The All-Seeing Fourth Branch of Government

Just recall George Orwell's novel 1984 if you didn't realize what this article is about after seeing the headline...

Make Way for the Snitch State: The All-Seeing Fourth Branch of Government

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

 

“It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”—Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche To Archetype

We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors.

This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

This far-reaching surveillance has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum.

Indeed, long before the National Security Agency (NSA) became the agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration were carrying out their own secret mass surveillance on an unsuspecting populace.

Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.

Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine.

It’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.

We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, even our gait—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.

All of those internet-connected gadgets we just have to have (Forbes refers to them as “(data) pipelines to our intimate bodily processes”)—the smart watches that can monitor our blood pressure and the smart phones that let us pay for purchases with our fingerprints and iris scans—are setting us up for a brave new world where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

For instance, imagine what the government could do (and is likely already doing) with voiceprint technology, which has been likened to a fingerprint. Described as “the next frontline in the battle against overweening public surveillance,” the collection of voiceprints is a booming industry for governments and businesses alike. As The Guardian reports, “voice biometrics could be used to pinpoint the location of individuals.”

We are now the unwitting victims of an interconnected, tightly woven, technologically evolving web of real-time, warrantless, wall-to-wall mass surveillance that makes the spy programs spawned by the USA Patriot Act look like child’s play.

Fusion centers. See Something, Say Something. Red flag laws. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.

These are all part and parcel of the widening surveillance dragnet that the government has used and abused in order to extend its reach and its power.

The COVID-19 pandemic has succeeded in acclimating us even further to being monitored, tracked and reported for so-called deviant or undesirable behavior.

Consequently, we now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of SWAT police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted.

This Kafkaesque nightmare has become America’s reality.

Despite the fact that its data snooping has been shown to be ineffective at detecting, let alone stopping, any actual terror attacks, the government continues to operate its domestic spying programs largely in secret, carrying out warrantless mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone calls, emails, text messages and the like.

The question of how to deal with government agencies and programs that operate outside of the system of checks and balances established by the Constitution forces us to contend with a deeply unsatisfactory and dubious political “solution” to a problem that operates beyond the reach of voters and politicians: how do you hold accountable a government that lies, cheats, steals, sidesteps the law, and then absolves itself of wrongdoing?

Certainly, the history and growth of the NSA tracks with the government’s insatiable hunger for ever-great powers.

Since its official start in 1952, when President Harry S. Truman issued a secret executive order establishing the NSA as the hub of the government’s foreign intelligence activities, the agency—nicknamed “No Such Agency”—has operated covertly, unaccountable to Congress all the while using taxpayer dollars to fund its secret operations. It was only when the agency ballooned to 90,000 employees in 1969, making it the largest intelligence agency in the world with a significant footprint outside Washington, DC, that it became more difficult to deny its existence.

In the aftermath of Watergate in 1975, the Senate held meetings under the Church Committee in order to determine exactly what sorts of illicit activities the American intelligence apparatus was engaged in under the direction of President Nixon, and how future violations of the law could be stopped. It was the first time the NSA was exposed to public scrutiny since its creation.

The investigation revealed a sophisticated operation whose surveillance programs paid little heed to such things as the Constitution. For instance, under Project SHAMROCK, the NSA spied on telegrams to and from the U.S., as well as the correspondence of American citizens. Moreover, as the Saturday Evening Post reports, “Under Project MINARET, the NSA monitored the communications of civil rights leaders and opponents of the Vietnam War, including targets such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohammed Ali, Jane Fonda, and two active U.S. Senators. The NSA had launched this program in 1967 to monitor suspected terrorists and drug traffickers, but successive presidents used it to track all manner of political dissidents.”

Senator Frank Church (D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated the NSA, understood only too well the dangers inherent in allowing the government to overstep its authority in the name of national security. Church recognized that such surveillance powers “at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”

Noting that the NSA could enable a dictator “to impose total tyranny” upon an utterly defenseless American public, Church declared that he did not “want to see this country ever go across the bridge” of constitutional protection, congressional oversight and popular demand for privacy. He avowed that “we,” implicating both Congress and its constituency in this duty, “must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

The result was the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the creation of the FISA Court, which was supposed to oversee and correct how intelligence information is collected and collated. The law requires that the NSA get clearance from the FISA Court, a secret surveillance court, before it can carry out surveillance on American citizens. Fast forward to the present day, and the so-called solution to the problem of government entities engaging in unjustified and illegal surveillance—the FISA Court—has unwittingly become the enabler of such activities, rubberstamping almost every warrant request submitted to it.

