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Epic Rant – ‘Nigel Farage Was Right!’
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Dawn of the New World Order: 2017 will be the year EVERYTHING changes
A NEW World Order is set to emerge next year as huge political changes sweep across Europe including the rise of the mega-alliance under Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
By Henry Holloway / Published 29th December 2016
GETTY/DSNEW WORLD ORDER: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will trigger a revolution across EuropePutin’s growing power and Trump’s extraordinary US Election victory are both herald’s of a growing movement against the established world governments.Anti-establishment parties raging against the political class could sweep to victory in a swathes of elections next year and change the face of the West.
From Germany, to France, to the Netherlands – fringe and extremist parties are gaining momentum hand over fist and looked primed to seize power.
Notable victories have already been won – with a shocking referendum win in Italy causing Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to resign in a move said to pave the way for the collapse of the EU.
DSEND OF THE EU: Anti-establishment parties are set to sweep to power in Europe
“The new axis between Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia, and European populists represents a toxic mix”
Fredrik Wesslau
Fredrik Wesslau, from the European Council of Foreign Relations, predicted the “unthinkable is now thinkable” after Trump was swept into the White House.
He said the political parties are trying to unseat the “liberal order” in a campaign backed by Putin and Trump.
Politicians look to overthrow the established order are hailing Trump’s election victory as the beginning of the “Patriotic Spring”.
There are six key elections coming up in 2017 which could very easily be won by right-wing parties with nationalist policies which would spell the end of the EU.
GETTYGOLDEN DAWN: The Neo-nazi movement in Greece is the most extreme example
Brexit aftershocks: Who’s next to leave the EU?
Wednesday, 29th June 2016
After Britain voted to leave the EU, we look at which European countries want to hold their own EU referendum.
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EXPRESS
Frexit, Nexit or Auxit? Who will be next to leave the EU
Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, could be poised to take power after the election in May in a move which could pull France out of the EU.
She has described the coming year as a “global revolution” after the election of Trump and the victory of Brexit.Mrs Le Pen has promised to pull france out of NATO and “push migrants who want to come to Europe back into international waters”.The alliance is feared to be a further casualty of the looming political shift – with NATO bosses “preparing for the worst” as they fear Putin will invade Eastern Europe and Trump will pull all US support.GETTYMARINE LE PEN: France’s National Front leader could seize power next yearGEERT WILDERS: The Netherlands’ Party for Freedom leader has compared the Koran to Mein KampfMeanwhile, anti-Islam and anti-migrant leader of the Party of Freedom Geert Wilders ended 2016 leading the polls in the Netherlands – contesting the general election in March.He tweeted a picture of Angela Merkel with blood on her hands following the Berlin Christmas market attack – and shared the message “they hate and kill us. An nobody protects us”.He has also compared the Koran to Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf – campaigning to have the Muslim holy book banned – and coined the phrase “patriotic spring”.FRAUKE PETRY: Angela Merkel faces losing Chancellor’s seat next year after major unrestFrauke Petry is also contesting the German federal election next year as the aftermath of the Berlin attack rocks the government of Angelea Merkel.While she does not have a seat in the Bundestag – the German parliament – approval of her Alternative for Germany party has been swelling in wake of backlash against refugees following terrorist attacks.In her first election manifesto she declared “Islam is not part of Germany” and has previously called on border guard to use “firearms if necessary” when dealing with refugees. GETTYGERMANY: Unrest is sweeping across the European nation after terror attacksGETTYBEPE GRILLO: This comedian turned politician has already struck a blow to the EULeader of Italy’s Five Star Movement TV comedian Beppe Grillo has already caused a stir as the the Italian government lost a key referendum.Savagedly anti-EU, he has said “political amateurs are conquering the world”, called Trump’s victory an “extraordinary turning point” and his party won two key mayoral seats in Turin and Rome.He has been called the “Italian Donald Trump” and his party could be a key player with elections expected to be held in 2017.GETTYJIMMIE AKESSON: Sweden Democrats’ outspoken leader led a campaign against migrantsThe Czech Republic is also set to hold elections in 2017 while Sweden goes to the polls in 2018, both with own Trump-esque leaders who could make a shocking grab for power.Andrej Babis, the second richest man in the Czech Republic, is expected to win the general election for the ANO party and has been reported to have close ties to Putin’s Russia.While in Sweden, anti-immigration Jimmie Akesson of the Sweden Democrats is gaining in popularity – campaigning against his nation’s membership of the EU and advocating a campaign to tell people not to come to Sweden.With Europe’s biggest economies set to go to the polls, struggling Greece could also follow suit.The extreme right fringes of their politics is dominated by the neo-nazi party Golden Dawn – who have launched attacks on refugee camps.While it is very unlikely they have any chance at power, their nationalist cause is of the most intense and hate-filed in Europe.Centre-right party New Democracy is the most likely to unseat the government should a snap election be called.The former EU diplomat Wesslau said: “The new axis between Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia, and European populists represents a toxic mix for the liberal order in Europe.”He added: “Within Europe, populists on the left and right are trying to roll back the liberal order.”This insurgency is being actively backed by Putin’s Russia, and, now, it seems, Trump’s America.”The European Union itself risks being an early casualty.”RELATED ARTICLES
Trump’s populist views of self-determination are sweeping the planet and the elite are in a sheer panic. Only a few weeks ago, the sheep of the planet were being marched to their Armageddon. The dumbed down masses have managed to mount a ninth inning rally that have sent the elite into frenzy.
Hillary Clinton Was Supposed to Usher in the New World Order Through the Fall of America
The lies are exposed. Hillary and Bill cannot unring the bill, the truth has been exposed for millions of people to see.
Two months ago, I called upon the Independent Media to step up their attacks on Hillary Clinton’s criminal behavior in a last-ditch and desperate effort to derail her presidential aspirations. After issuing my plea, I can happily report that I got more than I had hoped for. Merely a year ago, I was one of the few voices that was pounding away at Hillary Clinton’s sociopathic behavior. Today, the attacks are so bombastic and vitriolic, that I am joyfully reporting that I feel that my voice is being drowned out by a relentless chorus of voices that has Hillary Clinton in a death grip and they won’t let go. This is a great time for humanity. Even if the criminal elite unleash genocidal hell on Earth, at least humanity will die on their feet. There is absolutely no way that the criminal elite can stem the tide of rebellion against their corrupt and satanically inspired rule over the people.
The criminal elite had pinned their hopes on Hillary Clinton ushering in the NWO by tearing down what was left of American sovereignty. From a Bilderberg, Trilateral and CFR perspective, this woman was sociopathic enough to do what would need to be done to complete this task. However, the criminal elite forgot to do one thing. They neglected to manage her public image. It is leaders like Clinton and Cameron which have awakened the masses, through their abject criminality, and the people are saying enough is enough.
Clinton’s role in the emails, her treason by selling uranium to the Russians to raise money for her foundation, the Benghazi affair, etc., etc, are exploding on the national scene. Former Clinton campaign leaders and Secret Service personnel are speaking out against this despot. The genie will not fit back into the bottle. The elite know this and they are on the verge of a mass nervous breakdown. The playground bully has just been punched in the nose by the 98 pound weakling.
Zbigniew Brzezinski saw this awakening coming in 2011 which prompted him to say the following:
This is what wounded animals do, they lash out in an uncontrollable manner.
The following op-ed piece written for the Council on Foreign Relations captures the criminal elite’s sense of desperation.
The Face of Global Elite Arrogance
Meet the face of global pomposity and unbridled arrogance. His disdain for “your type” is noteworthy and speaks to the desperation of global criminal elite.
His name is James Traub and he and his kind are the absolute enemy of every American. He is the heir to the Bloomingdale industries and a prominent member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Traub’s elitist views leave nothing to the imagination. Writing for the mouthpiece of The Council on Foreign Relations, he leaves little doubt that the the evil empire is going to strike back.
It is clear that Traub and his fellow CFR elitist snobs are declaring war on any kind self-determination. He expects every Westerner to relish in their servitude to the globalists as he states the following in the article:
“the Brexit vote…utter repudiation of….bankers and economists”…
“…establishment political parties in major western countries must combine forces to keep out the nationalists”.
“…globalization means culture as well as economics: Older people whose familiar world is vanishing beneath a welter of foreign tongues and multicultural celebrations are waving their fists at cosmopolitan elites.”
“…(describes) the pro-Trump Republican base as “know nothing” voters…”
In one fell swoop, Traub validated several conspiracy theories, as being conspiracy facts as his statements admit to the following conspiratorial beliefs held by much of the Independent Media:
The bankers are involved in a conspiracy that work against the interests of the common man…all wars are bankers’ wars.
The Democrats and the Republicans are “establishment” parties and for all intents and purposes these two parties are two flavors of the same party.
There is an overt admission that illegal immigration is about decultralizing the west.
The “Know-nothing voters” who support Trump should be viewed with extreme disdain (e.g. extremists and domestic terrorists).
Conclusion
After reading Traub’s article, there is nothing left to the imagination, the elite are in absolute panic. This is what makes the criminal elite so very dangerous. It is my considered opinion that the panicked elite may resort to one of more of the following to reassert control over dumbed down masses, who are awake to the corruption that has ruled over them for so long:
False flag induced martial law, followed by mass incarcerations and genocide.
A complete economic collapse which will pit one useless eater vs. another useless eater.
Bankers start world wars of epic proportions. World War III could be right around the corner.
If this is not the future that you want for your children, you best get off of your backside and get involved in the planet-changing conflict.
And how moral psychology can help explain and reduce tensions between the two.
What on earth is going on in the Western democracies? From the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and an assortment of right-wing parties across Europe through the June 23 Brexit vote, many on the Left have the sense that something dangerous and ugly is spreading: right-wing populism, seen as the Zika virus of politics. Something has gotten into “those people” that makes them vote in ways that seem—to their critics—likely to harm their own material interests, at least if their leaders follow through in implementing isolationist policies that slow economic growth.
Most analyses published since the Brexit vote focus on economic factors and some version of the “left behind” thesis—globalization has raised prosperity all over the world, with the striking exception of the working classes in Western societies. These less educated members of the richest countries lost access to well-paid but relatively low-skilled jobs, which were shipped overseas or given to immigrants willing to work for less. In communities where wages have stagnated or declined, the ever-rising opulence, rents, and confidence of London and other super-cities has bred resentment.A smaller set of analyses, particularly in the United States, has focused on the psychological trait of authoritarianism to explain why these populist movements are often so hostile to immigration, and why they usually have an outright racist fringe.Globalization and authoritarianism are both essential parts of the story, but in this essay I will put them together in a new way. I’ll tell a story with four chapters that begins by endorsing the distinction made by the intellectual historian Michael Lind, and other commentators, between globalists and nationalists—these are good descriptions of the two teams of combatants emerging in so many Western nations. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front, pointed to the same dividing line last December when she portrayed the battle in France as one between “globalists” and “patriots.”But rather than focusing on the nationalists as the people who need to be explained by experts, I’ll begin the story with the globalists. I’ll show how globalization and rising prosperity have changed the values and behavior of the urban elite, leading them to talk and act in ways that unwittingly activate authoritarian tendencies in a subset of the nationalists. I’ll show why immigration has been so central in nearly all right-wing populist movements. It’s not just the spark, it’s the explosive material, and those who dismiss anti-immigrant sentiment as mere racism have missed several important aspects of moral psychology related to the general human need to live in a stable and coherent moral order. Once moral psychology is brought into the story and added on to the economic and authoritarianism explanations, it becomes possible to offer some advice for reducing the intensity of the recent wave of conflicts.Chapter One: The Rise of the GlobalistsAs nations grow prosperous, their values change in predictable ways. The most detailed longitudinal research on these changes comes from the World Values Survey, which asks representative samples of people in dozens of countries about their values and beliefs. The WVS has now collected and published data in six “waves” since the early 1980s; the most recent survey included sixty countries. Nearly all of the countries are now far wealthier than they were in the 1980s, and many made a transition from communism to capitalism and from dictatorship to democracy in the interim. How did these momentous changes affect their values?Each country has followed a unique trajectory, but if we zoom out far enough some general trends emerge from the WVS data. Countries seem to move in two directions, along two axes: first, as they industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations. Second, as they grow wealthier and more citizens move into the service sector, nations move away from “survival values” emphasizing the economic and physical security found in one’s family, tribe, and other parochial groups, toward “self-expression” or “emancipative values” that emphasize individual rights and protections—not just for oneself, but as a matter of principle, for everyone. Here is a summary of those changes from the introduction to Christian Welzel’s enlightening book Freedom Rising:
…fading existential pressures [i.e., threats and challenges to survival] open people’s minds, making them prioritize freedom over security, autonomy over authority, diversity over uniformity, and creativity over discipline. By the same token, persistent existential pressures keep people’s minds closed, in which case they emphasize the opposite priorities…the existentially relieved state of mind is the source of tolerance and solidarity beyond one’s in-group; the existentially stressed state of mind is the source of discrimination and hostility against out-groups.
Democratic capitalism—in societies with good rule of law and non-corrupt institutions—has generated steady increases in living standards and existential security for many decades now. As societies become more prosperous and safe, they generally become more open and tolerant. Combined with vastly greater access to the food, movies, and consumer products of other cultures brought to us by globalization and the internet, this openness leads almost inevitably to the rise of a cosmopolitan attitude, usually most visible in the young urban elite. Local ties weaken, parochialism becomes a dirty word, and people begin to think of their fellow human beings as fellow “citizens of the world” (to quote candidate Barack Obama in Berlin in 2008). The word “cosmopolitan” comes from Greek roots meaning, literally, “citizen of the world.” Cosmopolitans embrace diversity and welcome immigration, often turning those topics into litmus tests for moral respectability.
For example, in 2007, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave a speech that included the phrase, “British jobs for British workers.” The phrase provoked anger and scorn from many of Brown’s colleagues in the Labour party. In an essay in Prospect, David Goodhart described the scene at a British center-left social event a few days after Brown’s remark:
The people around me entered a bidding war to express their outrage at Brown’s slogan which was finally triumphantly closed by one who declared, to general approval, that it was “racism, pure and simple.” I remember thinking afterwards how odd the conversation would have sounded to most other people in this country. Gordon Brown’s phrase may have been clumsy and cynical but he didn’t actually say British jobs for white British workers. In most other places in the world today, and indeed probably in Britain itself until about 25 years ago, such a statement about a job preference for national citizens would have seemed so banal as to be hardly worth uttering. Now the language of liberal universalism has ruled it beyond the pale.
The shift that Goodhart notes among the Left-leaning British elite is related to the shift toward “emancipative” values described by Welzel. Parochialism is bad and universalism is good. Goodhart quotes George Monbiot, a leading figure of the British Left:
Internationalism…tells us that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington…. Patriotism, if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of British people [before the Congolese]. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism? How…do you distinguish it from racism?
Monbiot’s claim that patriotism is indistinguishable from racism illustrates the universalism that has characterized elements of the globalist Left in many Western nations for several decades. John Lennon wrote the globalist anthem in 1971. After asking us to imagine that there’s no heaven, and before asking us to imagine no possessions, Lennon asks us to:
Imagine there’s no countries; it isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.
This is a vision of heaven for multicultural globalists. But it’s naiveté, sacrilege, and treason for nationalists.
