Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Court: Student can be expelled for calling gay ‘marriage’ a sin on Facebook

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A Christian student who was expelled from university after posting on Facebook in support of Biblical teaching on marriage and sexual ethics has lost his case in a judicial review...

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Communism's bloody legacy: 100 years and 100 million deaths

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This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the worst mistakes ever made: the Communist revolution in Russia.

Communist regimes went on to kill about 100 million people. Most died in famines after socialist tyrants forced people to practice inefficient collective farming. Millions of others were executed in political purges.

Yet when the Russian Revolution happened, people both inside and outside Russia were excited . Crowds cheered Lenin. No longer would nobles rule; no longer would capitalists exploit workers. Now the people would prosper together.

British journalist Theodore Rothstein wrote, “The undivided sway of the Imperialist nightmare is at an end … (there will be) rule of the labouring classes.”

But you can’t have government plan every aspect of people’s lives and expect things to go well. Instead, you get bureaucratic planning commissions and secret police.

That won’t stop some Americans from celebrating Communism’s anniversary.

A day of anti-Trump protests is scheduled for Nov. 4, and I’m sure some protesters will wave hammer-and-sickle flags. Some will wear Che Guevara shirts.

A few commentators will call the protesters “idealistic” but impractical. They shouldn’t. We should call them supporters of mass murder.

Lenin ordered the hanging of 100 property owners at the very start of the Revolution, saying people needed to see the deaths of “landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers.”

Mass murder and starvation rapidly increased the death toll after that.

It wasn’t exactly what philosopher Karl Marx had in mind – but it shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Marx’s writing is filled with comparisons of capitalists to werewolves and other predators who must be destroyed.

Marx admitted that capitalism is productive but said “capital obtains this ability only by constantly sucking in living labor as its soul, vampire-like.”

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing — don’t miss his latest book, “No, They Can’t Why: Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

Even as the Russian regime killed millions, some journalists and intellectuals covered up the crimes.

Stalin kept most media out, so few Americans knew that millions were starving, but New York Times writer Walter Duranty saw it first-hand.

Yet he “covered up Stalin’s crimes,” says Tom Palmer of the Atlas Network, a group that promotes free-market ideas around the world.

Because Duranty wanted to support “the cause,” he wrote that “report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”

Duranty “saw the truckloads of bodies,” says Palmer, yet “he wrote on the front page of the New York Times how wonderful everything was.” He even got a Pulitzer Prize for it.

In some ways, times haven’t changed that much. This year, the Times ran a series of essays commemorating the anniversary of Russian Communism, including one piece arguing that sex was better in the Soviet Union because the Revolution destroyed macho capitalist culture.

At least the New York Times eventually admitted that Duranty’s work was “some of the worst reporting in this newspaper,” but the Pulitzer committee never withdrew its prize.

Communism kills wherever it’s practiced. But people still people believe. Making a video on Communism’s 100th anniversary, I interviewed Lily Tang Williams, who grew up under the regime in China.

“Mao was like a god to me,” she recounts. “In the morning, we were encouraged to chant and to confess to dear Chairman Mao.”

Under Mao, Williams nearly starved. “I was so hungry. My uncle taught me how to trap rats. But the problem is, everybody is trying to catch rats. Rats run out, too.”

Still, she says, she was so brainwashed by Communist propaganda that she “cried my eyes out when Mao died.”

But then, “when I was college student, I met a U.S. exchange student … He showed me a pocket Constitution and Declaration of Independence. A light bulb came on!”

For the first time, she realized, “I have rights … natural rights that cannot be taken away. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

She escaped to the United States. Now she says her mission in life is to teach Americans the importance of liberty.

I think her message is wiser than that of Karl Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

“Big, powerful government, it’s very scary,” she warns. “It will keep growing like cancer, will never stop. If you empower government, not the individuals, we’re going to lose this free country!”

 



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Will Spacey scandal expose 'gay' male obsession with young teens?

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I’d like to weigh in on the Kevin Spacey (age 26)/Anthony Rapp (age 14) tip-of-the-iceberg pederasty scandal that may rip open Hollywood like the hull of the Titanic.

Speaking as the only person ever charged for “crimes against humanity” (not a joke) in significant part for discussing the pedophile core of “gay” male culture – and one of the first people ever listed as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (for documenting that culture at the core of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party) – I’d just like to say, in advance, “I told you so.”

Frankly, however, pedophilia is too broad a term for this all-too-common aspect of homosexual orientation and misses the gender-specific nature of the problem. The correct term is pederasty, euphemistically known in historic “gay” society as “man/boy love,” as in the infamous North American Man/Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA – which was a regular participant in the early “gay”-pride parades before the LGBT movement got taken over by the marketing and PR strategists of the Democratic Party.

To be clear, I’m not saying all or even most men who identify as “gay” molest children. Even the word “children” is misleading in this context, since “children” connotes preschool and grammar school ages, while the target of pederasts are young teen and slightly pre-teen boys. And I’m not saying lesbians share this problem to the same extent that it exists in male homosexual culture (though lesbian abuse of girls is a problem, too).

What I am saying is that male homosexuality identity (from the days when the ancient Spartan military routinely drafted pre-teen boys and paired them with adult homosexual men) has always been oriented toward youth, and it is this man/boy sexual culture that not only spawned the modern “gay” movement but remains the largely hidden – in fact, politically protected and shielded – core of “gay” male society today. The American public has only once been allowed a glimpse of the pederast underworld – the Catholic priest scandal – which was exposed only because the left’s smoldering hatred of the Catholic Church briefly overwhelmed its protectiveness of “gay” society – but even they all conspired to falsely characterize the priests’ pederasty as “pedophilia” to obscure the homosexual connection.

Consider just a few salient facts documented in “The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party and on my blog ScottLively.net:

The German “Grandfather of Gay Rights,” Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, was molested at 14 by his riding instructor and went on to form the world’s first “gay rights” organization in the 1860s.

The first characterization of homosexual sodomy as a “human right” was by the German Society for Human Rights in the 1920s, whose most famous member was Hitler’s “gay” second-in-command Ernst Roehm (head of the Brown Shirts). Munich police records identified at least 11 boys recruited from a local high school for sex with Roehm – according to journalist Heinz Hoene’s book, “The Order of the Death’s Head” (called a “monumental achievement” by the New York Times).

The first American homosexual organization was the U.S. chapter of Roehm’s Society for Human Rights, started in Chicago in 1924 by Henry Gerber and two other men, all of whom were arrested shortly thereafter for sex with teen boys.

Related column: “C’mon, Disney! Tell the truth about same-sex attraction in kids,” by Linda Harvey

One of those abused boys, as an adult, molested another teen boy named Harry Hay, who is known today as the “Father of the American Gay Rights Movement.” Until his death, Hay was an outspoken advocate for man/boy sex and wore a sweatshirt reading “NAMBLA Walks with Me” in “gay”-pride parades after the pederast group had been banned by the marketing gurus who took over the “gay” movement.

The Stonewall Riots that are commemorated each year as “Gay Pride Day” were triggered by “gay” male patrons of the Stonewall Bar in New York City, angered at police efforts to arrest a 14-year-old boy transvestite prostitute (Mark Pascal, Varieties of Man Boy Love).

Many early “gay” activists were open pederasts, including NAMBLA founder David Thorstad, who also launched the Gay Activist Alliance in 1969, which spawned – directly or indirectly – innumerable LGBT activist organizations, including today’s political behemoth, the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, or HRC, which named me public enemy No. 1 of the global LGBT agenda in 2014.

HRC’s founder was Terrance “Terry” Bean, an Obama fundraising bundler accused of sex with a teen boy in 2014 but who escaped prosecution when (after a public monetary settlement offer) the boy (who had been in hiding at the time) declined to testify.

Terry Bean is based in Portland, Oregon, a sewer of rampant pederasty and home of the “gay” apologist Gus van Sant, whose films have romanticized male teen prostitution, and of Sam Adams, who was also accused of sex with a teen boy while mayor (one of many big-city mayors in recent years – most recently Ed Murray of Seattle, who resigned in September).