The 9/11 attacks served as a watershed moment in our nation’s history, ushering in an era in which immoral and/or illegal government activities such as surveillance, torture, strip searches, SWAT team raids are sanctioned as part of the quest to keep us “safe.”

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans’ phone calls and emails. That wireless wiretap program was reportedly ended in 2007 after the New York Times reported on it, to mass indignation.

Nothing changed under Barack Obama. In fact, the violations worsened, with the NSA authorized to secretly collect internet and telephone data on millions of Americans, as well as on foreign governments.

It was only after whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that the American people fully understood the extent to which they had been betrayed once again.

Even so, nothing really changed.

Since then, presidents, politicians, and court rulings have come and gone, but none of them have done much to put an end to the government’s “technotyranny.”

At every turn, we have been handicapped in our quest for transparency, accountability and a representative democracy by an establishment culture of secrecy: secret agencies, secret experiments, secret military bases, secret surveillance, secret budgets, and secret court rulings, all of which exist beyond our reach, operate outside our knowledge, and do not answer to “we the people.”

Yet the surveillance sector is merely one small part of a shadowy permanent government comprised of unelected bureaucrats who march in lockstep with profit-driven corporations that actually runs Washington, DC, and works to keep us under close watch and, thus, under control. For example, Google openly works with the NSA, Amazon has built a massive $600 million intelligence database for the CIA, and the telecommunications industry is making a fat profit by spying on us for the government.

Most recently, the Biden Administration indicated it may be open to working with non-governmental firms in order to warrantlessly monitor citizens online.

This would be nothing new, however. Vast quantities of the government’s digital surveillance is already being outsourced to private companies, who are far less restrained in how they harvest and share our personal data.

In this way, Corporate America is making a hefty profit by aiding and abetting the government in its militarized domestic surveillance efforts.

Cue the dawning of what The Nation refers to as “the rise of a new class in America: the cyberintelligence ruling class. These are the people—often referred to as ‘intelligence professionals’—who do the actual analytical and targeting work of the NSA and other agencies in America’s secret government. Over the last [20] years, thousands of former high-ranking intelligence officials and operatives have left their government posts and taken up senior positions at military contractors, consultancies, law firms, and private-equity firms. In their new jobs, they replicate what they did in government—often for the same agencies they left. But this time, their mission is strictly for-profit.”

The snitch culture has further empowered the Surveillance State.

As Ezra Marcus writes for the New York Times, “Throughout the past year, American society responded to political upheaval and biological peril by turning to an age-old tactic for keeping rule breakers in check: tattling.”

This new era of snitch surveillance is the lovechild of the government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs combined with the self-righteousness of a politically correct, technologically-wired age.

Marcus continues:

“Technology, and our abiding love of it, is crucial to our current moment of social surveillance. Snitching isn’t just a byproduct of nosiness or fear; it’s a technological feature built into the digital architecture of the pandemic era — specifically when it comes to software designed for remote work and Covid-tracing… Contact tracing apps … have started to be adapted for other uses, including criminal probes by the Singaporean government. If that seems distinctly worrying, it might be useful to remember that the world’s most powerful technology companies, whose products you are likely using to read this story, already use a business model of mass surveillance, collecting and selling user information to advertisers at an unfathomable scale. Our cellphones track us everywhere, and our locations are bought and sold by data brokers at incredible, intimate detail. Facial recognition software used by law enforcement trawls Instagram selfies. Facebook harvests the biometric data of its users. The whole ecosystem, more or less, runs on snitching.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we are dealing with today is not just a beast that has outgrown its chains but a beast that will not be restrained.

*

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org

UFO Report To Promote Arms Race!

If a real enemy does not exist, it has to be artificially created to increase military spending...

MSM Wastes No Time Using Senate UFO Report To Promote Arms Race

by Caitlin Johnstone

The New York Times has published an article on the contents of the hotly anticipated US government report on UFOs, as per usual based on statements of anonymous officials, and as per usual promoting narratives that are convenient for imperialists and war profiteers.

Together with one voice, the anonymous US officials and the "paper of record" which is supposed to scrutinize US officials assure us definitively that the mysterious aerial phenomena that have reportedly been witnessed by military personnel are certainly not any kind of secret US technology, but could totally be aliens and could definitely be a sign that the Russians or Chinese have severely lapped America's lagging military development.

"The report determines that a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology," NYT was reportedly told by the officials. "That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret."

Oh well if the US government has ruled out secret US government weaponry programs, hot damn that's good enough for me. Great journalism you guys.

One senior official said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology.

