Today's Attack Propaganda Against Trump Only Works On People With Amnesia

And those who are ignorant of basic legal concepts.

Today's attack mode: Donald Trump Jr,. an obnoxious character, son of the U.S. president, who is a chip off the old block, has been exposed by the U.S. secret police, using the New York Times as their megaphone, as having met with a Russian lawyer. The lawyer claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton- turned out she didn't.

Initially, moron Donald Jr. said the meeting was about adopting Russian children- an obvious, ludicrous lie. The Trumps seem adept at digging themselves in deeper and deeper in the political hole they're in.

So today we're being treated to the word "treason." Treason? The U.S. isn't at war with Russia. So there is no treason in an actual criminal law sense. The idea of "treason" is straight out of the McCarthy-Nixon-GOP playbook of 1947-1960, which the Democrats have latched onto as their strategy to try and topple Trump.

"Treason" having been so very loosely defined as being in cahoots with an enemy (Russia), what about the multimillion dollar donation to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for allowing Russian interests to buy uranium mines, approved by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? [1]

We're also getting "experts," from the secret police fraternity, no less, (like on NPR), saying this is a violation of campaign finance law, because information has value, and receiving such a "contribution" from a foreign source is illegal.

Well then, if "information" equals an illegal donation, what about that dodgy dossier compiled by BRITISH CITIZEN and former MI6 secret policeman Christopher Steele? He offered it to Trump's GOP rivals and to the Clinton campaign, and finally the U.S. secret police in the person of James "Mr. Upright" Comey, then-FBI Director, briefed Trump about it. Or for that matter, the numerous foreign contributions received by Bill Clinton back when, and the donors fled overseas to avoid investigators? No mention of THAT of course.

The hypocrisy and double-standards are breathtaking. As is the total obsession of U.S. media blatherers with every new arrow they can fire at Trump. (While barely covering the viciousness of his domestic policies. No surprise there. The entire power structure is fundamentally reactionary and thus objectively enemies of the overwhelming majority of the American population.) These propagandists and political hacks are apparently unaware that they are in a bubble, and that most people most probably could care less about all this nitpicking. Every day, a new molehill is blown up into a mountain by the propaganda system. Amazing.

I certainly agree that Trump is a rotten choice for president. But EVERY U.S. president has been rotten, only some more than others, because the U.S. has always been an evil empire. There are principled ways to oppose Trump. Unsurprisingly, the ruling elites and their minions have chosen an unprincipled way. True to their character.

One more point. One of the day's big propaganda talking points is that Donald Jr. should have immediately ran to the FBI and reported the approach to him! This is how far into a police state mentality the "liberals" of the media and Democratic Party are dragging us! It's thoroughly despicable. They are empowering the most evil part of the power structure more than ever, namely the secret police agencies, primarily the FBI, CIA, and NSA. They are treated as demigods now, and they are some of the most vile and malicious organs on the earth.

1]  The New York Times has amnesia for its own reporting. But you don't have to. See "Donations to the Clinton Foundation, and a Russian Uranium Takeover," April 23, 2015, and "Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal," April 23, 2015.

Remembering Manuel Noriega (And Forgetting the 4,000 Panamanians Murdered by the U.S. Military Invasion)

Manuel Noriega dies, U.S. media lies. (BBC and others too.)

Sickening "coverage" by U.S. and other media on the death of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. The U.S. invaded Panama on the orders of then-president George H.W. Bush (Bush the Elder) on the pretext of executing an arrest warrant for a head of state, Noriega. 26,000 U.S. troops were used for this purpose. The U.S. devastated poor neighborhoods in Panama, and an estimated 4,000 Panamanians were murdered by the U.S. and their bodies dumped into mass graves. This crime has been totally effaced from history.

The British propaganda network the BBC did the same thing, lavishing much time on Noriega and his fate, with not a single word on the number of Panamanians who paid with their lives for this act of wanton U.S. aggression. Ditto in the U.S. broadcast media.
Pretty despicable when you think about it.

The reason the U.S. overthrew Noriega, and this too was totally ignored and indeed lied about, was that he had refused an order from Admiral John Poindexter to step up Panama's cooperation with the U.S. terrorist aggression against Nicaragua. He was duly threatened with consequences for his defiance, which then followed.

Also covered up was the assassination of Noriega's predecessor, Omar Torrijos, who had the interests of the Panamanian people at heart. The closest anyone came to even mentioning this was Christopher Dickey, a career journalist, who on BBC called Torrijos plane crash "slightly suspicious." No, it was a definite hit. This is confirmed by former NSA operative John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, who explained that those who refused to sell out to U.S. "interests," like Torrijos did, are inevitably removed from power, violently if necessary, and that that is what happened to Torrijos.

