This Can't Be Happening!

(This article originally ran in WhoWhatWhy.org)
 

Would you be shocked to learn that the FBI apparently knew that some organization, perhaps even a law enforcement agency or private security outfit, had contingency plans to assassinate peaceful protestors in Houston and perhaps several other American cities — and did nothing to intervene?

Would you be surprised to learn that this intelligence comes not from a shadowy whistle-blower but from the FBI itself – specifically, from a document obtained from Houston FBI office last December, as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Washington, DC-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund?

To repeat: this comes from the FBI itself. The question, then, is: What did the FBI do about it?

The Plot

Remember the Occupy Movement? The peaceful crowds that camped out in the center of a number of cities in the fall of 2011, calling for some recognition by local, state and federal authorities that our democratic system was out of whack, controlled by corporate interests, and in need of immediate repair?

That movement swept the US beginning in mid-September 2011. When, in early October, the movement came to Texas, law enforcement officials and the state’s banking and oil industry executives freaked out  perhaps even more so than they did in some other cities. The push-back took the form of violent assaults by police on Occupy activists, federal and local surveillance of people seen as organizers, infiltration by police provocateurs—and, as crazy as it sounds, some kind of plot to assassinate the “leaders” of this non-violent and leaderless movement.

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what the document obtained from the Houston FBI, said:
 

FBI knew of plot to murder Occupy Activists in Houston but took no action to stop it, documents show

“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

— President Barack Obama
 

While President Obama used the right words in this quote, he clearly is taking the public for idiots.
 
Because as he surely is aware, we do have some big problems. They are not caused by misguided citizens who foolishly mistrust their government, though. Rather, our problems stem from the fact that our leaders, including him, have consistently lied to us, been corrupted by big money and have acted to benefit corporate interests to the detriment of the commonweal.

On March 12 of this year, when Obama’s National Intelligence Director James Clapper told a congressional inquiry that the government does not wittingly conduct surveillance of Americans, he was lying. He was deliberately deceiving the very people upon whom we’re told to rely to exercise oversight and safeguard our rights. When caught out in his lie by the disclosures of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Clapper additted his prevarications, saying he had tried to give “the least untrue answer” he could come up with.

Obama himself too, subsequent to Snowden’s disclosures of the NSA’s nationwide vacuuming up of all electronic communications of all Americans, has radically changed his tune about the surveillance techniques which he criticized under President Bush but has now embraced fully.

At this point, when it comes to our elected and appointed leaders, we can trust only that their words are untrustworthy.

Trust Congress? Venal, corrupted, pawns of their powerful financial contributors, feckless posturing maintainers of the status quo; not too much to trust there.

How about the courts? How much trust can we gin up for the brilliant black robed justices who have anointed corporations with personhood? When they go duck hunting with a torture advocating Vice President one day, and rule on the constitutionality of his draconian national security laws the next, how much trust do they inspire?

No Mr. President, the problem is not with us, it is squarely with you and the National Security State that preceded you and that you have continued to further expand and empower.
Who're we gonna believe, our leaders or our lying common sense?

The spectacle of the US threatening Hong Kong, China, Russia and now little Ecuador with all manner of reprisals if they don’t respect the “rule of law” and hand over whistleblower Edward Snowden to the tender mercies of the US national security apparatus is delicious to watch.

The very idea of Secretary of State John Kerry lecturing Russia about “following the law” is laughable. He cites seven common criminals that the US handed over to Russia over the past year, but Russia no doubt recalls cases where the US used diplomatic pressure to extradite Russian citizens from countries like Lithuania and Thailand that the Russians did not believe had committed extraditable crimes.

Also comical is Kerry and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) referring to Russia as an “ally” or “friend” and asking how President Vladimir Putin can then behave so badly in refusing to hand over the vile traitor Snowden. Ally? Friend? If so, why is the US emplacing anti-missile batteries around Russia? Why is the US National Security Agency, as Snowden disclosed, secretly tapping Russian leaders’ cell phones during a G-8 conference? This is the behavior of a “friend” and “ally”?