He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology https://t.co/bgYtohKC9O

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) June 4, 2021

"Intelligence officials believe at least some of the aerial phenomena could have been experimental technology from a rival power, most likely Russia or China," the Times reports. "One senior official briefed on the intelligence said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology. He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology."

"Russia has been investing heavily in hypersonics, believing the technology offers it the ability to evade American missile-defense technology," NYT adds. "China has also developed hypersonic weaponry, and included it in military parades. If the phenomena were Chinese or Russian aircraft, officials said, that would suggest the two powers’ hypersonic research had far outpaced American military development."

The article goes on to describe how the US military have been "unsettled" by aircraft moving and behaving in ways known technologies cannot explain. The implication of scary foreign adversaries having "outpaced American military development" to such an extent is of course that the US military is going to require a far bigger budget with far more intensive weapons development.

This would be the same New York Times that has consistently supported all of the US military's devastating acts of mass murder around the world, by the way.

This won't be the last time we hear the imperial media warning us that UFOs may be a sign of a frightening gap in technology leaving the US defenseless against far more powerful foreign foes, and they've already been priming us for it. Republican Rachel Maddow aka Tucker Carlson has been shrilly pushing this narrative for weeks now and demanding that the US government do more to address the fact that in alleged encounters with these aircraft, "our military was completely outmatched technologically by whatever these were."

"UFOs, it turns out, are real, and whatever else they are, they’re a prima facie challenge to the United States military," Carlson said on a segment last month. "They’re doing things the U.S. military does not allow, and they’re doing it with impunity. And they appear to be focused on the U.S. military."

"Why isn’t the Pentagon more focused on this? It seems like a threat if there ever was one," Carlson huffed.

In another segment Carlson had on military intelligence veteran Luis Elizondo, a leading figure in the steadily intensifying new UFO narrative which kicked off in 2017, claiming the aforementioned Senate report on the subject will reveal "an intelligence failure on the part of the US intel community on the level of 9/11."

"If there's a foreign adversary that can put a nuclear warhead within moments over Washington DC, okay, that's a problem," Elizondo told Carlson's Fox News audience.

All this over some completely unverifiable testimony, and a few videos being confirmed by the Pentagon which can all be explained by easily identifiable mundane phenomena.

I can't predict the future, but I won't be at all surprised if we begin seeing this arms race angle become the dominant aspect of this UFO story in the coming months/years. It would certainly fit the pattern of the US war machine and mass media promoting completely unverifiable allegations about foreign governments to justify further cold war escalations.

In the early sixties President John F Kennedy falsely promoted the "missile gap" narrative, telling the public that the Soviet Union had surpassed the United States in nuclear weapons when he knew full well the US nuclear arsenal had always far surpassed the USSR's in number, quality and deployment. Kennedy used this hawkish narrative to win an election and advance the largest peacetime expansion of US military power ever, leading directly to the events which gave rise to the Cuban Missile Crisis which came far closer to ending our world than most of us like to think about.

I have no idea what if anything is going on with these UFO phenomena, but I do know the world-threatening new cold war the US is waging against Russia and China is insane. There is no valid reason our planet's dominant power structures cannot at the very least cease brandishing armageddon weapons at each other and begin collaborating toward a better world together.

Reject the propagandists and cold warriors, no matter how elaborate or bizarre their manipulations become. Keep an eye on these bastards, and help spread awareness of what they're about.

= = =

Media Converges On The Narrative That UFOs May Be Russian/Chinese Threat

by Caitlin Johnstone

So in case you haven't been keeping up it's been pretty thoroughly confirmed that the US government's highly anticipated UFO report due this month won't contain any significant revelations and certainly won't verify anyone's ideas about these phenomena being extraterrestrial in origin, but it absolutely will contain fearmongering that UFOs could be evidence that the US has fallen dangerously behind Russian and Chinese technological development in the cold war arms race.

Unknown US officials have done a print media tour speaking to the press on condition of anonymity (of course), with first The New York Times reporting their statements about the contents of the UFO report and then CNN and The Washington Post. Each of these outlets reported the same thing: the US government doesn't know what these things are but is very concerned they constitute evidence that Russia and/or China have somehow managed to technologically leapfrog US military development by light years. All three mention these two nations explicitly.

This narrative was then picked up by cable news, with MSNBC inviting former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta on to explain to their audience that the US government should assume UFOs are Russian or Chinese in origin until that possibility has been exhausted.