Once again Western media exposes itself as nothing but a system of mendacious propaganda. It is NOT legitimate journalism.

No Honeymoon For President Trump

The current change in U.S. regime has certainly been different from the pattern of most of the last century or so. The usual practice is for the power structure to be at least outwardly respectful to the new Leader, and formally deferential. Media fawn over the new chief executive of the U.S. Government. The honeymoon can last for years in the case of an arch-reactionary like Reagan. Nixon had a second honeymoon in 1972 when he ran for reelection, when except for the Washington Post, the Watergate burglary was virtually ignored by the media- to the disgruntlement of Senator George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for president that election year.

The New York Times spent the first year of Jimmy Carter's presidency putting his smiling visage on their front pages almost daily, in a strenuous effort to repair the damage to the public esteem for the presidency in the wake of Nixon's forced resignation and his hand-picked successor Gerald Ford's pardoning of Nixon to protect him from criminal charges. But by the last year of Carter's rule, the Times was smitten by Reagan, and did its best to sabotage Carter's reelection, such as by putting a photo of him on the front page running a marathon and looking exhausted, and describing him as panting and weak. The media also ginned up a fake "rabbit attack" on Carter to make him look ridiculous.

With Trump, the media assault has been unrelenting. It began after he won the Republican nomination, when it apparently dawned on the media czars and their minions that Trump would be dangerously destabilizing an unpredictable with presidential power. (Until then they had made him the center of mostly benign media attention for months.) The assault increased in intensity and virulence after he "won" the presdiential election November 8, with fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, by winning in the Electoral College, that extremely peculiar U.S. version of electoral  "democracy." A shabby piece of libel, an alleged "dossier" or "report," cooked-up by a former British secret policeman from MI6 (Christopher Steele, currently in hiding) who was hired by Republican primary opponents of Trump to come up with derogatory information about Trump, and then peddled by the Brit to the Democratic camp, was used by the so-called "intelligence community" and U.S. media to smear Trump as a pervert who had hired Russian prostitutes to piss on a hotel bed in Moscow in which one of the Clintons had slept, and the Russian secret police covertly videoed the whole thing and are now using it or are going to use it to blackmail or control Trump. That such a cheap spy-novel fantasy is taken seriously shows the desperation of part of the U.S. power elite, including the main secret police agencies, to hobble Trump.

And when Trump refuses to buckle, and instead denounces the "intelligence" agencies for this tawdry behavior, he is attacked by the commentariat for "attacking" "his own" intelligence agencies and "siding with Putin," and admonished by "experts" (various secret policemen, secret police veterans, and members of the established nomenklatura) that he'll have to learn to "work with" the CIA, FBI, et al, and sit at their knees to learn from them.

Now, Trump is awful, for sure, and his cabinet appointments are the worst in modern history, worse even than the egregious ones of Reagan. But this tawdry propaganda campaign throws into stark relief the unethical nature of the power establishment. It also proves once again that the Deep State agencies, in particular the CIA, FBI, and NSA, truly are states within a state that care first and foremost about their own power and prerogatives. Their loyalty to the state as a whole, to the U.S. government, and certainly to the president, to whom they are nominally pledged to serve, is far less important to them than their own self-aggrandizing schemes. After all, the CIA arranged the assassination of the president in 1963, with the FBI as a full participant in aiding and abetting the crime by helping cover it up. And the entire U.S. media played along, and still do to this day by maintaining the absurd fictional account of the assassination by the Warren Commission. (By the way, Gerald Ford, the guy who pardoned Nixon, was one of the Commissioners and functioned as FBI spy on the Commission.)

It's unfortunate that "alternative" media and public figures have so lost perspective and are so incapable of objectivity that they are playing right along with every propaganda assault on Trump. Between Trump's distortions of reality, and the distortions of reality being fostered by the elements of the power establishment desperate to undercut Trump on foreign policy mainly, (they seem not too troubled by what he threatens to do domestically), people will be disoriented without a lodestar of objective truth to turn to.

Instead of becoming foot soldiers in one side of an intra-ruling class power struggle, progressives should chart an independent course, a principled course, and ultimately the actually pragmatic course of declaring a pox on both houses of the power elite and devise ways to take advantage of their conflict. Playing them off against each other, for example, not legitimizing the slanders of the anti-Trump faction. Heaven knows, there is plenty of legitimate information about Trump to use against him, without trying to paint him as a Putin puppet who engaged in a lurid defilement ritual involving urination.

