The Pentagon’s Destruction of the Bill of Rights

It is supremely ironic that Pentagon officials take an oath to support and defend the Constitution because they intentionally destroyed the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution when they set up their “judicial” system at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In fact, the very reason the Pentagon established its system in Cuba, rather than the United States, was to circumvent and avoid the provisions of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Prior to the 9/11 attacks, whenever someone was charged with terrorism or any other criminal offense, U.S. officials would secure a grand-jury indictment and then prosecute him in a U.S. District Court. The accused in the federal court system is guaranteed certain procedural protections, many of which were carved out during centuries of resistance by British citizens to the tyranny of their own government. Our American ancestors demanded that many of those procedural protections be expressly enshrined in the Bill of Rights so that everyone would know that federal officials would have to abide by them whenever they charged people with federal crimes.

Examples of procedural guarantees include no cruel and unusual punishments, the right to confront adverse witnesses, the right to counsel, the right to due process of law, the right of trial by jury, the right to be presumed innocent, the right to remain silent, the right of speedy trial, the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to be free of coerced confessions, and the right to counsel.

After 9/11, the Pentagon established its own “judicial” system at Gitmo to try terrorism cases, as an alternative to the federal judicial system in the United States. Yet, one searches in vain for any authority in the Constitution for the Pentagon to do that. When one reads the Constitution, the intent of the Framers is clear: one judicial system — the federal system — for trying all cases involving the commission of federal offenses.

Contrary to what some people maintain, terrorism is not an act of war. It is a federal criminal offense. That’s why it’s listed in the U.S. Code, which enumerates federal criminal offenses. It’s also why terrorism cases have long been tried in federal district court. It’s also why the Pentagon is prosecuting terrorism defendants in its “judicial” system in Cuba.

The establishment of the Pentagon’s system now enables federal officials the option of sending people who are accused of terrorism into two different systems — one run by the federal courts and the other run by the Pentagon. Thus, if two different people are charged with participating in the same terrorism offense, one can be sent into the federal court system and the other can be sent into the Pentagon’s system.

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Could America Survive a Truth Commission?

A nation that's no longer capable of naming names and reporting what actually happened richly deserves an economic and political collapse to match its moral collapse.

You've probably heard of the Truth Commissions held in disastrously corrupt and oppressive regimes after the sociopath/kleptocrat Oligarchs are deposed. The goal is not revenge, as well-deserved as that might be; the goal is national reconciliation via the only possible path to healing: name names and tell the plain, unadorned truth, stripped of self-serving artifice, spin, propaganda and PR.

Is such a stripped-of-spin truthful account of names and events even possible in the U.S.? Sadly, there is precious little evidence that a Truth Commission in the U.S. would be anything more than a travesty of a mockery of a sham, a parade of half-truths, misdirections, falsehoods and fabrications, all aimed at one goal: protecting the powerful from the consequences of their decisions and actions.

Sadly, we've lost the capacity to simply tell the truth: everything, and I mean everything, is crafted to protect the guilty, polish the putrid decay of legalized looting, defraud the unwary, ease the most venal, power-mad sociopaths into positions of unparalleled power, sell low-quality goods and services nobody needs or would even want if the marketing weren't so Orwellian, persuade debt-serfs to borrow more and bamboozle voters into further enriching the few at the expense of the many.

The truth is no match for greed is good and don't be evil, unless it's incredibly profitable, in which case, go for it but cover your tracks (here's looking at you, Big Tech). Outrage is reserved for whistleblowers who name names and reveal the sordid truths that the status quo has expended the nation's treasure to protect from the light of day.

This is the pathetic state of America: our outrage is reserved for those telling the truth, not for the legions who lie, cheat, steal and prevaricate to conceal the truth at all costs.

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?

The so-called gatekeepers are all corrupt and self-serving, minions of the Intelligence Community, corporate overlords, billionaires or the interest groups that fund their studies, departments, think tanks and "research" (the conclusions are established first and the "research" follows accordingly).

Who has earned our trust by refusing to toe the line of an approved narrative? Who's left who isn't blinded by hatred, bought off by billionaires or fearful of retribution from America's disastrously corrupt and oppressive regime, rightfully fearing being fired, demoted, marginalized, demonetized, disappeared from public view via being de-platformed or permanently disappeared via "accident" or "suicide"?