"Is it your assumption that it is Russia or China testing some crazy technology that we somehow don't have, or are we sort of over-assuming the abilities of China and Russia and that the only other explanation is that if it is not us ourselves then it is something otherworldly?" MSNBC's Chuck Todd asked Panetta.

"I believe a lot of this stuff probably could be countries like Russia, like China, like others, who are using now drones, using the kind of sophisticated weaponry that could very well be involved in a lot of these sightings," Panetta replied. "I think that's the area to go to very frankly in order to identify what's happening."

"It sounds like you think we should exhaust that out, exhaust that hypothesis first before you start dealing with other hypotheses," Todd said.

"Yeah, absolutely," said Panetta, who for the record is every bit as much of a tyrannical, thuggish imperialist cold warrior as any other CIA director.

This UFOs-as-Chinese/Russian-threat narrative has quickly been picked up and thrust into mainstream orthodoxy by all the major branches of the mass media, from Fox News to Reuters to The Guardian to Today to the BBC to USA Today. Whenever you see the imperial media converge to this extent upon a single narrative, that's the Official Narrative of the empire. We can expect to see a lot more of this going forward.

Interestingly, the only mass media segment I've seen on this topic since the New York Times story broke which doesn't promote the UFOs-as-Chinese/Russian-threat narrative is a guest appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight by Lue Elizondo, the military intelligence veteran who got the ball rolling on the new UFO narrative which emerged in 2017. Elizondo goes out of his way to tell Carlson (who himself has been promoting the idea that UFOs may be a foreign adversarial threat with cartoonish melodrama) that there's no way these could be Russian or Chinese aircraft.

Elizondo, who seems to favor the UFOs-as-extraterrestrials narrative, argues that there are extensive records of military encounters with these phenomena stretching back seventy years, which rules out China since it could barely keep its head above water back then and rules out Russia because it shared its UFO knowledge with the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I don't know what's going on with that last bit; I see no reason to trust that an American spook is acting in good faith on such an easily manipulated topic, but it is entirely possible that Elizondo set out on this road out of a sincere desire for government disclosure on UFOs and is now trying to regain control of the narrative now that he sees the cold war arms race direction it has taken.

Chris Melon, another major player in the new UFO narrative, recently complained on Twitter that "some important information was not shared" with the public in the UFO report. So who knows, maybe the initiators of this new UFO narrative were acting in good faith and their efforts were just swiftly hijacked by forces beyond their control to advance preexisting cold war agendas.

Clearest indication yet that the Imminent UAP report to Congress was neutered by access problems, this from @ChristopherKMe4: “Undoubtedly, some important information was not shared, potentially for a variety of reasons. Congress should inquire about that” https://t.co/9jmZRDFdsH  — Ross Coulthart (@rosscoulthart) June 5, 2021

Regardless of whether or not that's true, it was always inevitable that this strange new rabbit hole of UFOs going mainstream was going to lead to more cold war propaganda. I've been interacting a bit with the online UFO community for the first time ever, and it seems like they're mostly decent people with good intentions and a lot of hope for this new governmental investigation. But it also seems like they're largely a community which mostly just talks to itself and is only just beginning to meet the cold harsh light of day that is the impenetrable depravity of the US war machine.

The US government is pure swamp; you can't use the swamp to fix the swamp. Democrats were never going to use a Special Counsel to remove Trump, Trump was never going to take down the Deep State, and the US government isn't going to investigate itself and tell everyone that aliens are real.

If there are indeed extraterrestrials and they are indeed flying around our world in strange aircraft, we are more likely to get the truth about this from the extraterrestrials themselves than from the US military. The war machine only does killing and destruction; it's not going to suddenly develop an interest in truth and transparency. The sooner UFO enthusiasts realize this the better.

A New World Order Brought to You by COVID-19

 “A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power.”? Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

The Global Deep State: A New World Order Brought to You by COVID-19
By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead
April 29, 2021

For good or bad, COVID-19 has changed the way we navigate the world.

It is also redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up.

Owing in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations, it has become increasingly obvious that we have entered into a new world order — a global world order — made up of international government agencies and corporations.

This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

We’ve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which has seen governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, has shifted this transformation into high gear.

Fascism has become a global menace

It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, the pharmaceutical industry and, most recently, by the pharmaceutical-health sector.

All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care

Global Disease

The COVID-19 pandemic has propelled us into a whole new global frontier. Those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes will find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.

We are about to find our ability to access, engage and move about in the world dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who have not.

“It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”

This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.

Global Surveillance

Spearheaded by the National Security Agency (NSA), which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.

Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice.

Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:

    “The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”

Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).

Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.

Global War Profiteering

War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).

Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.

Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure,  spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.

It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

Global Policing

Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.

There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.

For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Interceptsums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”

This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerancewithin their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.

The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.

Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

Are you starting to get the picture now?

On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, you can bet that the government and its global partners have already struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has perished.

In its place is a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.

Given the trajectory and dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.

It’s taken less than a generation for our freedoms to be eroded and the Global Deep State’s structure to be erected, expanded and entrenched.

Mark my words: the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the Global Deep State.

Now there are those who will tell you that any mention of a New World Order government—a power elite conspiring to rule the world—is the stuff of conspiracy theories.

I am not one of those skeptics.

I wholeheartedly believe that one should always mistrust those in power, take alarm at the first encroachment on one’s liberties, and establish powerful constitutional checks against government mischief and abuse.

I can also attest to the fact that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I have studied enough of this country’s history—and world history—to know that governments (the U.S. government being no exception) are at times indistinguishable from the evil they claim to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

And I have lived long enough to see many so-called conspiracy theories turn into cold, hard fact.

Remember, people used to scoff at the notion of a Deep State (a.k.a. Shadow Government). They used to doubt that fascism could ever take hold in America, and sneer at any suggestion that the United States was starting to resemble Nazi Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power.

As I detail in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re beginning to know better, aren’t we?

*
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org

Challenges in repatriating India's stolen treasures

Germany will return the Benin Bronzes that were stolen from present-day Nigeria, but the path for India to get back its colonial treasures from the UK is still bumpy.

The uphill battle to repatriate India's stolen treasures
DW, May 28, 2021

The list of Indian artifacts that were stolen in colonial times and are now in the United Kingdom is long. After all, the British Empire was the largest colonial power in its time, and India was its biggest colony, the "jewel" of the crown.

Artifacts that the British seized, looted or took away as "gifts" include the 105.6-karat "Koh-i-noor" diamond, which adorned Queen Victoria's brooch and following that, the Queen Mother's crown; the Buddha's shrine from the Amaravati monument, in southeast India; and a wooden tiger that was seized from Tipu Sultan, a southern Indian ruler, after he was defeated by the British in the 18th century.

Today they are displayed, among other places, in the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), which also has an impressive collection of bronze statues from Benin. These were acquired by the British during a punitive expedition in the late 18th century to the Kingdom of Benin, located in present-day Nigeria.

Many of these statues landed in Germany, which recently announced it would return them to Nigeria .

Global volunteers trying to get back stolen art

Many Indians are still sensitive about artifacts that were stolen during the British conquest of India and have yet to be returned. "You took our lives. You took our natural resources. You took our heritage. You can't give back our lives and natural resources. At least give back our heritage," said Anuraag Saxena, who founded the India Pride Project (IPP) in 2014 to bring back historical artifacts that were taken from India during colonial times and after the country's independence in 1947.

"You haven’t really decolonized a nation, unless you’ve given back what’s theirs," he added.

Since its founding, the IPP has initiated many projects — some of which have been controversial. For example, in 2018, members of the group went to British museums and snapped pictures of Indian statues with speech bubbles carrying statements like "How did I get here?" and "I'm a deity, not a showpiece."

The uphill battle to repatriate India's stolen treasures

Germany will return the Benin Bronzes that were stolen from present-day Nigeria, but the path for India to get back its colonial treasures from the UK is still bumpy.

A photo of Tipu's wooden tiger shows a wooden tiger with a handle to wind it up pouncing on a wooden man who has fallen on his back. The wooden tiger belonged to Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore in the 18th century

The list of Indian artifacts that were stolen in colonial times and are now in the United Kingdom is long. After all, the British Empire was the largest colonial power in its time, and India was its biggest colony, the "jewel" of the crown.

Artifacts that the British seized, looted or took away as "gifts" include the 105.6-karat "Koh-i-noor" diamond, which adorned Queen Victoria's brooch and following that, the Queen Mother's crown; the Buddha's shrine from the Amaravati monument, in southeast India; and a wooden tiger that was seized from Tipu Sultan, a southern Indian ruler, after he was defeated by the British in the 18th century.

Today they are displayed, among other places, in the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), which also has an impressive collection of bronze statues from Benin. These were acquired by the British during a punitive expedition in the late 18th century to the Kingdom of Benin, located in present-day Nigeria.

Many of these statues landed in Germany, which recently announced it would return them to Nigeria .
A 1937 photograph of Queen Elizabeth as a child (pictured right) with her mother.

