Progressive journalist quits over censorship

By Reginald Johnson 

      In the latest journalism travesty, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Glenn Greenwald has been forced out of the publication he co-founded because editors there were censoring his stories about possible corruption by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

  Greenwald, who started The Intercept in 2014 after he broke stories about unlawful surveillance of the American people by the National Security Agency, resigned from The Intercept after editors said they would not run any of his stories unless he removed all material critical of Joe Biden.

  The Intercept --- along with almost all of the mainstream and left media --- have blacked out all the revelations in stories done by the New York Post concerning apparent influence peddling and possible criminal wrongdoing in connection with payments by foreign nationals to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. Also blacked out has been a statement by a Hunter Biden business associate that contradicted claims by Joe Biden that he knew nothing of his son’s business ventures in countries including Ukraine and China.

 The FBI is reportedly investigating Hunter Biden for money laundering.

   Biden, who served as Vice President from 2009-2017 in the administration of Barack Obama, was in charge of foreign policy concerning Ukraine and China, when his son went into business in Ukraine.

  Biden, who is facing Donald Trump in Tuesday’s presidential election, has denied any wrongdoing related to his son’s business dealings and said the stories were part of a Republican “smear campaign.”

  That denial has satisfied most of the media, the same media who acted like sharks smelling blood every time a report surfaced in the past about possible nepotism or nefarious activities by Trump family members.

  Biden supporters and many in the media have instead labeled the Post stories as “Russian disinformation” --- based on statements by former CIA Director John Brennan and former NSA Directors James Clapper and Michael Hayden.

 In an interview on FOX with Tucker Carlson, Greenwald said he was shocked to see even The Intercept ran a story referencing the claims by the former intelligence chiefs about Russian disinformation, even though the officials admitted in their full statement they had no hard evidence of a Russian link.

  Greenwald said The Intercept was founded on the idea that the media must be skeptical about the claims of the intelligence community, in light of the revelations about illegal mass surveillance by the NSA brought forth by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported by Greenwald.

  The investigative journalist said that in recent years an "unholy union" has come about between the media, the intelligence community, neo-cons, Silicon Valley (tech companies such as Google and Facebook). Democrats and Wall Street to advance a certain point of view and rule out independent voices. 

 Part of the reason for that joining of forces is that the left, which used to criticize the CIA, now likes the intelligence community because the CIA and FBI promoted the Russia-Trump collusion investigation, which nearly drove Trump from office, Greenwald said. The collusion narrative fell on its face however, when Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation found no conspiracy had taken place between the Trump campaign and Russia in influencing the 2016 election. 

  That "union of power," Greenwald contended, fully backs the Democratic Party which is likely to take over the Senate and possibly the presidency on Tuesday.

   "That is a very alarming proposition because they are authoritarian, they believe in censorship, they believe in suppression of information that exposes them in any kind of critical light," Greenwald said.

  The media has behaved very unprofessionally in refusing to probe the Biden allegations. That failure, together with the mistakes the press made in not covering the Russia-collusion controversy more critically, has left the media as an institution in tatters.

 That has grave implications for our democracy, since a vigorous and objective press is vital for our system to work well.

 Glenn Greenwald has not sold out. In my book, he's a hero.

   

 

 

 

 

American Coup?

                                       

By Reginald Johnson

   Elements of the intelligence community appear to be waging a determined campaign to oust Donald Trump from the presidency and block any détente between the United States and Russia.

  Ever since Trump was elected, there has been a string of damaging leaks coming out about classified phone conversations between members of the Trump administration, and Russian officials.

  All the leaks, and the reporting on them in the media, have made it appear that Trump and his top officials are too close to Russia and that Russia ---- an “adversary” nation --- may be taking advantage of the U.S.

  While previous administrations have had to deal with classified leaks, the number that has taken place since Trump got elected has been unprecedented.

  Already the Trump administration has suffered a casualty from this campaign. National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was forced to step down after information leaked that he may have improperly discussed the lifting of sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador during a phone call prior to the Trump administration taking office on Jan. 20.

   Since it is the intelligence agencies --- primarily the FBI, NSA and CIA ---  that have access to the contents of intercepted phone calls between U.S. and foreign officials, the obvious conclusion is that it is intelligence officials that are doing the leaking.

 Under law, the disclosure of classified information is a felony criminal violation, no matter who is doing it.

