The U.S. empire has been doing everything it can to restrict the flow of inconvenient information as public opposition to its criminality swells at home and abroad.
Department of Justice Building in Washington, D.C. in July 2012. (Another Believer, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au
Listen to Tim Foley read this article
The last few days have seen the U.S. ramping up its war on domestic political dissent in multiple ways, with U.S. lawmakers petitioning the Biden administration to crack down on anti-genocide protesters it suspects of foreign influence, and a journalist critical of U.S. foreign policy coming under the crosshairs of Washington’s increasingly weaponized Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
The F.B.I. has raided the home of former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy toward Russia.
Consortium News reports:
“Federal agents removed Ritter’s electronic equipment and numerous boxes of paper files from his Albany, N.Y. area home Thursday on suspicion that the former U.N. weapons inspector is violating the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act.
In a video posted to his Substack page, Ritter said that normally in alleged FARA violation cases the authorities send a letter to the subject of the inquiry informing them of the investigation. They do not send numerous F.B.I. agents to the door with a warrant to search and remove potential evidence.
The warrant, a copy of which Ritter posted, only called for electronic devices to be removed, but the agents, whom Ritter said acted professionally, also removed boxes of paper United Nations files from his days as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s.
As Ritter says in the video, U.N. documents are never classified and could have nothing to do with the alleged FARA case against him.
‘So the idea that, this is normal procedure is absurd in the extreme. I’m not a foreign agent. What I am is a journalist. And this is how we need to couch this entire thing. What the F.B.I. did yesterday, what the United States government did yesterday, was a frontal assault not only on free speech, but a free press,’ Ritter said in the video.”
The U.S. has been getting increasingly aggressive in using FARA to suppress political speech that is critical of U.S. foreign policy, with dissident voices being increasingly targeted by the Department of Justice on accusation of circulating unauthorized ideas in collaboration with governments like China and Russia.
This coincides with a report from Ken Klippenstein about a letter sent to the White House by 22 members of Congress demanding that protesters against the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza be investigated for any unauthorized affiliation with foreign governments, and severely penalized if any ties are found to “the Iranian regime.”
Klippenstein writes:
“Last Thursday, 22 members of Congress sent a letter to the Biden administration demanding the investigation and criminal prosecution as well as financial ruin of Gaza war protesters, whom they claim have received funding from Iran.
‘We write today regarding recent revelations that certain anti-Israel organizations in the United States have received funding from the Iranian regime,’ the letter begins. The revelation originated in a recent statement by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, on top of statements by F.B.I. director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco that Iran is trying to influence public opinion.
The letter goes on to call for the Justice Department ‘to criminally prosecute and pursue civil forfeiture actions against any individual or entity that violates the law by receiving funding from the Iranian regime.’
It ends by urging ‘the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and Treasury to make public all available information, without compromising sources and methods, regarding Iran’s funding of these pro-Hamas organizations so that the American people can see who these groups truly are.’”
Klippenstein notes that the letter demands a list of individuals and organizations that have received direct or indirect support from Iran or any of its “affiliates,” copies of banking information on “anti-Israel groups” believed to have received sanctioned funding, and information regarding what “severe monetary penalties” will be imposed on those found to be in violation.
The U.S. empire has been doing everything it can to restrict the flow of inconvenient information as public opposition to its criminality swells at home and abroad.
Propaganda, censorship, the war on the press, banning TikTok, consolidating the collaboration of Silicon Valley with U.S. government agencies, police crackdowns on campus demonstrators, and quashing political dissent are all outward manifestations of the agenda to manipulate the way the public thinks about what’s happening in the world.
The leaders of the U.S.-centralized empire understand that real power lies in the ability to control not just what happens in the world but what people think about what happens, because doing so allows them to act however they want to act without the risk of revolution.
Our task as ordinary members of the public is to weaken their control of the dominant narratives in our civilization, and wake the public up to the truth of what’s really happening under the rule of this tyrannical power structure.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
If the USA is an EMPIRE OF LIES and GENOCIDE,
then Scott Ritter is a traitor.
If the majority of ordinary American people stand for Truth and Decency,
Then Scott Ritter is the greatest American Patriot ever.
Take your pick.
The arguments Jewish leaders use to claim that the peaceful Palestinian effort, “Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS),” is antisemitic rely on the fact that the principles and existence of Israel/Zionism comprise an ethos within Judaism itself. Thus, the vast majority of Judaism itself supports the genocide in Gaza, as verified by polls conducted by the Pew Research Center. Beyond any doubt, Israel/Zionism is an outcome of Judaism, not just so-called Zionist, as if Zionists are separate from The Tribe. The Israeli Jews perform the acts of murder and the Diaspora Jews make it politically possible via the humongous US Jewish Lobby. Israel/Zionism is a product of Judaism and is continually maintained by Judaism.
