Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 703
June 28, 2021
A Domestic Terrorism Law? War on Dissent Will Proceed Full Speed Ahead
By Philip GiraldiWhat makes the current state of war against “terrorism” so dangerous is that the national security apparatus has been politicized.
President Joe Biden has already made it clear that legislation that will be used to combat what he refers to as “domestic terrorism” will be a top priority. That means that his inaugural speech pledge to be the president for “all Americans” appears to apply except for those who don’t agree with him. Former Barack Obama CIA Chief John Brennan, who is clearly in the loop on developments, puts it this way in a tweet where he describes how the new Administration’s spooks “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about [the] insurgency” [that includes] “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”
The United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which includes freedom of speech and association, has been under siege for some time now. Government has always used its assumed powers conferred by a claimed state of emergency to deprive citizens of their rights. During the American Civil War Abraham Lincoln imprisoned critics of the conflict. Woodrow Wilson’s First World War administration brought in the Espionage Act, which has since been used to convict whistleblowers without having to present the level of evidence that would be required in a normal civil trial. During the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt erected concentration camps that imprisoned Japanese Americans whose only crime consisted of being Japanese.
But perhaps the greatest attack on the Bill of Rights is more recent, the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts that were passed into law as a consequence of the “Global War on Terror” launched by President George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11. Together with the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which includes a court designed to speed up the warrant approval process, ordinary citizens found themselves on the receiving end of surveillance for which there was little or no justification in terms of probable cause. The FISA process was even notoriously abused in the national security apparatus attempt to derail the campaign of Donald Trump. The tools are in place for ever more government mischief and no one should doubt that the Democrats are just as capable of ignoring constitutional safeguards as the Republicans have been.
What makes the current state of war against “terrorism” so dangerous is that the national security apparatus has been politicized while the government has learned that labeling someone or some entity terrorist or even a “material supporter of terrorism” is infinitely elastic. That is precisely why Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has frequently called out opponents and attached to them the terrorist label, since it then permits other steps that might otherwise be challenged.
And there is also the fact that the playing field has changed since the First and Second World Wars. The government has technical capabilities that were never dreamed of in most of the twentieth century. Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers have demonstrated how the government routinely ignores constitutional limits on its ability to interfere in the lives of ordinary citizens. Not only that, it can monitor the lives of millions of Americans simultaneously, giving the police and intelligence agencies the power to mount “fishing expeditions” that literally invade the phones, computers and conversations of people who have not been guilty of any crime.
The authorizations that already exist will be further weaponized to go after dissidents as identified by the new regime. A bill introduced by House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff “would take existing War on Terror legislation and simply amend it to say we can now do that within the U.S.” It would be combined with previous legislation, including former president Barack Obama’s infamous 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the military to indefinitely detain American citizens suspected of terrorism without a trial. Obama and Brennan also assumed an illegal and unconstitutional right to act as judge, jury and executioner-by-drone of American citizens overseas. Given those precedents, a bill like Schiff’s would free the national security community’s hands even more.
The new body of legislation would mean increased secret legal surveillance, suppression of free speech, indefinite incarceration without charges, torture, and even perhaps assassination. If it sounds like totalitarianism it should. There ought to be particular concern that the plan of the Biden Administration to go after so-called domestic terrorists will be this generation’s version of either Pearl Harbor or 9/11. The incident that took place at the Capitol Building on January 6th (already being referred to as 1/6 in some circles) has been exaggerated beyond all recognition and is now being regularly referred to as an “insurrection,” which it was not, by both politicians and the mainstream media. The language used to vilify what are alleged to be “right wing” and “white supremacist” enemies of the state is astonishing and the technology is keeping pace to turn the United States and other countries into police states to ensure that citizens will do the bidding of government.
[…]
How Britain Came to Outlaw Slave Trafficking in 1838
Slave Routes: A Short History of Human Trafficking
Part 3 From Sugar to Rebellion
Film Review
Part 3 is about the Middle Passage and the commencement, by white Europeans, of industrial level human trafficking.
By the time of the 1620 Sugar War, the average slave only lived to age 30, translating into constant demand for replacements. Because women labored alongside side men (and both were drastically underfed), infant mortality was extremely high. Only one out of ten slave infants survived to adulthood.