Chapter Two: Globalists and Nationalists Grow Further Apart on ImmigrationNationalists see patriotism as a virtue; they think their country and its culture are unique and worth preserving. This is a real moral commitment, not a pose to cover up racist bigotry. Some nationalists do believe that their country is better than all others, and some nationalisms are plainly illiberal and overtly racist. But as many defenders of patriotism have pointed out, you love your spouse because she or he is yours, not because you think your spouse is superior to all others. Nationalists feel a bond with their country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways: Citizens have a duty to love and serve their country, and governments are duty bound to protect their own people. Governments should place their citizens interests above the interests of people in other countries.There is nothing necessarily racist or base about this arrangement or social contract. Having a shared sense of identity, norms, and history generally promotes trust. Having no such shared sense leads to the condition that the sociologist Émile Durkheim described as “anomie” or normlessness. Societies with high trust, or high social capital, produce many beneficial outcomes for their citizens: lower crime rates, lower transaction costs for businesses, higher levels of prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity, among others. A liberal nationalist can reasonably argue that the debate over immigration policy in Europe is not a case of what is moral versus what is base, but a case of two clashing moral visions, incommensurate (à la Isaiah Berlin). The trick, from this point of view, is figuring out how to balance reasonable concerns about the integrity of one’s own community with the obligation to welcome strangers, particularly strangers in dire need.So how have nationalists and globalists responded to the European immigration crisis? For the past year or two we’ve all seen shocking images of refugees washing up alive and dead on European beaches, marching in long lines across south eastern Europe, scaling fences, filling train stations, and hiding and dying in trucks and train tunnels. If you’re a European globalist, you were probably thrilled in August 2015 when Angela Merkel announced Germany’s open-door policy to refugees and asylum seekers. There are millions of people in need, and (according to some globalists) national borders are arbitrary and immoral.But the globalists are concentrated in the capital cities, commercial hubs, and university towns—the places that are furthest along on the values shift found in the World Values Survey data. Figure 1 shows this geographic disjunction in the UK, using data collected in 2014. Positive sentiment toward immigrants is plotted on the Y axis, and desire for Britain to leave the EU on the X axis. Residents of Inner London are extreme outliers on both dimensions when compared to other cities and regions of the UK, and even when compared to residents of outer London.
But if you are a European nationalist, watching the nightly news may have felt like watching the spread of the Zika virus, moving steadily northward from the chaos zones of southwest Asia and north Africa. Only a few right-wing nationalist leaders tried to stop it, such as Victor Orban in Hungary. The globalist elite seemed to be cheering the human tidal wave onward, welcoming it into the heart of Europe, and then demanding that every country accept and resettle a large number of refugees.
And these demands, epicentered in Brussels, came after decades of debate in which nationalists had been arguing that Europe has already been too open and had already taken in so many Muslim immigrants that the cultures and traditions of European societies were threatened. Long before the flow of Syrian asylum seekers arrived in Europe there were initiatives to ban minarets in Switzerland and burkas in France. There were riots in Arab neighborhoods of Paris and Marseilles, and attacks on Jews and synagogues throughout Europe. There were hidden terrorist cells that planned and executed the attacks of September 11 in the United States, attacks on trains and buses in Madrid and London, and the slaughter of the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris.By the summer of 2015 the nationalist side was already at the boiling point, shouting “enough is enough, close the tap,” when the globalists proclaimed, “let us open the floodgates, it’s the compassionate thing to do, and if you oppose us you are a racist.” Might that not provoke even fairly reasonable people to rage? Might that not make many of them more receptive to arguments, ideas, and political parties that lean toward the illiberal side of nationalism and that were considered taboo just a few years earlier?Chapter Three: Muslim Immigration Triggers the Authoritarian AlarmNationalists in Europe have been objecting to mass immigration for decades, so the gigantic surge of asylum seekers in 2015 was bound to increase their anger and their support for right-wing nationalist parties. Globalists tend to explain these reactions as “racism, pure and simple,” or as the small-minded small-town selfishness of people who don’t want to lose either jobs or benefits to foreigners.Racism is clearly evident in some of the things that some nationalists say in interviews, chant at soccer matches, or write on the Internet with the protection of anonymity. But “racism” is a shallow term when used as an explanation. It asserts that there are some people who just don’t like anyone different from themselves—particularly if they have darker skin. They have no valid reason for this dislike; they just dislike difference, and that’s all we need to know to understand their rage.But that is not all we need to know. On closer inspection, racism usually turns out to be deeply bound up with moral concerns. (I use the term “moral” here in a purely descriptive sense to mean concerns that seem—for the people we are discussing—to be matters of good and evil; I am not saying that racism is in fact morally good or morally correct.) People don’t hate others just because they have darker skin or differently shaped noses; they hate people whom they perceive as having values that are incompatible with their own, or who (they believe) engage in behaviors they find abhorrent, or whom they perceive to be a threat to something they hold dear. These moral concerns may be out of touch with reality, and they are routinely amplified by demagogues. But if we want to understand the recent rise of right-wing populist movements, then “racism” can’t be the stopping point; it must be the beginning of the inquiry.Among the most important guides in this inquiry is the political scientist Karen Stenner. In 2005 Stenner published a book called The Authoritarian Dynamic, an academic work full of graphs, descriptions of regression analyses, and discussions of scholarly disputes over the nature of authoritarianism. (It therefore has not had a wide readership.) Her core finding is that authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It is rather a psychological predisposition to become intolerant when the person perceives a certain kind of threat. It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on defending their in-group, kicking out foreigners and non-conformists, and stamping out dissent within the group. At those times they are more attracted to strongmen and the use of force. At other times, when they perceive no such threat, they are not unusually intolerant. So the key is to understand what pushes that button.The answer, Stenner suggests, is what she calls “normative threat,” which basically means a threat to the integrity of the moral order (as they perceive it). It is the perception that “we” are coming apart:
The experience or perception of disobedience to group authorities or authorities unworthy of respect, nonconformity to group norms or norms proving questionable, lack of consensus in group values and beliefs and, in general, diversity and freedom ‘run amok’ should activate the predisposition and increase the manifestation of these characteristic attitudes and behaviors.
So authoritarians are not being selfish. They are not trying to protect their wallets or even their families. They are trying to protect their group or society. Some authoritarians see their race or bloodline as the thing to be protected, and these people make up the deeply racist subset of right-wing populist movements, including the fringe that is sometimes attracted to neo-Nazism. They would not even accept immigrants who fully assimilated to the culture. But more typically, in modern Europe and America, it is the nation and its culture that nationalists want to preserve.
Stenner identifies authoritarians in her many studies by the degree to which they endorse a few items about the most important values children should learn at home, for example, “obedience” (vs. “independence” and “tolerance and respect for other people”). She then describes a series of studies she did using a variety of methods and cross-national datasets. In one set of experiments she asked Americans to read fabricated news stories about how their nation is changing. When they read that Americans are changing in ways that make them more similar to each other, authoritarians were no more racist and intolerant than others. But when Stenner gave them a news story suggesting that Americans are becoming more morally diverse, the button got pushed, the “authoritarian dynamic” kicked in, and they became more racist and intolerant. For example, “maintaining order in the nation” became a higher national priority while “protecting freedom of speech” became a lower priority. They became more critical of homosexuality, abortion, and divorce.One of Stenner’s most helpful contributions is her finding that authoritarians are psychologically distinct from “status quo conservatives” who are the more prototypical conservatives—cautious about radical change. Status quo conservatives compose the long and distinguished lineage from Edmund Burke’s prescient reflections and fears about the early years of the French revolution through William F. Buckley’s statement that his conservative magazine National Review would “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’”Status quo conservatives are not natural allies of authoritarians, who often favor radical change and are willing to take big risks to implement untested policies. This is why so many Republicans—and nearly all conservative intellectuals—oppose Donald Trump; he is simply not a conservative by the test of temperament or values. But status quo conservatives can be drawn into alliance with authoritarians when they perceive that progressives have subverted the country’s traditions and identity so badly that dramatic political actions (such as Brexit, or banning Muslim immigration to the United States) are seen as the only remaining way of yelling “Stop!” Brexit can seem less radical than the prospect of absorption into the “ever closer union” of the EU.So now we can see why immigration—particularly the recent surge in Muslim immigration from Syria—has caused such powerfully polarized reactions in so many European countries, and even in the United States where the number of Muslim immigrants is low. Muslim Middle Eastern immigrants are seen by nationalists as posing a far greater threat of terrorism than are immigrants from any other region or religion. But Stenner invites us to look past the security threat and examine the normative threat. Islam asks adherents to live in ways that can make assimilation into secular egalitarian Western societies more difficult compared to other groups. (The same can be said for Orthodox Jews, and Stenner’s authoritarian dynamic can help explain why we are seeing a resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism in the United States.) Muslims don’t just observe different customs in their private lives; they often request and receive accommodations in law and policy from their host countries, particularly in matters related to gender. Some of the most pitched battles of recent decades in France and other European countries have been fought over the veiling and covering of women, and the related need for privacy and gender segregation. For example, some public swimming pools in Sweden now offer times of day when only women are allowed to swim. This runs contrary to strong Swedish values regarding gender equality and non-differentiation.So whether you are a status quo conservative concerned about rapid change or an authoritarian who is hypersensitive to normative threat, high levels of Muslim immigration into your Western nation are likely to threaten your core moral concerns. But as soon as you speak up to voice those concerns, globalists will scorn you as a racist and a rube. When the globalists—even those who run the center-right parties in your country—come down on you like that, where can you turn? The answer, increasingly, is to the far right-wing nationalist parties in Europe, and to Donald Trump, who just engineered a hostile takeover of the Republican Party in America.The Authoritarian Dynamic was published in 2005 and the word “Muslim” occurs just six times (in contrast to 100 appearances of the word “black”). But Stenner’s book offers a kind of Rosetta stone for interpreting the rise of right-wing populism and its focus on Muslims in 2016. Stenner notes that her theory “explains the kind of intolerance that seems to ‘come out of nowhere,’ that can spring up in tolerant and intolerant cultures alike, producing sudden changes in behavior that cannot be accounted for by slowly changing cultural traditions.”She contrasts her theory with those who see an unstoppable tide of history moving away from traditions and “toward greater respect for individual freedom and difference,” and who expect people to continue evolving “into more perfect liberal democratic citizens.“ She does not say which theorists she has in mind, but Welzel and his World Values Survey collaborators, as well as Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, seem to be likely candidates. Stenner does not share the optimism of those theorists about the future of Western liberal democracies. She acknowledges the general trends toward tolerance, but she predicts that these very trends create conditions that hyper-activate authoritarians and produce a powerful backlash. She offered this prophecy:
[T]he increasing license allowed by those evolving cultures generates the very conditions guaranteed to goad latent authoritarians to sudden and intense, perhaps violent, and almost certainly unexpected, expressions of intolerance. Likewise, then, if intolerance is more a product of individual psychology than of cultural norms…we get a different vision of the future, and a different understanding of whose problem this is and will be, than if intolerance is an almost accidental by-product of simple attachment to tradition. The kind of intolerance that springs from aberrant individual psychology, rather than the disinterested absorption of pervasive cultural norms, is bound to be more passionate and irrational, less predictable, less amenable to persuasion, and more aggravated than educated by the cultural promotion of tolerance [emphasis added].
Writing in 2004, Stenner predicted that “intolerance is not a thing of the past, it is very much a thing of the future.”
Chapter Four: What Now?The upshot of all this is that the answer to the question we began with—What on earth is going on?—cannot be found just by looking at the nationalists and pointing to their economic conditions and the racism that some of them do indeed display. One must first look at the globalists, and at how their changing values may drive many of their fellow citizens to support right-wing political leaders. In particular, globalists often support high levels of immigration and reductions in national sovereignty; they tend to see transnational entities such as the European Union as being morally superior to nation-states; and they vilify the nationalists and their patriotism as “racism pure and simple.” These actions press the “normative threat” button in the minds of those who are predisposed to authoritarianism, and these actions can drive status quo conservatives to join authoritarians in fighting back against the globalists and their universalistic projects.If this argument is correct, then it leads to a clear set of policy prescriptions for globalists. First and foremost: Think carefully about the way your country handles immigration and try to manage it in a way that is less likely to provoke an authoritarian reaction. Pay attention to three key variables: the percentage of foreign-born residents at any given time, the degree of moral difference of each incoming group, and the degree of assimilation being achieved by each group’s children.Legal immigration from morally different cultures is not problematic even with low levels of assimilation if the numbers are kept low; small ethnic enclaves are not a normative threat to any sizable body politic. Moderate levels of immigration by morally different ethnic groups are fine, too, as long as the immigrants are seen as successfully assimilating to the host culture. When immigrants seem eager to embrace the language, values, and customs of their new land, it affirms nationalists’ sense of pride that their nation is good, valuable, and attractive to foreigners. But whenever a country has historically high levels of immigration, from countries with very different moralities, and without a strong and successful assimilationist program, it is virtually certain that there will be an authoritarian counter-reaction, and you can expect many status quo conservatives to support it.Stenner ends The Authoritarian Dynamic with some specific and constructive advice:
[A]ll the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness…. Ultimately, nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions, and processes. And regrettably, nothing is more certain to provoke increased expression of their latent predispositions than the likes of “multicultural education,” bilingual policies, and nonassimilation.
If Stenner is correct, then her work has profound implications, not just for America, which was the focus of her book, but perhaps even more so for Europe. Donald Tusk, the current president of the European Council, recently gave a speech to a conclave of center-right Christian Democratic leaders (who, as members of the educated elite, are still generally globalists). Painfully aware of the new authoritarian supremacy in his native Poland, he chastised himself and his colleagues for pushing a “utopia of Europe without nation-states.” This, he said, has caused the recent Euroskeptic backlash: “Obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that ordinary people, the citizens of Europe, do not share our Euro-enthusiasm.”
Democracy requires letting ordinary citizens speak. The majority spoke in Britain on June 23, and majorities of similar mien may soon make themselves heard in other European countries, and possibly in the United States in November. The year 2016 will likely be remembered as a major turning point in the trajectory of Western democracies. Those who truly want to understand what is happening should carefully consider the complex interplay of globalization, immigration, and changing values.If the story I have told here is correct, then the globalists could easily speak, act, and legislate in ways that drain passions and votes away from nationalist parties, but this would require some deep rethinking about the value of national identities and cohesive moral communities. It would require abandoning the multicultural approach to immigration and embracing assimilation.The great question for Western nations after 2016 may be this: How do we reap the gains of global cooperation in trade, culture, education, human rights, and environmental protection while respecting—rather than diluting or crushing—the world’s many local, national, and other “parochial” identities, each with its own traditions and moral order? In what kind of world can globalists and nationalists live together in peace?
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor in the Business and Society Program at New York University—Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Story 1: Operation Jade Helm: America’s Military Training Exercise in Southwest United States With 1,200 Special Forces — DisInfo Psyop Against American People — Texas Is Hostile — Ruling Elite Afraid of American People? — Videos
SOCOM Plans to Invade HOSTILE Texas Revealed
MSM Caught Lying: Breaking Jade Helm Update
OPERATION:JADE HELM 1 5…GOV TRAINING TO TAKE OVER TEXAS
ARMY and MSM Launch DisInfo Psyop Against American People
Army Betrays One Of Their Own
Jade Helm 15: 2 More States Join, Green Beret Says Drill Ends On 9/11 In Florida
Jade Helm 15: 10 States Now Involved with Massive US Military Exercise
Army Planing a Surprise Visit to US Towns! WHY? The Answer Will Make You Rethink Everything!