The Koh-i-noor, seen here on the Queen Mother's crown, with a young Queen Elizabeth

Global volunteers trying to get back stolen art

Many Indians are still sensitive about artifacts that were stolen during the British conquest of India and have yet to be returned. "You took our lives. You took our natural resources. You took our heritage. You can't give back our lives and natural resources. At least give back our heritage," said Anuraag Saxena, who founded the India Pride Project (IPP) in 2014 to bring back historical artifacts that were taken from India during colonial times and after the country's independence in 1947.

"You haven’t really decolonized a nation, unless you’ve given back what’s theirs," he added.

Since its founding, the IPP has initiated many projects — some of which have been controversial. For example, in 2018, members of the group went to British museums and snapped pictures of Indian statues with speech bubbles carrying statements like "How did I get here?" and "I'm a deity, not a showpiece."

In a written statement to DW, Saxena said the IPP was a network of global volunteers who have built "the case for India's stolen heritage to be brought back home." According to the activist, who believes "history belongs to its geography," nations, museums, citizens and officials need to understand why this is the right thing to do.

"We have taken an academic issue and made it into a social movement," he says, adding that debating the issue solely from an academic perspective would be "glorifying the diagnosis, but ignoring the treatment."

So far, the IPP has successfully traced stolen statues to countries including Australia and the US, but most of these have been artifacts that were stolen from Indian temples after 1947. For example, a statue that was stolen and later emerged in Germany was returned to India in 2019, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited New Delhi.

Returning the works of art

The "Koh-i-noor," whose name means "mountain of light" in Persian, has been claimed by at least four countries, including Iran and Pakistan. While India has always claimed the diamond as its own, the story behind the coveted gemstone got a new twist in 2016:

That year, Ranjit Kumar, India's solicitor general, the country's top lawyer, stated at a Supreme Court hearing in New Delhi that the diamond "was neither stolen nor taken away … It was given voluntarily by Ranjit Singh [the king of Punjab] to the British as compensation for help in the Sikh wars [in the 19th century]."

The statement appeared shortly after Prince William and his wife Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, visited New Delhi and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Should Prince William one day ascend the throne and the Duchess become queen consort, she is expected to wear the crown with the diamond. Incidentally, the diamond is traditionally considered "unlucky" for men.

The Indian government's declaration triggered a public outcry, and four years later, the government again appealed to the UK to return the treasures. Subsequently, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office replied, "The British Museum Act 1963 prevents our national museums from removing items … the government has no plan to change the law."

According to the act, museums cannot dispose of the objects in their collections, except in a few special cases and unless it is necessary to remove them "temporarily for any purpose connected with the administration of the Museum and the care of its collections."

Decontextualizing art

Despite the legislation, some UK institutions have gone ahead and returned historical objects to former colonies. They include the University of Edinburgh, which returned nine skulls of the Vedda people to Sri Lanka in 2019, and Manchester Museum, part of Manchester University, which returned 43 objects to Indigenous groups in Australia in the same year.

However, others, like the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Museum, claim they cannot return historical artifacts, either because of the Museums Act or because keeping the objects in the UK would be in the interest of the global community.

While the V&A Museum did not react to DW's requests for statements, the museum has been very clear about its attitude towards returning colonial artifacts.

In a 2019 essay for The Guardian newspaper, Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, argues why museums should not automatically give in to demands for restitution of exhibits that were procured in former colonies. For Hunt, a discussion on the restitution of colonial exhibits is particularly important for the V&A museum, which he said expanded "in line with the growth of the British empire."

"In Britain's colonies and spheres of influence, the practice of collecting was closely tied to the dominating psychology of colonialism," he wrote. Regardless, Hunt's argument is that one needs to separate the artworks from their context for decolonization to be successful.

He therefore advocates the creation of "universal museums," not only in Europe, but also in Africa and Asia, which would separate "the universal, encyclopedic museum from its colonial preconditions and reimagine it as a new medium for cultural understanding."

Problems in India

The road to restitution is tricky not only in the former colonial power but also in India, where there are no established processes to take back artifacts and some experts claim Indian authorities do not take care of such items properly.

Heritage theft also remains a rampant problem, with UNESCO, the UN agency for culture, saying poverty in the country fuels the theft of antiquities, and poor protection of historical monuments also adds to the problem.

In Blood Buddhas, a documentary on stolen historical treasures, filmmaker Nikhil Singh Rajputt touches upon the handling of objects that have been returned to New Delhi. Most of the 28 or so artifacts that were returned between 2014 and 2018 by the US, Australia, Canada and Germany have been handed over to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), a government agency responsible for cultural monuments.

They are stored at an ASI warehouse in Delhi's Purana Qila ("Old Fort") without proper protection against theft or atmospheric stressors.