In 1620, the French, English and Dutch formed an alliance to break the Portuguese/Spanish monopoly on the sugar industry.
The triangular British-slave-sugar trade provided the capital foundation for the emergency of European and North American capitalism. In the 17the century, it would totally transform the British banking system. After wealthy London merchants invited the Dutch businessman William of Orange man to assume the British throne, he granted the (private) Bank of England control over the money supply by enabling them to create the official national currency.*
In France slave trading families would be responsible for building the modern cities of Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Le Havre around the slave/sugar trade.
Vastly outnumbered by the slaves they oversaw, especially in the Caribbean islands, white plantation owners were terrified of slave revolts, which were occurring constantly.
The frequent slave revolts, along with the highly publicized Zong Massacre** in early 1781, would help enlighten the white population of Europe of the ugly role the slave trade played in sugar production.
A 1979 biography published by former slave Gustavo Vasses describing the Middle Passage, also strengthened the British abolition movement. In 1838, Parliament enacted on total ban on slave trading in the British empire.
**During the Zong massacre, the slave ship’s captain threw 130 enslaved Africans overboard in pursuit of a fraudulent insurance claim. When Lloyd’s of London denied the claim, the Zong owners took the company to court – and lost.
For information on viewing times consult https://www.dw.com/en/slavery-routes-part-3/a-52206653
June 27, 2021
America’s Largest Health Care Union Vows to Fight Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccines
“Gresham of 1199 says that the union’s members are overwhelmingly against mandatory vaccination, even if they have taken shots themselves. “
Global Research, June 26, 2021Gothamist 23 June 2021
All Global Research articlescan be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website”drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
Visit and follow us on Instagram at@crg_globalresearch.
***
Earlier this month, NewYork-Presbyterian became the first hospital system in the state to require employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19. It’s a step that agrowing numberof hospitals across the country are taking, but one that 1199SEIU, the largest health care union in the country, is prepared to fight.
“Whether there is a legal challenge that we can make, or whether it’s just a pure organizational challenge that we can make, we are not going to just give in,”George Gresham, president of 1199SEIU, told WNYC/Gothamist. The union is headquartered in New York City but represents health care workers throughout the…
View original post 715 more words
America’s Social Order is Unraveling, by Charles Hugh Smith
“America’s social cohesion has been lost, ground under the heel of soaring inequality, a two-tiered economic/political order, systemic unfairness and the elite’s divide-and-conquer manipulation of the political and cultural orders.”
The US is one financial crises and severe economic contraction away from becoming completely unhinged. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
The unraveling of America’s social order is accelerating, and denial will not save us from the consequences of the plundering of the social contract.
What kind of nation boasts a record-high stock market and an unraveling social order? Answer: a failed nation, a nation that has substituted artifice for realism for far too long, a nation that now depends on illusory phantoms of capital, prosperity and democracy to prop up a crumbling facade of “wealth” that the populace now understands is largely in the hands of a few families and corporations, most of which pay little to support the citizenry they dominate politically and financially.
The social order sounds abstract, but it is all too real.The social order has two primary components: social cohesion, the glue…
View original post 142 more words
Hundreds of Thousands Take to Streets in London
by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
Massive crowds took to the streets of London today to protest against COVID tyranny.
Video footage from the air and on the ground show massive crowds.
London, England right now!! 500,000 people on the streets protesting the new world order.#antiLockdown #NWO #PoliceState #LondonProtest #Rona #GreatReset pic.twitter.com/8ODNQGAIx6
— SmlPplAgstBigGov (@SPABG2) June 26, 2021
[…]
Assange Prosecution Relied on False Testimony From Sociopathic Pedophilic FBI Informant
By Caitlin Johnstone
The Icelandic newspaper Stundin reports that a key witness in the US prosecution of Julian Assange has admitted in an interview with the outlet that he fabricated critical accusations in the indictment against the WikiLeaks founder.
“A major witness in the United States’ Department of Justice case against Julian Assange has admitted to fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder,” Stundin reports. “The witness, who has a documented history with sociopathy and has received several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and wide-ranging financial fraud, made the admission in a newly published interview in Stundin where he also confessed to having continued his crime spree whilst working with the Department of Justice and FBI and receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution.”
