NO STRINGS ATTACHED NEWS THAT MAINSTREAM JUST WON'T COVER.
A disturbing new poll has found that the majority of Americans want to alter the First Amendment to limit the speech of their fellow Americans, up to and including jailing them.
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/americans-scrap-first-amendment-free-speech/
Massive Leak Confirms Turkey's "Gold-For-Gas" Scheme To Evade US Sanctions On Iran
We first started noticing major 'odd' exports of gold from Turkey to Iran in May 2012. Turkey’s trade balance fluctuated wildly as gold stocks flowed out of the country in bursts.
“Turkey’s going to continue it,” the Turkish economy minister said. “If those casting aspersions on the gold trade are searching for immorality, they should take a look in the mirror.”
Then, in 2014, we discussed Turkey's "200 tons of secret gold" trade with Iran detailing how a complex network that spanned Turkey, China, Dubai and Iran was used to skirt US sanctions on energy exports from Iran.
The operation featured an Iranian-born businessman who liked fast horses, faster cars and the fastest planes. His unique skill: Getting gold into sanctions-encircled Iran.
Enough gold that for a time he became the government’s key instrument in improving Turkey’s irksome economic imbalance.
At the time, the plot revealed what one observer called, "one of the most complex illicit finance schemes [prosecutors] have seen."
In 2017, the man at the center of the scheme, Reza Zarrab, was arrested (and briefly disappeared) and was tied to Turkey's president.
“Zarrab is thought to have been close to the Erdogan family and, indeed, he was given Turkish citizenship, alongside Iranian. This is a real stress point."
Zarrab pleaded guilty in October 2017 and turned against Mehmet Hakan Atila - a director at Turkey’s Halkbank - who was convicted on Jan. 3, 2018, and after serving a total 32 months behind bars was returned to Turkey and has since become the head of the Istanbul stock exchange.
And since then "one of the biggest money-laundering schemes ever" has disappeared from the headlines... until now.
Thanks to a massive leak of more than a million documents from a British offshore shell company provider, think Panama Papers 2.0, we now learn exactly how Iran’s national oil company and its subsidiaries hopscotch the globe, with the help of intermediaries, in search of tax havens that help it try to wriggle free from the grip of crippling U.S.-led sanctions.
As McClatchy reports, the massive data set of communications, incorporation certificates and other documents was leaked to journalists, and after months of collaboration, news organizations across the globe are collectively publishing stories starting this week under the title #29Leaks.
Included in the voluminous Formations House documents is a register of shareholders in an offshore company called Naftiran Intertrade Company Ltd, or NICO. This list of shareholders was attached to an email from December 2014, declaring the state-owned National Iranian Oil Company as the overarching shareholder and having complete control over NICO.
Also attached was a register of NICO directors listing five Iranian nationals.
NICO, the gasoline import arm of the state oil company, came to renewed international attention in March 2016 after the arrest at Miami International Airport of Reza Zarrab.
He flew to Florida to visit Disney World and on that trip was charged with conspiring to evade U.S. sanctions through an elaborate gold-for-gas scheme between Turkey and Iran, and using global banks to process transactions on behalf of Iran.
Prosecutors contend that Zarrab and a co-defendant, Mehmet Hakan Atila, who was a director at Turkey’s Halkbank, schemed to help Iran skirt U.S. sanctions by trading Turkish gold for oil and natural gas. Using companies across the globe, they facilitated $20 billion worth of transactions.
“High-ranking government officials in Iran and Turkey participated in and protected this scheme,” the Justice Department in Oct. 15, 2019. statement announcing charges against Halkbank, which incriminated Zarrab.
“Some officials received bribes worth tens of millions of dollars paid from the proceeds of the scheme ... and to help shield the scheme from the scrutiny of U.S. regulators.”
Shortly after his arrest, Zarrab, who is married to a Turkish pop star and has citizenship in Iran as well as Turkey, implicated Turkish President Recep Erdogan as having approved the operation.
Zarrab was represented briefly by Rudolph Giuliani, who has since become President Trump’s personal attorney. Zarrab was also a focus of Special Counsel Robert Mueller III’s prosecution of Trump adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn for lying under oath the FBI. Mueller looked at Flynn’s lobbying for Turkey.
