“The most dangerous man to any government
is the man who is able to think things out
for himself, without regard to the
prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost
inevitably he comes to the conclusion that
the government he lives under is dishonest,
insane and intolerable.”—H. L. Mencken.
September 04, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- The American kleptocracy (a government ruled
by thieves) continues to suck the American
people down a rabbit hole into a parallel
universe in which the Constitution is
meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and
the citizenry is powerless to defend itself
against government agents who steal, spy, lie,
plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict
mayhem and sow madness on everyone and
everything in their sphere.
Think about it.
Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the
U.S. government against the
citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the
nation secure—has come about as a result of some
threat manufactured in one way or another by our
own government.
Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical
attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance.
The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19
pandemic.
In almost every instance, the U.S. government
(often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its
typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of
terror domestically and internationally in order
to expand its own totalitarian powers.
Who is the
biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of
cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be
used to hack into computer systems, spy on
citizens, and destabilize vast computer
networks)? The U.S. government.
Who is the
largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in
the world, such that they are literally arming
the world? The U.S. government.
Which country has a
history of secretly testing out dangerous
weapons and technologies on its own
citizens? The U.S. government.
Which country has
conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting
populace—citizens and noncitizens
alike—making healthy people sick by spraying
them with chemicals, injecting them with
infectious diseases and exposing them to
airborne toxins? The U.S. government.
What country has a
pattern and practice of entrapment that
involves targeting vulnerable individuals,
feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and
weapons intended to turn them into terrorists,
and then arresting them as part of an
elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting?
The U.S. government.
Are you getting the picture yet?
The U.S. government isn’t protecting
us from terrorism.
The U.S. government is creating the
terror. It is, in fact, the source of the
terror.
Consider that this very same government has
taken every bit of technology sold to us as
being in our best interests—GPS devices,
surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used
it against us, to track, control and trap us.
So why is the government doing this? Money,
power and total domination.
We’re not dealing with a government that
exists to serve its people, protect their
liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather,
these are the diabolical machinations of a
make-works program carried out on an epic scale
whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be
permanently (and profitably) employed.
Case in point: the FBI.
The government’s henchmen have become the
embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be
so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from
being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among
the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents
in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing
fake emergency letters to gain access to
Americans’ phone records; using
intimidation tactics to silence Americans
who are critical of the government, or
persuading impressionable individuals to
plot acts of terror and then
entrapping them, the overall impression of
the nation’s secret police force is that of a
well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing
the boss’ dirty work.
It’s a diabolical plot with far-reaching
consequences for every segment of the
population, no matter what one’s political
leanings.
As Rozina Ali writes for The New York
Times Magazine, “The government’s approach
to counterterrorism erodes constitutional
protections for everyone, by blurring the lines
between speech and action and by broadening the
scope of who is classified as a threat.”
This is not an agency that appears to
understand, let alone respect, the limits of the
Constitution.
For instance, the FBI has been
secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme
in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell
purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime
syndicates and then used those phones to spy on
them as they planned illegal drug shipments,
plotted robberies and put out contracts for
killings using those boobytrapped phones.
All told, the FBI intercepted
27 million messages over the course of 18
months.
What this means is that the FBI was also
illegally spying on individuals using those
encrypted phones who may not have been involved
in any criminal activity whatsoever.
Even
reading a newspaper article is now enough to get
you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The
agency served a subpoena on USA Today /
Gannett to provide the internet addresses and
mobile phone information for everyone who read a
news story online on a particular day and time
about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.
This is the danger of allowing the government
to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and
entrapment operations using dubious tactics that
sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become
suspects and potential criminals, while
government agents, empowered to fight crime
using all means at their disposal, become
indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they
seek to vanquish.
To go after terrorists, they become
terrorists. To go after drug smugglers, they
become drug smugglers. To go after thieves, they
become thieves.
It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a
kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves),
a
kakistocracy (a government run by
unprincipled career politicians, corporations
and thieves that panders to the worst vices in
our nature and has little regard for the rights
of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight
to an
idiocracy.
This certainly isn’t a constitutional
republic, however.
Some days, it feels like the government is
running its own crime syndicate complete with
mob rule and mafia-style justice.
In addition to creating certain crimes in
order to then “solve” them, the FBI—the
government’s law enforcement agency—also gives
certain informants
permission to break the law, “including
everything from buying and selling illegal drugs
to bribing government officials and plotting
robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on
other fronts.
USA Today estimates that government
agents have authorized criminals to engage in as
many as
15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some
of these informants are getting paid
astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory
fellow, later arrested for attempting to run
over a police officer, was actually
paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap
for an entrapment scheme.
In addition to procedural misconduct,
trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and
damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry
list of crimes against the American people
includes surveillance, disinformation,
blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and
harassment.