This major witness would be Iceland’s Sigurdur “Sigi” Thordarson, a paid FBI informant who after his short-lived association with WikiLeaks has been found guilty of sexually abusing nine boys as well as embezzlement, fraud, and theft in his home country. A court-appointed psychologist has found him to be a sociopath.
“The court found that Sigurður is by all definitions a sociopath, suffering from a severe anti-social personality disorder. However, the court found that he did know the difference between right and wrong and could not be considered insane and could therefore stand trial,” Iceland Magazine reported in 2015 during Thordarson’s child abuse case.
This was all public knowledge when the US government was building its case to extradite Julian Assange to America and try him under the Patriot Act for journalistic activity which exposed US war crimes, a prosecution for which Assange is still locked up in Belmarsh Prison pending Washington’s appeal of a UK court’s denial of the extradition request. And now we know for a fact that the odious person whose testimony formed the basis for much of that prosecution was lying.
“US officials presented an updated version of an indictment against him to a Magistrate court in London last summer,” Stundin says. “The veracity of the information contained therein is now directly contradicted by the main witness, whose testimony it is based on.”
What this means is that the US decided to add more accusations to its previous indictment because charging a journalist for standard journalistic practices was too weak on its own, and now this decision has bitten them in the ass.
The article’s authors explain that contrary to the claims in that indictment, “Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs” and “further admits the claim, that Assange had instructed or asked him to access computers in order to find any such recordings, is false.”
Thordarson’s testimony was cited extensively by British Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser when she was providing her ruling on the extradition request which is currently under appeal, and it looks pretty silly now that we know it was bogus. Her ruling repeats the prosecution’s claim that Assange “asked Teenager to hack into computers to obtain information including audio recordings of phone conversations between high-ranking officials, including members of the Parliament,” but Thordarson has now recanted this claim.
While the judgement on the extradition request reads, “It is alleged that Mr. Assange and Teenager failed a joint attempt to decrypt a file stolen from a ‘NATO country 1’ [ code for Iceland] bank”, Thordarson told Stundin that “this actually refers to a well publicised event in which an encrypted file was leaked from an Icelandic bank and assumed to contain information about defaulted loans provided by the Icelandic Landsbanki,” and that “Nothing supports the claim that this file was even ‘stolen’ per se, as it was assumed to have been distributed by whistleblowers from inside the failed bank.”
While the ruling repeats the claim that Assange “used the unauthorized access given to him by a source, to access a government website of NATO country-1 used to track police vehicles,” Thordarson told Stundin that “Assange never asked for any such access.”
These revelations are entirely damning.
“This is the end of the case against Julian Assange,” tweeted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, adding, “If Biden continues to seek the extradition of a publisher under an indictment poisoned top-to-bottom with false testimony admitted by its own star witness, the damage to the United States’ reputation on press freedom would last for a generation. It’s unavoidable.”
[...]
June 26, 2021
Some UK Olympic Athletes Refusing Covid Vaccine over Side-Effect Fears
Women wearing protective face masks walk past the Olympic rings in Tokyo. Photograph: Naoki Ogura/ReutersThe Guardian
The British athletes who do not want to get vaccinated against Covid-19 before the Tokyo Olympics are doing so over performance-related fears rather than an anti-vax stance, the Guardian understands.
The British Olympic Association remains confident that almost all its 370 or so Olympians will have two jabs before they fly to Japan, with only “a small handful” still remaining unconvinced.
Mo Farah in ‘good shape’ for last-ditch shot at Olympic qualificationIt is believed the remaining holdouts are worried that the possible side effects of the vaccine – which can include tiredness, headaches and chills – might affect a crucial period of their training given the Games are due to begin in just under four weeks. However, the BOA remains hopeful they will change their minds.
Speaking to the BBC, the BOA chief executive, Andy Anson, said “well over 90%” of British athletes will have two vaccine doses by the Olympics. But he also admitted “there are individuals who didn’t want to be vaccinated”.
Anson said: “We’re trying to convince them it’s the right thing to do. People have got the right to choose, and we have to respect that. But it’s not necessarily that helpful.”
The BOA said this month that it was on track to ensure all athletes and staff were fully vaccinated before the Olympics. The Tokyo Games, delayed last year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, will begin on 23 July.