  It’s apparent that a group of people in the intelligence community that don’t like the direction of Trump’s foreign policy due to Trump’s repeated statements about establishing better relations with Russia, want to smear him and thwart any rapprochement with Russia.

  Russia in turn has previously been discredited with a barrage of claims --- none of them substantiated --- that Russian officials somehow “hacked” the November election and helped Trump win.

  Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio told an interview on FOX Business last week that it’s clear what’s going on.

  “What’s at the core of this is an effort by some in the intelligence community to upend any positive relationship between the United States and Russia,” he said in the FOX interview, which was also reported by Cleveland.com.

 Kucinich added that war profiteering is threatened by a more peaceful relationship with Russia.

 
“And I tell you there’s marching band and Chowder Society out there. There’s gold in them there hills,” he said. “There are people trying to separate the U.S. and Russia so that this military-industrial-intel axis can cash in.” 

 He added, “What’s going on here with the intelligence community with the new president is unprecedented. They’re making every effort to upend him….This is like Deep State. It’s like some kind of spy novel. But it’s real. The American people have to understand a game is being played with the security of our country.” ( See “Ex-Rep. Dennis Kucinich says intelligence community schemed against Michael Flynn” http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2017/02/ex-rep_dennis_kucinich_says_in.html)

 Eli Lake, a national security columnist for Bloomberg View, in a piece entitled “The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn,” wrote that “Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are among the government’s mostly tightly held secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do.”

   By “permanent state” Lake was referring to the intelligence agencies whose employees, except for appointees at the top, stay in place no matter who is president. They hold sweeping powers and their activities are largely kept secret.

  The New York Times and Washington Post, which have led media outlets in giving the anonymous leaks wide play, have reported that a number of people who were part of the Trump campaign are under investigation by the FBI for their ties to Russia.

  A congressional investigation is now underway on the claims of Russian election interference, even though cyber experts and former CIA officials have debunked them.

  It is surprising that so much of the media and many members of Congress are giving the leaks and inferences of wrongdoing so much credence. After all, the contents of any intercepted phone calls with Russian officials have been known for many months going back into the Obama administration. If there was any indication of illegal activity, that information would have been given to the Attorney General (Janet Lynch) and surely a prosecution would have followed.

  But that didn’t happen. Presumably, nothing illegal was found.  So why all the fuss? Why is all this stuff being fed to the press?

  Is there something illegal about talking with a Russian official now? Are we reverting back to the McCarthy era --- people being investigated for “contacting” a Russian?  ‘Are you now or have you ever been consorting with a Russian official’?

  There is something very disturbing going on here. Members of the intelligence community are misusing their power to push this country to pursue a geopolitical agenda that they think is appropriate regardless of what the President wants.

  Kucinich made a very telling point in his interview. He said the abuse of power by the intell community has to be a concern for all Americans, Republican or Democrat.

  “Wake up America,” he said.

 Indeed.

 

 

  

 

Cornering Trump

                                 

 By Reginald Johnson

  

  A campaign appears to be underway to derail the incoming presidency of Donald Trump and possibly force him from power.

   Ever since Trump won the election in a stunning upset over Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8, intelligence officials, some neo-conservatives and prominent media outlets have been demonizing Russia and at the same time raising doubts about whether Trump is too friendly with Russia to be commander-in-chief.

   Leaders of the CIA and NSA, neo-cons in Congress like Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham and editorial writers have relentlessly pushed the dubious story that Russia hacked the election, by invading the email networks of the Clinton campaign and feeding derogatory information about Clinton and her surrogates to whistleblower Julian Assange, who then released the information on the Internet.

  Proponents of this theory claim that the Russians did the hacking to help Trump win the election and ensure they got a friend in the White House. Trump has often said that he wants better relations with Russia and has questioned the value of NATO, while Clinton has expressed a more aggressive, interventionist foreign policy and, like other neo-cons, views Russia as a hostile power.

  The Russian election hacking claims claims have been widely debunked by cyber experts, Julian Assange and former distinguished members of the CIA and NSA, such as Ray McGovern and William Binney. The forensics don't add up. The truth is that the Clinton team emails were leaked by a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter, who thought the Clinton people were rigging the primaries against Sanders.

   But the drumbeat of charges about "Russian hacking" has continued and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have uncritically accepted the conclusions by the intelligence leaders and mindlessly parrot their claims of "Russian election interference." 