For example, the Associated Press lodged a
complaint with the Dept. of Justice after
learning that FBI agents
created a fake AP news story and emailed it,
along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat
suspect in order to implant tracking technology
onto his computer and identify his location.
Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser
railed, “The FBI may have intended this false
story as a trap for only one person. However,
the individual could easily have reposted this
story to social networks, distributing to
thousands of people, under our name, what was
essentially
a piece of government disinformation.”
Then again, to those familiar with
COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to
“disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize”
groups and individuals the government considers
politically objectionable, it should come as no
surprise that the agency has mastered the art of
government disinformation.
The FBI has been particularly criticized in
the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for
targeting vulnerable individuals and not only
luring them into fake terror plots but actually
equipping them with the organization, money,
weapons and motivation to carry out the
plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their
so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the
FBI characterizes as “forward
leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”
Another fallout from 9/11, National Security
Letters, one of the many
illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot
Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that
banks, phone companies, and other businesses
provide them with customer information and not
disclose the demands. An internal audit of the
agency found that the FBI practice of issuing
tens of thousands of NSLs every year for
sensitive information such as phone and
financial records, often in non-emergency cases,
is
riddled with widespread violations.
The FBI’s surveillance capabilities, on a par
with the National Security Agency, boast a
nasty collection of spy tools ranging from
Stingray devices that can track the location of
cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow
agents to eavesdrop on phone calls.
In one case, the FBI actually managed to
remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless
internet card so that it would send
“real-time cell-site location data to Verizon,
which forwarded the data to the FBI.”
The FBI has also repeatedly sought to
expand its invasive hacking powers to allow
agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in
the world.
Indeed, for years now, the U.S. government
has been creating what one intelligence insider
referred to as a cyber-army capable of offensive
attacks. As part of this cyberweapons programs,
government agencies such as the NSA have been
stockpiling all kinds of nasty malware, viruses
and hacking tools that can “steal
financial account passwords, turn an iPhone into
a listening device, or, in the case of Stuxnet,
sabotage a nuclear facility.”
In fact,
the NSA was responsible for the threat posed
by the “WannaCry” or “Wanna Decryptor” malware
worm which—as a result of hackers accessing the
government’s arsenal—hijacked more than 57,000
computers and crippled health care,
communications infrastructure, logistics, and
government entities in more than 70 countries.
Mind you, the government was repeatedly
warned about the dangers of using criminal
tactics to wage its own cyberwars. It was warned
about the consequences of blowback should its
cyberweapons get into the wrong hands.
The government chose to ignore the warnings.
That’s exactly how the 9/11 attacks unfolded.
First, the government helped to create the
menace that was al-Qaida and then, when bin
Laden had left the nation reeling in shock
(despite
countless warnings that fell on tone-deaf ears),
it demanded—and was given—immense new powers in
the form of the USA Patriot Act in order to
fight the very danger it had created.
This has become the shadow government’s
modus operandi regardless of which party
controls the White House: the government creates
a menace—knowing full well the ramifications
such a danger might pose to the public—then
without ever owning up to the part it played in
unleashing that particular menace on an
unsuspecting populace, it demands additional
powers in order to protect “we the people” from
the threat.
Yet the powers-that-be don’t really want us
to feel safe.
They want us cowering and afraid and willing
to relinquish every last one of our freedoms in
exchange for their phantom promises of security.
As a result, it’s the American people who pay
the price for the government’s insatiable greed
and quest for power.
Suffice it to say that when and if a true
history of the United States is ever written, it
will not only track the rise of the American
police state but it will also chart the decline
of freedom in America: how a nation that once
abided by the rule of law and held the
government accountable for its actions has
steadily devolved into a police state where
justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the
show, representative government is a mockery,
police are extensions of the military,
surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and
the law is little more than a tool for the
government to browbeat the people into
compliance.
Somewhere over the course of the past
240-plus years, democracy has given way to
kleptocracy, and representative government has
been rejected in favor of rule by career
politicians, corporations and
thieves—individuals and entities with little
regard for the rights of American citizens.
This dissolution of that sacred covenant
between the citizenry and the
government—establishing “we the people” as the
masters and the government as the servant—didn’t
happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of
one particular incident or one particular
president. It is a process, one that began long
ago and continues in the present day, aided and
abetted by politicians who have mastered the
polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”
As I point out in my book
Battlefield America: The War on the American
People and in its fictional counterpart
The Erik Blair Diaries, our
freedoms have become casualties in an all-out
war on the American people.
Constitutional attorney and author John W.
Whitehead is founder and president of
The
Rutherford Institute. His most recent books
are the best-selling
Battlefield America: The War on the American
People, the award-winning
A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American
Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction
novel,
The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be
contacted at
staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the
Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute.
Information about The Rutherford Institute is
available at
www.rutherford.org.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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