Police State America –Volume One
Chapter 1-The Rise of the Police State
Chapter 4 — Universal Public Surveillance
Chapter 5 — Other Surveillance
Chapter 6 — Searching for Anarchists, or Maybe Just Political Activists
Chapter 7 — Winning the Information War
Chapter 8 — Arbitrary and Unaccountable Law Enforcement
Chapter 9 — The Militarisation of the Police
Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street
Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press
Chapter 12 — The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism
Chapter 13 — The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil
Police State America
Chapter 7 — Winning the Information War
Police State America – Volume One free e-book
As I have noted elsewhere, and in spite of the utopian American myths about freedom of speech, the US has never tolerated open dissent, especially the kind containing fundamental criticisms of the government. Dissension that is not heavily circumscribed and within an approved format has always been treated harshly. In one typical case that fails to appear in the history books under chapters of freedom, a US soldier named Walter Turnbull objected to the illegal US occupation of Hawaii by stating, “The President … as an institution is a disgrace to the whole God damned country. I’m sick and disgusted with the whole damned country, everything and everybody in it. I wish I could get where I would never hear the name of the United States again. Flag and country are a disgrace to humanity.” For exercising his rights to free speech and political dissension, Turnbull was dishonorably discharged from the military and sentenced to 26 years at hard labor. In a similar prior case, another soldier received a sentence of 40 years in prison for speaking his mind about US government crimes. In this context, little has changed in the US in the past 80 or 90 years.
The American media as a group boast of a remarkable level of free speech and freedom of the press, and parrot the government line that US intelligence agencies never spy on anybody except to ferret out terrorists, and that whistleblowers are adequately protected by the system. Yet the prominent and renowned Washington Post, the virtual mouthpiece of the US government, has been forced by circumstances to offer its readers a secure and encrypted method of communicating and forwarding news tips. The Post has instituted a system it calls SecureDrop, which it describes as “a discreet way for readers to share messages and materials with our journalists. It offers greater security and anonymity than conventional e-mail and Web forms … an application designed to encrypt your communications and obscure your computer’s IP address.” The Post advises its readers to “go to a place with a public Internet connection, one that you don’t normally frequent” – like a public library, copy a specific URL into the browser and download an encryption file, then use this site for emails after recording a codename that can be used to log in and check for replies. The US media gleefully boast that such precautions are necessary only in Axis of Evil countries, yet I am not aware of any other nation in the world where the major media have been forced to resort to such drastic measures to avoid surveillance and retribution from their own
government.
And with good reason. In early 2014 there was a case in Germany of a man who had finally been released after spending four years in a psychiatric institution as punishment for blowing the whistle on some criminal money transfers being made to a Swiss bank. He had unfortunately chosen some rather powerful people to irritate with his accusations – which were later fully justified and proven accurate – but he still spent the four years in a mental institution. I mention this because this method of silencing dissidents was not uncommon in the US in the past and appears in danger of being resurrected today.
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Ezra Pound
One of the most famous cases was of the renowned American poet Ezra Pound who spent 13 years as a political prisoner in a mental institution in Washington, DC, for questioning America’s motives in entering the Second World War. After President Roosevelt had Pound excommunicated from broadcasting in the US, Pound moved to Italy and continued his broadcasting efforts from there, attempting to enlighten Americans about the real causes and agenda of the war, the fact that it was a ‘banker’s war’, and encouraging them to stay out.
His biographer Humphrey Carpenter, a distinguished British radio broadcaster and author, wrote “Certainly there were Americans who would have agreed with virtually every word Ezra said at the microphone about the United States Government, the European conflict, and the power of the Jews”. Roosevelt finally bullied the Italian government into arresting Pound and deporting him to the US where he was charged with treason for his anti-war stance. But since there was no evidence of treason, the court deemed him “mentally unfit to stand trial” and had him imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital. There have been many such cases in the US but substantiating detail is difficult to obtain.
Returning to the present, in 2012 a young US war veteran named Brandon Raub was seized by the FBI and forcibly placed in a psychiatric institution after making a series of anti-government posts on Facebook, comments the authorities determined were “terrorist” in nature. Fortunately, public outrage obtained some good lawyers who forced the issue into a court, with the judge quickly throwing out the case and ordering Raub released immediately, declaring that the document committing Raub to a mental institution was “so devoid of any factual allegations that it could not be reasonably expected to give rise to a case”. The FBI claimed Raub’s Facebook posts were indicative of a terrorist, but the only posts of apparent consequence were those where Raub challenged the official narrative of 9-11, for example asking “where are the wings” of the plane that supposedly crashed into the Pentagon and, though the FBI denied it, it appears his incarceration in a mental institution was part of new program of intimidation to silence these so-called “conspiracy theorists”.
Hillary Clinton: “We are in an information war, and we’re losing that war”
When Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she lamented that “We are in an information war, and we’re losing that war” because, with all the attention directed to subversion of other countries’ governments with the likes of the VOA and Radio Free Europe, the Americans neglected their own dissidents who were increasingly disbelieving a great many official stories, including that of 9-11. There are now many more voices on the second and third tiers of the Internet, in effect creating their own microphone to challenge the stories of 9-11, the wars in Iraq and Libya, and much more, voices with growing audiences and which are difficult to silence. More in a moment.