But in some people's eyes, these are hardly reasons that speak against restitution. As Indian member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor says in Blood Buddhas: "The fact that these things are protected only at a certain standard in India doesn't entitle somebody else to steal them and say, 'We can look after them better.' In any case, they didn't steal them because they could look after them better; they stole them first and found the justification later."

Saxena of the India Pride Project also agrees that the Indian government's standards for safekeeping heritage assets is not up to the mark. But there's hope: "Piecemeal legislation exists, but not a holistic framework. We'll get there," he says.

Germany apologizes for genocide against Namibians

Germany apologized for the genocide against the Herero and Nama in Namibia. But reconciliation cannot be taken for granted — now the hard work begins, writes DW's Daniel Pelz. 

Germany pledged to give €1 billion ($1.2 billion) towards reconstruction programs in Namibia as compensation.

Namibia's wounds will take time to heal
DW, May 28, 2021

Finally, Germany is officially accepting responsibility for the genocide against the Hereros and Namas. Finally, a German president is going to say the words they've been waiting to hear for over 100 years. Finally, Germany is not going to ignore this brutal crime any longer.

It's a big step forward, at least from a German perspective. But the first reactions from Namibia tell a different story. President Hage Geingob's spokesman has, rather diplomatically, called Germany's announcement "a step in the right direction." And a group of traditional leaders from the Herero and Nama communities have bluntly called it a "PR coup" and an offense against Namibia.

Anger among some Herero and Namas

Emotions are running high after almost six years of closed-door negotiations. Some Herero and Nama leaders have long demanded direct talks with the German government. They are not convinced that their communities are really going to benefit from the €1 billion ($1.2 billion) reconstruction program that Germany has announced. And they're angry about Germany's statements that there is no legal basis for reparations — which in their eyes sounds as if Germany views the apology as a kind of gift. Other Herero and Nama leaders have supported the negotiations. But nobody knows who is representing the majority.

A heavy burden of responsibility rests on the shoulders of the two governments. Germany's request for forgiveness is only going to be worth anything if the majority of Namibians accepts it. And that requires trust — a big challenge for German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. He has to find the right words to convince the skeptics that Germany is sincere — something he's capable of doing. The president is a man who knows about the power of words and how to find the right words at the right moment.

After an apology, the work begins

But it's not just about words. Gestures matter as well. Asking for an apology in front of the Namibian parliament is an important step. But it's equally important to repeat it in the home areas of the Herero and Nama, in front of them and in front of their memorial sites for the victims.

Beyond words, the work must continue. Reconciliation does not come about with the stroke of a pen. Reconciliation begins when streets and memorials in Germany no longer uncritically remember the perpetrators of colonialism, but the victims. Reconciliation begins when all German pupils learn about the genocide in school. Reconciliation begins when German tourists that come to Namibia do not just see the picturesque buildings from the German era, but also recognize the terrible history behind them.

Reconciliation begins when not just the president and the government, but a majority of Germans recognize the crimes German troops committed. Reconciliation begins, when the majority of all Namibians, particularly the Herero and Nama believe that Germany is serious about its request for forgiveness. Reconciliation begins, when Germans and Namibians one day stand and shed tears together in memory of the victims. There is still a long way to go.

Motivation behind US spying of Europe's subservient politicians

Thanks to Edward Snowden, it has been common knowledge for some time that the NSA had targeted Merkel and Steinmeier. His 2013 revelations sent shockwaves around the world. It was always obvious that secret service agencies, even those of democratic states, are not simply harmless associations. But the degree of ruthlessness and lack of scruple astonished even political heavyweights like Angela Merkel, a victim of the NSA's surveillance.

The Danish government knew of the involvement of their country's secret service in the NSA scandal by 2015 at the latest.

They began to collect information on the FE's cooperation with the NSA between 2012 and 2014 in the secret Dunhammer report following the disclosures by the former NSA employee and whistleblower Edward Snowden, NDR reported.

The information they gathered made it clear that the FE had helped the NSA to spy on leading politicians in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and France, as well as Germany.

Danish intelligence also helped the US agency to spy on the Danish foreign and finance ministries as well as a Danish weapons manufacturer. The FE also cooperated with the NSA on spying operations against the US government itself.

Upon discovering exactly how far the cooperation between the two countries' intelligence services went, the Danish government forced the entire leadership of the FE to step down in 2020.

