism. The
Anti-Defamation League called the recorded statements “outrageous,” but
said they did not undermine “the important contributions and ultimate
legacy of Henry Kissinger,” including his support of Israel. The
American Jewish Committee described the remarks as “truly chilling,” but
suggested that anti-Semitism in the Nixon White House might have been
at least partly to blame.
“Perhaps
Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to
the president that there was no question as to where his loyalties lay,”
the committee’s executive director, David Harris, said in a statement.
There
was no hedging in editorials by Jewish-themed newspapers like The
Forward and The Jewish Week. Separately, in a Jewish Week column,
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a New York lawyer who is active in
Holocaust-related issues, dismissed Mr. Kissinger as “the quintessential court Jew.” And J. J. Goldberg, a Forward columnist, wrote, “No one has ever gone broke overstating Kissinger’s coldbloodedness.”
Now
87, Mr. Kissinger confined himself this week to a brief statement that
said his taped comments “must be viewed in the context of the time.”
Back
then, American Jewish groups strongly supported legislation that would
have made any improvement in American-Soviet trade relations contingent
on freer emigration by Soviet Jews. The president and Mr. Kissinger
rejected that approach, which was rooted in human rights concepts not
suited to their power politics, or realpolitik. They were bluntly angry
at Jewish organizations for pushing hard on the issue.
In his statement,
Mr. Kissinger said of Jewish emigration that “we dealt with it as a
humanitarian matter separate from the foreign policy issues.” That
approach, he said, led to a significant rise in the number of Jews
permitted to leave the Soviet Union. In fact, it did, for a while
anyway.
Still, that “gas chamber” line
is about as ugly as it gets. It seems unlikely to change many views of a
man who is both widely admired and widely hated, but there is one word
that just might haunt Mr. Kissinger to his final days.
Genocide is “not an American concern,” he said, but “maybe a humanitarian concern.”
TheHill | Across news sites, Democrats are warning of the imminent death of democracy. Hillary Clinton has warned that a Trump victory would be the end of democracy. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is warning of “executions.” Even actors like Robert DeNiro are predicting that this may be our very last democratic election.
Yet these harbingers of tyranny are increasingly pursuing the very
course that will make their predictions come true. The Democratic Party
is actively seeking to deny voters choices in this election, supposedly
to save democracy.
Henry Ford once promised customers any color so long as it is black.
Democrats are adopting the same approach to the election: You can have
any candidate on the ballot, as long as it’s Joe Biden.
This week, the Executive Committee of the Florida Democratic Democracy told voters that they would not be allowed to vote against Biden. Even though he has opponents in the primary, the party leadership has ordered that only Biden will appear on the primary ballot.
And if you want to register your discontent with Biden with a
write-in vote, forget about it. Under Florida law, if the party
approves only one name, there will be no primary ballots at all. The
party just called the election for Biden before a single vote has been
cast.
This is not unprecedented. It happened with Barack Obama in 2012 and,
on the Republican side, with George W. Bush in 2004. It was wrong then,
and it is wrong now.
As Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.)
noted, “Americans would expect the absence of democracy in Tehran, not
Tallahassee. Our mission as Democrats is to defeat authoritarians, not
become them.”
In Iran, the mullahs routinely bar opposition candidates from ballots as “Guardians” of the ballots.
There is good reason for the Biden White House to want the election called before it is held. A CNN poll found that two out of three Democrats believe that the party should nominate someone else. A Wall Street Journal poll that found 73 percent of voters say Biden is “too old to run for president.”
The party leadership is solving that problem by depriving Democratic voters of a choice.
In other states, Democratic politicians and lawyers are pursuing a
different strategy: “You can have any candidate, as long as it isn’t
Trump.”
They are seeking to bar Trump from ballots under a novel theory about
the 14th Amendment. In states from Colorado to Michigan, Democratic
operatives are arguing that Trump must be taken off the ballots because
he gave “aid and comfort” to an “insurrection or rebellion.” Other
Democrats have called for more than 120 other Republicans to be stripped
from the ballots under the same claim tied to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
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April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
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4 x 3 = 12
...
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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