We've been so jaded by all the lies, all the legal looting, all the rigged statistics, and yes, all the convenient "accidents" that we no longer trust anyone to simply report the names and events. We now assume that everyone has an ax to grind and is likely being handsomely rewarded to sharpen the ax without appearing to do so too blatantly.

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A Tight Grip On Our Nuclear Toys

“Everyone wants to play with the big boys, and the only way to become one of the big boys is to have nuclear toys.”

Attention Planet Earth! Attention Planet Earth! It is time to grow up.

The words are those of Mohamed ElBaradei, then director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, from a 2005 interview, several months before he and the agency were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. They remain eerily relevant in 2019, summing up as they do the puerile recklessness that is in the process of regaining its grip on geopolitics. Nuclear weapons treaties are withering on the vine and proliferation threatens a triumphant return.

Hello, omnicide. We may not be as lucky as we were in the Cold War era, when the consequences of nuclear accidents and political brinkmanship were relatively contained and the victims of nuclear development were limited to the people who lived near test areas like the Marshall Islands, Kazakhstan or the Nevada Test Site in the western United States. Nuclear stockpiles have shrunk, not grown, and nuclear-armed nations number nine.

This is still insane, of course. That number should – must – find its way to zero, as declared by the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was passed by a United Nations vote of 122-1 in 2017 but still awaits actual ratification by 50 countries (32 have ratified it so far). Hope-inspiring as that treaty is, the big boys – who boycotted the U.N. vote two years ago – still control the game, and led by the USA, they are pulling out of the treaties that constrain them.

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Trump "The Military Industrial Complex They Like Fighting! They Make A LOT Of Money When They Fight"

Deception, Espionage & Totalitarianism—The Communist China Threat to US National Security

Opposing War Is The Best Approach To Revolution

So endless war is a 100 percent indispensable element in preserving existing power structures. The US-centralized empire cannot exist without it. The trouble for the empire, however, is that it can’t just come out and tell the public “Yeah we need to destroy everyone who opposes our resource control agendas and dominance in key geostrategic regions, so we’ll be forcibly eliminating this noncompliant government on Thursday.” The public would never go for it, because that’s a plainly sociopathic values system which we are taught since school age that our society evolved beyond many generations ago. People would lose trust in all government institutions, and revolution would quickly foment as a result.

For this reason, propaganda is necessary. Because America is where the empire has centralized most of its military firepower and billionaires, Americans are the most propagandized people on earth. There are thousands of people whose whole entire job is to convince Americans that it is good and desirable to keep trillions of dollars in military hardware moving around the planet and killing complete strangers who pose no threat to any American.

The challenge for the propagandists is that this is plainly bat shit crazy. It’s an assignment that is both absolutely necessary and extremely difficult. When the entire world order depends on convincing millions of people that something transparently insane and ridiculous is perfectly sane and rational, you’re naturally going to have difficulty smoothing over all the plot holes in the narratives you’re selling. That’s why you’re always seeing glaring discrepancies in the narratives used to promote US foreign policy agendas. In retrospect I’ve pretty much built my career on highlighting these discrepancies.

There are plenty of moral arguments against imperialism, but you don’t even need to enter into morality to see that it’s smart to make opposing war your foremost priority. The kingdom of the bastards who are grinding us all down and trying to make us poorer, sicker and stupider so we can’t muster the chutzpah to toss them out on their asses is fed by an umbilical cord of endless war, and we have the power to cut that cord by opposing war and attacking war propaganda together.

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Soldier Boy

Globalist warlord DEAD. Big win for patriots.

Read the Julian Assange indictment

Soon after Assange’s arrest on Thursday, the Justice Department unsealed court documents of charges related to WikiLeaks’ publication of videos and documents leaked by US Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning starting in 2010. The indictment alleges that Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Manning to crack a password on a Defense Department computer network for classified documents and communications to download classified records and transmit them to WikiLeaks. 

In a statement, the department called the incident “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.”

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The CIA Takeover of America in the 1960s Is the Story of Our Times. The Killing of the Kennedys and Today’s New Cold War

When Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968, the American public fell into an hypnotic trance in which they have remained ever since. The overwhelming majority accepted what was presented by government authorities as an open and shut case that a young Palestinian American, Sirhan Sirhan, had murdered RFK because of his support for Israel, a false accusation whose ramifications echo down the years. That this was patently untrue and was contradicted by overwhelming evidence made no difference.