The IHRA Jewish Leaders Insult our Intelligence
Not just human intelligence, but AI as well
hxxps://iwasathought.substack.com/p/the-ihra-jewish-leaders-insult-our
The Jewish Lobby
hxxps://iwasathought.substack.com/p/the-jewish-lobby
So, the top liars at the DOJ are saying Iran is funding people who protest the crackdown on free speech. Now the rant is “Iran, Iran, Iran” instead of Russia, Russia, Russia as it was a few years ago. All the U.S. and DOJ are doing is proving to more and more people that if the government is saying it, don’t believe it!
I am offended when writers who claim to share inform us reliably start by calling our country an “empire”. I don’t live in an empire ! I don’t like everything our country does but let us be thoughtful instead of hateful.
Many Americans have indeed been conditioned not to see that the US is largest empire in history.
What else could it be when it wants to run the world? And steals the lives, resources, and land from the indigenous peoples?
Professor Michael Parenti counts convincing a large portion of the American public that America is not an empire, as one if it’s highest propagandistic achievements.
Max Blumenthal turned me on to this video from Professor Parenti a few years ago.
h**ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPO7sd0X1ds
Sometimes the truth hurts. I think the overwhelming evidence is that the U. S. is in fact the hub of a global empire.
Do you have any evidence or any argument that the U. S. is NOT the hub of a global empire?
Sorry, but yes you do.
DOJ is completely out of control.
In my recent case against FBI and HSA for collusion with political racketeers (Repubs), where all levels of all agencies refused to investigate theft of $120 million in conservation funds for three years, despite thirty full packets of evidence and analysis sent to all local, state, HQ, and OIG offices, I found that they had investigated a Dem politician for six years for alleged mishandling of one-thousandth that amount.
Their defense, after DOJ was given six extra months to investigate the agencies, was to refuse even to Answer the COmplaint, claiming wildly that all government agencies may commit massive racketeering crime AT THEIR DISCRETION, and that they have IMMUNITY for massive racketeering crime. The utterly corrupt judiciary of the DC district agreed, with ZERO FACT OR ARGUMENT, and the DC Circuit appeals court AGREED with zero fact, argument, or precedent.
The fact is that the entire judiciary and all secretive agencies are completely OUT OF CONTROL and are systematically SUBVERTING THE CONSTITUTION for bribes and promotions from political parties.
That is what we have, folks. A Corruptocracy with no relationship at all to democracy.
“The U.S. has been getting increasingly aggressive in using FARA to suppress political speech that is critical of U.S. foreign policy”
You can thank the Trump era ‘Resistance’ for that. Prior to 2016, FARA registration was widely considered an afterthought that no one bothered to enforce. But Russiagaters saw it as a weapon to bring down many of the Bad Orange Man’s inner circle, without stopping to consider that once you give law enforcement a tool to harm your enemies, they never give it back. They just keep using it, and when your enemies are no longer in power, they use it on dissenters from your side of the aisle (progressives, Gaza protestors, Democratic socialists, etc.).
They’ll learn the same lesson in the coming years as all these novel legal theories used to try and kill the Trump candidacy and bankrupt and possibly put the Tangerine one behind bars will eventually be used on progressives/left-leaning activists before too long.
Posted at the IRmep Israeli Archives, Oct 2008, after being declassified in June of 2008,
Point of fact, SECRET DOJ Battle with AIPAC’s Parent Organization.
“Presenting the internal file archive of 1962- 1965 DOJ attempt to register the American Zionist Council as agent of a foreign government. The chronology provides perspective about how delays, leadership changes and lobby requests for secrecy resulted in America’s first non-public Foreign Agents Registration Act declaration: declassified 2008.”
The attempt by the Kennedy brothers resulted in the death of both in my opinion.
Trump never being the “sharpest tool in the shed” has caused immeasurable damage to this country by being “stupid” and full of himself. Ignorant of his own limitations in matters such as these, continues to charge head long down the road to perdition.
The history of the last 100 years is very enlightening give it a look sometime.
I agree
Trump tends to tilt at windmills without the slightest idea of how to finish the job. Which is why the administrative state and the intelligence community ran circles around him. That said, Trump’s tilting at windmills did serve a useful purpose of exposing a lot of the worst behavior of those permanent state bureaucrats and spooks to sunlight. And that has had a huge impact on Republicans former blind trust in the intelligence community. Unfortunately, at the same time Republicans have become skeptics of the IC, establishment Democrats have adopted the old Republican position of trusting the spy organizations and smearing anyone who questions them as a traitor/fascist.