US caught spying on EU ‘allies’ AGAIN…not like the Europeans will do anything about it
Tom Fowdy
RT : 31 May, 2021

A new report alleging the US was spying on European leaders through Danish intelligence services is not the first of this kind. Washington has been caught before, but there’s no will in the EU to assert its independence.

According to a report in Danish media, the country’s intelligence services had been working at the behest of the notorious US National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on leaders throughout Europe, including Germany’s Angela Merkel.

This is not the first time such allegations have been made, with the US having been accused of spying on Berlin in 2014 too. It’s also not the first time America used the Danish intelligence services as a medium – last year, a story surfaced claiming that Washington coordinated with them to spy on their own government in order to ensure Denmark would buy F-35’s as opposed to Eurofighters to replace its F-16s. In light of all these revelations, one has to question whether Denmark is truly even sovereign if its intelligence is de facto loyal to the US.

The surprising part about it is that none of these revelations are really new or unprecedented at all. It’s a well-established fact that the United States, despite calling them “allies” and embracing the rhetoric of
“transatlanticism” openly commits espionage on Europe and treats its leaders with a fulcrum of political suspicion, as if they are paranoid that the European Union may make decisions against their interests. This is deeply ironic for an America which has strong-armed Europe arguing that Huawei, China and, of course, Russia, are all real “espionage” threats. But with Washington now caught, the real question is, what is Europe going to do about it? What will change?

Whilst the European Union talks of matters such as “strategic autonomy” and idealizes itself as a unified, independent force for good in the world, the reality could not be further from the truth. Espionage revelations are just the tip of the iceberg of a variety of ways in which the United States has, through its integration with Europe’s military and security dynamic, utilized a myriad of political tactics to strong-arm the bloc into following its political will and agenda, even when it is apathetic or openly objects to it. The EU is ultimately just one institution amongst many on the continent competing for input on foreign policy agendas across 27 respective countries, which the US ultimately monopolizes through treaties, think-tanks, and discourse in the global media.

A very clear example of this is how the United States quickly drove a wedge between the EU and China when they sought to make their own separate treaty, the ‘EU-China comprehensive investment agreement’ (CAI), which Washington openly opposed. Whilst American opposition to it otherwise may have seemed irrelevant or barking on the sidelines, the Biden administration were able to utilize the Xinjiang issue to obligate the EU to “pick a side” on a matter of human rights and subsequently join in coordinated sanctions on the matter, which quickly soured relations as Beijing retaliated. Mission accomplished; Europe fell into the trap. One may ultimately describe America’s approach to European countries not as being driven by good faith or solidarity, but by ‘keeping it on a leash’. The dog may pull increasingly in another direction, but stays on the same path as its owner.

The espionage dynamic ultimately ties into the same mindset: The United States sees the European Union more as an economic competitor than as a friend and does not in any respect want it to get ahead of them or gain “advantage” in any specific area. The F-16 story above reveals how US intelligence in fact serves the interests of the military industrial complex, seeking out the secrets of Europe’s own defence industry and ensuring America always has the competitive edge, even to the point of making national intelligence agencies betray their own countries. As Edward Snowden stated in an interview in 2014, the US engages in constant industrial espionage against big German companies such as Siemens, stating: “If there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to US national interests – even if it doesn’t have anything to do with national security – then they’ll take that information nevertheless.”

In line with this, Angela Merkel, as a very Eurocentric leader who has a maverick approach to foreign policy and Germany’s place in the world, is unsurprisingly a frequent target of American intelligence activities. Washington is constantly wondering what she is thinking, intending and doing, not least regarding China and Russia where they do not see eye to eye. She is perhaps a “frenemy” to the US, a de facto ally and enemy simultaneously. But this all boils down to the big question as stated above, what is Europe going to do about it? Or can they do anything about it? The EU’s response to such unending controversies seems to be to make a small protest in the heat of the moment, but otherwise forget it and do nothing, passively tolerating American infiltration designed to undermine European
interests and competitiveness across the board.

If Europe is serious about upholding its own “strategic clout” it has to be prepared to take bigger risks and stop being pressed into line under the obligation of “transatlaticism” and get tougher on the “American problem.” The bloc should take a leaf out of its rhetoric toward China and demand “reciprocity” in its relations with the United States, that it ceases espionage against them, seeks to curtail excessive “American influence” operations undermining their foreign policy and strategic independence and that it treats the continent as an equal and fair partner. Surely one would think ‘enough is enough’ but of course there is little reason to think anything will change. In a world where
US surveillance is intrusive and rampant, America still surprisingly gets away with accusing everyone else of “spying.”

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Tom Fowdy is a British writer and analyst of politics and international relations with a primary focus on East Asia.