Sirhan did not kill Robert Kennedy, yet he remains in jail to this very day.  Robert Kennedy, Jr., who was 14 years old at the time of his father’s death, has visited Sirhan in prison, claims he is innocent, and believes there was another gunman.  Paul Schrade, an aide to the senator and the first person shot that night, also says Sirhan didn’t do it. Both have plenty of evidence.  And they are not alone.

There is a vast body of documented evidence to prove this, an indisputably logical case marshalled by serious writers and researchers. Lisa Pease is the latest.  It is a reason why a group of 60 prominent Americans has recently called for a reopening of, not just this case, but those of JFK, MLK, and Malcom X.  The blood of these men cries out for the revelation of the truth that the United States national security state and its media accomplices have fought so mightily to keep hidden for so many years.

That they have worked so hard at this reveals how dangerous the truth about these assassinations still is to this secret government that wages propaganda war against the American people and real wars around the world.  It is a government of Democrats, Republicans, and their intelligence allies working together today to confuse the American people and provoke Russia in a most dangerous game that could lead to nuclear war, a possibility that so frightened JFK and RFK after the Cuban Missile Crisis that they devoted themselves to ending the Cold War, reconciling with the Soviet Union, abolishing nuclear weapons, reining in of the power of the CIA, and withdrawing from Vietnam.  That is why they were killed.

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Whistleblowers Say NSA Still Spies On American Phones In Hidden Program

Meanwhile, the bulk of the NSA’s surveillance and “offensive” information warfare capabilities remain completely unknown...

On Monday 4th, the New York Times reported that the National Security Agency has “quietly” shut down a controversial phone records surveillance program revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

The claim was made by a senior Republican congressional aide who told the newspaper that the Trump administration had stopped using the program, which analyses the domestic call and text logs of American citizens, due to technical problems.

On Twitter Snowden hailed the news as a “victory”, while Intercept journalist Glen Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story to international acclaim, took the story at face value. Neither of them raised the obvious question  -  is the “shut down” of this program merely a smokescreen to continue spying on American phones under new or different secretive programs?

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The Coming Military Vision of State Censorship

At TruePublica, we have continually warned that in Britain the government is becoming ever more authoritarian with its underhand attack on civil liberty and human rights. We have warned about the illegality of mass surveillance and state intrusion into the privacy of every citizen. We have warned about sweeping new police powers, the use of secret courts and new laws designed to protect the state and corporations from the scrutiny and criticisms of the people and we have warned that democracy in Britain is being eroded in favour of a political elite whose power they want entrenched. This is demonstrated no better than recent events in a meeting held in Austalia of new state censorship rules.

A key meeting of cabinet members from the US-led Five Eyes (UK,US, Aus, Can, NZ) global spying network was held in Australia in late August, which went totally unreported by the mainstream media, mainly because Britain’s representative used the cloak of Brexit to disguise it, ironically via social media.

Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton hosted the summit. Leading the other delegations were US Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid, along with Canada’s Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and New Zealand Justice Minister Andrew Little.

On the agenda, these ‘Five-Eyes’ officials castigated the major tech transnationals for not meeting with them.  An accompanying “Joint Statement on Countering the Illicit Use of Online Spaces” demanded that these internet corporations toe the line and clamp down on social media and algorithms producing results, not in the state interest.

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America’s Militarized Economy

Donald Trump’s biggest success, thus far into his Presidency, has been his sale of $400 billion (originally $350 billion) of U.S.-made weapons to the Saudi Arabian Government, which is owned by its royal family, after whom that nation is named. This sale alone is big enough to be called Trump’s “jobs plan” for Americans. It is also the biggest weapons-sale in all of history. It’s 400 billion dollars, not 400 million dollars; it is gigantic, and, by far, unprecedented in world-history.

The weapons that the Sauds and their friends, the 7 monarchies that constitute the United Arab Emirates, are using right now, in order to conquer and subdue Yemen, are almost entirely made in America. That’s terrific business for America.