Additionally, the leaked documents tie the mid-October, six-count indictment against Halkbank for fraud, money laundering and sanctions-evasion was tied to NICO and the state oil company.
Prosecutors said that bank has been the “sole repository of proceeds from the sale of Iranian oil” to Turkey and also cited Zarrab transactions involving NICO.
The leaked new documents expose this chain of communications between a Dutch offshore services provider, Dennis Vermeulen of INCO Business Group, Formations House employees Oliver Hartmann (aka Syed Rizwan Ahmed) and Charlotte Pawar, and Farhad Dizadji, owner and senior partner of London-based accounting firm Roberts & Partners.
“Just like we’ve seen in the Halkbank scandal, entities are eager to exploit the secrecy afforded by anonymous shell companies to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran, undermining our national security,” the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Oregon’s Ron Wyden, said in a statement on the Formations House leak.
“Ending anonymous shell companies would make it easier for law enforcement to ‘follow the money’ when investigating complex financial crimes like sanctions evasion.”
By constantly switching domiciles, NICO may have sought to ease political pressures, according to a former senior official at the U.S. Treasury Department. The official previously worked on Iran sanctions and international money-laundering investigations and requested anonymity in order to discuss non-public matters.
So, in conclusion, we now have two facts confirmed - trust no one and nothing; and gold is money. Given the level of grift here, we wonder just how long before more incriminating evidence is leaked about how Democrats have benefited greatly from Ukraine deals.
Tyler Durden Fri, 12/06/2019 - 04:15 Tags Politics Business FinanceUkrainian Neo-Nazis Flock To The Hong Kong Protest Movement
Authored by Ben Norton via TheGrayZone.com,
Ukrainian fascists who previously fought in a US-backed neo-Nazi militia joined the anti-China protests in Hong Kong, sharing their tactics and showing off their tattoos.
Neo-Nazis from Ukraine have flown to Hong Kong to participate in the anti-Chinese insurgency, which has been widely praised by Western corporate media and portrayed as a peaceful pro-democracy movement.
Since March 2019, Hong Kong has been the site of often-violent protests and riots that have run the city’s economy into the ground. The US government has funded many of the groups leading the pro-Western and anti-Beijing movement, and opposition leaders have coordinated closely with conservative political figures in Washington like Marco Rubio and Steve Bannon, lobbying for sanctions and other punitive measures against China.
Numerous delegations of far-right groups from across the world have traveled to Hong Kong to join the violent insurgency against Beijing, in which secessionists have attacked police with bows and arrows, shot gasoline bombs out of catapults, and burned numerous people alive.
With their flamboyant waving of US and British colonial flags and tendency to belt out the American national anthem on megaphones, anti-China separatists in Hong Kong have made themselves a magnet for the US far-right. Staff of the website InfoWars, right-wing social media personality Paul Joseph Watson, and the ultra-conservative group Patriot Prayer are among those who have made pilgrimages to the protests.
The latest collection of extreme-right activists to reinforce the ranks of the Hong Kong separatists are from Ukraine. They call themselves Gonor and have tattoos on their upper torsos with undeniable symbols of white supremacy and neo-Nazism.
These extremists previously fought in a notoriously brutal neo-Nazi militia called the Azov Battalion, in Ukraine’s war against pro-Russian militants.
The Azov Battalion is an explicitly fascist paramilitary group that organizes around neo-Nazi ideology. After a Western-backed 2014 coup against Ukraine’s democratically elected government, Azov was incorporated into the Ukrainian national guard. It has received support from the US government, which has armed and advised the neo-Nazis in their fight against Moscow.
Azov has also helped train American white supremacists, who have plotted terrorist attacks back at home in the United States.
While Western governments and corporate media outlets portray China as an authoritarian regime that treats Hong Kong like a colony, these violent Ukrainian fascists took advantage of the region’s autonomy to gain entry through its borders. It is unlikely they would have been admitted to mainland China, or to the Western European countries that routinely refuse visas to political extremists.