Jade Helm 15 – the low down
DEBUNK THIS: OP JADE HELM 15 Surgical Strikes Included
Psy Op Colonel Texas Needs To Submit
Army Special Ops Command Pushes Back Against Infowars
PSYOP and MISO
History of Psychological Operations and Military Information Support Operations
What is United States Army Civil Affairs & Psychological Command(Airborne)
Army MOS 37F Psychological Operations Specialist
304th PSYOP Company – Information video
US Army Reserves Psychological Operations
37F Psychological Operations Specialist (Reserve)
PSYOP Soldiers Training
Army embeds PSYOPS soldiers at local TV stations
Heather Wokusch on ‘Welcome to the Jungle: US Military Psychological Operations’
Sentient World Simulation by James Corbett
The Sentient World Simulation’s aim, according to its creator, is to be a “continuously running, continually updated mirror model of the real world that can be used to predict and evaluate future events and courses of action.” In practical terms that equates to a computer simulation of the planet complete with billions of “nodes” representing every person on the earth.
The EyeOpener- PSYOPS 101: The Technology of Psych Warfare
Yuri Bezmenov: Psychological Warfare Subversion & Control of Western Society (Complete)
Soviet Subversion of the Free World Press, 1984 – Complete
The Quigley Formula – G. Edward Griffin lecture
An excellent lecture by G. Edward Griffin entitled “The Quigley Formula: A conspiratorial view of history as taught by the conspirators themselves”
“Quigley” is the late Carroll Quigley, a Council on Foreign Relations member and historian, as well as mentor to CFR & Trilateral Commission member Bill Clinton.
The lecture is based around the following quote from his book Tragedy & Hope, pp. 1247-1248:
“The National parties and their presidential candidates, with the Eastern Establishment assiduously fostering the process behind the scenes, moved closer together and nearly met in the center with almost identical candidates and platforms, although the process was concealed as much as possible, by the revival of obsolescent or meaningless war cries and slogans (often going back to the Civil War)….The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy. … Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.”
Carroll Quigley on Tragedy And Hope
Michael Hastings: Army Deploys Psychological Operations on U.S. Senators in Afghanistan War Effort
Sgt. Biggs On Military Life and Why Michael Hastings was Murdered
Michael Hastings Widow Speaks Out For The First Time To Piers Morgan,Piers Asks Was His Death
Infowars Special Report: Introduction to Media Manipulation & Psychological Operations
Minority Report: Fiction Has Become Reality
Minority Report 2012 Full – CG (Tom Cruise)
Special forces set to swarm Southwest and operate undetected among civilians in massive military exercise
Operation Jade Helm will see 1,200 service members including Green Berets and SEALs and special forces from the Air Force and Marines in July
Soldiers armed with blank rounds will operate in and around towns in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado for 8 weeks
The so-called Realistic Military Training has some residents fearful the drill is a preparation for martial law
By DAILYMAIL.COM REPORTER
Seven Southwestern states will soon be infiltrated by 1,200 military special ops personnel as part of a controversial domestic military training in which some of the elite soldiers will operate undetected among civilians.
Operation Jade Helm begins in July and will last for eight weeks. Soldiers will operate in and around towns in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado where some of them wil drop from planes while carrying weapons loaded with blanks in what military officials have dubbed Realistic Military Training.
But with residents of the entire states of Texas and Utah dubbed ‘hostile’ for the purposes of the exercises, Jade Helm has some concerned the drills are too realistic.
+3
Hostile: An unclassified military document reveals the states involved in a controversial multi-agency training exercises that will place 1,200 military personnel into 7 Southwest states–with residents of Utah, Texas and part of Southern California designated as ‘hostile’
Special ops: Operation Jade Helm will involve Green Berets and SEALs and special forces from the Air Force and Marines starting in July and lasting 8 weeks
Headlines like Freedom Outpost‘s ‘Operation Jade Helm—military trains for martial law in American South-west’ abound across the Right-leaning blogosphere and Info Wars warns that Jade Helm is simply ‘an effort to test the effectiveness of infiltration techniques’ on the American public.
‘They’re having Delta Force, Navy SEALS with the Army trained to basically take over,’ Info Wars’ Alex Jones said Sunday. ‘Texas is listed as a hostile sector, and of course, we are…We’re here defending the republic.’
The Houston Chronicle reports that, among the planned exercises, soldiers will attempt to operate undetected among civilian populations.
Residents, in turn, will be asked to report suspicious activity in order to gauge the effectiveness of the soldiers.
Military officials say they’ve gotten the go ahead for the operations from local authorities such as mayors and county commissions.
And sheriff’s deputies told the Houston Chronicle they would ensure residents living near where aircraft were slated to create disturbances and drop soldiers, civilian and military vehicles will barrel through and where blank rounds would be fired.
Jim Stewart with the Brazos County, Texas Sheriff’s Office told the Chronicle that such exercises are far from anything new.
‘Special ops for years have trained off-post for years, where they go out and have folks that are role players out on the economy,’ said the Army intelligence veteran. ‘They’ll have a scenario they’ll be following and they’ll interact with these role players as if they’re in another country.’
However, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command themselves say Jade Helm is different.
+3
Reassuring? Sheriff’s deputies say they will ensure residents living near where aircraft were slated to create disturbances and drop soldiers, civilian and military vehicles will barrel through and where blank rounds would be fired [FILE PHOTO]
Texas, which the military has designated as ‘hostile’ for the purposes of the training, was chosen to be a hub of the unprecedentedly large program because ‘Texans are historically supportive of efforts to prepare our soldiers’ writes the USASOC
‘The size and scope of Jade Helm sets this one apart. To stay ahead of the environmental challenges faced overseas, Jade Helm will take place across seven states,’ the USASOC wrote in a March 24 release.
‘The diverse terrain in these states replicates areas Special Operations Soldiers regularly find themselves operating in overseas.’
The military has also reacted to widespread fear of the operation by calling some ultra-conservative coverage of the ‘martial law’ drills alarmist and inaccurate.
‘That notion was proposed by a few individuals who are unfamiliar with how and why USASOC conducts training exercises,’ USASOC spokesman Army Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria told Stripes.
‘This exercise is routine training to maintain a high level of readiness for Army Special Operations Forces because they must be ready to support potential missions anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice.’
Army Special Operations Command pushes back against alarmist claims about upcoming exercise
U.S. Army Special Operations Command is pushing back against alarmist claims that an upcoming U.S. military exercise is a preparation for imposing martial law or subduing right-leaning groups and individuals.
Conspiracy theories about the exercise, known as JADE HELM 15, appeared online this week. Some commentators railing against the event referred to an online slide show allegedly created by USASOC, which outlined a special operations exercise slated to take place across multiple states, outside the confines of U.S. military bases. In the slide show, a map of the southwest region of the United States labels Texas and other territory as “hostile” or “insurgent pocket.” The document also refers to coordination with law enforcement agencies.
Officials at USASOCM were not able to immediately verify the authenticity of the slide show because their computer firewalls prevented them from accessing the websites where the document appeared.
Army Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria, a USASOC spokesman, confirmed that there is an upcoming exercise called Jade Helm 15 which is scheduled to take place this summer at locations in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, California and Nevada. But he denied the event is preparation for some sort of military takeover.
“That notion was proposed by a few individuals who are unfamiliar with how and why USASOC conducts training exercises,” he said in an email. “This exercise is routine training to maintain a high level of readiness for Army Special Operations Forces because they must be ready to support potential missions anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice.”
He said the only thing unique about this particular exercise, which is slated to take place between July 15 and Sept. 15, is “the use of new challenging terrain” which was chosen because it is similar to conditions special operations forces operate in overseas.
Lastoria said coordination with local law enforcement is necessary for safety reasons because some of the training will take place outside of military bases where civilian agencies have jurisdiction.
He said his office has been receiving a lot of calls from people who heard about the exercise and are concerned about “the nature of the training objectives.”
Reserve Army – U.S. Army Civil Affairs Psychological Operations Command(USACAPOC)Garrison/HQFort Bragg, NCPatronSaint GabrielMotto”Persuade, Change, Influence”ColorsArmy – Bottle-green piped withsilver gray.InsigniaIdentification
symbolArmy – Knight chess piece (Often mistaken for the Trojan Horse)
Psychological operations (PSYOP) or, as it has been known since 2010, Military Information Support Operations (MISO),[1] are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.[2]
The purpose of United States psychological operations is to induce or reinforce behavior favorable to U.S. objectives. They are an important part of the range of diplomatic, informational, military, and economic activities available to the U.S. They can be utilized during both peacetime and conflict. There are three main types: strategic, operational, and tactical. Strategic PSYOP include informational activities conducted by the U.S. government agencies outside of the military arena, though many utilize Department of Defense (DOD) assets.Operational PSYOP are conducted across the range of military operations, including during peacetime, in a defined operational area to promote the effectiveness of the joint force commander’s (JFC) campaigns and strategies. Tactical PSYOP are conducted in the area assigned to a tactical commander across the range of military operations to support the tactical mission against opposing forces.
PSYOP can encourage popular discontent with the opposition’s leadership and by combining persuasion with a credible threat, degrade an adversary’s ability to conduct or sustain military operations. They can also disrupt, confuse, and protract the adversary’s decision-making process, undermining command and control.[3] When properly employed, PSYOP have the potential to save the lives of friendly or enemy forces by reducing the adversary’s will to fight. By lowering the adversary’s morale and then its efficiency, PSYOP can also discourage aggressive actions by creating disaffection within their ranks, ultimately leading to surrender.
The integrated employment of the core capabilities of electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception, and operations security, in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own.[4]
Products
A Somali boy holding up a leaflet dispersed during Operation Restore Hope in the early 1990s
PSYOP involves the careful creation and dissemination of a product message. There are three types of products that are used to create these messages. They include White products which are used in overt operations and Gray and Black products which are used in covert PSYOP. White, Gray, and Black don’t refer to the product’s content but rather the methods used to carry out the operation.
In order for PSYOP to be successful they must be based in reality. All messages must be consistent and must not contradict each other. Any gap between the product and reality will be quickly noticed. A credible “truth” must be presented which is consistent to all audiences. Primarily it is a component of offensive counterinformation but can be used defensively as well. PSYOP are used in support of special operations, unconventional warfare, and counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. PSYOP can include military operations other than warfare and also include joint operations. They include counterterrorism operations, peace operations, noncombatant evacuation, enforcement of sanctions and maritime interception operations, strikes and raids, etc.
White PSYOP
White PSYOP is attributable to PSYOP as a source.
U.S. Army PSYOP soldiers with Detachment 1080, 318th Psychological Operations Company distribute newspaper products in the East Rashid region of Baghdad, Iraq, July 11, 2007.
White is acknowledged as an official statement or act of the U.S. Government, or emanates from a source associated closely enough with the U.S. Government to reflect an official viewpoint. The information should be true and factual. It also includes all output identified as coming from U.S. official sources.
Authorized to engage in white activity directed at foreign audiences are: The State Department, USIA, the Foreign Operations Administration (a predecessor of the Agency for International Development), the Defense Department and other U.S. Government departments and agencies as necessary.[5]
Gray PSYOP
The source of the gray PSYOP product is deliberately ambiguous.
The true source (U.S. Government) is not revealed to the target audience. The activity engaged in plausibly appears to emanate from a non-official American source, or an indigenous, non-hostile source, or there may be no attribution.
Gray is that information whose content is such that the effect will be increased if the hand of the U.S. Government and in some cases any American participation are not revealed. It is simply a means for the U.S. to present viewpoints which are in the interest of U.S. foreign policy, but which will be acceptable or more acceptable to the intended target audience than will an official government statement.[5][dead link]
Black PSYOP
The activity engaged in appears to emanate from a source (government, party, group, organization, person) usually hostile in nature. The interest of the U.S. Government is concealed and the U.S. Government would deny responsibility. It is best used in support of strategic plans.
Covert PSYOP is not a function of the U.S. military but instead is used in special operations due to their political sensitivity and need for higher level compartmentalization. Further, black PSYOP, to be credible, may need to disclose sensitive material, with the damage caused by information disclosure considered to be outweighed by the impact of successful deception.[6] In order to achieve maximum results and to prevent compromise of overt PSYOP, overt and covert operations need to be kept separate. Personnel involved in one must not be engaged in the other.
Media
PSYOP conveys messages via visual, audio, and audiovisual media. Military psychological operations, at the tactical level, are usually delivered by loudspeaker, and face to face communication. For more deliberate campaigns, they may use leaflets, radio or television. Strategic operations may use radio or television broadcasts, various publications, airdropped leaflets, or, as part of a covert operation, with material placed in foreign news media.
Process
In order to create a successful PSYOP the following must be established: 1) clearly define the mission so that it aligns with national objectives 2) need a PSYOP estimate of the situation 3) prepare the plan 4) media selection 5) product development 6) pretesting – determines the probable impact of the PSYOP on the target audience 7) production and dissemination of PSYOP material 8) implementation 9) posttesting – evaluates audience responses 10) feedback
Before these steps can occur, intelligence analysts must profile potential targets in order to determine which ones it would be most beneficial to target. In order to figure this out, analysts must determine the vulnerabilities of these groups and what they would be susceptible to. The analysts also determine the attitudes of the targets toward the current situation, their complaints, ethnic origin, frustrations, languages, problems, tensions, attitudes, motivations, and perceptions, and so on. Once the appropriate target(s) have been determined, the PSYOP can be created.
Psychological operations should be planned carefully, in that even a tactical message, with modern news media, can spread worldwide and be treated as the policy of the United States. The U.S. Army is responsible for military psychological warfare doctrine.[6] See the World War I section for an example of how a tactical leaflet, not properly coordinated, can cause national-level harm.
Psychological operations, at any level, must be consistent with the policies of higher levels of command
The message to be delivered can be adapted to tactical situations, but promises made must be consistent with national policy.
U.S. PSYOP forces are forbidden to target (i.e., attempt to change the opinions of) U.S. citizens at any time, in any location globally, or under any circumstances.[7] However, commanders may use PSYOP forces to provide public information to U.S. audiences during times of disaster or crisis. The use of PSYOP forces to deliver necessary public information to a U.S. audience was established in relief activities after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Tactical Psychological Operations teams (TPTs) were employed to disseminate information by loudspeaker on locations of relief shelters and facilities. Information support to a noncombatant evacuation operation (NEO) by PSYOP forces to provide evacuation information to U.S. and third-country nationals would also adhere to the order.[6]
As an example of the use of PSYOP in a humanitarian relief operation Major General Anthony Zinni, Director of Operations for Unified Task Force Somalia, said
Psychological operations were a key Battlefield Operating System used extensively to support Unified Task Force (UNITAF) Somalia operations. In order to maximize the PSYOP impact, we established a Joint PSYOP Task Force under the supervision of the Director of Operations, integrated PSYOP into all plans and operations, and limited the PSYOP focus to the operational and tactical levels. Psychological operations do not accomplish missions alone. They work best when they are combined with and integrated in an overall theater campaign plan. In Operation RESTORE HOPE, we were successful in doing that.[6]
United States PSYOP units and soldiers of all branches of the military are prohibited by law from conducting PSYOP missions on domestic audiences.[7] While PSYOP soldiers may offer non-PSYOP related support to domestic military missions, PSYOP can only target foreign audiences. Though, it is worth noting that this does not rule out PSYOP targeting foreign audiences of allied nations. Additionally, in the Information Operations Roadmap made public January 2006 but originally approved by Defense SecretaryDonald Rumsfeld in October 2003, it stated “information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa.”[10]
Army
Chieu Hoi Mission by Craig L. Stewart, U. S. Army Vietnam Combat Artists Team IX (CAT IX 1969-70). Painting shows army soldiers airdropping Psy Op leaflets during the Vietnam War.
Soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 350th Tactical Psychological Operations, 10th Mountain Division, drop leaflets over a village near Hawijah in Kirkuk province, Iraq, on March 6, 2008.