[…]
Geopolitics, Profit, and Poppies: How the CIA Turned Afghanistan into a Failed Narco-State
By Alan Macleod
AFGHANISTAN — The COVID-19 pandemic has been a death knell to so many industries in Afghanistan. Charities and aid agencies have even warned that the economic dislocation could spark widespread famine. But one sector is still booming: the illicit opium trade. Last year saw Afghan opium poppy cultivation grow by over a third while counter-narcotics operations dropped off a cliff. The country is said to be the source of over 90% of all the world’s illicit opium, from which heroin and other opioids are made. More land is under cultivation for opium in Afghanistan than is used for coca production across all of Latin America, with the creation of the drug said to directly employ around half a million people.
This is a far cry from the 1970s, when poppy production was minimal, and largely for domestic consumption. But this changed in 1979 when the CIA launched Operation Cyclone, the widespread funding of Afghan Mujahideen militias in an attempt to bleed dry the then-recent Soviet invasion. Over the next decade, the CIA worked closely with its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI, to funnel $2 billion worth of arms and assistance to these groups, including the now infamous Osama Bin Laden and other warlords known for such atrocities as throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women.
“From statements by U.S. Ambassador [to Iran] Richard Helms, there was little heroin production in Central Asia by the mid 1970s,” Professor Alfred McCoy, author of “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” told MintPress. But with the start of the CIA secret war, opium production along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border surged and refineries soon dotted the landscape. Trucks loaded with U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons would travel from Pakistan into its neighbor to the west, returning filled to the brim with opium for the new refineries, their deadly product ending up on streets worldwide. With the influx of Afghan opium in the 1980s — Jeffrey St. Clair, co-author of “Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press,” alleges — heroin addiction more than doubled in the United States.
“In order to finance the resistance for a protracted period, the Mujahideen had to come up with a livelihood beyond the weapons that the CIA was providing,” McCoy said, noting that the weapons issued could not feed the fighters’ families, nor reimburse them for lost labor:
So what the resistance fighters did was they turned to opium. Afghanistan had about 100 tons of opium produced every year in the 1970s. By 1989-1990, at the end of that 10-year CIA operation, that minimal amount of opium — 100 tons per annum — had turned into a major amount, 2,000 tons a year, and was already about 75% of the world’s illicit opium trade.”
[…]
CDC data show kids most likely have herd immunity from coronavirus, but vaccine trials still ongoing anyway
Dr Eddy Betterman
According to the CDC’s own data, around 42 percent of Americans between the ages of five and 17 have already been infected with and recovered from the coronavirus. This means that American youth are probably already at herd immunity without the need for vaccinations.
Even the World Health Organization (WHO) understands that COVID-19 cases among under 18-year-olds only represent a sliver of all reported cases. And among those cases, most experience a very mild form of the disease and even fewer die from it.
But companies like Pfizer are still pushing forward with their vaccine trials for children, with the approval of the CDC. Some hospitals are even expanding the trial to include “volunteers” as young as six months old.
[…]
WORLD WAR ‘C’: COVID Began In North Carolina 2 Years Before Wuhan
COVID 19 was a US Army bio-weapons project to manufacture a pneumonia-causing disease that would be nearly impossible to vaccinate for in patients over 40 years old. The proof is here, simply scroll down. The study was run by the University of North Carolina and funded by USAID/CIA. It chose a Chinese bat virus and chose to include a medical facility in Wuhan as well
Source – veteranstoday.com
“…Documents below will show that research to create COVID 19 began in the United States in 2006 and culminated in a successful bio-weapon in 2015, with work done at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard and at the Food and Drug Administration’s lab in Arkansas. Their work was titled: A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence” Banned: COVID began in North Carolina, not Wuhan, not until 2 years later
VT had the story right from the beginning. Now that the CIA is officially tasked with finding a source for COVID, someone to blame, the vast American program of bio-warfare defense which creates every nasty virus we have seen, probably ebola, certainly swine flu, and then “accidentally” releases them in such a way that the CIA’s agenda is served.
Since this article was written, we have…
View original post 8,018 more words
The Most Revolutionary Act
- Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's profile
- 11 followers