Not only are Americans employed, in strategically important congressional districts (that is, politically important congressional districts), to manufacture this equipment for mass-murdering in foreign lands that never threatened (much less invaded) America, but the countries that purchase this equipment are thereby made dependent upon the services of those American manufacturers, and of the taxpayer-funded U.S. ‘Defense’ Department and its private military contractors such as Lockheed Martin, to maintain this equipment, and to train the local military enforcers, on how to operate these weapons. Consequently, foreign customers of U.S. military firms are buying not only U.S. weapons, but the U.S. Government’s protection — the protection by the U.S. military, of those monarchs.

They are buying the label of being an “American ally” so that the U.S. news media can say that this is in defense of American allies (regardless of whether it’s even that).

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Coming Coup Against Trump

The American backlash against President Trump over his summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin has been as ferocious as it was predictable.

Every possible vilification has been thrown at him. But it is the slur of Trump as "traitor" that puts this president in grave danger.

Democrats, Republicans, state intelligence pundits, hawkish media, liberal media — all have launched a torrent of attacks on Donald Trump for daring to meet with Putin in Helsinki this week.

The Washington Post accused Trump of "openly colluding with the criminal leader of a hostile power". Let those extreme words sink in for a moment. The implication is as serious as it can get.

As with other politicians and media outlets, the Post said the president had "betrayed" American intelligence services by siding with President Putin in denying that Russia had interfered in US elections.

Former CIA chief John Brennan denounced Trump as a "traitor" who had "committed high crimes" in holding a friendly summit with Putin.

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The NSA Has Hidden Spy Hubs Within AT&T Buildings Nationwide

Why Russia’s New Strategic Capabilities Come As a Shock to US Intelligence Community

The United States of America spends something like $80 billion annually on intelligence gathering and analysis. When the CIA was founded by the National Security Act in 1947 the intention was to create a mechanism that would warn about an imminent threat. The memory of Pearl Harbor in 1941, when Japan attacked the U.S. naval base was still fresh, and the legislation was popularized by the slogan “no more Pearl Harbors.”

In spite of the dedication of considerable resources and manpower, there have been some major intelligence failures in the past seventy years, starting with the inability to anticipate the breakout of the Korean War and including the embrace of false intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. But the most recent failure is perhaps more consequential than either Korea or Iraq.

On March 1st, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke before his country’s Federal Assembly plus a large group of both local and foreign journalists, outlining his plans for the economy and also dealing with other domestic issues should he be reelected later this month. The final third of the presentation was on national defense and, in its substance, was clearly directed at a global audience, particularly the United States.

He explained

“During all these years since the unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty [in 2001] we have been working intensively on advanced equipment and arms, which allowed us to make a breakthrough in developing new models of strategic weapons.”

He was referring to the RS-28 Sarmat ballistic missile, which has almost unlimited range and ultra-high speed, enabling it to employ trajectories including strikes coming over the South Pole that can defeat existing American Anti-Ballistic Defense systems. Russia has also produced and deployed a hypersonic glider weapon system Avangard.

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The Pentagon’s “Ides of March”: Best Month to Go to War

Timeline of March Military Interventions (1965- 2017)

Recent history confirms that with the exception of Afghanistan (October 2001) and the 1990-91 Gulf War, all major US-NATO led military operations over a period of almost half a century –since the invasion of Vietnam by US ground forces on March 8, 1965– have been initiated in the month of March.

The Vietnam War

The US Congress adopted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Lyndon Johnson to dispatch ground forces to Vietnam on March 8, 1965.

On 8 March 1965, 3,500 U.S. Marines were dispatched to South Vietnam marking the beginning of “America’s ground war”.

NATO’s War on Yugoslavia

NATO’s war on Yugoslavia was launched on March 24, 1999. 

The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia code-named by the US Operation “Noble Anvil”. started on March 24, 1999 and lasted until June 10, 1999.

The Iraq War

The War on Iraq was launched on March 20, 2003. (Baghdad time)

The US-NATO led invasion of Iraq started on 20 March 2003 on the pretext that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

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How the Pentagon Devours the Budget

Imagine for a moment a scheme in which American taxpayers were taken to the cleaners to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and there was barely a hint of criticism or outrage.  Imagine as well that the White House and a majority of the politicians in Washington, no matter the party, acquiesced in the arrangement.  In fact, the annual quest to boost Pentagon spending into the stratosphere regularly follows that very scenario, assisted by predictions of imminent doom from industry-funded hawks with a vested interest in increased military outlays.