Beyond that, Kerry is a fine one to talk about betrayal. He has famously betrayed his own Vietnam War comrades-in-arms — veterans who had, with him, risked their careers in the military and their futures in the US by coming forward in the Winter Soldier movement during the early 1970s to speak out about US war crimes the US, and often they themselves, had committed in Vietnam. But Kerry, in the interest of pursuing his political career, later abandoned that honorable stance and became instead an avid supporter of US empire, even becoming an apologist for the Vietnam War in his failed 2004 campaign for the presidency, when he tried to capitalize on his alleged heroism as a Navy riverboat captain. Such a stunning betrayal of one’s comrades and one’s conscience is hard to even contemplate.

Also stunning is hearing Kerry and the US government lecture Ecuador and other Latin American nations that might be considering offering Snowden asylum about respecting the “rule of law,” and threatening them with “consequences” if they offer him haven from US prosecution.
Equadorian soldiers rescue President Correa (in gas mask) from a hospital where National Police coup leaders had been holding him in a 2010 coup widely believed to have covert CIA backing

Now that Edward Snowden is safely away out of the clutches of the US police state, at least for now, let’s take a moment to contemplate how this one brave man’s principled confrontation with the Orwellian US government has damaged our national security state.

Firstly, there are the four computers loaded with National Security Agency secrets, which have already exposed the details of how our government is monitoring our entire national communications grid, prying into the details of the telephonic and internet activity of every American citizen. We’ve only begun to learn about the ugly totalitarian activities of our government, and now that Snowden is safe from arrest, we will no doubt learn much more.

Second, the US has been humiliated by both China and Russia, which have demonstrated dramatically that they cannot be intimidated by the world’s dominant superpower, which stands revealed as less super and less powerful than it has been claiming. China, according to local experts on Hong Kong/China relations like Chinese University of Hong Kong professor Willie Lam, intervened in the legal process to tell Hong Kong authorities not to honor the US government’s arrest warrant on espionage and theft of official secrets charges, and to allow him to leave the territory. Russia, meanwhile, whose President Vladimir Putin had already volunteered to grant Snowden amnesty, provided the world’s most celebrated whistleblower a seat on an Aeroflot flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, where he just landed safely today.

The US was left to bluster impotently. The government warned that Hong Kong’s unwillingness to arrest and hold Snowden in response to the US indictment and extradition request was a sign that the Hong Kong Special Administration Region, which supposedly has autonomy from Beijing, is actually not so autonomous if it cannot adhere to an extradition treaty with the US (one that was signed in 1996 while the city was still a British colony). As an unidentified “senior official” of the Obama administration was reported saying to the Washington Post, “If Hong Kong doesn’t act soon, it will complicate our bilateral relations and raise questions about Hong Kong’s commitment to the rule of law.”

That line must be evoking gales of laughter around the world. It could also be a laugh line for local comics here in the US, where the rule of law died years ago. It died with the illegal invasion of Iraq, the illegal secret rendition, detainment and torture of hundreds of suspects in the Bush/Obama “War” on Terror, the continued operation of the internationally illegal Guantanamo Bay detention and torture center, the three-year torture and detainment without trial of Army whistleblower Bradley Manning, the extra-legal killing of Americans by drone-launched missile attacks, and the NSA spying on all Americans, begun as early as 2007.
Vans from the presidential office of Vladimir Putin waiting at Moscow airport for Edward Snowden's arrival from Hong Kong

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The reason: where else can you find a report about how the FBI Houston Office had information about a plot by an “identified” organization that planned to use photo surveillence to tag the leaders of Occupy Houston, and then use “suppressed sniper fire” to execute them, but then did nothing about it? Where else can you learn that the Obama White House was notified by Turkish forensics experts that American 19-year-old peace activist Furkan Dogan had been murdered at point blank range by Israeli commandos in their shipboard raid of a Gaza Peace flotilla, but hid that report from the American public? Where else can you learn that the federal government paid journalists in Miami to trash five Cuban’s on trial for espionage so as to help win a conviction? Where else can you get the kind of inside reporting on the Occupy Wall Street action that we had from Manhattan TCBH! journalist Chuck Young?