And they dare to criticize Russia for curbing freedom.
Goes with that old adage…being silenced is golden! Bar none.
I could use your advice on $ management. I’m so inept that those Soros payments for the many demonstrations I’ve been in didn’t disqualify me from living in a low income seniors’ apt. bldg.
PS–I’m not fluent, but I do speak some Russian. No Farsi, but I’m willing to learn.
This sounds like a non sequitur because I hit the wrong “reply” tag. I meant it for L. McGovern; I’ll repost there.
So, newspapers have to hustle to stay afloat while we are hiding our booty for seeking the truth? – Perceptual and conceptual discrepecies in neozio warons.
So much for subtlety. Or logic. Or truth, for that matter.
How about investigating whether or not “certain anti-Palestine organizations in the United States have received funding from the Israeli regime”? Will such people also “incur civil forfeiture”?
There’s the de facto cancellation of the 1st Amendment, too. How many courageous journalists have been deplatformed? Now the heavy handed raid on Scott Ritter.
The neolib/neocon uniparty isn’t even bothering with subtlety anymore. All these last ditch efforts to keep a badly frayed and failing U.S. empire in power. I just finished re-reading Chris Hedges’ 2010 //The Death of the Liberal Class.// It’s a terrible truth to face, but he was (and is) right.
This can only end with prosecutions. They may not be done in the US, not at first, but done somewhere, and only then will the information flow be seen by the general public.
A failing empire always fears it’s citizens. Arrest and prosecute all the foreign agents who serve Israel and the population in DC would be much reduced.
Too bad we don’t have a law restricting Agents of Foreign Powers that we can use to restrict foreign money from coming in and influencing our country. Imagine an America where nations like Israel, Saudi Arabia, or England can’t buy influence in American domestic affairs? If we aren’t allowed to imagine there’s no countries, can’t we at least imagine this?
Thank you for all your years of hard work, Caitlin.
Live long and prosper.
What does/did democracy look like? In this time of political conventions, lets go back and look at the 1964 Democratic Convention. This is an important moment in the Civil Rights movement, and is one year after Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
The South is still staunchly Democrat and staunchly segregationist. They have sent slates of delegates to the DNC that are all of European heritage. The Civil Rights movement in the South is challenging this on the floor of the Democratic Convention. They have brought alternate slates of delegates, and they are challenging the overall Democratic National Convention to reject the delegates from the loyal party faithful and replace them with the civil rights delegates in a fight over which group got ‘credentials’. This occurs in a convention where several thousand delegates have been elected from across the country and decide not only on the choice of a nominee but also on the platform and direction of the party. It also occurs pretty much on live TV, and if not on TV, then on live radio broadcasts. The whole nation can listen in.
There is a long debate. Long in the manner of democracy. Democracy does not frequently run its trains on time. Lots of speeches in favor and against. A basic rule of democracy is that you give as many as possible a chance to speak. All of this is public. All of this is broadcast live to the nation. IIRC, the Democrats stuck with the loyal party faithful from the South and rejected the civil rights delegates. But the whole nation was listening and watching to this national debate, and making up its own minds.
That is what democracy looked like. It wasn’t a perfect democracy, and in fact one of its flaws was on public display on national TV on all four networks (3 commercial, 1 truly public) when that was all there was. But, it was a lot more of a democracy than an infomercial where a nominee is ‘introduced’ without appearing that year on a ballot.
Since it was on TV, I suspect you can go find some old videos, probably black n white, of what democracy used to look like and sound like. You might notice a bit of a difference to what you see and hear today.
Very well said Jane.
hxxps://www.facebook.com/MikeEspyMS/videos/fannie-lou-hamer-1964-dnc-convention-speech/755068215284361/
What an Alice in Wonderland world we live in! While our government cracks down on US citizens with legitimate dissenting views regarding foreign countries…..it is our government itself that has been 100% usurped by the foreign nation of Israel.
This must be a fairy tale. Is that why we keep ignoring the obvious? Is that why we keep pretending we don’t know how to fix it?
Read down to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence. Down below the famous bit about life and liberty and not having your chances at happiness crushed by tyranny, and down below the list of grievances against the King where many sound very familiar today, down at the very bottom, just above John Hancock’s showoff signature, you will find the reason why everyone keeps ignoring the obvious. To not ignore the obvious requires a pledge of your lives, your fortunes and your sacred honor.