Compulsive Liars of FBI Blatantly Lie Again- Media Doesn't Notice

You may recall that for the last month or so, the FBI has been insisting that the only way they can get into the encrypted data on an iPhone used by one of two Islamofascists who committed a massacre in San Bernardino, California, is if the Apple Corporation creates a software program to break its own encryption on the phone. [1]

Well whaddaya know, turns out it's not so. The U.S. Department of "Justice" is dropping its court case to compel Apple to make cracker software for the FBI. The FBI, after a full-court press in the media for a month, claiming that the terrorists were going to destroy "National Security" if Apple didn't submit, said Never Mind. They "found" a company that can do the job. Surprise surprise.

Actually it was always obvious that the FBI could break into the iPhone of the dead killer without forcing Apple to create software that the FBI, contrary to its oh-so-innocent protestations, would then use routinely and in secret to break into the phones of whomever it doesn't like. (People like me. Although I personally don't have an iPhone.) For one thing, there's this outfit called the NSA (National Security Agency) that most certainly already has methods to defeat iPhone security. And the FBI has free access to the NSA's databases and can call on them for assistance. (They just don't want to admit it in open court.)

For another thing, there's an entire industry devoted to data retrieval. Edward Snowden even pointed this out weeks ago. So the FBI is availing itself of the services of a company that specializes in this.

It had already been pointed on tech websites that various means exist to get past the Apple encryption, such as merely copying the contents of the flash storage as many times as needed and trying out password possibilities on the copies until one worked. (That's called a brute force attack.) There was much repetition of the claim that after 10 wrong password attempts, all th date would be deleted and gone forever. Not so, according to some tech experts. The password would be deleted.

The point is, the FBI's original claim was bogus, knowingly false. But the U.S. media will never, ever, point out an FBI lie, no matter how obvious. (The BBC won't either, I've noticed.)

But in the meantime, we were subjected to a month of media attacks on Apple for selfishly putting profits ahead of "National Security" and Protecting the American People from Terrorism. (Funny, I thought corporate profits were the whole point of this system! That's the reason they overthrow governments and slaughter millions of people, to make the world safe for corporate profits.) As part of this propaganda offensive to aid and abet yet another FBI power grab, the media trotted out the usual suspects, giving a platform to various secret police poohbahs and the political enablers of the secret police state. Some of whom you might not have expected in such a role, such as the "progressive" mayor of New York City, that alumnus of the Clinton cabal, Bill "My Deeds Contradict My Words" de Blasio, who scolded Apple and lectured them on the necessity of "protecting" people's "safety" rather than worrying about their image and profits. His hand-picked police Commissioner, Bill "The Velvet Repressor" Bratton, chimed in likewise.

Apple, for self-interested reasons, dug in its heels. Other tech companies verbally backed them. But this is only a defeat for the secret police leviathan in the sense that a grab for still more repressive power was stymied. The principle that corporations have to act as accomplices to the secret police in making cracker software was temporarily staved off. But no legal precedent was set, since the case was dropped. In practice however the secret police still strip all of us naked of any privacy every second of every day. And the tech companies, and especially the phone companies, are still almost fully cooperative with the secret police, as they have been ever since the invention of the telephone. (The telegraph too, for that matter.)

We'll see what repercussions, if any, will be visited on Apple CEO Tim Cook for his effrontery. Remember what happened to the head of Qwest Communications, Joseph Nacchio, when at the beginning of the regime of Bush the Younger, the NSA went around to all the telecoms to tap into their networks illegally. Nacchio said Sure, just show us the warrant. He was the ONLY telecom exec to require a warrant. The NSA said Never Mind, and the next thing that happened was the Federal government found an excuse to indict Nacchio on a insider trading charge and he was socked with a 6 year stretch in prison.

By the way, the NSA was setting up this massive illegal spying in February 2001. That's 7 months before September 11, when agents of the U.S. Deep State, acting on the orders of Richard Cheney, blew up those three buildings at the World Trade Center, which has ever since been used as a justification for every state crime under the sun.

1] The San Bernardino massacre occurred December 2 of last year. The attack was carried out by a married ethnic Pakistani couple, who targeted an office party for the husband's co-workers, killing 14 of them. For details and background on the San Bernardino killers, see "Last Days: Preparing for the apocalypse in San Bernardino," New Yorker, February 22, 2016. For an interesting insight into how extremists go unnoticed by people who know them, see "San Bernardino and the Mechanics of a Double Life," New Yorker, December 16, 2015. This also refutes the demagogues who insist that the Muslim "community" shelters and hides terrorists.We just heard it again from the U.S. demagogues, including Donald Trump and the "talk" radio stormtrooper ranters, saying that the Muslims in Belgium "had to know" the terror suspects were among them. Like everybody knows who's hiding in a given apartment! It's called hiding for a reason.