The presence of Ukrainian regime-change activists in the Hong Kong protests is further evidence of the alliances that anti-Chinese activists in Hong Kong are building with other right-wing, US-backed movements around the world, sharing tactics to weaken and destabilize countries targeted by NATO.
On December 1, the far-right activist Serhii Filimonov posted photos on Facebook showing himself and three Ukrainian friends upon their arrival in Hong Kong. The images were accompanied by the anti-Beijing’s unofficial slogan: “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong!!”
Stand With Hong Kong is also the name of a Western-backed organization that has been lobbying the governments of the US, Britain, Germany, Canada, and Australia to impose sanctions and take punitive action against China.
In a video they posted on social media, the Ukrainian white supremacists revealed that they had obtained a press pass, misleadingly portraying themselves as journalists.
Joining Filimonov on the trip to Hong Kong was a notorious extreme-right Ukrainian activist who goes by the name Maliar. Maliar is popular on Instagram, under the name xgadzillax, where he has more than 23,000 followers. (Maliar has a distinctive scar on the left side of the neck, which makes him easy to recognize in photos.)
Besides the swastikas inked into his skull, Maliar had the Nazi symbols tattooed on his right leg, next to an algiz rune, another common white supremacist emblem.
Several photos show that at least two of the Ukrainian fascists in Hong Kong have tattoos reading “Victory or Valhalla,” the title of a compilation of writings by the notorious American white supremacist David Lane, whose neo-fascist terrorist group The Order murdered a liberal Jewish radio host and planned more assassinations of left-wing Jews.
Lane, who was convicted to 190 years in a US prison for numerous crimes, created the most famous white supremacist slogan, known as the 14 Words — which inspired the name of another Ukrainian neo-Nazi group called C14.
Filimonov, who also has a large following on Instagram, where he uses the name Sunperuna, published a photo showing the phrase “Victory or Valahalla” emblazoned on his chest.
The book “Victory or Valhalla” is dedicated to “Aryankind.” In its pages, its author says he is committed to preventing the “imminent extinction facing the White Race” and the “Judeo-American/Judeo-Christian murder of the White race.” The screed is replete with homages to Nazis, and the back cover shows a photo of Lane’s body in his coffin, wrapped in a Confederate flag.
These Ukrainian fascists were such fans of the book that they permanently tattooed its title on their bodies.
Maliar, the other member of Gonor who joined the Hong Kong protests, has “Victory or Valhalla” inscribed conspicuously on his neck.
Journalist Morgan Artyukhina identified another member of the far-right Ukrainian contingent in Hong Kong as Serhii Sternenko. Artyukhina noted that Sternenko is a former leader of the Ukrainian fascist group Right Sector, which burned down a trade union building in Odessa during the 2014 coup, killing 42 people.
Neo-Nazis take campusOn December 2, the Ukrainian fascist visitors posted photos of themselves on the campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), a site of violent protests.
PolyU has been a crucial base of operation for the separatist uprising. A total of 3,989 petrol bombs, 1,339 pieces of explosives, and 601 bottles of corrosive liquid were recovered at the school, as of December 2, according to reports.
Serhii Filimonov (the first on the left in the photo above) has faced legal troubles in the past, appearing in court for allegedly brawling with police.
The photos Filimonov posts on social media make two things abundantly clear: He is a Nazi and wants as many people as possible to see him shirtless while bearing heavy weapons.
Other members of Gonor have published photos on Instagram holding guns.
A video posted on Instagram in 2015 shows Maliar and a friend in a “White Rebel” Confederate flag t-shirt surrounded by guns and tasers.
Gonor’s symbol draws on many of the same far-right ultra-nationalist themes, with three white knives centered on a black flag.
Gonor’s Telegram channel offers members a front row seat to an orgy of violence. It has published dozens of videos of Hong Kong insurgents, heroizing them for shooting arrows and carrying out brutal attacks on state security forces.
https://telegram.org/js/telegram-widget.js?7Both Filimonov and Maliar previously fought in the US-backed neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Maliar has posted photos on Instagram showing the two armed and in military uniform, wearing Azov patches.
And Filimonov has published several photos showing him and his friends wearing Azov t-shirts.