Portland is where I had my eyes opened to the destructive LGBT agenda as spokesman for the No Special Rights Act (1992), and where I faced the first four of five major lawsuits by the “gay” movement trying unsuccessfully to silence my criticism.

It was there I learned about the homosexual/Nazi connection that led to writing “The Pink Swastika” with Jewish researcher Kevin E. Abrams – dangerous knowledge that got me targeted by the ultra-powerful Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, long before it would begin smearing the pro-family movement as a whole.

Here is the SPLC’s dirty little secret that sort of ties everything together in one little vignette: the man/boy sex angle, the Hollywood angle, the Nazi angle and the protect “gays” from the pederast connection at all costs angle.

You see, SPLC’s most famous anti-Nazi lawsuit was against white supremacist Tom Metzger of Southern California, by linking him to the beating death of Ethiopian graduate student Mulugeta Seraw by Skinhead death-metal musician Ken “Death” Mieske and two others in Portland in 1988. Mieske was Metzger’s protégé and likely “gay” lover. He was also the darling of Hollywood “gay” giant Gus Van Sant, who once made a film about Mieske upon his release from prison for an earlier burglary conviction, titled “Ken Death Gets Out of Jail.” Mieske’s history as a teen sexual target of older men is documented in a book about the Seraw murder by Elinor Langer, titled appropriately “A Hundred Little Hitlers.” There’s more on the topic here.

I began this column stating that the Hollywood pederast Titanic may be about to sink – but then again it may not, because there is no higher priority on the political left than protecting the “gay” movement from the link to pederasty.

If the SPLC could bury the pederast and Van Sant connection in the Metzger “gay” Nazi case, while simultaneously mocking “The Pink Swastika” as ludicrous – without a hint of media coverage exposing its hypocrisy; and if Terry Bean could get off scot-free without anyone on the left admitting that his teen accuser may have been paid off under their very noses; and if Kevin Spacey can escape any real consequences for his assault of Anthony Rapp by turning his apology into a “coming-out” celebration (the most “sacred” of LGBT ceremonies), then there may never be a day of public reckoning for the many chickenhawks of Hollywood – whose scope of control and abuse would make Harvey Weinstein and James Toback seem like altar boys by comparison.

 

 

 

 

 



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Monday, October 30, 2017

The nine principles of ethical policing as written in 1829

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Policing in America today is a far cry from what policing was like just even a couple of generations ago. While it needs to be said that there are indeed many good-minded police in our society, there is also a startling rise in a new kind of insidious police brutality in America. A new callousness where many cops and police departments appear to be preying on the American public while viewing American citizens as dangerous enemies that must be dominated at all costs.Everyday another terrible video...

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Russian Content May Have Reached 126 Million Facebook Users, There Is Just One Catch

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One month ago, the media world and political punditry was in a furore after Facebook revealed that some 470 alleged Russian troll accounts had paid Facebook a whopping $100,000 to purchase 3,000 advertisements potentially influencing the outcome of the election (even though many of the ads "showed support for Clinton" and only half ran before the actual election). The furore did not last long: gradually the story fizzled, before becoming a watercooler joke that Russia had managed to buy the outcome of the US presidential election for a whopping 100 grand - which would make Vladimir Putin not only a propaganda genius of the highest order, but the best damn advertising mastermind to ever live, generating the highest ad IRR in history .

So, eager to keep the "Russia interfered in US elections" meme going (not to be confused with what the Washington Post one year ago titled "The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere"), tomorrow Facebook's general counsel,  Colin Stretch , together with his peers from Google and Twitter, will will sit before the Senate judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism and try to fascinate the public with some far bigger numbers, while hopefully also pitching the vast reach Facebook and other social media have. To do that, Facebook will say that it estimates that a grand total of 126 million people may have seen content posted by Russian-backed accounts over more than two years that, as the WSJ puts it, "sought to disrupt American society", according to a prepared copy of the remarks obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

How is this number different from the far smaller number quoted previously when referring only to the Russian trolls' alleged ad outreach? Because this time, Facebook will count virtually every post created by these alleged Russian troll farms as direct form of propaganda: as the WSJ explains, tomorrow's definition of "reach" will include such content as "free posts and events listings."

In all, Facebook will claim that Russian-linked accounts allegedly churned out 80,000 pieces of content - call them posts, surveys, notes, and pretty much anything else, as well as ads - between January 2015 and August 2017.

Going back to the revised "total reach" number, at first blush it sounds unprecedented: up to a whopping 126 million people, more than a third of the US population - and more than half of Facebook's entire US penetration - may have been brainwashed by those pesky Russians.

A quick tangent: when it comes to Facebook's US penetration, lately it's difficult to separate the truth from the lies, because readers may recall that on month ago, Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research, calculated that Facebook claimed that its ad platform can reach millions more young adults in the U.S. than are estimated to actually live in the country. Facebook's Ads Manager claims to have a potential reach of 41 million people in the U.S. between the ages of 18-24, according to Wieser, even as the U.S. Census Bureau estimates there were only 31 million people in that age range last year.

Oops.

Of course, numbers are "fluid" when it comes to the advertising industry - and by fluid we mean grossly fabricated and fraudulent - and the last thing we want to do is get Facebook in even more trouble with its advertisers who one day will get sick of reaching robotic click farms in Bangladesh and ask for their money back.

However, there is one catch. When Facebook says that up 126 million people may have seen the allegedly Russian content, what it really means is that there has been a total of 126 million possible impressions and "click thrus" (we give Facebook the benefit of the doubt on the math here). What it did not say, or actually did as we will show momentarily, is that at the same time as the Russian content was running, everyone else was also desperately seeking to attract the attention - and clicks - of these 126 million potential eyeballs, or rather 256 million eyeballs, with their own content, ads, articles, and what not.

How much more content? Here is the math - the Russians supposedly created 80,000 pieces of content. Now, as WaPo explains, for Facebook, which places roughly 220 posts each day in the news feeds of U.S. users, the amount of content equals a tiny fraction of total content served. How tiny? Americans in total were served over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds between 2015 and 2017. In this context, those 80,000 Russian posts appear... modest.

Which is precisely what Facebook will say tomorrow in its defense. Quote the WSJ:

In his testimony, Mr. Stretch plans to say that “any amount” of fake or malicious activity is “too much,” while at the same time playing down its importance, according to the prepared remarks. Mr. Stretch plans to argue that these posts were a small fraction of the content consumed by Americans during this period—0.004% of posts, or one out of 23,000 pieces of content.

In other words, yes - up to 126,000,000 Americans may have seen the "socially-damaging" Russian content on Facebook. The problem is that those same 126,000,000 Americans also saw a few trillion other stories in the same time period. And speaking of "socially-damaging", this is what Facebook will claim was the content of the ads and posts:

“Many of the ads and posts we’ve seen so far are deeply disturbing—seemingly intended to amplify societal divisions and pit groups of people against each other,” Mr. Stretch plans to say.

Judging by Donald Trump's twitter feed, at least one person was religiously clicking on the Russian Facebook content.

Which about covers Twitter. What about Google? Here is WaPo:

Google said it had found 18 English-language channels with 1,108 videos uploaded, totaling about 43 hours of content, that originated with Russian operatives.

 

The company also found that two accounts linked to the Russian troll farm spent a total of $4,700 on search and display ads during the 2016 election cycle.

So to summarize: having spent $100,000 on Facebook ads, and unleashed a troll army to wrote Facebook posts - which had a 0.004% change of being read - Putin then went for the kill, and assured himself a Trump presidency by splurging another $4,700 for Google ads and creating an additional 43 hours of video content. The rest is history.



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Sunday, October 29, 2017

Syria: NSA Acknowledges Salman Role in 2013 Ghouta Attacks - Veterans Today

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The NSA is actually acting like a positive force in releasing this information. I feel it is doubtful that Snowden had anything to do with the document’s release, as it was very difficult to get the story out back then. I knew the reporter covering the Saudi gas canisters on the ground days after the […]

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Hillary's corruption may change U.S. politics forever

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(FOX NEWS)

By Newt Gingrich

The Left has been desperately working for months to find any shred of evidence that Donald Trump had even the slightest connection to Russia during the presidential campaign. Despite having the full support of their friends in the media, they have consistently failed to find anything substantive.