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Just for the sake of argument, let’s suspend our disbelief for a moment and pretend (I know it’s a stretch) that the Obama administration and the apologists for the nation’s spy apparatus in Congress, Democratic and Republican, are telling us the gods’ honest truth.

They have, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, “amped up” their defense of the NSA’s massive spying program, claiming that not two, but 50 terrorist plots have been foiled thanks to their metadata mining and their intrusive monitoring of our phone and email conversations and website browsing activity.

Think what that means: for years now, the Jihadists have known that the US spy apparatus is ubiquitous, and that it is able to track all their communications. Of course they knew this, because they would have seen all these plots being foiled (the real ones, not the many ones that were created by FBI or CIA provocateurs and plants), and, not being stupid, they would have put it together and realized that the plots that depended upon a lot of phone calls and internet communications were getting busted up, while ones that were handled either solo, or that were developed by careful word-of-mouth communication and courier were managing to succeed.

But we poor schmucks, the American people, have been left in ignorance, imagining that our carefully crafted and painstakingly memorized six or eight-digit passwords, including at least one letter and one number (or if we’re really good, some symbol or other), were doing the job of keeping our online lives private and that our unlisted numbers, or our decision not to list an address with the phone company, were keeping our telephonic communications secure.

Ho ho! Were we fooled!

But really (stepping back into the real world again now), are we going to believe this nonsense about 50 NSA-foiled plots?

The Washington Liar’s Club: President Obama, Congress and the Supreme Court

If Edward Snowden’s goal in blowing his whistle was to spark a public debate about privacy and surveillance, he has marvelously succeeded.

Everybody’s talking about Snowden, his revelations and their significance. The talk, predictably, is contentious and divided. But government officials and their subservients in the mainstream media aren’t participating in a debate; they are attempting to avoid one. The amount of distracting, disingenuous and disinformative noise sparked by this story would drown out any serious debate.

Government officials and press pundits have already convicted young Snowden of treason because he’s “aided the enemy” by damaging our surveillance capability. Some confused (and perhaps frightened) “opinion givers” have walked a thin (and not very straight) line by supporting his whistling on U.S. surveillance but sharply, and nonsensically, denouncing his “revelations” on U.S. spying on China. A chorus of bloggers, talk show guests and pundits routintely toss up nasty, personal insults about Snowden’s education, girlfriend, sexuality and courage.

The Hero and the President — Who's the Target?

It’s all nonsense. The Chinese have been accusing the U.S. of spying on them for a long time, citing very specific evidence, so Snowden hasn’t revealed anything to them. As for the “wrecking our protections” argument: given the scope of this data capturing, any person looking to commit a crime knows his or her communications are going to be intercepted. The revelation is that the United States is capturing all the data on the Internet. What are terrorists going to do once they read that? Stop using the Internet?

In supporting this illogical contention, Obama reps are claiming PRISM has been effective in preventing terrorism but nobody can say how. In a Monday night interview, the President told Charlie Rose: “…you’ve got a guy like Najibullah Zazi, who was driving cross-country trying to blow up a New York subway system….” This is one of the main arguments being used to defend the NSA but it’s totally bogus. As the Associated Press reported Zazi, now a convicted terrorist, was discovered when British intelligence seized his computer and found an email that revealed his plot. That’s why the President was careful not to directly state that there was a connection. “In using Zazi to defend the surveillance program,” AP reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman wrote, “government officials have further confused things by misstating key details about the plot.” From President Obama’s carefully worded statement, it’s clear he’s very conscious of the confusion he’s creating; it’s his plan.

But why? What is the purpose of this forged confusion? It’s to hide the most important truth: we, the people of the United States, are the real target of this surveillance and the surveillance is part of a long-term strategy of control.