Despite all of this publicly available evidence demonstrating the open fascism of the Ukrainian hooligans in Hong Kong, the Kiev-based Free Hong Kong Center published a statement on Facebook defending and whitewashing Gonor.
The organization confirmed that the extremists did indeed fight with Azov “during the first period of the war” against pro-Russian separatists, but claimed that they have been unaffiliated since 2015.
The Free Hong Kong Center described the neo-fascists as “activists of the Revolution of Dignity and as well as veterans of the defending war with Russia.” Absurdly, the center declared that they “assured us they are really against nazism and another kind of alt-right ideology.”
“A lot of people were disappointed by the tattoos of these guys,” the Free Hong Kong Center conceded. But they insisted “that all symbols are from Slavic paganism.”
The Free Hong Kong Center is a project of an NGO called the Liberal Democratic League of Ukraine. In addition to building links with anti-Beijing forces in Hong Kong, the project says its mission is to “counter Chinese threats to Ukraine.”
The Liberal Democratic League of Ukraine is a pro-European Union advocacy organization which is a member of the European Liberal Youth and the International Federation of Liberal Youth, both of which are funded by the EU.
The main coordinator of the Free Hong Kong Center is a Ukrainian activist named Arthur Kharytonov, who is also the president of the Liberal Democratic League of Ukraine. Kharytonov was deeply involved in the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, which led to the 2014 US-backed coup. He then set up the league in 2015.
Kharytonov and his organization have been frequently amplified in US government-funded Ukrainian media outlets such as Hromadske. In these softball interviews with a highly sympathetic press, Kharytonov likens the anti-Russia protests in Ukraine to the anti-China protests in Hong Kong, and calls for closer bonds between them.
On 6th year anniversary of #Euromaidan revolution, Ukrainians showed solidarity with protesters in Hong Kong. We invited main coordinator of Kyiv-based Free Hong Kong Center, Arthur Kharytonov to draw parallels between the events in #Ukraine & #HongKong.https://t.co/MMJkPLmeQC
— Hromadske Int. (@Hromadske) November 25, 2019 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsKharytonov and these Western government-backed organizations are part of a growing network of Ukrainian regime-change activists who are organizing with secessionists in Hong Kong, holding and sharing insurgency tactics.
As the US and NATO-led unipolar hegemonic order that has dominated the world since the end of the Cold War begins to crumble, and as a rising China and Russia seek to restore a multipolar global system, Washington and European nations are constructing a latticework of movements to undermine their adversaries on their frontiers.
This global network is marketed as the advance guard of global liberalism, but as events from Ukraine to Hong Kong have revealed, fascism is festering at its base.
Tyler Durden Fri, 12/06/2019 - 03:30 Tags War Conflict PoliticsUAE Private Sector Tanks To 10-Year Low Amid Recession Fears
The second-largest economy in the Middle East, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has just recorded business activity at a decade low, reported Reuters.
IHS Markit UAE Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) printed at 50.3 in Nov. from 51.1 in Oct., hitting the lowest level since Aug. 2009 and on the threshold of declaring a contraction in growth.
Last year, the manufacturing and services sectors (pretty much covering UAE's non-oil sector) recorded growth of 55.8 but had slid to almost contraction territory by late 2019.
New orders plunged into contraction (48.9) in Nov. from 51 in Oct., which has resulted in companies discounting prices to attract new business as the economic slump continued to intensify.
"Anecdotal evidence commonly linked the decline to subdued market conditions and weaker customer demand," said David Owen, an economist at IHS Markit.
An employment downturn was also initiated in 2019. Job levels dropped in Nov., indicating that last month was one of the fastest decline in the workforce for non-oil companies in nearly a year.
Despite UAE's four years of economic deceleration since oil collapsed in 2014, the country is finally experiencing weakness spreading from its oil sector into the broader economy.
The country's deteriorating property sector risks the quality of assets held by domestic banks could create banking difficulties in the early 2020s.
"Weaker asset quality will also put pressure on profitability," said Redmond Ramsdale, Fitch's head of Middle East bank ratings, who reently spoke with the Financial Times.