U.S. Army PSYOP Force structure
Until recently, the Army’s Psychological Operations elements were administratively organized alongside Civil Affairs to form the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (USACAPOC), forming a part of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC). However, in May 2006 USCAPOC was reorganized to instead fall under the Army reserve command, and all active duty PSYOP elements were placed directly into USASOC. While reserve PSYOP forces no longer belong to USASOC, that command retains control of PSYOP doctrine. Operationally, PSYOP individuals and organizations support Army and Joint maneuver forces or interagency organizations.
Army Psychological Operations support operations ranging from strategic planning down to tactical employment.
PSYOP Support Elements generally support Corps sized elements. Tactical Psychological Operations Companies typically support Division sized elements, with Tactical Control through G-3. Brigades are typically supported by a Tactical PSYOP Detachment. The PSYOP Commander maintains Operational Control of PSYOP elements, advises the Commander and General Staff on the psychological battlespace.
The smallest organizational PSYOP element is the Tactical PSYOP Team (TPT). A TPT generally consists of a PSYOP team chief (Staff Sergeant or Sergeant), an assistant team chief (Sergeant or Specialist), and an additional soldier to serve as a gunner and to operate the speaker system (Specialist). A team is equipped with a Humvee fitted with a loud speaker, and often works with a local translator indigenous to the host or occupied country.
Generally, each maneuver battalion-sized element in a theater of war or operational area has at least one TPT attached to it. Women are not allowed to serve on TPTs in a war zone due to a PSYOP team’s high chance of contact with the enemy.
U.S. Army PSYOP branch of service collar insignia and regimental distinctive insignia.
PSYOP soldiers are required to complete nine weeks of Basic Combat Training. All enlisted PSYOP soldiers report to Fort Bragg to complete the 13-week Psychological Operation Advanced Individual Training (AIT) course. After AIT, the active duty-component PSYOP soldier is then required to attend Airborne training. Sometime after initial training, PSYOP soldiers will spend up to a year (or perhaps more for specific languages) in foreign language qualification training. Certain reserve soldiers serving in units designated as Airborne are also required to attend Airborne training, while language training and Airborne qualification for PSYOP soldiers assigned to non-Airborne units is awarded on a merit and need basis.
A U.S. Army field manual released in January 2013 states that “Inform and Influence Activities” are critical for describing, directing, and leading military operations. Several Army Division leadership staff are assigned to “planning, integration and synchronization of designated information-related capabilities.”[11]
245th Psychological Operations Company (POC) – Dallas, Texas
*Became the 345th PSYOP Company. Deployed soldiers during Operation Desert Storm (The Gulf War).
The 345th also deployed post 9-11 to Afghanistan working with U.S. Army Special Forces. In 2003 the 345th deployed to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Since November 2001, the 345th Tactical Psychological Operations Company (Airborne) has continuously had a detachment of deployed soldiers in Afghanistan, Iraq and / or Horn of Africa.
Commando Solo flies low over theStatue of Liberty in New York Harbor in 2001.
The Air National Guard provides support for Psychological Operations using a modified C-130 Hercules aircraft named EC-130 COMMANDO SOLO, operated by the 193d Special Operations Wing. The purpose of COMMANDO SOLO is to provide an aerial platform for broadcast media on both television and radio. The media broadcast is created by various agencies and organizations. As part of the broader function of information operations, COMMANDO SOLO can also jam the enemy’s broadcasts to his own people, or his psychological warfare broadcasting.
The Commando Solo aircraft currently is the only stand-off, high-altitude means available to PSYOP forces to disseminate information to large denied areas. Two orbits were established during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, one in the northern area and one in the southern part of the country, both far enough from harm’s way to keep the aircraft out of reach of potential enemy attack. At their operational altitude of 18,000 feet (5,500 m) and assuming clear channels, these aircraft can transmit radio and TV signals approximately 170 miles (270 km), which does not reach the objective areas near Baghdad. Straightforward physics dictate the range, given the power installed and the antenna configuration and assuming clear channels.
The enhanced altitude capability of the Commando Solo EC–130J (now funded) is increasing transmitter range. While this is an improvement over 130E capability, it is a small step, since the
increase in altitude is only 7,000 feet (less than 50 percent) and the range increase is governed by a square root function (that is, a 14 percent increase in range).[12]
A challenge to COMMANDO SOLO is the increasing use of cable television, which will not receive signals from airborne, ground, or any other transmitters that the cable operator does not want to connect to the system. At best, in the presence of cable TV, COMMANDO SOLO may be able to jam enemy broadcasts that are not, themselves, transmitted by cable.
Navy
Navy psychological operations policy is specified in OPNAVINST 3434.1, “Psychological Operations”.[9] The Navy provides support to Joint PSYOP programs by providing assets (such as broadcast platforms using shortwave and very high frequency (VHF) frequencies) for the production and dissemination of PSYOP materials. With the ability of naval vessels (especially the larger task forces) to produce audio-visual materials the Navy can often produce PSYOP products for use in denied areas. Leaflets are dropped utilizing the PDU-5B dispenser unit (aka Leaflet Bomb). The Navy coordinates extensively with the Army as the majority of PSYOP assets reside within USASOC. PSYOP planning and execution is coordinated through the Naval Network Warfare Command (NETWARCOM) and the Naval Information Operations Command (NIOC), both located in Norfolk, VA.
The U.S. Navy possesses the capability to produce audiovisual products in the Fleet Audiovisual Command, Pacific; the Fleet Imagery Command, Atlantic; the Fleet Combat Camera Groups; Naval Imaging Command; various film libraries; and limited capability from ships and aircraft of the fleet. A Naval Reserve PSYOP audiovisual unit supports the Atlantic Fleet. Navy personnel assets have the capability to produce documents, posters, articles, and other material suitable for PSYOP. Administrative capabilities exist ashore and afloat that prepare and produce various quantities of printed materials. Language capabilities exist in naval intelligence and among naval personnel for most European and Asian languages. The Fleet Tactical Readiness Group provides equipment and technical maintenance support to conduct civil radio broadcasts and broadcast jamming in the amplitude modulation frequency band. This unit is not trained to produce PSYOP products and must be augmented with PSYOP personnel or linguists when necessary. The unit is capable of being fully operational within 48 hours of receipt of tasking. The unit’s equipment consists of a 10.6 kW AM band broadcast radio transmitter; a broadcast studio van; antenna tuner; two antennas (a pneumatically raised 100-foot (30 m) top-loaded antenna mast and a 500-foot (150 m) wire helium balloon antenna); and a 30 kW generator that provides power to the system.
Central Intelligence Agency
Psychological operations was assigned to the pre-CIA Office of Policy Coordination, with oversight by the Department of State.[13] The overall psychological operations of the United States, overt and covert, were to be under the policy direction of the U.S. Department of State during peacetime and the early stages of war:
The Secretary of State shall be responsible for:
(1) The formulation of policies and plans for a national foreign information program in time of peace. This program shall include all foreign information activities conducted by departments and agencies of the U. S. Government.[13]
(2) The formulation of national psychological warfare policy in time of national emergency and the initial stages of war.[13]
(3) The coordination of policies and plans for the national foreign information program and for overt psychological warfare with the Department of Defense, with other appropriate departments and agencies of the U.S. Government, and with related planning…[13]
(4) Plans prepared by this organization for overt psychological
warfare in time of national emergency or the initial stages of war shall
b. The employment and expansion, insofar as is feasible, of the activities and facilities which compose the national foreign information program in time of peace, in order to assure rapid transition to operations in time of national emergency or war.[13]
c. Control of the execution of approved plans and policies by:
(1) the Department of Defense in theaters of military operations;
(2) the Department of State in areas other than theaters of military operations.[13]
d. Transmittal of approved psychological warfare plans and policies to theater commanders through the Joint Chiefs of Staff.[13]
After the OPC was consolidated into the CIA,[5] there has been a psychological operations staff, under various names, in what has variously been named the Deputy Directorate of Plans, the Directorate of Operations, or the National Clandestine Service.
History of U.S. Psychological Warfare
World War I
During World War I, the Propaganda Sub-Section was established under the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) Military Intelligence Branch within the Executive Division of the General Staff in early 1918. Although they produced most propaganda, the AEF Propaganda Sub-Section did not produce a few of the leaflets. General Pershing is supposed to have personally composed Leaflet “Y,” Austria Is Out of the War, which was run off on First Army presses, but distributed by the Propaganda Sub-Section. That Sub-Section, perhaps reflecting some professional jealousy, thought the leaflet sound in principle, but too prolix and a little too “brotherly.” Corps and Army presses issued several small leaflet editions containing a “news flash,” after the Sub-Section had approved their content. But in one or two cases that approval was not obtained, and in one unfortunate example a leaflet in Romanian committed the Allies and the United States to the union of all Romanians in Austria-Hungary with Romania. Such geopolitics was emphatically not the job of AEF propaganda and had the potential to cause serious embarrassment.[6]
World War II
There was extensive use of psychological operations in World War II, from the strategic to the tactical. National-level white propaganda was the responsibility of theOffice of War Information, while black propaganda was most often the responsibility of the Morale Operations branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).[14]
Psychological operations planning started before the U.S. entry into the war, with the creation of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), under Nelson Rockefeller, with the responsibility for psychological operations targeted at Latin America.[15] Special operations and intelligence concerning Latin America was a bureaucratic problem throughout the war. Where the OSS eventually had most such responsibilities, the FBI had its own intelligence system in Latin America.
On 11 July 1941, William Donovan was named the Coordinator of Information, which subsequently became the OSS. At first, there was a unit called the Foreign Information Service inside COI, headed by Robert Sherwood, which produced white propaganda outside Latin America.[15]
To deal with some of the bureaucratic problems, the Office of War Information (OWl) was created with Elmer Davis as director. FIS, still under Sherwood, became the Overseas Branch of OWl, dealing in white propaganda. OSS was created at the same time. Donovan obtained considerable help from the British, especially with black propaganda, from the British Political Warfare Executive (PWE), part of the Ministry of Economic Warfare. PWE was a sister organization to the Special Operations Executive, which conducted guerilla warfare. The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6), was an essentially independent organization. For the U.S., the OSS included the functions of SIS and SOE, and the black propaganda work of PWE.
The OSS Morale Operations (MO) branch was the psychological operations arm of OSS. In general, its units worked on a theater-by-theater basis, without a great deal of central coordination.[15] It was present in most theaters, with the exception of the Southwest Pacific theater under Douglas MacArthur, who was hostile to OSS.
OSS was responsible for strategic propaganda, while the military commanders had operational and tactical responsibility. Dwight Eisenhower was notably supportive of psychological operations, had psychological warfare organization in the staff of all his commands, and worked with OSS and OWI.[15] The military did theater-level white propaganda, although the black propaganda function varied, often carried out by joint U.S.-UK organizations.
For the first time in U.S. history, American psywarriors employed electronic psywar in the field, in September 1944. Engineers of the 1st Radio Section of the 1st MRBC recorded POW interviews for front- line broadcasts, and reproduced the sound effects of vast numbers of tanks and other motor vehicles for Allied armored units in attempts to mislead German intelligence and lower enemy morale.[6]
Leaflets were delivered principally from aircraft, but also with artillery shells.[16]
Psychological operations were used extensively during the Korean War. The first unit, the 1st Loudspeaker and Leaflet Company, was sent to Korea in fall 1950.[19][20] Especially for the operations directed against troops of the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK; North Korea), it was essential to work with Republic of Korea (ROK; South Korea personnel) to develop propaganda with the most effective linguistic and cultural context.
Since the war was a United Nations mandated operation, political sensitivities were high. While rules limited mentioning thePeoples Republic of China or the Soviet Union, first due to fear it would increase their intervention, and later because it might demoralize ROK civilians, Stalin was depicted and Chinese troops were targeted in leafleting.[21][20]
Various methods were used to deliver propaganda, with constraints imposed by exceptionally rugged terrain and that radios were relatively uncommon among DPRK and PRC troops. Loudspeaker teams often had to get dangerously close to enemy positions. Artillery and light aircraft delivered leaflets on the front lines, while heavy bombers dropped leaflets in the rear. Over 2.5 billion leaflets were dropped over North Korea during the war.[19] There was a somewhat artificial distinction made between strategic and tactical leaflets: rather than differentiating by the message, tactical leaflets were delivered within 40 miles (64 km) of the front lines and strategic leaflets were those delivered farther away.
Less direct and immediate correlation between tactical PSYOP efforts and target audience behavior may still be substantiated after the fact, especially by means of polling and interviews. For example, in the Korean War, approximately one-third of the total prisoner of war (POW) population polled by the United Nations (UN) forces claimed to have surrendered at least in part because of the propaganda leaflets. The contributions of PSYOP in the first Persian Gulf War have also been corroborated through POW interviews. Ninety-eight percent of the 87,000 POWs captured either possessed or had seen PSYOP leaflets that provided them with instructions on how to approach U.S. troops to surrender. Fifty-eight percent of the prisoners interviewed claimed to have heard coalition radio broadcasts, and 46 percent believed that the coalition broadcasts were truthful despite coming from their enemy. Again, some portion of the surrenders might have occurred even without PSYOP encouragement; but certainly, there would appear to be a correlation between PSYOP, which offered the enemy a way to escape the onslaught of U.S. military power, and their compliance with those instructions.[12]
One such operation, is Operation Moolah. The objective of the psychological operation was to target Communist pilots to defect to South Korea with a MiG-15, in order for the U.S. to conduct analysis of the capabilities of the MiG.
Some leafleting of North Korea was resumed after the Korean War, such as in the Cold WarOperation Jilli from 1964 to 1968.[22]
Guatemala
The CIA’s operation to overthrow the Government of Guatemala in 1954 marked an early zenith in the Agency’s long record of covert action. Following closely on two successful operations, one of which was the installation of the Shah as ruler of Iran in August 1953, the Guatemalan operation, known as PBSUCCESS, was both more ambitious and more thoroughly successful than either precedent. Rather than helping a prominent contender gain power with a few inducements, PBSUCCESS used an intensive paramilitary and psychological campaign to replace a popular, elected government with a political non-entity. In method scale and conception it had no antecedent, and its triumph confirmed the belief of many in the Eisenhower Administration that covert operations offered a safe, inexpensive substitute for armed force in resisting what they declared was Communist inroad in the Third World.[23]
As early as August 1964, almost one year before the activation of the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO), General William Westmoreland told a CA and PSYOP conference that “psychological warfare and civic action are the very essence of the counterinsurgency campaign here in Vietnam…you cannot win this war by military means alone.” Westmoreland’s successor, Creighton Abrams, is known to have sent down guidelines to the 4th Psychological Operations Group that resulted in the drawing up of no fewer than 17 leaflets along those lines. In fact, the interest in PSYOP went all the way up to the Presidency; weekly reports from JUSPAO were sent to the White House, as well as to the Pentagon and the Ambassador in Saigon. In sum, it is a myth that the United States, stubbornly fixated on a World War II-style conventional war, was unaware of the “other war.”[6]
Safe conduct pass.
During the Vietnam era, the organization of the 4th Psychological Operations Group was very different. The four battalions of the group were divided by geographic region rather than area of expertise as they are now.
The 6th PSYOP Battalion was stationed at Bien Hoa and provided services to the tactical units, both American and Vietnamese, and to the various political entities such as provinces and cities in the area of III Corps.
The 7th PSYOP Battalion was stationed in Da Nang and provided service to I Corps.
The 8th PSYOP Battalion was based at Nha Trang, but it its B Company, which was its field teams, was based out ofPleiku nearly 100 kilometers away. The 8th Battalion served the II Corps area of Vietnam.
The 10th PSYOP Battalion was stationed in Can Tho and served IV Corps.
The A company of each battalion consisted of a command section, S-1, S-2, S-3, and a Psyop Development Center (PDC). Additionally, they generally had extensive printing facilities.