At first, I assumed the liberal elites were simply driven by their inability to accept that the American people elected Donald Trump as their 45th president. Now, I have another theory: The Trump-Russia story is meant to serve as a pure distraction aimed at masking real corruption by the Clinton political machine.

As The Hill reported on Sunday, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, a Kremlin-linked bank paid her husband, former President Bill Clinton, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also during her tenure as top diplomat, earlier reports indicate Canadian and Russian business executives directed many millions more to the Clinton Foundation. In fact, citing recently unsealed Federal Bureau of Investigation reports, The Hill described a thorough Russian campaign aimed at gaining access to the Clintons and capitalizing on their influence, while also spying on them to advance a pro-Russia agenda. In 2010, the FBI arrested 10 so-called “sleeper cell” Russian spies who had reportedly become too close to Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, while serving as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was also overseeing a laundry list of U.S.-Russian initiatives and dealings.

Among other things, she served on the Committee on Foreign Investment, where she voted in favor of President Obama’s approval of the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian business, to a state-owned Russian nuclear energy outfit. At the time, the Canadian company controlled 20 percent of the U.S. uranium reserves.



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In Shocking, Viral Interview, Qatar Confesses Secrets Behind Syrian War

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A television interview of a top Qatari official confessing the truth behind the origins of the war in Syria is going viral across Arabic social media during the same week a leaked top secret NSA document was published which confirms that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the conflict.

And according to a well-known Syria analyst and economic adviser with close contacts in the Syrian government, the explosive interview constitutes a high level "public admission to collusion and coordination between four countries to destabilize an independent state, [including] possible support for Nusra/al-Qaeda." Importantly, "this admission will help build case for what Damascus sees as an attack on its security & sovereignty. It will form basis for compensation claims."

A 2013 London press conference: Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. A 2014 Hillary Clinton email confirmed Qatar as a state-sponsor of ISIS during that same time period. 

As the war in Syria continues slowly winding down, it seems new source material comes out on an almost a weekly basis in the form of testimonials of top officials involved in destabilizing Syria, and even occasional leaked emails and documents which further detail covert regime change operations against the Assad government. Though much of this content serves to confirm what has already long been known by those who have never accepted the simplistic propaganda which has dominated mainstream media, details continue to fall in place, providing future historians with a clearer picture of the true nature of the war.

This process of clarity has been aided - as predicted - by the continued infighting among Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) former allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with each side accusing the other of funding Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorists (ironically, both true). Increasingly, the world watches as more dirty laundry is aired and the GCC implodes after years of nearly all the gulf monarchies funding jihadist movements in places like Syria, Iraq, and Libya.

Since 2013 The Intercept (+WaPo?) hid NSA docs showing Saudi ordering 'rebel' attacks on Damascus. Now released. https://t.co/0PZrBKpJCw

— Julian Assange ???? (@JulianAssange) October 24, 2017

The top Qatari official is no less than former Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, who oversaw Syria operations on behalf of Qatar until 2013 (also as foreign minister), and is seen below with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in this Jan. 2010 photo (as a reminder, Qatar's 2022 World Cup Committee donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation in 2014).

In an interview with Qatari TV Wednesday, bin Jaber al-Thani revealed that his country, alongside Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States, began shipping weapons to jihadists from the very moment events "first started" (in 2011).

Al-Thani even likened the covert operation to "hunting prey" - the prey being President Assad and his supporters - "prey" which he admits got away (as Assad is still in power; he used a Gulf Arabic dialect word, "al-sayda", which implies hunting animals or prey for sport). Though Thani denied credible allegations of support for ISIS, the former prime minister's words implied direct Gulf and US support for al-Qaeda in Syria (al-Nusra Front) from the earliest years of the war, and even said Qatar has "full documents" and records proving that the war was planned to effect regime change.

"We argued over the prey and that prey run away".Ladies and Gentleman: To these people #Syria #Assad was nothing but a f....ing hunting game https://t.co/w4oKO5TTK6

— EHSANI2 (@EHSANI22) October 27, 2017

According to Zero Hedge's translation, al-Thani said while acknowledging Gulf nations were arming jihadists in Syria with the approval and support of US and Turkey: "I don't want to go into details but we have full documents about us taking charge [in Syria]." He claimed that both Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah (who reigned until his death in 2015) and the United States placed Qatar in a lead role concerning covert operations to execute the proxy war.

The former prime minister's comments, while very revealing, were intended as a defense and excuse of Qatar's support for terrorism, and as a critique of the US and Saudi Arabia for essentially leaving Qatar "holding the bag" in terms of the war against Assad. Al-Thani explained that Qatar continued its financing of armed insurgents in Syria while other countries eventually wound down large-scale support, which is why he lashed out at the US and the Saudis, who initially "were with us in the same trench."

In a previous US television interview which was vastly underreported, al-Thani told Charlie Rose when asked about allegations of Qatar's support for terrorism that, "in Syria, everybody did mistakes, including your country." And said that when the war began in Syria, "all of use worked through two operation rooms: one in Jordan and one in Turkey."

Below is the key section of Wednesday's interview, translated and subtitled by @Walid970721. Zero Hedge has reviewed and confirmed the translation, however, as the original rush translator has acknowledged, al-Thani doesn't say "lady" but "prey" ["al-sayda"]- as in both Assad and Syrians were being hunted by the outside countries.

#Qatar's ex PM says that Qatari support for jihadists including Nusra in #Syria was in coordination w/ KSA, Turkey & the US via @BBassem7 pic.twitter.com/tu8IMRI7IP

— Walid (@walid970721) October 27, 2017

The partial English transcript is as follows:

"When the events first started in Syria I went to Saudi Arabia and met with King Abdullah. I did that on the instructions of his highness the prince, my father. He [Abdullah] said we are behind you. You go ahead with this plan and we will coordinate but you should be in charge. I won’t get into details but we have full documents and anything that was sent [to Syria] would go to Turkey and was in coordination with the US forces and everything was distributed via the Turks and the US forces. And us and everyone else was involved, the military people. There may have been mistakes and support was given to the wrong faction... Maybe there was a relationship with Nusra, its possible but I myself don’t know about this… we were fighting over the prey ["al-sayda"] and now the prey is gone and we are still fighting... and now Bashar is still there. You [US and Saudi Arabia] were with us in the same trench... I have no objection to one changing if he finds that he was wrong, but at least inform your partner… for example leave Bashar [al-Assad] or do this or that, but the situation that has been created now will never allow any progress in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], or any progress on anything if we continue to openly fight."

As is now well-known, the CIA was directly involved in leading regime change efforts in Syria with allied gulf partners, as leaked and declassified US intelligence memos confirm. The US government understood in real time that Gulf and West-supplied advanced weaponry was going to al-Qaeda and ISIS, despite official claims of arming so-called "moderate" rebels. For example, a leaked 2014 intelligence memo sent to Hillary Clinton acknowledged Qatari and Saudi support for ISIS.

The email stated in direct and unambiguous language that: 

"the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region."

Furthermore, one day before Prime Minister Thani's interview, The Intercept released a new top-secret NSA document unearthed from leaked intelligence files provided by Edward Snowden which show in stunning clarity that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the war which has now claimed half a million lives.

The newly released NSA document confirms that a 2013 insurgent attack with advanced surface-to-surface rockets upon civilian areas of Damascus, including Damascus International Airport, was directly supplied and commanded by Saudi Arabia with full prior awareness of US intelligence. As the former Qatari prime minister now also confirms, both the Saudis and US government staffed "operations rooms" overseeing such heinous attacks during the time period of the 2013 Damascus airport attack. 

No doubt there remains a massive trove of damning documentary evidence which will continue to trickle out in the coming months and years. At the very least, the continuing Qatari-Saudi diplomatic war will bear more fruit as each side builds a case against the other with charges of supporting terrorism. And as we can see from this latest Qatari TV interview, the United States itself will not be spared in this new open season of airing dirty laundry as old allies turn on each other.