With the UAE economy and domestic banks still not fully recovered from the 2008 crisis, the economy is once again rapidly decelerating with financial turbulence likely seen in the next 12 to 18 months.
And just a reminder, UAE banks hold tens of billions of dollars in loans to Dubai government-related entities, with a maturity wall in 2021.
Dubai is currently going through a housing market downturn that has the risk of spreading contagion fears across the continent.
Tyler Durden Fri, 12/06/2019 - 02:45 Tags Business FinanceGermany: All EU Members Must Take In Migrants
Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,
German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has unveiled a new plan to reform the European asylum system. A draft of the proposal leaked to the media shows that all member states of the European Union would be required to take in illegal migrants.
Countries in Central and Eastern Europe are opposed to mandatory relocations on the basis that decisions about the granting of residence permits should be kept at the national level. They have noted that by unilaterally imposing migrant quotas on EU member states, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels are seeking to force the democratically elected leaders of Europe to submit to their diktat.
Indeed, the continuing debate over migration is, at its core, about European federalism and the degree to which the European Union will be allowed to usurp decision-making powers from its 28 member states.
Seehofer presented his four-page plan to reform the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) to the new president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in Brussels on December 2. She is expected to unveil her migration proposals in February 2020, ahead of Germany's six-month presidency of the European Council which begins in July 2020.
The new plan is aimed at replacing the European Union's Dublin Regulation, a law that requires people seeking asylum in the EU to do so in the first European country they reach.
Southern European countries — especially Greece and Italy — have complained that, in the context of mass migration from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the current system places an unfair and disproportionate burden on them. They say that all EU member states should take equal responsibility for migrants reaching European shores.
At the height of Europe's migration crisis in September 2015, some EU member states voted to relocate 120,000 migrants from Italy and Greece to other parts of the bloc. This number was in addition to a July 2015 plan to redistribute 40,000 migrants from Italy and Greece.
Of the 160,000 migrants to be "shared," nine countries in Central and Eastern Europe were ordered to take in around 15,000 migrants. Although the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia voted against the agreement, they were still required to comply.
In September 2017, the European Union's highest court, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), ruled that the European Commission, the powerful executive arm of the European Union, has the legal right to order EU member states to take in so-called asylum seekers. It also ruled that EU member states have no legal right to resist those orders.
Hungary and Slovakia, backed by Poland, argued that the European Union broke its own rules and exceeded its powers when it approved the quota system with a "qualified majority" — around two thirds of the bloc's members. They also argued that the relocation scheme is a direct violation of the Dublin Regulation.
The European Court of Justice ruled that a qualified majority vote was sufficient because the EU "was not required to act unanimously when it adopted the contested decision." The ruling, which did not mention the Dublin Regulation, concluded: "The mechanism actually contributes to enabling Greece and Italy to deal with the impact of the 2015 migration crisis and is proportionate."
Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó called the court ruling "outrageous and irresponsible" and "contrary to the interests of the European nations, including Hungary." He added: "The decision puts at risk the security of all of Europe and the future of all of Europe as well."
In November 2019, the European Court of Auditors reported that of the 160,000 migrants intended to be shared by EU member states, ultimately only 34,705 people (21,999 from Greece and 12,706 from Italy) were relocated.
The leaders of France and Italy, during a recent bilateral meeting in Rome, called on the European Union to introduce a new, automatic system of taking in migrants. French President Emmanuel Macron said that he was "convinced that an automatic European mechanism is needed for the reception of immigrants," and that EU countries that refused to take part in the scheme should be "seriously penalized."
The leaked draft of Seehofer's proposal states that the Dublin Regulation creates "clear imbalances" as "in 2018, 75 percent of all applications for international protection were lodged in only five member states."
The document argues that the Dublin Regulation is "inefficient" because "in the entire EU, applicants are transferred to the member state (originally) responsible in only 3 percent of cases," which means that in practice asylum seekers are not sent back to the country of first arrival.
The key part of the document calls for asylum applications to be assessed immediately upon arrival at the EU's external border. From there, a newly created European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) would "determine" which member state is responsible for taking in the applicant and processing his or her application.
Seehofer's plan is intended to be permanent and not limited to crisis situations. Notably, the plan does not address the issue of returning illegal migrants back to their countries of origin.