The B companies consisted of the field teams that were stationed throughout their respective corps billeted with MACV teams and combat units.
There are individual authors who claim that U.S. submarines and other vessels “frequently” and “regularly” operated in the territorial waters of neutral Sweden, including in Stockholm harbor, as part of an elaborate psychological warfare operation whose target was the Swedish people. The Swedish people and government were led to believe that the vessels were Soviet. U.S. operations were likely conducted by the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO) and aspects of the operations were coordinated with the secret NATO “stay-behind” network deployed in Sweden. See Strategy of tension and Operation Gladio. British submarines also participated in such secret operations. The campaign was successful in totally changing the psychology of the Swedish people: the Swedish population was convinced of the “present danger” posed by the desired enemy, the Soviet Union, and was prepared for war against it. Also, since the Swedish government continued to release “enemy” submarines, large parts of the Swedish population turned against their government’s conciliatory attitude and adopted more hard-line views.[24]
Most PSYOP activities and accomplishments in Panama were hardly noticed by either the U.S. public or the general military community. But the special operations community did notice. The lessons learned in Panama were incorporated into standard operating procedures. Where possible, immediate changes were made to capitalize on the PSYOP successes of the Grenada and Panama operations. This led to improved production, performance, and effect in the next contingency, which took place within 6 months after the return of the last PSYOP elements from Panama. Operations [in Iraq] employed PSYOP of an order of magnitude and effectiveness which many credit to the lessons learned from Panama.[6]
The broader scope of information operations in Panama included denying the Noriega regime use of their own broadcasting facilities. A direct action missionremoved key parts of the transmitters.[25] After-action reports indicate that this action should have had a much higher priority and been done very early in the operation.
An unusual technique, developed in real time, was termed the “Ma Bell Mission”, or, more formally, capitulation missions. There were a number of Panamian strongpoints that continued to have telephone access. By attaching Spanish-speaking Special Forces personnel to a combat unit that would otherwise take the strongpoint by force, the Spanish-speaking personnel would phone the Panamian commander, tell him to put away his weapons and assemble his men on the parade ground, or face lethal consequences. Because of the heavy reliance on telephones, these missions were nicknamed “Ma Bell” operations. “During this ten day period, TF BLACK elements were instrumental in the surrender of 14 cuartels (strongpoints), almost 2,000 troops, and over 6,000 weapons without a single U.S. casualty. Several high-ranking cronies of Manuel Noriega who were on the “most wanted” list were also captured in Ma Bell operations.[25]
Psychological operations sometimes are intimately linked to combat operations, with the use of force driving home the propaganda mission. During the Panamanian operation, it was necessary ? Ft. Amador, an installation shared by the U.S. and Panamanian Defence Forces (PDF). There were U.S. dependents at the installation, but security considerations prevented evacuating them before the attack. Concern for U.S. citizens, and rules of engagement (ROE) that directed casualties be minimized, PSYOP loudspeaker teams, from the 1st Bn, 4th PSYOP Gp, became a key asset. When the PDF did not surrender after initial appeals, the message changed, with the tactical commander warning “that resistance was hopeless in the face of overwhelming firepower and a series of demonstrations took place, escalating from small arms to 105 mm howitzer rounds. Subsequent broadcasts convinced the PDF to give up. The entire process allowed Ft. Amador to be secured with few casualties and minimal damage.”[26]
United States PSYOP became a part of popular culture during the U.S. invasion of Panama, the America public watched on TV as PSYOP soldiers blasted rock music into the Vatican Embassy to drive out ousted leader Manuel Noriega. However, it is widely believed inside the PSYOP community that the reasoning for the music was not actually to drive Noriega out, but to keep American news reporters from listening in on the negotiations for Noriega’s surrender.[citation needed]
The 1991 Gulf War
Psychological Operations was extremely valuable during the Gulf War due to the Iraqi military’s desire to avoid combat. Through leaflets and loudspeaker broadcasts, PSYOP forces walked many enemy soldiers through successful surrender.
Coalition forces worked extensively with Saudi, Kuwaiti, and other partners, to be sure psychological operations were culturally and linguistically appropriate.[27] One unusual technique involved dropping leaflets telling Iraqi troops that they would be bombed the next day by B-52 bombers, and urged them to surrender and save their lives. After the bombing the next day, which was not done in a manner to maximize casualties, another set of leaflets were dropped, saying the promise was kept and the survivors should surrender to save themselves. Variants of this technique were used on other units, telling them the specific unit that had been bombed the previous day. By the number of prisoners who surrendered, presenting the leaflet that identified itself as a safe-conduct pass, this program was effective.
United States PSYOP was widely employed in both Bosnia and Kosovo, most famously for their “mine awareness” campaign and its Superman comic.[citation needed]
In the 1990s it came to light that soldiers from the 4th Psychological Operations Group had been interning at the American news networks Cable News Network (CNN) and National Public Radio (NPR). The program was an attempt to provide its PSYOP personnel with the expertise developed by the private sector under its “Training with Industry” program. The program caused concern about the influence these soldiers might have on American news and the programs were terminated.
National Public Radio reported on April 10, 2000:
The U.S. Army’s Psychological Operations unit placed interns at CNN and NPR in 1998 and 1999. The placements at CNN were reported in the European press in February of this year and the program was terminated. The NPR placements will be reported this week in TV Guide.[28]
Toppling of Saddam Hussein statue
Arguably the most visible image of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in central Baghdad. Allegations that the event was staged have been published. It is claimed it was actually an idea hatched by an Army psychological operations team.[29] Allegations surfaced that not only were the cheering group of people surrounding the statue in fact smaller than they were made out to be, in media depictions, but that also the group were not local to the area and were instead brought in by the military for the specific purpose of watching and lending credence to the pre-planned toppling.[30][31][32]
PSYOP pamphlet disseminated inIraq. The text translates as “This is your future al-Zarqawi,” and depicts al-Qaeda terrorist al-Zarqawi caught in a rat trap which is being held by an Iraqi Army soldier or an Iraqi Policeman.
In 2003 Sergeant Mark Hadsell claimed to have used loud music during the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners:[33]
“These people haven’t heard heavy metal. They can’t take it. If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide, your train of thought slows down and your will is broken. That’s when we come in and talk to them.”[33]
Other reports of the use of music during interrogation have occasionally plagued PSYOP.[34]
On 9 December 2008 the Associated Press reported that various musicians were coordinating their objections to the use of their music as a technique for softening up captives through an initiative called Zero dB.[35][36] However, not all musicians have taken issue with the possibility that their music is being used during interrogations. Stevie Benton of the groupDrowning Pool commented supportively:[36]
“I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that.”[36]
Afghanistan burning bodies incident
On 1 October 2005 in Gumbad, Afghanistan, Soldiers from the 173rd Airborne decided to burn the bodies of two Taliban fighters killed in a firefight the previous day for hygienic reasons. Despite Islamic customs that forbid cremation, they chose to proceed. The Platoon Leader also failed to properly notify his Battalion Commander of the decision prior to burning the bodies. When his Battalion Commander was notified, he ordered the flaming bodies extinguished. An official investigation into the incident found evidence of poor decision making, poor judgement, poor reporting, a lack of knowledge and respect for local Afghan custom and tradition. The Infantry Officer received a General Officer letter of reprimand. Reserve PSYOP soldiers were involved because they heard about the incident and used the information to incite Taliban fighters in another area where freelance journalist Stephen Dupont was located. Dupont reported that the PSYOP soldiers claimed the bodies were to be burned due to hygiene concerns.[37]
During the War on Terror, U.S. PSYOP teams often broadcast abrasive messages over loudspeakers to try tempting enemy fighters into a direct confrontation where the Americans have the upper hand. Other times, they use their loudspeaker to convince enemy soldiers to surrender. In the Afghanistan incident, a PSYOP sergeant allegedly broadcast the following message to the Taliban:
Attention, Taliban, you are all cowardly dogs. You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned. You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be.
Another soldier stated:
You attack and run away like women. You call yourself Talibs but you are a disgrace to the Muslim religion and you bring shame upon your family. Come and fight like men instead of the cowardly dogs you are.
U. S. authorities investigated the incident and the two Reserve PSYOP Soldiers received administrative punishment for broadcasting messages which were not approved. Investigators found no evidence that the bodies were burned for a psychological effect. They concluded that the broadcast violated standing policies for the content of loudspeaker messages and urged that all soldiers in the command undergo training on Afghan sensitivities.[38]
Pentagon Analysts and the Main Stream Media
In 2008, The New York Times exposed how analysts portrayed in the U.S. news media as independent and objective were in fact under the tutelage of the Pentagon.[39] From the NYT:
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance
2009 congressional delegation to Afghanistan
In February 2011, journalist Michael Hastings published an article in Rolling Stone reported that Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the supposed leader of a PSYOP group in Afghanistan, alleged that Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell a three-star General in charge of training troops in Afghanistan,[40] ordered Holmes and his group to perform in-depth research on visiting U.S. congressmen in order to spin presentations and visits.[41] According to Holmes, his team was tasked with “illegally providing themes and messages to influence the people and leadership of the United States.”[42] Reported targets included United States Senators John McCain,Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken, Carl Levin, Rep. Steve Israel of the House Appropriations Committee; Adm. Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Czech ambassador to Afghanistan; the German interior minister, and think-tank analysts.[41] Under the 1948 Smith–Mundt Act, such operations may not be used to target Americans. When Holmes attempted to seek counsel and to protest, he was placed under investigation by the military at the behest of General Caldwell’s chief of staff.[41]
Caldwell’s spokesman, Lt. Col. Shawn Stroud, denied Holmes’s assertions, and other unnamed military officials disputed Holmes’s claims as false and misleading, saying there are no records of him ever completing any PSYOP training. Subsequently Holmes conceded that he was not a Psychological Operations officer nor was he in charge of a Psychological Operations unit and acknowledged that Caldwell’s orders were “fairly innocuous.”[43] Officials say that Holmes spent his time in theater starting a strategic communications business with Maj. Laural Levine, with whom he conducted an improper relationship in Afghanistan. A former aid said, “At no point did Holmes ever provide a product to Gen. Caldwell”. General David Petraeus has since ordered an investigation into the alleged incident.[42]
Portrayals in popular culture
The general’s daughter from both the novel and blockbuster movie The General’s Daughter was a PSYOP officer.
A USACAPOC combat patch (FWS-SSI) can be seen being worn by a soldier in the film X-Men: The Last Stand in the President’s command center.
In the 9th season of the television series NCIS, Jamie Lee Curtis plays a recurring role as the civilian PSYOPs director at the US Department of Defense.
Purdue University‘s Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS, is currently being used by Homeland Security and the US Defense Department to simulate crises on the US mainland.[1] SEAS “enables researchers and organizations to try out their models or techniques in a publicly known, realistically detailed environment.”[2] It “is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence. […] The Iraq and Afghanistan computer models are the most highly developed and complex of the 62 available to JFCOM-J9. Each has about five million individual nodes representing things such as hospitals, mosques, pipelines, and people.”[1]
SEAS was developed to help Fortune 500 companies with strategic planning. Then it was used to help “recruiting commanders to strategize ways to improve recruiting potential soldiers”. In 2004 SEAS was evaluated for its ability to help simulate “the non-kinetic aspects of combat, things like the diplomatic, economic, political, infrastructure and social issues”.[3]
Sentient World Simulation is the name given to the current vision of making SEAS a “continuously running, continually updated mirror model of the real world that can be used to predict and evaluate future events and courses of action.”[4]
Development and use
SEAS technology resulted from over ten years of research at Purdue University, funded by the Department of Defense, several Fortune 500 companies, the National Science Foundation, the Century Fund of the state of Indiana, and the Office of Naval Research. Originally, SEAS was developed to help Fortune 500 companies with strategic planning. It was also used to model the population of the U.S. that is eligible for military service to help “recruiting commanders to strategize ways to improve recruiting potential soldiers”[3]and to study biological attacks.[5]
In January 2004 SEAS was evaluated by the Joint Innovation and Experimentation Directorate (J9) of the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) for its ability to help simulate “the non-kinetic aspects of combat, things like the diplomatic, economic, political, infrastructure and social issues” at the Purdue Technology Park during Breaking Point 2004, an environment-shaping war game resulting in the conclusion that it “moves us from the current situation where everyone comes together and sits around a table discussing what they would do, to a situation where they actually play in the simulation and their actions have consequences.”[3]
In 2006 JFCOM-J9 used SEAS to war game warfare scenarios for Baghdad in 2015. In April 2007 JFCOM-J9 began working with Homeland Security and multinational forces in a homeland defense war gaming exercise.[1]
Sentient World Simulation
The Sentient World Simulation project (SWS) is to be based on SEAS. The ultimate goal envisioned by Alok R. Chaturvedi on March 10, 2006 was for SWS to be a “continuously running, continually updated mirror model of the real world that can be used to predict and evaluate future events and courses of action. SWS will react to actual events that occur anywhere in the world and incorporate newly sensed data from the real world. […] As the models influence each other and the shared synthetic environment, behaviors and trends emerge in the synthetic world as they do in the real world. Analysis can be performed on the trends in the synthetic world to validate alternate worldviews. […] Information can be easily displayed and readily transitioned from one focus to another using detailed modeling, such as engineering level modeling, to aggregated strategic, theater, or campaign-level modeling.”[4]
^ Jump up to:abcPurdue University article USJFCOM teams with Purdue University to add the human factor to war game simulations published February 6, 2004
^ Jump up to:abPurdue University abstract from Alok Chaturvedi titled Computational Challenges for a Sentient World Simulation published March 10, 2006
Jump up^Purdue University article Indiana researchers tap into grid computing to prepare for disasters published June 24, 2002
NATO article Using the Multinational Experiment 4 (MNE4) Modeling and Simulation Federation to Support Joint Experimentation begins with: “Multinational experimentation is a critical element of the United States Joint Forces Command’s (USJFCOM) Experimentation Directorate (J9) joint concept development and experimentation program. The Multinational Experiment (MNE) series explores ways to achieve a coalition’s political goals by influencing the behaviour of our adversaries by relying on the full weight of the coalition’s collective national powers (diplomatic, information, military and economics actions). MNE4, conducted in February – March 2006, was one such experimentation venue that explored new ways to apply the various elements of the coalition’s considerable influence, short of direct military conflict. MNE4 required an extensive international modeling and simulation (M&S) development effort with models provided by France, Germany and the United States.”
Professor Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s mentor at Georgetown University, authored a massive volume entitled “Tragedy and Hope” in which he states: “There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims, and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies, but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”
“The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences…”
“The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds’ central banks which were themselves private corporations…”
“The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups.” Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in Our Time (Macmillan Company, 1966,) Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University
“The Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of a society which originated in England (RIIA) … [and] … believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established.” Dr. Carroll Quigley
“As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship. And then, as a student, I heard that call clarified by a professor I had named Carroll Quigley.”President Clinton, in his acceptance speech for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, 16 July 1992
“Quigley” is the late Carroll Quigley, a Council on Foreign Relations member and historian, as well as mentor to CFR and Trilateral Commission member Bill Clinton. The lecture is based around the following quote from his book Tragedy & Hope, pp. 1247-1248:
“The National parties and their presidential candidates, with the Eastern Establishment assiduously fostering the process behind the scenes, moved closer together and nearly met in the center with almost identical candidates and platforms, although the process was concealed as much as possible, by the revival of obsolescent or meaningless war cries and slogans (often going back to the Civil War)….The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy. … Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.”