So New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and former Times executive editor Bill Keller are both saying that the massive NSA spying program on all Americans’ communications is a needed thing because if they don’t do it, then maybe there could be another major terrorist strike on the US, and democracy would be erased in the US.

What’s wrong with this argument?

What’s wrong is that it is news organizations like the New York Times that make that kind of twisted calculus work.

When 9-11 happened, the New York Times was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the ensuing undermining of civil liberties, was an integral part of the conspiracy to convince Americans that there was a grave threat to the US posed by Al Qaeda, that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda and that he was developing nuclear, chemical and germ weapons that could be targeted against the US, and that we needed the Constitution-gutting PATRIOT Act, as well as invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, to protect us from this supposedly existential threat.

It could well be correct that if there were another major mass-casualty terrorist attack, even a fraction of the size of the one on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on some iconic target in the US, democracy would go down the tubes here, but the reason that could happen is because news organizations like the Times, judging by past history, would be braying for it to happen.

If the corporate news media would do their assigned “Fourth Estate” Constitutional job of questioning authority — for example demanding to know why the FBI lied brazenly to the 9-11 commission about (for instance, the fact that it actually had found and has in its possession the four black boxes from the two planes that hit the World Trade Center towers), if the news media asked questions about why the Tsarnaev brothers are being tagged as the lone-wolf bombers of the Boston Marathon, when the two backpacks they were wearing look nothing like the exploded backpack in the FBI’s evidentiary photos, and also do not look in the surveillance photos like they have any significant weight in them — certainly not the weight of a fully-loaded 6-liter steel pressure cooker, if the media demanded answers now about the administration’s alleged evidence claiming to prove that the Syrian government is using Sarin gas, and about a report in the British Daily Mail that a British military contracting firm’s email appears to show it was asked to provide poison gas to the Syrian rebels to stage a “Washington-approved” false flag poison gas attack to justify US military intervention in Syria — if the US media were to do these things instead of just parrot the fear-mongering garbage spread by the Obama administration and by the war-mongers of both parties in Congress, we wouldn’t have the problem of our democracy being on the chopping block.

The Times' Bill Keller and Tom Friedman, apologists for and defenders of the national security state

Dave Lindorff talks about the US national security state on RT-TV's "Crosstalk" program (to play, click on the image)

I hate to do this, but I feel obligated to share, as the story unfolds, my creeping concern that the writer Naomi Wolf is not whom she purports to be, and that her motive in writing an article on her public Facebook page speculating about whether National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden might actually be still working for the NSA, could be to support the government’s effort to destroy him.

After all, with Snowden under vicious attack by both the government and the corporate media, being wrongly accused of treason, or portrayed as a drop-out slacker, a narcissist, a loser hoping to gain fame and even a “cross-dressing” weirdo, what defender of liberty would pile on with publication of a work of absolutely fact-free speculation as to whether he might also be a kind of “double agent” put out there by the NSA in order to discourage real potential whistleblowers from even considering leaking information about government spying on Americans.

Because that is exactly what Wolf has done on her website (the first clause at the opening of this article is a direct quote from the lead in Wolf’s Facebook piece, but with her name substituted for Snowden’s).

What basis does she offer for her wild-eyed speculation that Snowden is perhaps “not who he purports to be”?

Well, first of all she notes darkly that US spy agencies “create false identities, build fake companies, influence real media with fake stories, create distractions or demonizations in the local news that advance US policies, bug (technologically) and harass the opposition, disrupt and infiltrate the meetings and communications of factions that the US does not wish to see in power.” This, she says, touting her own now rather dated 2007 book The End of America, is “something you can’t not see if you spend time around people who are senior in both the political establishment and the intelligence and state department establishments. You also can’t avoid seeing it if you interview principled defectors from those systems, as I have done…”

Then, after having assuring us of how well-connected she is, she raises what she calls “red flags” about Snowden:

Who's acting in the interest of the NSA: Naomi Wolf or Edward Snowden?