    The inference in much of the discussion has been that Trump may have colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin to get the hacking done, and thereby committed treason.

 

  Trump also came under fire when intelligence officials released a  very derogatory report – largely based on hearsay from a former British intelligence agent ---  alleging that Trump had at one time cavorted with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. Officials said that if the Russians knew this they could use the information to blackmail him. The President-elect has strongly denied the claims in the “dossier,” which was contained in an appendix to a larger intelligence report on the hacking.

    The bombshell allegations --- though now widely questioned --- were released just eight days prior to Trump’s inauguration (which takes place Friday).

   The claims in the “Russian dossier” and the hacking charges leveled at Russia have put Trump on the defensive for the past number of weeks --- an unusual situation for a newly-elected president. He’s been forced to make some concessions and admit that Russia may have been behind the hacking --- which he had refused to believe before.

   It is clear that high officials of the CIA, NSA, neo-cons in Congress and in the press and top military people are angry over Trump’s pledge to open a new dialogue with Russia. They have no interest in a détente and are determined to block it.

   Their continued negative publicity campaign, centered around national security and Russia, may be aimed at creating a groundswell of doubt about Trump and ultimately to set the stage for a successful impeachment drive. The actual trigger for the impeachment would be based either on some concocted information about misconduct in office or possibly something credible, like a charge that Trump violated the Constitution by taking emoluments through his foreign-based businesses (which could happen if Trump doesn’t totally sever his ties to his various business interests).

  Author Daniel Lazare, writing in Consortium News on Jan. 14 in a piece entitled “The Scheme to Take Down Trump,” maintains that the CIA and other intelligence officials were hoping that the salacious rumors in the Russian dossier might have been enough to shame Trump and force him to step aside. Instead, the bellicose Trump blasted the report as “fake news” and said that the intelligence officials were acting like something out of “Nazi Germany.”

  “The intelligence communities’ hopes, if that’s what they were, were dashed,” Lazare wrote.

  He added, “All of which is thoroughly unprecedented by American political standards. After all, this is a country that takes endless pride in the peaceful transfer of power every four years or so. Yet here was the intelligence community attempting to short-circuit the process by engineering Trump’s removal before he even took office.”

   While the “military-intelligence complex” as Lazare calls it,  has failed so far to force Trump out, they will keep trying.

  “…that doesn’t mean they’re giving up. All it means rather, is they’ll go deeper underground. Trump may enter the White House on Jan. 20. But the big question is how long he will remain.”

  The prospect of Trump being ousted from the presidency may put a smile on the faces of Democrats and progressives, who dislike him, rightfully, for his divisive rhetoric on immigrants and regressive domestic policies. But they should be careful what they wish for.

  If Trump is impeached, Pence will take over, and his views on domestic policy are just as bad as Trump’s. His foreign policy approach is worse.

  But there’s an even bigger point. If Republicans turn on Trump to join an impeachment effort, spurred by concern over Trump’s moves to improve ties with Russia and by anger over bogus claims of Russian hacking,  it will mean that the CIA and other intelligence officials have truly succeeded in manipulating the American democratic process.

   That should be deeply troubling to everyone.

 

 

 

    

  

Fighting Back Against NSA Spying

                                            

By Reginald Johnson

        After a successful national protest earlier this month against the sweeping surveillance over Americans’ phone calls and email activity by the National Security Agency, it’s critical to keep up the pressure on Congress to rein in the spying programs.

    According to the website “The Day We Fight Back,” which promoted the Feb. 11 event of the same name, some 555,000 emails were sent to members of Congress urging them to rein in the NSA through reform legislation;  89,000 phone calls to Congress were made; some 301,000 people signed a petition demanding privacy as a human right; the website the daywefightback.org  was shared 420,000 times on Facebook; and more than 37 million people worldwide saw the “The Day We Fight Back” banner on the website the day of the protest.

  “Together we demonstrated that activists, organizations and companies can work in unison to fight mass surveillance and laid a foundation for escalation over the months to come,” said a statement on the website following the protest.

   The statement added that the fight still has a long ways to go. “To push back against surveillance, we need to keep acting to educate and urge our representatives to take action,” it said.