The plan studiously avoids using the politically explosive term "quota" and replaces it with "fair share" (gerechter Anteil). The document also omits the term "mandatory," although it is assumed throughout that the migrant relocation scheme will be compulsory for all EU member states.
If everything goes according to plan, the draft legislation would be adopted by the European Parliament in the second half of 2020 when Germany holds the presidency of the EU. It would then be ratified by the European Council, made up of the leaders of the EU member states.
The new European Commissioner for the Promotion of the European Way of Life, Margaritis Schinas, expressed support for the scheme:
"Migration Commissioner Ylva Johansson and I met Horst Seehofer. We completely agree with Germany. We need this consensus from all Member States, and we are working hard to achieve it."
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, however, voiced his opposition to the German plan. In an interview with the Czech news agency ČTK, he said that he saw through Seehofer's semantics:
"We fundamentally reject illegal migration. We also reject allowing smuggling gangs to decide who will live in Europe. We reject quotas and I am surprised that this issue has once again returned to the negotiating table. I hope that the new European Commission will put a stop to this."
Czech Interior Minister Jan Hamáček said that the Czech Republic would "coordinate our position" with the other members of the Visegrád Four (V4), a cultural and political alliance of four Central European states — the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said that the V4 would not bow to EU pressure to accept migrants:
"The V4's position is clear. We are not willing to admit any illegal migrants into central Europe. The success and security of central Europe is thanks to our pursuit of a firm anti-migration policy, and this will endure.
"This is why central Europe is one of the most successful regions of the European Union today, and its engine of growth. We do not tolerate any kind of pressure and we Hungarians insist on our right to decide whom to allow into our country and with whom we wish to live."
Tyler Durden Fri, 12/06/2019 - 02:00 Tags Social Issues PoliticsBetraying The Constitution: Who Will Protect Us From An Unpatriotic Patriot Act?
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”
- Thomas Paine
While Congress subjects the nation to its impeachment-flavored brand of bread-and-circus politics, our civil liberties continue to die a slow, painful death by a thousand cuts.
Case in point: while Americans have been fixated on the carefully orchestrated impeachment drama that continues to monopolize headlines, Congress passed and President Trump signed into law legislation extending three key provisions of the USA Patriot Act, which had been set to expire on December 15, 2019.
Once again, to no one’s surprise, the bureaucrats on both sides of the aisle—Democrats and Republicans alike—prioritized political grandstanding over principle and their oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution.
As Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) predicted:
Today, while everyone is distracted by the impeachment drama, Congress will vote to extend warrantless data collection provisions of the #PatriotAct, by hiding this language on page 25 of the Continuing Resolution (CR) that temporarily funds the government. To sneak this through, Congress will first vote to suspend the rule which otherwise gives us (and the people) 72 hours to consider a bill. The scam here is that Democrats are alleging abuse of Presidential power, while simultaneously reauthorizing warrantless power to spy on citizens that no President should have... in a bill that continues to fund EVERYTHING the President does... and waiving their own rules to do it. I predict Democrats will vote on a party line to suspend the 72 hour rule. But after the rule is suspended, I suspect many Republicans will join most Democrats to pass the CR with the Patriot Act extension embedded in it.
Massie was right: Republicans and Democrats have no problem joining forces in order to maintain their joint stranglehold on power.
The legislation passed the Senate with a bipartisan 74-to-20 vote. It squeaked through the House of Representatives with a 231-192 margin. And it was signed by President Trump—who earlier this year floated the idea of making the government’s surveillance powers permanent—with nary a protest from anyone about its impact on the rights of the American people.
Spending bill or not, it didn’t have to shake down this way, even with the threat of yet another government shutdown looming.
Congress could have voted to separate the Patriot Act extension from the funding bill, as suggested by Rep. Justin Amash, but that didn’t fly. Instead as journalist Norman Solomon writes for Salon, “The cave-in was another bow to normalizing the U.S. government’s mass surveillance powers.”
That, right there, is the key to all of this: normalizing the U.S. government’s mass surveillance powers.
In the 18 years since the USA Patriot Act—a massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA—was rammed through Congress in the wake of the so-called 9/11 terror attacks, it has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.
The Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, violating at least six of the ten original amendments—the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments—and possibly the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well.
The Patriot Act also redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience are now considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state.
The Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens—no doubt a reflexive impulse shared by small-town police and federal agents alike.
This, according to Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow, Jr., was a fantasy that “had been brewing in the law enforcement world for a long time.” And 9/11 provided the government with the perfect excuse for conducting far-reaching surveillance and collecting mountains of information on even the most law-abiding citizen.
Federal agents and police officers are now authorized to conduct covert black bag “sneak-and-peak” searches of homes and offices while you are away and confiscate your personal property without first notifying you of their intent or their presence.
The law also granted the FBI the right to come to your place of employment, demand your personal records and question your supervisors and fellow employees, all without notifying you; allowed the government access to your medical records, school records and practically every personal record about you; and allowed the government to secretly demand to see records of books or magazines you’ve checked out in any public library and Internet sites you’ve visited (at least 545 libraries received such demands in the first year following passage of the Patriot Act).
In the name of fighting terrorism, government officials are now permitted to monitor religious and political institutions with no suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government has subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation; monitor conversations between attorneys and clients; search and seize Americans’ papers and effects without showing probable cause; and jail Americans indefinitely without a trial, among other things.
The federal government also made liberal use of its new powers, especially through the use (and abuse) of the nefarious national security letters, which allow the FBI to demand personal customer records from Internet Service Providers, financial institutions and credit companies at the mere say-so of the government agent in charge of a local FBI office and without prior court approval.
In fact, since 9/11, we’ve been spied on by surveillance cameras, eavesdropped on by government agents, had our belongings searched, our phones tapped, our mail opened, our email monitored, our opinions questioned, our purchases scrutinized (under the USA Patriot Act, banks are required to analyze your transactions for any patterns that raise suspicion and to see if you are connected to any objectionable people), and our activities watched.
We’re also being subjected to invasive patdowns and whole-body scans of our persons and seizures of our electronic devices in the nation’s airports. We can’t even purchase certain cold medicines at the pharmacy anymore without it being reported to the government and our names being placed on a watch list.
It’s only getting worse, folks.
Largely due to the continuous noise from television news’ talking heads, most Americans have been lulled into thinking that the pressing issues are voting in the next election, but the real issue is simply this: the freedoms in the Bill of Rights are being eviscerated.
The Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—which historically served as the bulwark from government abuse.
Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches and the like—all sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—a recitation of the Bill of Rights would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.
We can pretend that the Constitution, which was written to hold the government accountable, is still our governing document. However, the reality we must come to terms with is that in the America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.
What once were considered inalienable, fundamental “rights” are now mere privileges to be taken away on a government bureaucrat’s say-so.
To those who have been paying attention, this should come as no real surprise.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the Constitution has been on life support for some time now, and is drawing its final breaths.
The American government, never a staunch advocate of civil liberties, has been writing its own orders for some time now. Indeed, as the McCarthy era and the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. and others illustrates, the government’s amassing of power, especially in relation to its ability to spy on Americans, predates the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001.
What the Patriot Act and its subsequent incarnations did was legitimize what had previously been covert and frowned upon as a violation of Americans’ long-cherished privacy rights.
After all, the history of governments is that they inevitably overreach.
Thus, enabled by a paper tiger Congress, the president and other agencies of the federal government have repeatedly laid claim to a host of powers, among them the ability to use the military as a police force, spy on Americans and detain individuals without granting them access to an attorney or the courts. And as the government’s powers have grown, unchecked, the American people have gradually become used to these relentless intrusions into their lives.
In turn, the American people have become the proverbial boiling frogs, so desensitized to the government’s steady encroachments on their rights that civil liberties abuses have become par for the course.
Yet as long as government agencies are allowed to make a mockery of the very laws intended to limit their reach, curtail their activities, and guard against the very abuses to which we are being subjected on a daily basis, our individual freedoms will continue to be eviscerated so that the government’s powers can be expanded, the Constitution be damned.
Tyler Durden Fri, 12/06/2019 - 00:05 Tags Politics