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Saturday, October 28, 2017

The One Paragraph You Need To Read From The JFK Assassination Files That May Change Everything

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Zero Hedge
October 28, 2017

TruePundit.com warns that one haunting paragraph unearthed from 3,000 never-before-seen documents will shake Patriots to their core about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Or perhaps worse. Make that haunting three paragraphs.

This is not pretty.

But it is likely President Donald Trump understands what Kennedy comprehended, which now appears to have led to his murder:

The out-of-control shadow government in this country threatens the fabric and the future of the United States.

See for yourself.

As a reminder, here is the position of the alleged shooter explained…

So how do ‘they’ explain this…

From Jan 31st 1964 FBI memo

For clarity…

…the “Surgeon General’s Report” on the assassination stated that the first bullet entered the President’s throat below the adams apple, clearly showing that two persons were involved with the first shot being fired from the bridge across the park way in front of the car.
To further substantiate this, POTITO said there was a bullet hole in the wind shield of the President’s car

Not exactly the narrative that was sold to the world – and certainly not the narrative that J. Edgar Hoover proclaimed must be defended to the world.

Here is Douglas P. Horne, via LewRockwell.com, detailing the photographic evidence of a bullet hole in JFK’s limousine’s windshield “hiding in plain sight.”

  • A d v e r t i s e m e n t

In 2009, I believed I had discovered new evidence in the JFK assassination never reported by anyone else: convincing photography of the through-and-through bullet hole in the windshield of the JFK limousine that had been reported by six credible witnesses. I revisited that evidence today, and am more convinced than ever that the bullet hole in the limousine windshield is what I am looking at in those images. But the readers of this piece don’t have to take my word for it — you can examine the images yourself, and make up your own minds. The evidence is contained in one of the banned, suppressed episodes of Nigel Turner’s The Men Who Killed Kennedy — episode 7 in the series, called “The Smoking Guns,” which was aired in 2003, and then removed from circulation by The History Channel in response to intense political pressure by former LBJ aides Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers.

I’ll tell you about the stunning evidence I have found in that episode at the end of this article, but first we need to set the stage by reviewing the eyewitness testimony about the damage to the windshield observed the day of JFK’s assassination, on Friday, November 22nd, 1963; as well as three days later, on Monday, November 25th, 1963.

Introduction

Before I reveal the details about the “new” photographic evidence I am talking about here, let’s review the Big Picture, the “evidentiary landscape” on this issue (see pages 1439-1450 of Volume V of my book, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, for full details):

(1) Dallas motorcycle patrolmen Stavis Ellis and H. R. Freeman both observed a penetrating bullet hole in the limousine windshield at Parkland Hospital. Ellis told interviewer Gil Toff in 1971: “There was a hole in the left front windshield…You could put a pencil through it…you could take a regular standard writing pencil…and stick [it] through there.” Freeman corroborated this, saying: “[I was] right beside it. I could of [sic] touched it…it was a bullet hole. You could tell what it was.” [David Lifton published these quotations in his 1980 book, Best Evidence.]

(2) St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Richard Dudman wrote an article published in The New Republic on December 21, 1963, in which he stated: “A few of us noted the hole in the windshield when the limousine was standing at the emergency entrance after the President had been carried inside. I could not approach close enough to see which side was the cup-shaped spot which indicates a bullet had pierced the glass from the opposite side.”

(3) Second year medical student Evalea Glanges, enrolled at Southwestern Medical University in Dallas, right next door to Parkland Hospital, told attorney Doug Weldon in 1999: “It was a real clean hole.” In a videotaped interview aired in the suppressed episode 7 of Nigel Turner’s The Men Who Killed Kennedy, titled “The Smoking Guns,” she said: “…it was very clear, it was a through-and-through bullet hole through the windshield of the car, from the front to the back…it seemed like a high-velocity bullet that had penetrated from front-to-back in that glass pane.” At the time of the interview, Glanges had risen to the position of Chairperson of the Department of Surgery, at John Peter Smith Hospital, in Fort Worth. She had been a firearms expert all her adult life.

(4) Mr. George Whitaker, Sr., a senior manager at the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant in Detroit, Michigan, told attorney (and professor of criminal justice) Doug Weldon in August of 1993, in a tape recorded conversation, that after reporting to work on Monday, November 25th, he discovered the JFK limousine — a unique, one-of-a-kind item that he unequivocally identified — in the Rouge Plant’s B building, with the interior stripped out and in the process of being replaced, and with the windshield removed. He was then contacted by one of the Vice Presidents of the division for which he worked, and directed to report to the glass plant lab, immediately. After knocking on the locked door (which he found most unusual), he was let in by two of his subordinates and discovered that they were in possession of the windshield that had been removed from the JFK limousine. They had been told to use it as a template, and to make a new windshield identical to it in shape — and to then get the new windshield back to the B building for installation in the Presidential limousine that was quickly being rebuilt. Whitaker told Weldon (quoting from the audiotape of the 1993 interview): “And the windshield had a bullet hole in it, coming from the outside through…it was a good, clean bullet hole, right straight through, from the front. And you can tell, when the bullet hits the windshield, like when you hit a rock or something, what happens? The back chips out and the front may just have a pinhole in it…this had a clean round hole in the front and fragmentation coming out the back.” Whitaker told Weldon that he eventually became superintendent of his division and was placed in charge of five plant divisions. He also told Weldon that the original windshield, with the bullet hole in it, had been broken up and scrapped — as ordered — after the new windshield had been made.

When Doug Weldon interviewed Whitaker in August of 1993, his witness insisted on anonymity. Weldon reported on the story without releasing Whitaker’s name in his excellent and comprehensive article titled: “The Kennedy Limousine: Dallas 1963,” which was published in Jim Fetzer’s anthology Murder in Dealey Plaza, in 2000. After Weldon interviewed Whitaker in August of 1993, Mr. Whitaker subsequently — on November 22, 1993 (the 30th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination) — wrote down all he could remember about the events he witnessed involving the Presidential limousine and its windshield. After George Whitaker’s death in 2001, his family released his written testament to Nigel Turner, who with their permission revealed Mr. Whitaker’s name, as well as the text of his “memo for history,” in episode 7 of The Men Who Killed Kennedy, “The Smoking Guns.”

In “The Smoking Guns,” the text of Whitaker’s memo can be read on the screen employing freeze frame technology with the DVD of the episode. It said, in part: “When [I] arrived at the lab the door was locked. I was let in. There were 2 glass engineers there. They had a car windshield that had a bullet hole in it. The hole was about 4 or 6 inches to the right of the rear view mirror [as viewed from the front]. The impact had come from the front of the windshield. (If you have spent 40 years in the glass [illegible] you know which way the impack [sic] was from.”

(5) The sixth credible witness to a bullet hole in the windshield of the limousine was Secret Service agent Charles Taylor, Jr., who wrote a report on November 27, 1963 in which he detailed his activities providing security for the limousine immediately after the car’s return to Washington following the assassination. The JFK limousine and the Secret Service follow-up car known as the “Queen Mary” arrived at Andrews AFB aboard a C-130 propeller-driven cargo plane at about 8:00 PM on November 22, 1963. Agent Taylor rode in the Presidential limousine as it was driven from Andrews AFB to the White House garage at 22nd and M Streets, N.W. In his report about what he witnessed inside the White House garage during the vehicle’s inspection, he wrote: “In addition, of particular note was the small hole just left of center in the windshield from which what appeared to be bullet fragments were removed.”

Summary of the Eyewitness Testimony About the Windshield Bullet Hole

Summarizing, six credible witnesses — Stavis Ellis, H. R. Freeman, Richard Dudman, Evalea Glanges, George Whitaker, and Charles Taylor — all reported seeing a bullet hole in the windshield of JFK’s limousine either on the day of the assassination (for five of the six witnesses), or on the following Monday (in the case of Mr. Whitaker, who did not see the limousine and its windshield until he reported to work at the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant, in Detroit, on Monday morning, November 25th, 1963).