Nobody on the left is willing to pledge more than to wear a pink hat on a given Sunday. You can count the number of people willing to mount even a ‘safe’ opposition using a couple of people’s hands, but when the police tell the crowd to clear, you will likely find yourself standing alone. Been there, done that, tasted the teargas from yet another Democrat Mayor’s police force that most of your now-departed fellow protestors voted into office and fully funded.
The left now appears to be in the DoubleThink position of opposing Genocide in Gaza, but not opposing Armageddon. Not surprising I suppose from the DoubleThink group that opposes Capitalism but also insists that there is no alternative to Capitalism. From such moral confusion, one does not find the strength to challenge tyranny. When people are committed to the comforts of living within a system, they can not challenge the system.
Or, as a better poet named Leonard Cohen once put it:
“They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom,
for trying to change the system from within.”
(‘First We Take Manhattan’, L.Cohen)
The protestors in Daddy’s tents at the Elite schools have by now figured out that they risk having to give up Daddy’s tent when the cops come in to smash the protest. Some might even be starting to figure out that might even have to give up Daddy and his money and his tuition checks and the rest of Daddy’s System to be in opposition against it.
If they really want to be in opposition, they need to learn how to live without Daddy, and with Daddy on the far side of “Who cares what the Squares Think?” the way their Grandparents used to say. Its very hard to oppose a System, a Culture, from within. Build your own culture is a much better foundation for opposition and resistance. You can live in a commune called “The Farm”, or you can work on Maggie’s Farm. But you can’t do both.
A physical metaphor: heating a gas in a closed container increases the pressure; with enough pressure the integrity of the container is tested, often to the point of failure, and is broken. The pressure on a population comes from increasing numbers, reduction of capacity to sustain expectations and then life itself, uncertainty and lies from leaders and ultimately from conditions that violate the basic biology of the human animal. As the pressure builds journalists find themselves migrating to the more dangerous seams and either trying to deny or expose them…but what actually matters is the reducing of the pressure which is just not on the table as an option.
Maxwell’s Demon
It does extend the metaphor: the media as the demon increasing the temperature difference (polarization of the system).
Who are the scum that signed that letter?
I would not be surprised to see my Israeli representative — Jared Golden, 2nd District of Maine — having signed that garbage. But people who are prostrate before $$$$$ cannot believe anyone else is motivated for any other reason.
Somehow Israel is not a foreign country, Iran with whom we are not at war is a “regime” like Russia but we have a real democracy with every vote bought by corporations. No wonder we are obliged to enter (never invade of course) so many inferior nations to set them in the right direction.
The old Texas adage comes to mind: “An honest politician is one who stays bought.”
What’s hard to believe is how wide the gulf between mainstream media and reality is getting.
You would think there would be some critical mass of BS, a BS singularity, some point that when reached, even the most brainwashed among us would say well that’s BS, I don’t believe that.
I would have thought so, Michael, but it does not seem to work that way. While I do believe that reality will eventually and inevitably intrude, this will not be because the public will become wise to the racket but rather because of national bankruptcy or barbarians breaking down the gates while the citizens of modern Rome continue to act business as usual.
Yes it is clear things must break down MORE and get much worse here at home before any kind of mass-awakening takes place.
The of trial of the Uhuru 3 trial is coming up on Sept 3 in Tampa. They are accused of being agents of Russia because of their opposition to the proxy war in Ukraine. This case is a threat to any individual or organisation acting to oppose US foreign policy.
Thanks for the reminder! I hope CN will be able to cover this very important trial.
And all this will act like a boomerang and backfire something awful. Slowly the masses haven’t got much more to lose so they’ll do anything to regain people power. And rightfully so.
investigate members of the us govt for being funded by a foreign entity aipac. Punish with jail time , fines, and asset forfeiture.
Great idea!…so who do we pick to do this self investigating? Tom Hall, if he promises to stay bought.
What you are suggesting is long overdue.
Quick, Caitlin, as I have advised my brother Ray with the millions of $ in the off-shore account Putin has set up for him, better hide those gold bars in your basement that Iranians gave you!! Maybe Senator Menendez would have some advice in that regard – oh wait…
(Wish this comment was actually funnier than it is)
I must say…you have a weird sense of humour…but don’t give up trying :-)
Are you here all week?
Hey Raybro Larry:
What you say goes with the old adage–being silenced is golden! Bar none.
I could really use your advice on money management. I’m so inept that all those $ I was paid by Soros for the many, many demonstrations I’ve participated in didn’t disqualify me from living in apartments for very low income seniors.
PS–I’m not fluent, but I do speak some Russian. No Farsi, but I’m willing to learn. No prob if these scandalous remarks get me put on some list; I’m pretty sure I’ve been on several for decades.