Most Americans are probably aware that the Pentagon spends a lot of money, but it’s unlikely they grasp just how huge those sums really are.  All too often, astonishingly lavish military budgets are treated as if they were part of the natural order, like death or taxes.

The figures contained in the recent budget deal that kept Congress open, as well as in President Trump’s budget proposal for 2019, are a case in point: $700 billion for the Pentagon and related programs in 2018 and $716 billion the following year.  Remarkably, such numbers far exceeded even the Pentagon's own expansive expectations.  According to Donald Trump, admittedly not the most reliable source in all cases, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis reportedly said, “Wow, I can’t believe we got everything we wanted” -- a rare admission from the head of an organization whose only response to virtually any budget proposal is to ask for more.

The public reaction to such staggering Pentagon budget hikes was muted, to put it mildly. Unlike last year’s tax giveaway to the rich, throwing near-record amounts of tax dollars at the Department of Defense generated no visible public outrage.  Yet those tax cuts and Pentagon increases are closely related.  The Trump administration’s pairing of the two mimics the failed approach of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s -- only more so.  It’s a phenomenon I’ve termed “Reaganomics on steroids.”  Reagan’s approach yielded oceans of red ink and a severe weakening of the social safety net.  It also provoked such a strong pushback that he later backtracked by raising taxes and set the stage for sharp reductions in nuclear weapons. 

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US Foreign Policies Remain Unchanged Since 1948

Ever since 1948, the U.S. Government’s foreign policies have been consistently focused upon breaking up the Soviet Union and turning its Warsaw Pact allies against the Soviet Union; and, then, once that would be (and was) accomplished, turning any remaining allies of Russia against Russia; and, then, once that will have been accomplished, conquering Russia. Since at least 2006, U.S. ‘defense’ policy has been that nuclear war will be an acceptable way to conquer Russia if lesser measures fail to do the job. (Since 2006, the concept that a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia would result in “mutually assured destruction,” or “MAD” —  a war that both parties to it would lose — has been rejected at the highest levels of the U.S. Government, but continues unchanged as being the policy at the highest levels of Russia’s Government, which are terrified of the U.S. Government’s attempts to develop anti-ballistic missiles and other systems that would eliminate Russia’s defenses — i.e., ability to retaliate — against a U.S. nuclear first-strike attack — terrified at the U.S. Government’s preparations to win a nuclear war.) 

When the Republican U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said on 26 March 2012 that, “Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe”, he was actually stating publicly something that U.S. President Barack Obama secretly agreed with and had been working since day-one of his Presidency to implement — and his State Department had secretly already been drawing up plans since 2011 to overthrow the Moscow-friendly leaders of two nations: Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych. But Obama (who was the most gifted liar in U.S. Presidential history, and really understood how to use truths to demolish even lies that his own policies were secretly based upon — simultaneously criticising bad polices while secretly implementing them) responded to Romney’s statement of March 26th, by saying on 22 October 2012,

“Gov. Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that al-Qaeda is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaeda. You said Russia … the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

And Romney replied,

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US Needs to Kick Cold War Habit and end its Addiction to Militarism

The National Defense Strategy unveiled by Pentagon chief James Mattis illustrates once again the revanchist Cold War mindset dominating Washington which is the inevitable expression of the US’ destructive addiction to militarism.

More than a quarter century after the official end of the Cold War between the US and the former Soviet Union, Washington has the cheek to label both Russia and China as “revisionist powers.”

Policy and discourse dominating Washington shows it is the US that is the biggest “revisionist power,” trying to revive ideological tensions and antagonism with Russia and China.

Defense Secretary Mattis declared last week that fighting non-state terrorism was no longer the primary focus of US national security. He said the “great power competition” with Russia and China was the new priority.

Mattis’ National Defense Strategy echoed themes contained in the National Security Strategy document published in December, which was signed off by President Trump. The NSS also cast Russia and China as “rivals” and existential threats to America’s influence in the world.

As with the NSS paper, Moscow and Beijing condemned the latest Pentagon document as being stuck in Cold War thinking and dealing with foreign relations in an “imperialistic” manner. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said it was regrettable that Washington, “instead of conducting normal dialogue is trying to prove its leadership using such confrontational concepts and strategies.”

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