Two of these witnesses — Evalea Glanges and George Whitaker — were absolutely positive that the bullet causing the damage had been a shot from the front, which had entered the front surface of the windshield, and exited the inside surface.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? Because if true, the windshield bullet evidence alone disproves the lone assassin myth aggressively promoted by the U.S. government for 49 years now, since the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was supposedly firing from above and behind the limousine as it traveled down Elm Street.

The Windshield Evidence Was Twice Switched-Out — Substituted — By the U.S. Government

The windshield in evidence today at the National Archives is not the windshield that was in the Presidential limousine on Elm Street, in Dallas, on November 22, 1963. It simply cannot be. Why? Remember, according to George Whitaker, Sr. of the Ford Motor Co., the original was destroyed, per company orders, after it was used as a template to make a replacement on November 25th, 1963.

But it gets much worse than that. The first replacement, the one installed by Whitaker’s two lab technicians in Detroit, was damaged on the wrong side by an incompetent Secret Service organization (incompetent not only at protecting the 35th President, but also in implementing a cover-up). Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman (who rode in the right front seat of the limousine in Dallas) testified before the Warren Commission, in March of 1964, that when he examined the windshield (obviously the replacement, installed by Whitaker’s team in Detroit) on November 27th, it was smooth on the outside, and damaged on the inside. This is consistent with damage caused by an impact on the front side of the windshield. (Safety glass exhibits damage on the opposite side from which it is struck). Researcher Robert P. Smith (as reported by David Lifton in Best Evidence) interviewed a Mr. Bill Ashby, crew leader at the Arlington Glass Company, who told Smith he removed the limousine’s windshield in Washington, D.C. on November 27th; this occurred after Roy Kellerman had felt the interior surface earlier that day and determined it to be damaged on the inside, and smooth on the outside.

But the windshield at the National Archives today exhibits long cracks — not a through-and-through bullet hole — and is damaged on the outside, which is the opposite of what Kellerman noted by physical examination on November 27th.

Co-owner Willard Hess of the automotive firm Hess and Eisenhardt in Cincinnati, Ohio told Doug Weldon that his company also replaced the windshield in the Presidential limousine, and that the glass removed was standard safety glass — consistent with what George Whitaker said his team reinstalled in the limousine in Detroit, immediately after the assassination. Hess and Eisenhardt replaced the standard safety glass with special bullet resistant glass made by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. (Presumably, the windshield removed by Hess and Eisenhardt was the second new windshield installed — by the Arlington Glass Company — on November 27th, 1963, and is the one in the National Archives today.) Mr. Hess told Weldon that the windshield his company removed was not damaged at the time it was removed.

The clear implication here is that the windshield in the Archives today, which exhibits cracks but not a bullet hole, was intentionally damaged by someone involved in the cover-up AFTER its removal by Hess and Eisenhardt.

This distressing (and depressing) tale of cover-up, deceit, and deception mirrors what was going on with the JFK medical evidence (namely, the President’s cranial wounds and throat wound; and the autopsy photographs and x-rays), and the Zapruder film, during the weekend following the assassination — that is, alteration and gross substitution. The pattern is the same, and the pattern is one of lying, and intentionally covering up the truth, by destroying some evidence, and substituting altered evidence in its place. All of this substitution of evidence — tampering with wounds prior to the commencement of the autopsy through clandestine post mortem surgery; the alteration of some of the key autopsy photographs and x-rays (and the destruction of others); and the alteration of the Zapruder film — was all intended to suppress evidence of shots from the front (i.e., proof of conspiracy), so the government could more easily promote its lone assassin cover story.

…And the U.S. Government Later Suborned Perjury in the Matter of the Damage to the Limousine Windshield

Unfortunately for Mr. Charles Taylor of the Secret Service, he — like Galileo Galilei before the Inquisition in the 17th century — was forced to recant, for he had committed heresy when he wrote in his official report on November 27th that he had observed a bullet hole in the windshield of the limousine as the car was closely examined in the White House garage the evening of the assassination, in 1963. In his 1976 recantation, an affidavit prepared for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), Taylor indicated that he changed his mind after examining the windshield stored in the Archives on December 19, 1975. Like Galileo, when prompted by his inquisitors, Taylor reversed himself, saying: “…I never examined this apparent hole [on November 22, 1963] to determine if there had been any penetration of the glass, nor did I even get a good look at the windshield in well-lighted surroundings…”. This is hardly credible. SA Kinney drove JFK’s limousine from Andrews AFB to the White House garage on November 22nd, 1963, and Taylor was the only passenger. The back seat bench (as revealed by horrifying color photographs taken in the White House garage) was still covered with gore, so we know Taylor did not sit there amidst the blood and brain tissue; and it is most doubtful that he sat in one of the uncomfortable jump seats in the middle of the car. Surely, he sat in the right front seat of the limousine all the way from Andrews AFB, to the garage where it was examined that evening — an ideal spot for noticing the bullet hole in the windshield, which would have been within arm’s reach for him. Inevitably, when the interior of the car was disassembled that evening inside the White House garage by FBI and Secret Service agents working together, the lights must have been on for this crucial joint inspection! Taylor reported on their activities in detail in his report, prepared on November 27th, 1963. The report makes clear that the agents could see what they were doing. In that context, consider Taylor’s written statement in his 1976 HSCA affidavit, about thirteen years later, in which he stated: “I have no doubt that the cracks [seen in the windshield placed in the Archives and in official photographs]…cracks in the inner layers of the glass only, are the ones I noticed on the trip from Andrews Air Force Base…it is clear to me that my use of the word ‘hole’ to describe the flaw in the windshield was incorrect.” Taylor’s sworn affidavit in 1976, shortly after he was asked by someone in government to examine the switched-out windshield deposited in the Archives, can only be viewed and described for what it was: perjury.

Previously Known Photographic Evidence of a Windshield Bullet Hole

As I documented in chapter 15 of my book, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, the famous “Altgens photo” taken on Elm Street, the one reported to be equivalent to Zapruder frame 255 in the extant film, appears to many who study it to show a bullet hole in the windshield in some of the versions of that photograph that have been published: namely, in The Torch Is Passed (1964), on page 16; in Groden’s The Killing of a President, on pages 30 and 36; on page 314 of Trask’s Pictures of the Pain; and in the version published in Fetzer’s Murder in Dealey Plaza, on page 149. The apparent bullet hole detected by many viewers in the Altgens photo appears to be just to the right of the rightmost edge of the rear view mirror, as seen from the front. But there is another Altgens photo taken on Elm Street, showing Jackie Kennedy on the trunk of the limousine after the assassination, which also shows damage in the area of the windshield that is left-of-center, as seen from inside the car. Frustratingly, the damage seen in this photograph appears to be some cracks emanating from a frosted white area of the windshield that is left-of-center. It is most clearly seen in The Torch Is Passed, on page 17; in my view, it is unclear whether we are looking at a round bullet hole with two cracks emanating from it, or simply cracks. The poor quality versions of this image published in The Killing of a President (on page 42) and in Pictures of the Pain (on page 316) are useless in resolving this issue.

Therefore, any additional photographic evidence captured the day of the assassination might prove decisive in resolving the windshield debate, once and for all — which leads us back to the headline of this journal entry: “Photographic Evidence of Bullet Hole in JFK Limousine Windshield Hiding in Plain Sight.”

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT SINCE 2003

On pages 1473-1474 of Volume V my book (in chapter 16), I wrote about the circumstances in which The History Channel, in 2003, was forced by political pressure and by threat of legal action to stop airing the remarkably popular seventh, eighth, and ninth episodes of the series The Men Who Killed Kennedy: “The Smoking Guns,” “The Love Affair,” and “The Guilty Men.” Not only did The History Channel agree to stop broadcasting the three episodes (which were getting very high ratings), but it also pulled all of the DVDs from stores (where they were selling like hotcakes), and agreed to stop selling the three episodes, which were packaged together in a two-disc, three episode A & E network video product titled: The Men Who Killed Kennedy: The Final Chapter, Cat. No. AAE-71255. (Thanks to Phil Singer of Chicago, I own a set of these three banned DVDs.)