   The Feb. 11 protest was organized by a coalition of civil liberties organizations, digital rights groups, companies and activists who are determined to force the government to curtail the dragnet surveillance that was exposed last year by whisteblower Edward Snowden. The former contractor for the NSA released a trove of classified documents which showed that the NSA was tracking the phone records, email communications,  social network activity and web activity of hundreds of millions of Americans and foreigners.

  Billions of records of phone calling “metadata” --- showing who made a call, to whom, how long the call was, and the location of those taking part ---- are being swept up by the government.

  According to The Washington Post, one of the papers which published the revelations made by Snowden, the NSA is also harvesting both the metadata and content of emails, web activity, social networks and chats, as part of what the agency calls “upstream collection.”

   The government claims that the NSA surveillance is both constitutional and a necessary tool in fighting terrorism.

  But civil liberties advocates claim that the NSA spying program is a clear violation of the Constitution’s guarantees of the right to privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of association.

   The American Civil Liberties Union, which is part of the coalition fighting the NSA surveillance, says that the agency’s “aggregation of metadata constitutes an invasion of privacy and an unreasonable search” and is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. Also, the phone tracking program violates the First Amendment “because it vacuums up sensitive information on associational and expressive activity.”

  The ACLU is suing the government to end the spying program and have all the collected data deleted.

  According to Josh Levy, of the internet rights group Free Press, the NSA surveillance programs “attack our basic rights to connect and communicate in private, and strike at the foundations of democracy itself. Only a broad movement of activists, organizations and companies can convince Washington to restore these rights.”

    During the “Day We Fight Back” protest, people either calling or emailing their representatives in Congress were urged to tell them to support the USA Freedom Act, which would end the bulk collection of phone data by the government and make the deliberations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) --- which authorizes NSA surveillance programs --- more transparent.

   Another bill is going through Congress, offered by U.S. Dianne Feinstein, D-Ca., relating to the NSA. However, the bill, though offering some cosmetic reforms in the FISA process, would largely keep in place the existing NSA surveillance programs.

   Several members of the Connecticut congressional delegation were called by this reporter in the “Day We Fight Back” protest. A staff member for U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4, said the congressman was still weighing whether to support the USA Freedom Act. A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy also said the senator hadn’t taken a position on the bill yet.

  The position of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., was clear, however. Blumenthal is a co-sponsor of the USA Freedom Act, a staffer said.

   Activists see an urgency in rolling back the legal authority for the spying programs, as more and more revelations keep coming out about how extensive the government surveillance is, both in the United States and abroad.

  Recently The Guardian newspaper in the UK reported that the British spy agency GCHQ, with aid from the NSA, had intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of Internet users not suspected of wrongdoing.

  

   

                  

Restore the Fourth!

By Reginald Johnson            


     A grassroots movement has formed to fight back against the dragnet government surveillance exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    “Restore the Fourth” recently organized protests against the spying, which involves government monitoring of both phone and Internet communications.

   On Independence Day, July 4^th, the group held rallies around the country targeting the surveillance begun under former President George W. Bush and expanded under President Barack Obama.

   “Restore the Fourth” takes its name from the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which says  “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

   Members of “Restore the Fourth” maintain that the sweeping NSA surveillance of phone and Internet records of millions of Americans violates the Fourth Amendment and must be ended.

   President Obama has defended the spying, saying it’s been approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court and is a vital tool in stopping terrorist acts.

   A majority of both Republicans and Democrats have also supported the need for spying on citizens, citing the war on terror.

   The administration has launched an intensive effort to capture Snowden, a former private contractor with the NSA, and bring him up on charges of having violated the Espionage Act due to his release of classified information. Snowden fled first to Hong Kong, and then to Russia. He is believed now to be in the Moscow Airport, where he is attempting to gain asylum to another country, possibly in Latin America.

   The “Restore the Fourth” campaign is supported by other privacy groups, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Stop Watching Us and the Internet Defense League.

  The rallies on the 4^th brought out people from both the left and right.  A demonstration at the courthouse in Louisville, Ky. saw conservatives join with liberal Democrats carrying signs like “Privacy is our right” and “No Spying on Americans,”  according a story in the Courier-Journal.

  Fred Gittner of Southern Indiana, who was wearing a tea-party shirt, held a sign next to self-described liberal Democrat Patty Call, of Crestwood, Ky.

  “At least we can agree on this,” she said. “Basically, spying on everyone, without a warrant, is going too far.”