Cass Sunstein
In the meantime, Cass Sunstein, the Jew who was Obama’s White House Information controller, was tasked with the problem of dealing with these “conspiracy theories” that were gaining sufficient momentum to force new enquiries into government cover-ups. His solution, beautifully couched in phrases like wanting to encourage Americans “to do what’s best for our society”, was in fact a blueprint for new laws that would force Americans to dilute their own free speech – by making these conspiracy theories illegal, to have doubts about government lies banned by law. He recommended that any website offering an alternative to the official government story – in other words, the truth – would be mandated by law to have automatic pop-ups containing the official government version, in fact that “government propaganda be forcibly included” on every such website, providing “a quick argument for a competing view”. He further insisted that such websites with political content be forced to list 25 “reliable” websites like CNN and Fox News. Yes, I’m serious, and so was he. This brilliant Harvard professor (wouldn’t you know he’d be a Harvard professor?), claimed that “any political opinion which didn’t concur with the establishment view, should be taxed or even banned outright”, the “tax” of course being a euphemism for a heavy criminal fine.
Our eminent and freedom-loving Jewish Harvard professor (the same one who’s exposing your kid to new and exciting cultures and ideas) created these proposals to counter the “dangerous” idea that the government might actually lie to the people, suggesting the government “ban conspiracy theorising”, censor their dissemination completely, or “impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories”. The ‘financial or otherwise’ is a euphemism for a prison sentence.
As Alex Jones wrote, “Essentially, Sunstein wants it to be written into law that the government can dictate the very nature of reality to Americans and that their opinions can only be voiced at best when accompanied by mandatory federal propaganda or at worst that Americans can be silenced entirely by federal decree.” They of course have good reason to be concerned, since polls indicate a majority of Americans believe 9-11 was a covert act carried out by Israel and the US governments, and that the collapse of the World Trade Center was not caused by the crashing aircraft but by explosives secretly planted in the buildings. Sunstein’s conspiracy paper contained this gem: “When civil rights and civil liberties are absent, people lack multiple information sources, and they are more likely to accept conspiracy theories. Our principal claim here involves the potential value of cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, designed to introduce informational diversity into such groups.” If I understand his comment, he is admitting Americans hold these attitudes of distrust and disbelief in their government because they have no remaining civil rights or liberties, and he doesn’t care to improve this situation but instead wants to infiltrate these “extremist” groups and introduce a bit of “informational diversity” into them. In other words, silence them by categorising them as extremists and terrorists, and threaten them with criminal fines, prison sentences, and involuntary incarceration in a psychiatric institution.
It is now no secret that various branches of the US government, the military and the espionage agencies are scouring the Internet, scanning all online comments in social media, posts on news sites and other public venues, to identify individuals who make posts and have a following, and to assign to them what it calls a “threat score” – not a threat to society but a threat to the government. In a Global Research article, it was reported from Reuters that “law enforcement authorities have since 2012 utilized an application called Beware that takes just seconds to crawl billions of records in commercial and public databases to assign a threat rating to an individual”. Even more, Sunstein, and the Demos group claimed the state needed to “fight back” against those who question the government’s official version of things – for the sake of “increasing trust in government”, naturally. Both recommend that dissident groups and ‘conspiracy theory groups’ be infiltrated and subverted “if they persist in publishing the truth about government corruption and atrocities”. Of course, the US and Israel governments already do this on a massive scale, employing large numbers of agents whose only job is to destroy the truth-seekers. Jones also reported that the Pentagon was expanding what it called “Information Operations” on the Internet by setting up fake foreign news websites, designed to look like independent media sources but in reality, carrying misinformation and propaganda.
Of course, identifying these anonymous individuals on the Internet is not always easy. In this vein, I discovered the most suspicious website calling itself the “Dissident Defense Network”, which claims to be “A network for the documentation of the harassment and persecution of dissidents, whistle-blowers and critics of the elitist rulers”. It tells us to “Look at us as the Amnesty International for dissidents and critics of the NWO system”. We are assured us that all who sign up will be “protected from publicity” and will be “followed up by other network members” to ensure that “everything is OK, at all times”. Sounds good. A place for all us dissidents and whistle-blowers to gather in complete safety without fear of exposure. In fact, when we sign up on this website, we agree to follow up (and be followed up by) other members, by telephone, by email, and – most importantly – by “regular personal meetings”. What could be safer than that? The website compassionately tells us that too many of us dissidents are feeling alone, and informs us that its “moderators” are actively “seeking dissidents who need some publicity” for their views, but who want to feel safe. We are assured that their “dissidents on file” will be regularly monitored (to ensure that everything is “fine”), and that the moderators will faithfully document everything that we do between follow-up sessions. Now, wouldn’t you feel safe, belonging to an organisation like this? Of course you would. This is America, where you can believe everything you read.
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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 —Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
2186604556@qq.com
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