Not only did former LBJ aides Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers engage in a high-profile publicity campaign against The History Channel, but an enraged Jack Valenti (who had long been the chief lobbyist in the nation’s capital for the motion picture industry) summoned the executive producer of episodes 7, 8, and 9 (including the LBJ episode, “The Guilty Men”) — Dolores Gavin — to Washington, D.C., where she was given the “Valenti treatment,” i.e., browbeaten and intimidated in private, in a rather brutal fashion. (I was informed of this by a Hollywood-based professional who had worked with her on the project; Dolores Gavin herself was the source of the information.) Shortly afterwards, The History Channel succumbed to this overt censorship and all three episodes were added to a new, twenty-first century Index Expurgatorius.

The presumptive cause of this Holy Edict of the American Establishment was the LBJ episode, “The Guilty Men,” which fingered Lyndon Baines Johnson with involvement in the JFK assassination conspiracy. But in retrospect, I now wonder if perhaps the real, principal (but unacknowledged) cause of the suppression was actually the episode titled “The Smoking Guns.” The LBJ episode may have simply been the excuse to ban “The Smoking Guns,” for this episode contains multiple evidentiary proofs of a U.S. government cover-up of the Kennedy assassination evidence.

The Stunning Content of “The Smoking Guns”

There is some “B-roll” in “The Smoking Guns” episode, only a little over two seconds long, which definitely appears to show the bullet hole in the limousine windshield — the through-and-through bullet hole described by the six credible witnesses cited above. This is shown during the segment of the program in which Evalea Glanges was interviewed. This “B-roll” footage appears between the times of 14:02 and 14:04 on the DVD, and consists of a total of 84 video frames (there are 30 video frames per second in a U.S. television broadcast). The black-and-white images appear to come from standard 16 mm B & W newsreel footage, taken by a stocky man wearing a hat who had approached the Presidential limousine as it was parked outside the Parkland Hospital emergency room (and before the bubble top was installed). The point of view (POV) of the camera was that of someone sitting in the limousine, or rather standing just beside it and to the right side. The camera is pointed at the inside surface of the windshield from behind — that is the POV. One man in a suit and tie can be seen standing on the front side, or forward of, the windshield, and two DPD motorcycle patrolmen (are they Ellis and Freeman?) can be seen leaning in and examining the windshield. What looks to me like a through-and-through bullet hole is visible in all 84 video frames, left of center on the windshield (adopting the POV of the camera) and approximately halfway down from the top, although these are only rough approximations. The location appears to be entirely consistent with that described by Charles Taylor and George Whitaker (above).

I wish to make something very clear here: you cannot access the images I am describing above in the U-Tube segment in which this episode has been put up on the internet. First, the timing is different in the U-Tube segment (13:08, vice 14:02), because the U-Tube segment was copied from the broadcast. [The factory DVD location of the clip is at a later point in the program, at 14:02, because of advertising material inserted at the beginning of the DVD.] Second, the size of the U-Tube presentation is so small on one’s computer screen, and the resolution so poor in comparison with a big screen HD television, that you can forget seeing this windshield bullet hole on U-Tube. The viewer needs the factory-produced DVD; a good DVD player with functioning frame-by-frame advance; and a big screen, High Definition (1080p) TV. The bullet hole shows up clearly on my 52″ SONY Bravia television. So anyone concerned with doing research here simply must obtain the factory-produced DVD.

Now, no doubt the “lone-nutter” crowd — both those who are in denial of the reality of an American coup in 1963 (because they can’t handle the truth), and the U.S. government’s third-party surrogates in the midst of the research community (whose job it is to cast doubt on all new research pointing to conspiracy and cover-up) — will react violently to this essay, and that is predictable. But you don’t have to listen to their opinions…EXAMINE THE EVIDENCE YOURSELF AND MAKE UP YOUR OWN MIND. Just obtain a factory-produced DVD of “The Smoking Guns,” by hook or crook (or E-Bay); put it in your DVD player; go to the specified time of 14:02 into the program; and then examine the 84 video frames, one at a time, on an HD big screen TV. You will find that video frames 1, 15, 31, 37, 47, 59, and 71 best depict the bullet hole. The 16 mm camera was hand-held, so there is some motion and some blurring of the images, and that is why some video frames are more clear than others. In my opinion, the best frames are #1 and # 71 in the windshield sequence.

Then consider how dangerous this two-seconds of “B-roll” footage is to the U. S. government’s contrived position on the assassination as we approach the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination: a through-and-through hole in the limousine windshield, made by a frontal shot traveling from front-to-back (as stated by George Whitaker and Evalea Glanges), all by itself, demolishes the lone-assassin myth still being perpetuated by the U.S. government and by its surrogates in the mainstream media in America. No wonder the establishment in America felt this episode had to be suppressed.

And consider the other reasons for its suppression. This episode also features Dr. David Mantik, M.D., PhD., eloquently and clearly discussing his conclusion — based on his nine visits to the National Archives to view the autopsy materials — that the autopsy photographs of the rear of JFK’s head are photographic forgeries. It also features former USIA photographer Joe O’Donnell discussing how White House photographer Robert Knudsen showed him two sets of post mortem photos of JFK’s head wounds late in 1963: one set that consisted of authentic, pre-alteration images, showing the true entry and exit wounds in the head (an entry wound high in the right forehead, and a large exit wound in the right rear of the skull); and another set of images that was post-alteration, with the entry wound high in the forehead no longer visible, and the back of the head seemingly intact. It also features Dr. Gary Aguilar, M.D., discussing in convincing terms G. Robert Blakey’s suppression of the content of interviews the HSCA conducted with JFK autopsy witnesses, and Blakey’s intentional misrepresentation of the contents of those interviews in the HSCA’s report; the JFK Records Act resulted in the “premature release” of the suppressed autopsy witness interviews in 1993, and the “Big Lie” in the HSCA report was exposed. (The HSCA report, in volume 7, stated that all of the Dallas doctors had to be wrong about the exit wound they recalled in the back of JFK’s head, since all of the autopsy witnesses the HSCA had interviewed said the wounds they observed matched the autopsy photos which show the back of the head intact. The release of the interview reports in 1993 revealed that the HSCA had lied about what those witnesses had said.) All of this, and more, was presented in this one key episode.

So ask your friends, go on E-Bay, and one way or another, get your hands on the banned episode of The Men Who Killed Kennedy titled “The Smoking Guns,” and see the bullet hole in the windshield yourself. Then compare it to the photographs of the windshield in the National Archives, and ask yourself what this sorry episode says about the integrity of our national government.

President Kennedy was killed in Dealey Plaza by a crossfire, meted out by shooters firing from multiple directions, from both the front and behind — therefore, he was felled by a conspiracy, by definition. The windshield bullet hole evidence, all by itself, proves a conspiracy; and its clumsy and unsuccessful suppression, all by itself, is proof of a government cover-up of the facts in President Kennedy’s assassination, since the U.S. government controlled all of the windshield evidence. The facts contained in this tale prove that we had a coup in America in 1963, and that powerful and influential people were still covering it up in 1975, and 1976, and 1979, and in 2003. Former CIA Director William Colby once said that everyone of any significance in the U.S. media was owned by the CIA. I believe it — otherwise, this windshield nonsense would have been exposed long ago on a show like “60 Minutes.”

I have expressed here my own strong opinion about what is shown in the 84 video frames visible in this documentary. A good follow-on step here would be to obtain the original 16 mm camera footage (presumably a black and white negative, not some multi-generational stock footage), perform a high-resolution digital scan of the film frames in Hollywood, and have them analyzed by motion picture professionals in the film industry who have no axe to grind — not by Gary Mack at the Sixth Floor Museum (who has never been to film school, or worked in the motion picture industry), or by any member of the JFK research community who has espoused a conspiracy or cover-up in the assassination. A true, third-party independent analysis of the camera negative, or of the earliest surviving generation of this newsreel footage, would be a good next step in the process of evaluating these images.

I have sounded the alarm here — and I am not afraid of a truly independent third-party analysis. Let’s do a little honest science here, and “let the chips fall where they may.”



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James Bovard: “How Facebook Censored Me”

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by James Bovard via USAToday.com,

Facebook said my post's image of a violent FBI raid 'incorrectly triggered our automation tools'... But it wasn't the first time an iconic image vanished...