Segment 1: Pope Francis Attacks Unfettered Capitalism in Apostolic Exhortation or “The Joy of the Gospel” — Instead of Out of Control Government Spending and Government Failures — Videos
‘This Week’: Pope Francis’ Economic Critique
Pope Francis on the joy of the Gospel
RCE: Sort out your financial empire – other topics addressed – glass house attitude !!!
Pope Francis unveils new vision for Catholics
Pope Francis: Unfettered Capitalism Is Tyranny
Pope Francis Goes Off On Capitalism
Is Pope Francis Anti Capitalism
Pope Francis Calls Unfettered Capitalism ‘Tyranny’
November 26, 2013
by Joshua Holland
Earlier this month, Laurie Goodstein reported forThe New York Timesthat Pope Francis’ softer rhetoric on hot-button social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage were causing conservative Catholics no small amount of chagrin.
Pope Francis has attacked unfettered capitalism as “a new tyranny”, urging global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality in the first major work he has authored alone as pontiff.
The 84-page document, known as an apostolic exhortation, amounted to an official platform for his papacy, building on views he has aired in sermons and remarks since he became the first non-European pontiff in 1,300 years in March.
He also called on rich people to share their wealth. “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills,” Francis wrote in the document issued on Tuesday.
“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”
In a sense, the new pope is just grappling with the reality he faces. Polls show that American Catholics, at least, agree with the pontiff’s position that the church focuses too much on social issues. And Francis recently commissioned a survey of Catholics around the world to see where they fall on these questions.
Meanwhile, Dominic Barton, the Managing Director of McKinsey & Co., writes in today’s Wall Street Journal: ”In 2012, the top 1% of earners in the US collected 19.3% of the country’s total household income–an all-time high… The disparity is growing rapidly as well. Incomes of the top 1% grew by 31.4% from 2009 to 2012, compared to just 0.4% for the remaining 99%.”
Pope Francis’ new document, Evangelii Gaudium: 9 things to know and share
BY JIMMY AKIN
Pope Francis has just released a new document titled Evangelii Gaudium.
It is his first apostolic exhortation, and it is devoted to the theme of the new evangelization.
Here are 9 things to know and share . . .
1) What does “Evangelii Gaudium” mean?
It’s Latin for “The Joy of the Gospel.”
2) What is an apostolic exhortation?
It’s a papal document that, as the name suggests, exhorts people to implement a particular aspect of the Church’s life and teaching.
Its purpose is not to teach new doctrine, but to suggest how Church teachings and practices can be profitably applied today.
Some apostolic exhortations are devoted to the pastoral challenges faced in particular parts of the world (Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas). Others are devoted to particular themes.
Previous apostolic exhortations include:
Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi (on evangelization today)
John Paul II’s Christifideles Laici (on the role of the laity)
John Paul II’s Redemptoris Custos (on St. Joseph)
Benedict XVI’s Sacramentum Caritatis (on the Eucharist)
Benedict XVI’s Verbum Domini (on the Word of God)
3) How much authority does an apostolic exhortation have?
It is one of the more important papal documents—more important, for example, than a Wednesday audience or a homily.
As it is of a pastoral nature rather than a doctrinal or legal nature, though, it is ranked lower than an encyclical or an apostolic constitution.
As with everything official that the pope writes, it is to be taken very seriously.
4) What leads a pope to write an apostolic exhortation?
Frequently, apostolic exhortations are written after a meeting of the Synod of Bishops.
The Synod of Bishops is a group that gathers selected bishops from across the world to discuss a particular subject.
At the synod, the bishops write a document making recommendations for the pope. It is then given to him for his reflection, and he may then write an apostolic exhortation based on the bishops’ recommendations.
Exhortations that come about in this way are called “post-synodal” apostolic exhortations because they are written after (“post-”) a meeting of the synod.
There does not have to be such an exhortation. Sometimes they hold a meeting of the synod of bishops, but no apostolic exhortation is released.
Also, not all apostolic exhortations are written after a synod, though. Sometimes the pope may decide to write one on his own, without a synod being held on the subject. This was the case with John Paul II’s Redemptoris Custos.
5) Why did Pope Francis write Evangelii Gaudium?
It was written in response to the most recent meeting of the Synod of Bishops, which took place in October, 2012.
It was devoted to the subject of the new evangelization, so that is the subject of Evangelii Gaudium.
This synod took place before Pope Francis was elected in March 2013.
It sometimes happens that a synod is held and the pope who presided over it leaves office before the exhortation is released. His successor may then choose to go forward with the project.
For example, the 2005 synod on the Eucharist was held under John Paul II, but he had passed on before an exhortation was released. Benedict XVI then took the document that the bishops had prepared and had an exhortation written.
(Usually, the pope does not draft the document himself, but it is drafted based on his decisions, and he has final approval over what it says.)
Pope Francis’s decision in this case is similar to his decision to release the encyclical Lumen Fidei, which was primarily drafted by Pope Benedict, but which he completed.
Unlike that case, though, Pope Francis contributed much, much more to this document.
With Lumen Fidei, he did not add very much to what Pope Benedict had written. Evangelii Gaudium, by contrast, is much more a “Francis document.” It regularly emphasizes the distinctive thought and themes of the new pope.
6) What is Pope Francis’ main message in Evangelii Gaudium?
As suggested by the name, the principal theme involves the need for a joyful proclamation of the Gospel to the entire world.
Archbishop Rino Fisichella, who presented the document at a Vatican press conference, summarized its main message this way:
If we were to sum up Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium in a few words, we could say that it is an Apostolic Exhortation written around the theme of Christian joy in order that the Church may rediscover the original source of evangelization in the contemporary world.
Pope Francis offers this document to the Church as a map and guide to her pastoral mission in the near future.
It is an invitation to recover a prophetic and positive vision of reality without ignoring the current challenges.
Pope Francis instills courage and urges us to look ahead despite the present crisis, making the cross and the resurrection of Christ once again our “the victory banner” (source).
7) What particularly noteworthy things does the pope have to say in the document?
There is a mountain of them.
The document is 51,000 words long, which means that it is the length of a novel and takes at least 5 hours to read.
There are numerous important things that the pope says, some of which I will endeavor to unpack in future blog posts.
However, Archbishop Fisichella offers a summary of seven main themes that it covers:
The following seven points, gathered together in the five chapters of the Exhortation, constitute the fundamental pillars of Pope Francis’ vision of the new evangelization:
1. the reform of the Church in a missionary key,
2. the temptations of pastoral agents,
3. the Church understood as the totality of the People of God which evangelizes,
4. the homily and its preparation,
5. the social inclusion of the poor,
6. peace and social dialogue,
7. and the spiritual motivations for the Church’s missionary action.
The cement which binds these themes together is concentrated in the merciful love of God which goes forth to meet every person in order to manifest the heart of his revelation: The life of every person acquires meaning in the encounter with Jesus Christ and in the joy of sharing this experience of love with others.
8) Can you give a specific example of something notable he says?
Sure. It’s hard to pick just one!
Pro-lifers will be heartened to read what he has to say concerning unborn children and abortion:
213. Among the vulnerable for whom the Church wishes to care with particular love and concern are unborn children, the most defenseless and innocent among us.
Nowadays efforts are made to deny them their human dignity and to do with them whatever one pleases, taking their lives and passing laws preventing anyone from standing in the way of this.
Frequently, as a way of ridiculing the Church’s effort to defend their lives, attempts are made to present her position as ideological, obscurantist and conservative.
Yet this defense of unborn life is closely linked to the defense of each and every other human right.
It involves the conviction that a human being is always sacred and inviolable, in any situation and at every stage of development.
Human beings are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems.
Once this conviction disappears, so do solid and lasting foundations for the defense of human rights, which would always be subject to the passing whims of the powers that be.
Reason alone is sufficient to recognize the inviolable value of each single human life, but if we also look at the issue from the standpoint of faith, “every violation of the personal dignity of the human being cries out in vengeance to God and is an offence against the creator of the individual”.
214. Precisely because this involves the internal consistency of our message about the value of the human person, the Church cannot be expected to change her position on this question.
I want to be completely honest in this regard.
This is not something subject to alleged reforms or “modernizations”.
It is not “progressive” to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.
On the other hand, it is also true that we have done little to adequately accompany women in very difficult situations, where abortion appears as a quick solution to their profound anguish, especially when the life developing within them is the result of rape or a situation of extreme poverty.
Who can remain unmoved before such painful situations?
9) Is there an extra significance to the document?
It will take time to fully process the significance of the document, but one this is immediately clear: This document is not something that Pope Francis delegated to others and allowed to be written on auto-pilot. It contains far too much of his own thought and themes for that.
This means that Pope Francis was closely involved in the writing of this document, and that shows that he cares—powerfully—about the theme of evangelization.
This demolishes the wrongheaded claims that Pope Francis doesn’t take the task of evangelization seriously.
On the contrary, it’s one of the highest priorities of his pontificate.
‘Not to share wealth with poor is to steal’: Pope slams capitalism as ‘new tyranny’
Pope Francis has taken aim at capitalism as “a new tyranny” and is urging world leaders to step up their efforts against poverty and inequality, saying “thou shall not kill” the economy. Francis calls on rich people to share their wealth.
The existing financial system that fuels the unequal distribution of wealth and violence must be changed, the Pope warned.
“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” Pope Francis asked an audience at the Vatican.
The global economic crisis, which has gripped much of Europe and America, has the Pope asking how countries can function, or realize their full economic potential, if they are weighed down by the debts of capitalism.
“A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules,” the 84-page document, known as an apostolic exhortation, said.
“To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which has taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits”, the pope’s document says.
He goes on to explain that in this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which has become the only rule we live by.
Shameful wealth
Inequality between the rich and the poor has reached a new threshold, and in his apostolic exhortation to mark the end of the “Year of Faith”, Pope Francis asks for better politicians to heal the scars capitalism made on society.
“Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills,” Francis wrote in the document issued Tuesday.
His calls to service go beyond general good Samaritan deeds, as he asks his followers for action“beyond a simple welfare mentality”.
“I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor,” Francis wrote.
A recent IRS report shows that the wealth of the US’s richest 1 percent has grown by 31 percent, while the rest of the population experienced an income rise of only 1 percent.
The most recent Oxfam data shows that up to 146 million Europeans are at risk of falling into poverty by 2025 and 50 million Americans are currently suffering from severe financial hardship.
“As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems,” he wrote.
Named after the medieval saint who chose a life of poverty, Pope Francis has gone beyond general calls for fair work, education, and healthcare.
Newly-elected Pope Francis has stepped up the fight against corrupt capitalism that has hit close to home – he was the first Pope to go after the Vatican bank and openly accused it of fraud and shady offshore tax haven deals.
In October, Pope Francis removed Vatican bank head Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, after revelations of alleged mafia money laundering and financial impropriety.
Ron Paul On Syria – Plans Rumours And War Propaganda For Attacking Syria – Revolution – June 19 2012
Congressman Ron Paul, MD – We’ve Been NeoConned
Glenn Beck : The New War Republicans and Democrats Want In The Middle East 2013
The United States continues to supply weapons to rebels in the Middle East who kill, cut open, and eat organs out of their enemies dead bodies. 6/17/13
Glenn Beck : Progressive’s War Causes Refugees To Flee For Life 6/18/13
Glenn Beck : It’s Time To Change Things 6/25/13
World War 3 – The Map – TheBlaze
WW3 is about to BEGIN U S British, German, French, Nato TROOPS n WARSHIPS Ready to Invade SYRIA
Pete Seeger: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
Background Articles and Videos
The United States continues to supply weapons to rebels in the Middle East who kill, cut open, and eat organs out of their enemies dead bodies. 6/17/13
Syria: UN experts arrive in Damascus, refugees arrive in northern Iraq
LibertyNEWS TV – “Distracting Al Qaeda Terror Threat Played Down – Now Obama Can Play Golf”
Rand Paul Obama’s plan to arm Syrian rebels means siding with terrorists
Obama Funded Syrian Rebels Mauling Christians, Using Child Soldiers
Al Qaeda’s fighting is ‘spinning out of control’
US Arming Syrian Rebels Likely to Inflame Already Bloody Conflict
Breaking NEWS: Syria CIVIL WAR Obama supports REBELS, Al-Qaeda take down Assad REGIME (CIA funding)
Rand Paul: You Will Be Voting To Fund And Send Arms To The Allies Of Al-Qaeda
SYRIA CRISIS: U.S. senators seek to bar MILITARY AID to AL-QAEDA linked Syrian REBELS [INFOWARS]
WAR: White House Says Syria Crossed “Red Line” – Will Provide Military Support To Syrian Rebels!
Syria – Who are Jabhat al-Nusra? – Truthloader
Al Nusra Front Terror Camp in Lattakia, Syria (30/12/12)
A video released by an increasingly powerful and well connected Al Qaeda cell in Syria’s Northern Province of Lattakia depicts the terrorist organisation training recruits, many of whom are foreigners in the heavily forested and mountainous terrain typical of Lattakia.
The original video feratured speeches from well known Al Qaeda figures, (which I haven’t included in this video) including slain former second in command Abu Yaya Al Libi who was killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan. Al Qaeda in Lattakia could beconsidered separate to the major Al Qaeda in Syria branch Jabhat Al Nusra in the sense that they have direct connections to the mainstream global Jihadist community without having to run through Jabhat Al Nusra, itself a known affiliate of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The emergence of groups like Al Qaeda in Lattakia mirrors a trend in which new Jihadist groups many connected to previous incarnations of the Al Qaeda brand are now springing up all over Syria making a volatile situation in which extreme Jihadists already dominate the insurgency even more complex and dangerous. There can be little doubt that Afghanistan’s problems with Islamic militany similarly tired to Western support may well be dwarfed by the carnage and terrorism that may emanate from Syria for decades to come should the insurgents not be defeated.
The Road to World War 3
World War 3 Has Already Begun
World War 3 – TheBlaze
GLENN Beck Explains Why World War III Could Be on the Horizon
John McCain meets Syrian opposition face-to-face
JOHN McCain Syria Chemical Weapons Use Crosses Red Line Game Changer.
Glenn Beck: We Are on The Wrong Side in Syria
Benghazi-Gate: Connection between CIA and al-Qaeda in Libya and Syria, with Turkey’s Help
GERALD CELENTE – The Start Of WW3 – ISRAEL says they have Right to Defend Themselves
U.S.: Syria used chemical weapons, crossing “red line”
By Steve Chaggaris, Stephanie Condon
The Obama administration has concluded that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government used chemical weapons against the rebels seeking to overthrow him and, in a major policy shift, President Obama has decided to supply military support to the rebels, the White House announced Thursday.
“The president has made a decision about providing more support to the opposition that will involve providing direct support to the [Supreme Military Council]. That includes military support,” Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communication Ben Rhodes told reporters.
President Obama has repeatedly said that the use of chemical weapons is a “red line” that, if crossed, would be a “game changer” for more U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war.
“The President has been clear that the use of chemical weapons – or the transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist groups – is a red line for the United States,” said Rhodes in a separate written statement.
“The President has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has,” he continued.
In terms of further response, Rhodes said, “we will make decisions on our own timeline” and that Congress and the international community would be consulted. Mr. Obama is heading to Northern Ireland Sunday for a meeting of the G8 group of nations; Rhodes indicated the president will consult with leaders of those countries.
“Any future action we take will be consistent with our national interest, and must advance our objectives, which include achieving a negotiated political settlement to establish an authority that can provide basic stability and administer state institutions; protecting the rights of all Syrians; securing unconventional and advanced conventional weapons; and countering terrorist activity,” Rhodes said.