Responding to Russian-funded political advertisements, Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg declared last month that “we will do our part to defend against nation states attempting to spread misinformation.” But Facebook is effectively sowing disinformation by kowtowing to foreign regimes and censoring atrocities such as ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. In the name of repressing fake news and hate speech, Facebook is probably suppressing far more information than Americans realize.

Facebook blocked a post of mine last month for the first time since I joined it nine years ago. I was seeking to repost a blog article I had written on Janet Reno, the controversial former attorney general who died last year. I initially thought that Facebook was having technical glitches (no novelty). But I checked the page and saw the official verdict: “Could not scrape URL because it has been blocked.”

“Pshaw!” I said, or some other one-syllable epithet.

I copied the full text of the article into a new blog post. Instead of using “Janet Reno, Tyrant or Saint?” as the core headline, I titled it: “Janet Reno, American Saint.” Instead of a 1993 photo of the burning Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, I substituted an irreproachable official portrait  of Reno. Bingo - Facebook instantly accepted that crosspost. I then added a preface detailing the previous blockage and explaining why I sainted Reno. The ironic headline attracted far more attention and spurred a torrent of reposts by think tanks and other websites.

I contacted Facebook’s press office to learn why the initial post was blocked. Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja checked into the matter and notified me that I would be permitted to post that link. "But why was it blocked?" I replied. She responded: “There was an image in the post that incorrectly triggered our automation tools. That issue has been corrected.”

So when did showing the home of more than 70 people engulfed in flames after a FBI assault become beyond the pale? Facebook presumably blocked everyone who sought to share that image from the most vivid law enforcement debacle of the 1990s.

This was not the first time Facebook erased an iconic image that the U.S. government would be happy to see vanish. Facebook likely deleted thousands of postings of the 1972 photo of a young Vietnamese girl running naked after a U.S. plane dropped napalm on her village.  After coming under severe criticism last year, Facebook announced that it would no longer suppress that image. Unfortunately, Facebook is unlikely to disclose a list of the images it bans. Because most Americans are clueless about current events and recent history, they will have little idea of what vanishes into the Memory Hole.

Zuckerberg also promised last month to continue working “to ensure our community is a platform for all ideas and force for good in democracy.” But the Facebook vision of democracy does not include freedom of information. Facebook instructs its employees that “we will not censor content unless a nation has demonstrated the political will to enforce its censorship laws.” But in such cases, Facebook happily teams up with heavy-handed politicians to crush dissent and suppress heretical notions.

In Turkey, IndiaPakistan and Morocco, Facebook routinely suppresses comments from regime opponents. Facebook cooperates closely with the Israeli government and “Palestinian groups are blocked so often that they have their own hashtag, #FbCensorsPalestine.”

In June, German police raided dozens of homes across the nation suspected of offensive social media postings and “conducted home searches and interrogations,” according to the New York TimesFacebook is deleting 15,000 posts a month in Germany but the government is threatening a $50-million-plus fine unless Facebook suppresses far more comments. Judith Bergman of the Gatestone Institute commented on the German mandate: "When employees of social media companies are appointed as the state's private thought police ... free speech becomes nothing more than a fairy tale. Or is that perhaps the point?" Other European nations are jumping on the suppression bandwagon. British Prime Minister Theresa May last month called on Facebook to remove purportedly extremist content within two hours of a government demand. 

Facebook is massively deleting posts from the victims of the ongoing slaughter of ethnic minority Muslims (known as Rohingya) by Myanmar's military. Facebook spokeswoman Budhraja explained to The Daily Beast: “We work hard to strike the right balance between enabling expression while providing a safe and respectful experience.”  What is the “right balance” regarding a brutal campaign that is creating hundreds of thousands of refugees and spurring denunciations all over the world?

Facebook last May announced plans to hire an additional 3,000 content reviewers to scrutinize and delete offensive or improper postings or false information. But catch-all notions of "fake news" can abet government coverups. Condemnations of Congress’ 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution were often considered “fake news” (or communist propaganda) until Americans learned how the Johnson administration deceived them into the Vietnam War. Allegations that the feds had any role in that Waco fire were labeled conspiratorial nonsense until 1999, when the Justice Department admitted that the FBI fired pyrotechnic devices into the ramshackle building before the conflagration. Assertions that foreign governments had any role in the 9/11 attacks were summarily condemned until recent disclosures about Saudi financing of the hijackers.

Unlike its role in many foreign nations, Facebook is not functioning as an official censor in the U.S. But the company’s nonchalance about engaging in the electronic equivalent of book burning abroad should spur wariness about its conduct here. 

There are far too many American politicians who would be happy to browbeat Facebook into silencing their critics.



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How the U.K. Prosecuted a Student on Terrorism Charges for Downloading a Book

ORIGINAL LINK

On the first day of the trial, Josh Walker wore a long navy jacket, a white shirt, beige pants, and black shoes. He stood outside the courthouse clutching a cigarette and shivering slightly in the cold morning air. “I’m beginning to feel nervous now,” he said, glancing toward the entrance of the court building.

Last summer, Walker traveled from London to Syria, where he joined the Kurdish-led YPG militia in its fight against the so-called Islamic State. After serving with the group for some six months, Walker returned to England, where he was charged under an anti-terrorism law.

Police had arrested Walker when he arrived at the airport. They later searched his apartment, turning up a copy of the infamous “Anarchist Cookbook,” which contains bomb-making instructions along with information about how to eavesdrop on phone calls and commit credit card fraud. Walker was accused of violating the Terrorism Act because he possessed information “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.” He faced the possibility of a 10-year jail sentence.

This week, Walker went on trial. After hearing four days of evidence, a 12-person jury at Birmingham Crown Court in England’s West Midlands found him not guilty. But questions remain about why the highly unusual case — which took months to prepare and cost large sums of taxpayer money — proceeded at all.

The Anarchist Cookbook was first published in 1971 and has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. Newer, updated versions are available freely online.

The week before the trial, 27-year-old Walker was in London visiting his lawyers. He was feeling optimistic. “I’m pretty confident that it’s going to go my way,” he said as he waited to board a train from Paddington Station back to Bristol in the southwest of England, where he has been living with his mother, Adele, while on bail.

But an element of doubt had crept into his mind by the time he arrived at the court on Monday morning. Before the trial began, Walker’s lawyer Joel Bennathan tried to get the judge to throw out the case. Bennathan called the prosecution “grossly disproportionate,” an “abuse of process,” and a breach of Walker’s right to “receive and impart information and ideas” under Article 10 of the U.K.’s Human Rights Act.

The judge, Mark Wall, nevertheless decided to proceed with the trial. It was an early blow for Walker, and not how he’d hoped the week would begin. In the dock, locked in a secure room behind a glass screen, he shook his head in disappointment.

As the case moved forward, the prosecution acknowledged that Walker was not suspected of plotting any kind of terrorist atrocity. The government was instead arguing that his mere possession of the book was a violation of the Terrorism Act’s Section 58 because it contained information that could have been useful to a terrorist if discovered. The book is freely available to anyone on the internet, and versions of it can even be purchased on Amazon. Regardless, prosecution lawyer Robin Sellers said it was possible a “radicalized” person could find Walker’s copy of the book and use it to prepare an attack.

The prosecution’s argument seemed bizarre and without precedent. People in the U.K. have been prosecuted before under the Terrorism Act for possessing the “Anarchist Cookbook,” but usually the defendants have been involved in some other kind of nefarious activity as well. In 2010, for example, a member of a violent neo-Nazi group called the “Wolf Pack” was convicted of a terrorism offense for possessing the book. He was linked, through his father, to a plot to overthrow the government and poison people. In another case, in 2011, a man was sentenced to three years in prison for selling the “Cookbook” and Al Qaeda training manuals, pocketing $113,000 in the process. Walker’s case was different: He was being prosecuted solely because he downloaded and stored a copy of the book.