To date, the U.S. policy on Syria has primarily focused on offering the rebels nonlethal assistance and humanitarian aid.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who met with the rebels last month and has been a vocal critic of the president’s Syria policy said in a joint statement with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.: “We appreciate the President’s finding that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons on several occasions. We also agree with the President that this fact must affect U.S. policy toward Syria. The President’s red line has been crossed. U.S. credibility is on the line. Now is not the time to merely take the next incremental step. Now is the time for more decisive actions.”
“A decision to provide lethal assistance, especially ammunition and heavy weapons, to opposition forces in Syria is long overdue, and we hope the President will take this urgently needed step” they added. Former President Bill Clinton this week, at a private event with McCain, also ratcheted up pressure for the White House to increase its support to the rebels.
However, Rhodes would not detail the type of military support the administration intends on providing. He said helping the opposition improve their effectiveness as a fighting force means helping with “nonlethal assistance” such as communications equipment and transportation. “These are things that allow them to cohere as a unit,” he said.
He added, meanwhile, that no decision has been made about enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria. “A no-fly zone… would carry with it open-ended costs for the international community,” Rhodes said. “Furthermore, there’s not even a clear guarantee that it would dramatically improve the situation on the ground.”
A Syrian rebel group’s pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda’s replacement for Osama bin Laden suggests that the terrorist group’s influence is not waning and that it may take a greater role in the Western-backed fight to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The pledge of allegiance by Syrian Jabhat al Nusra Front chief Abou Mohamad al-Joulani to al-Qaeda leader Sheik Ayman al-Zawahri was coupled with an announcement by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq, that it would work with al Nusra as well.
Lebanese Sheik Omar Bakri, a Salafist who says states must be governed by Muslim religious law, says al-Qaeda has assisted al Nusra for some time.
“They provided them early on with technical, military and financial support , especially when it came to setting up networks of foreign jihadis who were brought into Syria,” Bakri says. “There will certainly be greater coordination between the two groups.”
The United States, which supports the overthrow of Assad, designated al Nusra a terrorist entity in December. The Obama administration has said it wants to support only those insurgent groups that are not terrorist organizations.
Al Nusra and groups like it have seen some of the most significant victories against Syrian government forces in the course of the 2-year-old uprising in which Assad’s forces have killed about 80,000 people. Rebels not affiliated with al-Qaeda have pressed Washington for months to send weaponry that will allow them to match the heavy weapons of the Syrian army. They’ve urged the West to mount an air campaign against Assad’s mechanized forces.
President Obama refuses to provide any direct military aid. Foreign radical Islamists streaming into the fight from the Middle East and Europe are making headway with the Syrian population by providing services and gaining ground in battles.
Tamer Mouhieddine, spokesman for the Syrian Free Army, a force made up of Syrian soldiers who have defected, said the recent announcements would not change his group’s attitude toward al Nusra.
“The rebels in Syria have one common enemy — Bashar Assad — and they will collaborate with any faction allowing them to topple his regime,” he said.
He confirmed that al Nusra is generating loyalty in Aleppo, a region battling for months with Assad, by providing financial support as well as setting up charities.
Aaron Zelin at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington says al Nusra’s ability to provide security and basic needs such as bread and fuel to Syrian civilians, as well as to reopen shops and restart bus services, has won gratitude from people who would not usually adhere to its strict ideology.
Zelin says some Syrian people have criticized al Nusra for banning alcohol, forcing women to wear a full veil and whipping men who are seen with women in public.
“This illustrates the need for American leadership in the Syrian conflict, particularly with regard to helping non-Qaeda-aligned rebels contain the growth of (al Nusra) and similar groups,” he said. “Washington should also try to take advantage of cleavages within the rebellion and civilian population, since al Nusra is outside the mainstream and more concerned with establishing a transnational caliphate than maintaining the Syrian state.”
Groups such as the Islamic Liwaa al Tawhid, which collaborates with al Nusra on military operations, worried that Assad would use the announcement from al Nusra as evidence for his claim that he is fighting terrorists, not Syrian citizens who wish an end to his dictatorship, Mouhieddine said.
“We are willing to fight alongside any faction targeting the Assad regime, as long as it does not have a foreign agenda, which seems now the case” of al Nusra, he said.
Segment 0: The Dirty Dozen aka Soros, Obama, Jarrett, Shulman, Kelley, Hall, Lerner, Paz, Thomas, Seck, IRS Agents: White House–IRS Collectivist Conspiracy Targets Pro Israel, Pro Life, Tea Party and Conservative Movement Groups To Suppress Voter Turnout! — Videos
IRS Subject Matter Expert
Holly Paz
Manager
Exempt Organizations Guidance
Holly is a manager in Exempt Organizations’ Guidance office, which is responsible for drafting notices, announcements, revenue procedures, and other guidance on exempt organization matters. Holly’s work often involves coordination with the Office of Chief Counsel and the Treasury Department on legislative and technical issues, as well as providing information to the tax writing committees of Congress.
Before coming to Exempt Organizations, Holly served as an attorney-advisor in the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent organization within the Internal Revenue Service that helps taxpayers resolve problems with the IRS. She also worked for eight years as an attorney in private practice focusing on exempt organizations issues. She earned her juris doctor from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
The Dirty Dozen Movie Trailer
Dirty Dozen (1967) – General Inspection
Movie of the Week: Dirty Dozen – Lee Marvin Review by Best Movies By Farr
George Soros Exposed – Puppet master Glenn Beck
Obama Admin Evolution Of A Scandal – IRS Enemies List – Hannity
Targeted By The Taxman – He Made Us Do It! RPT: IRS Worker Names ATT”Y Carter Hull
Reality Check: IRS Scandal Exclusive
Heads are starting to roll at the IRS. Ben is following a story that is going in many directions. With many who are distancing themselves. In fact, He first told
you on March 1, 2012 that Tea Party and Liberty Groups in seven states claimed they were being targeted by the IRS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Sit-….
In this Reality Check compilation, Ben goes in-depth on the IRS vs. Tea Party, Liberty groups, and religious organizations.
The IRS apologized. The white House decries the unacceptable actions and any connection to the current administration.
Ben has tracked the chain of command through the Cincinnati office and is going to show you how this situation transitions into the Washington D.C. office, and possibly beyond.
Obama Admin IRS Scandal & Congress Dealing With Scandals – Krauthammer On O’Reilly
IRS Worker At Center Of Targeting Scandal Gets Promoted -RPT – Cavuto – Wake Up America
Goldberg on IRS Scandal on IRS
Stein on IRS Scandal
IRS – May 6th Letter To Conservative Group Suggest Targeting Is Not Over Cavuto
Tea Party Groups Protests The IRS
The Blaze TV “The IRS Tax Scandal” Matt Kibbe & Adam Brandon 5/29/13
Part II – The Blaze TV “The IRS Tax Scandal” Matt Kibbe & Adam Brandon 5/29/13
Tea Party Groups To Sue IRS Over Targeting Of Conservatives – Megyn Kelly -Wake Up America
Katie Pavlich on Shulman’s 159 Visits to WH – IRS Scandal with Neil Cavuto – Fox Business – 5-30-13
IRS Scandal, How High Does It Go? Catastrophic Failure! – Greta On The Record
FreedomWorks VP: IRS Scandal Just Beginning [The Christian Broadcasting Network]
IRS Scandal – New Information On IRS Chain Of Command – Missing Link Cindy Thomas? – Megyn Kelly
IRS Targeting Scandal Sarah Hall Inram Now Running Obamacare Office & Benghazi Update
Glenn Beck » IRS, ObamaCare, And The White House
You are a conspiracy theorist if you blame Obama
Peakaboo Politics: The IRS Scandal — A Timeline of Confusing Statements
IRS Lois Lerner Pleads The Fifth, Dismissed From Scandal Hearing
IRS 5-22-2013 House Oversight Committee 4
TRIFECTA — Targeting Tea: Obama’s IRS Singles Out Conservative Groups
Mark Levin on Hannity: Obama Said Only Learned About IRS Story on Friday
The IRS and Sarah Hall Ingram
The IRS And ObamaCare
Former IRS Commish Shulman cites Easter Egg Roll for visiting White House 118 times
U.S. Treasury Knew About I.R.S. Partisanship
Why IRS Scandal Could Haunt Obama
FTN: NTEU urges political contributions
Why I Serve: Colleen Kelley, National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU)
Fall of America: G. Edward Griffin on Conspiracy Theories
G. Edward Griffin – The Collectivist Conspiracy
PJTV: Obama IRS Scandal Uncovers the Ugly Side of Income Taxes
IRS scandal: GOP looks to seize election opportunity, CBS News Video 5-30-2013
FreedomWorks On Tap “The IRS Tax Terror” 5-16-13
Another 30 Mins w/ Glenn Beck & Richard Poe @ GBTV Regarding “The ShadowParty” Book, George Soros
Former IRS Chief’s Wife Works for Leftist Campaign Finance Reform Group
On Friday, reports broke that Former IRS chief Doug Shulman’s wife works with a liberal lobbying group, Public Campaign, where she is the senior program advisor. Public Campaign is an “organization dedicated to sweeping campaign reform that aims to dramatically reduce the role of big special interest money in American politics.”
The goal of Public Campaign is to target political groups like the conservative non-profits at issue in the IRS scandal. The Campaign says it “is laying the foundation for reform by working with a broad range of organizations, including local community groups, around the country that are fighting for change and national organizations whose members are not fairly represented under the current campaign finance system.”
CEO of Public Campaign Nick Nyhart has offered words of support for the IRS’ targeting: “There are legitimate questions to be asked about political groups that are hiding behind a 501(c)4 status. It’s unfortunate a few bad apples at the IRS will make it harder for those questions to be asked without claims of bias.”
Public Campaign gets its cash from labor unions like AFL-CIO, AFSCME, SEIU, and Move On.
George Soros Gives $1 Million To Barack Obama Super PAC
The Huffington Post | By Paul Blumenthal
The Democrats heavy-hitters are finally coming out of the dugout to play ball in the brave new world of unlimited contributions and super PACs.
A spokesperson for Priorities USA Action, the super PAC backing President Barack Obama’s reelection, confirmed to The Huffington Post Thursday that billionaire investor George Soros has committed $1 million to the PAC. A spokesman for House Majority PAC also confirmed to HuffPost that Soros had given a combined $500,000 to House Majority PAC and the Senate Majority PAC in September.
The New York Times’ Nick Confessore was first to publish the news about the Soros donations. According to Confessore, Soros’ political adviser Michael Vachon announced the contributions at a meeting of the liberal donor group, Democracy Alliance where former President Bill Clinton, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) were urging donors — most of whom have refused until now — to give to super PACs. Aside from the Soros donations, another $10 million was promised by donors attending the meeting.
Confessore writes that Soros, who did not attend the meeting, sent an email to Democracy Alliance members explaining his contributions:
“I fully support the re-election of President Obama,” Mr. Soros said in the email. He had not contributed until now, he wrote, because he opposed the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, which paved the way for super PACs and unlimited money in politics. But since then, Mr. Soros wrote, he had become “appalled by the Romney campaign which is openly soliciting the money of the rich to starve the state of the money it needs to provide social services.”
It’s a sharp contrast to where Soros stood shortly after the 2010 midterm elections, when he expressed criticism of the Obama administration before a group of donors at a private meeting and suggested they pledge their money elsewhere.
Soros already has given $1.275 million to super PACs, the majority of which went to the Democratic opposition research hub American Bridge. His announced contributions this election still come nowhere near the amount that he gave to try to unseat President George W. Bush in 2004. Soros donated more than $30 million in that election — a record sum until international casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson dropped more than $70 million this year into a host of super PACs and non-disclosing non-profits.
George Soros: His Influence on the Media and the IRS Scandal
Soros’ Hand in the IRS Scandal
By Russ Jones
New details regarding the IRS scandal that found the nation’s top tax office intentionally targeting conservative groups are surfacing. Like, for example, the fact that George Soros-funded organizations sent letters encouraging the IRS to investigate conservative organizations.
According to findings reported by the Media Research Center (MRC), Soros gave $6.1 million to liberal groups who urged the Internal Revenue Service to investigate conservative non-profit organizations, including various tea party and Christian groups.
Dan Gainor, vice president of business and culture for MRC, says the scandal could be traced to a series of letters that two liberal groups — Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and Democracy 21 — sent to the IRS in 2010 and 2011 asking for an “investigation” of political consultant Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.
“What they need to focus on is this timeline,” Gainor suggests. “We actually carry the timeline here, and the timeline is when these lefty operations sent their letters to the IRS and what the IRS did soon after.”
Pro Publica,The Huffington Post and Mother Jones were just a few of the accomplices that helped instigate IRS investigations. But as of 2010, Pro Publica received a two-year contribution of $125,000 each year from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
“It is a who’s who of far-left organizations,” the MRC spokesman offers. “Remember — this is George Soros, who has given $8.5 billion to charity. Of that … that we could track, $550 million has gone to liberal operations here in the United States.”
Applications of nine organizations applying for tax-exempt status that had yet to be approved were sent to Pro Publica. Unapproved applications are not supposed to be made public.
Soros Gave $6.1 Million to Groups Linked to Pressure on IRS to Target Conservative Nonprofits
By Mike Ciandella (CNS News), May 15, 2013 •
As IRS efforts targeting politically-conservative groups gained momentum, George Soros-funded liberal groups repeatedly called on the IRS to investigate conservative nonprofit organizations.
While the first reported instances of extra IRS scrutiny for conservative groups began in Cincinnati in March of 2010, the attacks began to pick up steam on a national level soon after Soros-funded groups began firing off letters to the IRS in October of that year – following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.
The talking points of these groups then bounced around a carefully created progressive “echo chamber,” until they eventually made their way into established media outlets. Key IRS policy changes about how it investigated conservative groups took place soon after it received three separate letters sent by Soros-funded liberal organizations.
Several Soros-funded groups including the Campaign Legal Center, Democracy 21, the Center for Public Integrity, Mother Jones and Alternet have worked to pressure the IRS to target conservative nonprofit groups. The subsequent IRS investigation flagged more than 100 tea party-related applications for higher scrutiny, including applications that included the words “Tea Party” and “patriot.”
The IRS scandal can be traced back to a series of letters that the liberal groups Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and Democracy 21 sent to the IRS back in 2010 and 2011. Both groups were funded by George’s Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The CLC received $677,000 and Democracy 21 got $365,000 from the Soros-backed foundation, according to the Foundation’s 990 tax forms.
The letters specifically targeted conservative Super PACs like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, asking the IRS to scrutinize them more thoroughly to determine whether or not they should retain their tax-exempt status.
On Oct. 5, 2010, when the first letter was sent to the IRS, calling specifically for the agency to “investigate” Crossroads GPS. The letter claimed Crossroads was “impermissibly using its tax status to spend tens of millions of dollars in the 2010 congressional races while hiding the donors funding these expenditures from the American people.” Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer wrote a blog post for the liberal Huffington Post to promote it, and the effort to get the media to notice the anti-conservative campaign began.
On June 27, 2011, a second letter by the CLC and Democracy 21 complained about enforcement of 501(c)(4) tax regulations, asking “that the IRS issue new regulations that better enforce the law.” Two days later, an IRS senior agency official was briefed on a new policy targeting groups which “criticize how the country is being run,” according to a Washington Post story. According to the Post, this policy was later revised.
A third letter by the CLC and Democracy 21, on Sept 28, 2011, got media traction. The letter showed the escalation of the left’s complaint about 501(c)(4) groups. It challenged “the eligibility of four organizations engaged in campaign activity to be treated as 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations.” The four organizations included Crossroads GPS, Priorities USA, American Action Network and Americans Elect.