The court was told that Walker had downloaded the book in May 2015, from the library at Aberystwyth University in Wales, where he was studying international politics and strategic studies. Walker had printed the book to use it for a role-playing “crisis game” group he was part of, in which students would act out dangerous world events to better understand how government officials make decisions during volatile, high-pressure situations. On this occasion, Walker was helping to organize a game that was going to simulate a terrorists-versus-security-services scenario, and he wanted to use the “Cookbook” as a reference for the kinds of weapons, bombs, and other criminal tactics the terrorist team would be allowed to deploy.

During the trial, three students who participated in the game corroborated Walker’s account. One of the former students, Samantha Barlow, said she was concerned at the time about Walker printing the book, as she thought it could get him in trouble. Nevertheless, she did not think that possession of the book itself was illegal, or that it was a “restricted document,” as police later told her. “I didn’t know we still had those in this country,” she told the court.

The crisis games had inadvertently caused trouble at the university in the past. After a previous game involving a terrorist scenario, students had left behind notes and papers that contained information about a phony terror plot that had been simulated as part of the game. A cleaner found the notes and, not realizing their purpose, reported them. Police officers were called in.

To avoid a similar mishap, Walker and his fellow students planned to destroy all their notes and documents after the game. They had a party at Aberystwyth’s South Beach, a 10-minute walk from the university’s Old College, and threw all the papers from the game onto a barbecue. But Walker — who told the court he had been drinking whiskey and smoking cannabis heavily that night — forgot to burn the “Cookbook.”

The prosecution claimed Walker had deliberately retained his copy of the “Cookbook” because he was “curious” about its contents. Walker denied this, saying he could not remember what he’d done with it after the game. Sellers, the prosecution lawyer, suggested Walker had endangered public safety by taking the book home and storing it in a drawer under his bed.

The government argued that his mere possession of the book was a violation of the Terrorism Act.

The anti-terrorism law Walker was charged under includes a defense for possessing documents that are likely to be useful to a terrorist. If you have a “reasonable excuse” for having the information, the law states, you have not committed a crime.

Walker had two “reasonable excuses” that his lawyer presented to the court. The first was that the document had an academic purpose: It helped inform his university game, educating students about terrorism and counterterrorism. The second was that after the game had finished, he forgot that the document was in his possession.

Walker’s case seemed to strengthen on Wednesday, when Sharon Marie Broome, an explosives expert with the British Ministry of Defence, told the court that while the makeshift explosive instructions in the “Anarchist Cookbook” were “credible,” much of the same information could be obtained from freely available books and academic literature.

Broome said that she had worked for 25 years assessing explosives, sometimes forensically analyzing devices used in real terrorist attacks perpetrated in the U.K. and overseas. Bennathan, Walker’s lawyer, pressed her on whether she had ever encountered a terrorist case that involved the use of the “Anarchist Cookbook.” She could not provide any examples.

Later on Wednesday, the pendulum appeared to swing back in the other direction, when Walker was called to the stand for the first time. He looked relaxed and assured at first, but as Sellers, the prosecution lawyer, pressed Walker on why he had not destroyed the “Cookbook” after the game, Walker grew agitated.

Sellers told Walker he never needed to download it in the first place.

“I am not suggesting you intended to follow any of the instructions in the book,” Sellers said.

“So why I am here then?” Walker snapped.

The judge reprimanded Walker for arguing with Sellers.

“I’m sorry, Your Honor,” Walker said, glancing up toward the judge. “I am just trying to defend myself.”

By the end of the session, Walker slumped in his seat, exhausted and deflated. He stepped down from the witness box and walked across the small courtroom to the public gallery, where his father was waiting.

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A group of Kurdish activists gathered outside Birmingham Crown Court in support of Josh Walker, on Oct. 23, 2017.

Photo: Ryan Gallagher

Because of his affiliation with the YPG in Syria, Walker has gained the backing of the U.K.’s Kurdish community. On the first day of his trial, a group of local Kurdish men and women, plus a small group of activists, stood outside the court for hours holding supportive banners. Several carried signs with a simple message: “We are proud of you Josh Walker.”

Among them was Chris Scurfield, whose son Kosta was killed in March 2015, the first Briton to die fighting against the Islamic State in Syria. Like Walker, Kosta was a volunteer with the YPG. “The government and the police really need to get their act together and work out who their friends are,” said Scurfield, who wore a small pin with a picture of his son on the lapel of his jacket.

“Take your freedoms for granted and you will lose them somewhere down the line.”

Although Walker’s possession of the “Anarchist Cookbook” was the focus of the case, his trip to Syria loomed over the proceedings. In the end, his effort to help fight the Islamic State in that country — risking his own life in the process — probably benefited his case. His defense team used it to show that he was of good character and to emphasize that he did not deserve the harsh punishment the government sought.

During closing arguments on Thursday, the prosecution reiterated its claim that Walker had no reasonable excuse to possess a copy of the “Cookbook,” which could “help someone planning to build a bomb.” That the book is freely available on the internet did not matter, argued Sellers, the prosecution lawyer. It was an issue of “personal responsibility,” he said, and it was the government’s view that possessing the book was unlawful, because it could be useful to terrorists.

Bennathan countered that we would be living in a “mad world” if a student were convicted of a terror crime for downloading a book. He told the jury they could choose not to live in that “mad world” by acquitting Walker of the alleged Terrorism Act offense. “Take your freedoms for granted and you will lose them somewhere down the line,” he said.

He also pointed out that Walker was probably the only person in the courtroom who had actually fought against terrorism by going to Syria and joining the YPG. “Back he comes, despite that background, and they choose to prosecute him,” Bennathan said.

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Josh Walker addresses the media outside Birmingham Crown Court on Oct. 26, 2017.

Photo: Ryan Gallagher

In a lobby area outside the courtroom, Walker’s parents anxiously awaited the jury’s verdict. Neither was confident enough to predict the outcome one way or the other. It was difficult to read the jury and gauge their responses to the evidence. Were they sympathetic?

Walker’s father, Dennis, 47, works as a carpenter and lives in Pembrokeshire, Wales. He had brought a copy of Charles Dickens’s novel “Hard Times,” which he was reading in an effort to take his mind off the proceedings. Wearing blue jeans and a green jumper, he was sitting on a bench outside the courtroom, hoping his son would not be jailed. “He hasn’t acted dishonorably as far as I am concerned,” the elder Walker said. “It’s shame that it’s come to this, … but it is what it is. We’ve just got to deal with it.”

After about an hour, a tinny-sounding announcement emanated from the court’s speakers: The jury had reached its verdict. The 12 jurors — eight men and four women — filed in and took their seats. Asked for their decision, the jury foreman stood: “Not guilty.”

There were gasps and cheers in the public gallery. Walker rose to his feet and, from behind the glass screen in the dock, clasped his hands and mouthed the words “thank you” to the jury across the room. A security guard standing inside the secure room with Walker pulled the keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. His mother, weeping, leapt from the public gallery and embraced him.

Walker almost sprinted down the courthouse steps. He was greeted outside by a small handful of Kurdish supporters, who shouted in celebration when they heard the result.

“I’m elated,” Walker said. “I’m just glad this is all over.”

“There are times in history and society when the law is wrong, when policy is wrong,” he said. “And it is up to us as citizens to put that right.”

He said he was not bitter about how he had been treated by the government, but he reserved some sharp criticism for the prosecutors. They “could have made much better use of their resources,” he said. “We’ve wasted a lot of taxpayers’ money on this.”

A spokesperson for the Crown Prosecution Service said in a statement that its decision to pursue the case against Walker was made “following detailed consideration of the evidence and in accordance with the Code for Crown Prosecutors.” The spokesperson added: “We acknowledge and respect the decision the jury has reached.”

As a free man, Walker can now make plans. He will soon return to work in Bristol, where he has a job as a kitchen porter in a restaurant; next year, he hopes to resume his university studies. In the immediate aftermath of his acquittal, however, there was only one thing on his mind. “I think we’re going for a drink,” he said, smiling.

Top photo: Josh Walker photographed in Birmingham, England, on Oct. 26, 2017.

The post How the U.K. Prosecuted a Student on Terrorism Charges for Downloading a Book appeared first on The Intercept.



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