The Soros-funded Center for Public Integrity ($2,716,328) published a “study” on 501(c)(4) groups, on October 31, which drew heavily from, and referenced, the CLC and Democracy 21. The Center for Public Integrity has strong media connections and boasts an advisory board that includes Ben Sherwood, president of ABC News, and Michele Norris, an NPR host, as well as a board of directors with such prominent names as Huffington Post CEO Arianna Huffington, Steve Kroft of CBS News’s 60 Minutes and Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist).
This study then led to a Mother Jones article about a month later, on November 18, which was reposted on the left-wing blog Alternet on November 21. By December of 2011, the topic had been picked up in a New York Times editorial, and then began receiving other media coverage. That editorial called for “the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on the secret political money already flooding the 2012 campaign from partisan operatives ludicrously claiming to be ‘social welfare’ activists.”
On Jan. 15, 2012, the IRS targeted groups focused on limiting government or educating people about the Constitution and Bill of Rights
Alternet and Mother Jones are both members of The Media Consortium, which is designed to do exactly what happened here. The Media Consortium was created to be a progressive “echo chamber,” where 63 separate left-wing media outlets can network and share ideas, as well as cross-promote stories. Other members of the Consortium include such liberal outlets as The Nation,Democracy Now! and The American Prospect. The consortium has also received $675,000 in Soros funds since 2000. Alternet ($285,000) and Mother Jones ($485,000) have both also received individual funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
This isn’t the only time the IRS has targeted conservative groups recently, nor is it the only connection between the IRS and Soros-funded groups. The IRS gave the left-wing journalism site ProPublica the applications for nine conservative groups pending tax-exempt status.
The IRS also released the confidential donor lists of the National Organization for Marriage to the liberal Human Rights Campaign. Both the Human Rights Campaign ($2,716,328) and ProPublica ($300,000) are also Soros-funded. Despite its blatant liberal leanings, ProPublica boasts a staff of well-known journalists, including veterans of The New York Times and The Wall Street journal, as well as of liberal operations like the Center for American Progress and The Nation, and has even won two Pulitzer Prizes.
Timeline Shows Influence of Soros-Funded Groups:
March 1-17, 2010: First ten reported cases of targeting by the IRS against groups that had ties to the “tea party or similar organizations.”
Sept. 16, 2010: TIME article “The New GOP Money Stampede” quotes Wertheimer;
Sept. 23, 2010: DISCLOSE act, a campaign finance disclosure act specifically targeting a Tea Party group, in the writing of which the CLC participated, fails in the Senate;
Sept. 28, 2010: Democrat Senator Max Baucus writes a letter to the IRS, citing the TIME article;
Oct. 5, 2010: Democracy 21 and Campaign Legal Center petition IRS, Wertheimer writes HuffPo article;
Oct. 7, 2010: Legal brief from HoltzmanVogel PLLC against the Democracy 21 petition;
Oct. 14, 2010: Dick Durbin asks IRS to investigate American Crossroads, HuffPo coverage;
June 27, 2011: Second petition to the IRS by CLC and Democracy 21;
June 29, 2011: IRS senior agency official Lois Lerner briefed on efforts to target groups which “criticize how the country is being run”;
Sept. 28, 2011: CLC and Democracy 21 petition IRS again, this time about four conservative groups;
Oct. 31, 2011: CPI “investigation”;
Nov. 18, 2011: Mother Jones article;
Nov. 21, 2011: Alternet repost of Mother Jones Article;
Dec. 29, 2011: New York Times oped;
Jan. 15, 2012: IRS targeted groups focusing on limiting government or educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights;
February 2012: First articles promoting this issue appear in New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times.
IRS Chain of Command Suggests Scandal Not Limited to ‘Low-Level Employees’
By MARK HEMINGWAY
After the IRS revealed it had wrongly targeted hundreds of conservative and Tea Party groups, the agency claimed that the misconduct was limited to “low-level employees” in its Cincinnati office. Yesterday, the attorney for Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS’s tax-exempt organizations division, told the House Oversight Committee she would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights, making that explanation much less credible.
Now the local Cincinnati Fox affiliate, FOX19, has done some digging and uncovered information suggesting that top officials at the IRS weren’t too far removed from the six low-level employees identified as making unjustified inquiries. Fox19 has not only identified all six IRS agents in question, it turns out that they all have only one supervisor in common:
When an application for tax exempt status comes into the IRS, agents have 270 days to work through that application. If the application is not processed within those 270 days it automatically triggers flags in the system. When that happens, individual agents are required to input a status update on that individual case once a month, every month until the case is resolved. …
So who in the chain of command would have received all these flags? The answer, according to the IRS directory, one woman in Cincinnati, Cindy Thomas, the Program Manager of the Tax Exempt Division. Because all six of our IRS workers have different individual and territory managers, Cindy Thomas is one manager they all have common.
Cindy Thomas’s name is significant, because Thomas is the woman who leaked nine tax documents to the journalism outlet ProPublica last year. The leaking of pending tax documents is a clear violation of the law. After having uncovered the nature of Thomas’s involvement, FOX19 looks at her place in the IRS chain of command:
Former Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller… retires
Joseph Grant, Commissioner of Tax Exempt and Government Entities… retires.
Lois Lerner, Head of Exempt Organization…says she will invoke her 5th amendment right to not incriminate herself when called before Congress on Wednesday.
Holly Paz, Director of Exempt Organizations, subpoenaed to Washington to be interviewed by members of Congress.
All of this IRS leadership, in Washington D.C.
Then one level down is Cindy Thomas, the highest ranking employee in Cincinnati in this Tax Exempt and Government Entities Department that no one in Congress is talking to… yet.
Scandal Watch: New evidence makes it clear that the Internal Revenue Service campaign against conservatives wasn’t the result of two “rogue” agents, but was directed from higher up. The question is, how high up?
The claim that a couple of workers in the bowels of an IRS office in Cincinnati managed to block tax-exempt applications from conservative groups for more than two years, while subjecting them to outrageous, intrusive and improper requests for information, started falling apart days ago.
Last weekend, the Washington Post quoted a staffer saying that “everything comes from the top” at the IRS.
As Colleen Kelley, president of the union that represents IRS agents, told the Associated Press, “No processes or procedures or anything like that would ever be done just by frontline employees without any management involvement.”
And the New York Times reported that IRS accountants got a “directive from their manager” in early 2010 to “be on the lookout” for Tea Party-type groups.
This week, NBC News quoted a former manager of that Cincinnati office who explained how various internal checks and balances would have prevented workers from carrying out such a scheme on their own.
And Cincinnati’s Fox 19 News, which has done more solid reporting on this story than most of the major news outlets, looks to have put the final nail in the “rogue agent” story.
The local news station found that there were six agents — not two as former IRS head Steven Miller insisted just last week — who worked on these tax-exempt applications. These agents, Fox 19 learned, all had different direct managers, who in turn had different territory managers.
That means any directive applying to all these workers would had to have come from at least three levels up the management chain.
That manager turns out to be Cindy Thomas — who the IRS says oversees “exempt organization determinations” nationwide. She also happens to be the same person who ProPublica said signed off on releasing nine confidential tax-exempt applications from conservative groups to that liberal-leaning news website.
So if Thomas ordered the targeting, why? And if someone told her to get it done, who was that?
Fox 19 also learned all these managers would have known that Tea Party applications were being blocked long ago. IRS agents must handle tax-exempt applications within 270 days, after which the system automatically sends out an alert, making the agent provide a status update each month until the case is resolved.
Since the IRS started blocking Tea Party-type applications in April 2010 and didn’t approve a single one for more than two years, “thousands of red flags would have been generated.” Given the 270-day schedule, the first alerts would have hit back in December 2010.
Given all this, it’s not surprising that one top IRS official is now pleading the Fifth, and that the IRS is stonewalling congressional requests for communications relating to the targeting, including crucial emails.
Every new tidbit of information only makes the scandal look worse.
Yesterday I asked in this space, among other questions about the IRS scandal, this:
What was the subject of the Obama-Kelley March 31, 2010 meeting?
I received the following response to my question from the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) — the union for IRS employees headed by ex-14 year agent Colleen Kelley. The response came from union spokesperson Dina Long. It reads, in its entirety, this:
Statement of NTEU
On March 31, 2010, NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley attended the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility at the Old Executive Office Building. The forum was attended by approximately 200 attendees including business leaders, workers, policy experts and labor representatives discussing telework and worklife balance issues. Attendees were broken into five groups to discuss workplace issues. The president made opening remarks. President Kelley did not have any direct contact with the president or the first lady. President Kelley has never discussed the tea party with the president.
Below is a description of the March 2010 forum from the White House web site:
On March 31, 2010, President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and the White House Council on Women and Girls hosted the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility. The Forum brought together small business owners, corporate leaders, workers, policy experts, and labor leaders to explore the importance of creating workplace practices that allow America’s working men and women to meet the demands of their jobs without sacrificing the needs of their families. Building on the momentum coming out of that forum, the Administration is hosting follow-up forums around the country and encourages others to convene events in their communities to engage in dialogue and take action on this important issue.”
Sounds reasonable, yes?
Read again. Let’s see how the Washington game is played.
Over here, in a story by the Daily Caller’s Caroline May, the NTEU responded to Ms. May with the exact same statement that was sent to me.
With one difference. This interesting sentence:
President Kelley has never discussed the tea party with the president.
The folks over at the Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson’s site, are no dummies. If that sentence had been included in the otherwise identical response they received from the NTEU, they would have reported it.
So why was that one particular sentence tacked on to the otherwise identical statement from the NTEU? In a response to me?
Because in fact it is an answer — a disturbingly partial answer — to but one question of eight questions that I asked of Ms. Kelley. Let me share with you the exact email I sent to the NTEU for Colleen Kelley:
US News reports today the March 31, 2010 meeting mentioned in the article was a ” ‘Workplace Flexibility Forum,’ a March 2010 event that was about the state of flexible work arrangements.” I realize there are a number of questions here, but under the circumstances of this IRS controversy I want to make sure that Ms. Kelley has the opportunity to answer. I will be happy to publish her answers verbatim in The American Spectator.
Thanks,
Jeff Lord
The American Spectator
US News mentions that it has received no comment from Ms. Kelley. I would like to get a response from Ms. Kelley to the following questions:
• Did the President himself ever, at any time, discuss the Tea Party with Ms. Kelley?
• Did the President ever communicate his thoughts on the Tea Party to Kelley – in any fashion other than a face-to-face conversation such as e-mail, text or by phone?
• Was the Tea Party or any other group opposing the President’s agenda discussed at the March 31st meeting, or before or after that meeting?
• Will Ms. Kelley be asking the White House to release any e-mails, text or phone records that detail Kelley’s contacts with not only Mr. Obama but his staff? Will Ms. Kelley release any of these communications that are in the files of NTEU?
• Will Ms. Kelley ask the IRS to release all e-mail, text or phone records between Kelley or any other leader of the NTEU with IRS employees? With the Oversight Board? IRS employees are federal employees paid with taxpayer dollars.
• Has Ms. Kelley ever been given access to IRS records of Tea Party cases? Has she ever discussed the Tea Party or any conservative organization with IRS employees at any level?
• What did Ms. Kelley discuss with the President or any White House or government official at the December 3, 2009 White House Christmas Party that she attended?
• What role did Executive Order 13522 play in the IRS investigations of the Tea Party and all these other conservative groups?
That would be eight questions for “President Kelley,” as she was called in the NTEU response.
The very first question was:
Did the President himself ever, at any time, discuss the Tea Party with Ms. Kelley?
To which the NTEU responded by simply tacking on the following single sentence to their boilerplate reply to the media:
President Kelley has never discussed the tea party with the president.
But the rest of it? The answers to questions two through eight?
Silence.
Silence from the official NTEU spokesperson Dina Long. Silence from Colleen Kelley herself.
There was no “I’ll get back to you further.” There was no “Give us some time, what’s your deadline?” There was just….silence.
Note as well that when contacted by the Washington Post last week, the NTEU’s Kelley was, in the words of the Post headline, “mum.” Wrote the Post:
So far, the National Treasury Employees Union, which generally is not shy with public comment, has next to nothing to say about that or anything else.
NTEU is working to get the facts but does not have any specifics at this time. Moreover, IRS employees are not permitted to discuss taxpayer cases. We cannot comment further at this time,” NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said via e-mail.
A call to the NTEU office in Cincinnati resulted in a similar response: “We’ve been directed by national office. We have no comment.”
So what do we have here?
This.
A powerful labor union — the union that represents IRS employees — is displaying a pattern of refusing to answer questions. Other than the solitary statement to The American Spectator that “President Kelley has never discussed the tea party with the president.”
Beyond a generic, boilerplate answer to media inquiries, there is silence.
No answers about releasing union e-mails or phone records to or from the White House, the IRS or the IRS Oversight Board (on which board sits a former NTEU president) and no answers on all the rest.
But over here at the Washington Post, we have, buried in a story about the Cincinnati office of the IRS, this key phrase:
“Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”
Got that?
“Everything comes from the top.”
The top is where Colleen Kelley, the head of all those unionized IRS workers in Cincinnati, operates.
The top is the White House, the IRS offices in Washington, D.C., and the IRS Oversight Board.
The top is what makes it possible for the IRS union to have the run of the IRS, to get an Executive Order (# 13522) from the President to “allow employee and unions to have pre-decisional involvement in all workplace matters….”
The top is where Colleen Kelley goes to a White House Christmas party as the guest of President and Mrs. Obama — six days before that Executive Order 13522 is issued.
The top is where Colleen Kelley can be the head of the IRS union that gets its dues, its very survival money, from employees being paid by taxpayer dollars — and not have to answer questions about the details of her “collaboration” with the White House, the Obama-run IRS and the IRS Oversight Board.
And being at the top is what gives Ms. Kelley the belief that she can head an IRS public employees union — and do the old Nixon stonewall.
She isn’t the only one at the top busy stonewalling right now.
And as with Watergate, the place to get to the bottom of the top is Congress.
Where a new version of an old question should be asked:
What did the IRS union president know — and when did she know it?
“My question is who is going to jail?” — House Speaker John Boehner on the IRS Scandal
The President couldn’t even bring himself to breathe a word of the truth.
He could fire some hapless Acting Commissioner, but last night Mr. Obama never came close to discussing that which must never be discussed.
The IRS?
It’s about a union: the National Treasury Employees Union. The NTEU. A left-wing union representing 150,000 employees in 31 separate government agencies, including the IRS. A union that not only endorsed President Obama for election and re-election, but a union whose current president, Colleen Kelly, was a 14-year IRS agent and now is both union president and Obama administration appointee (of which more in a moment).
It’s about 94% of NTEU union contributions going to Democrats in the Senate and House in 2012 — candidates who campaigned as vociferous opponents of the Tea Party.
And the recently released report from the Treasury Inspector General? You will not find a single reference to the NTEU. Whose members are both player and referee in the exploding controversy over the IRS targeting of conservative groups.
Which raises the obvious question: how many NTEU members were involved in the writing of the Inspector General’s report?
Even more to the point, what contact — what coordination — has the Obama White House had with their allies in the NTEU leadership as both the White House and the NTEU race to get on top of a scandal that is rapidly engulfing both?
Did I mention that the NTEU has no comment on all of this? And that when President Obama went in front of cameras to make his statement on the IRS scandal — he never once mentioned his very powerful union buddies that have the run of the IRS? Right down to the control of who gets a Blackberry? Literally.
Let’s first see how the IRS/NTEU game with the Tea Party and conservatives is played, shall we?
In the 2012 election cycle, the IRS union gave its money this way:
For the U.S. Senate: Total to Democrats: $156,750 Total to Republicans: $1,000
For the U.S. House: Total to Democrats: $391,062 Total to Republicans: $23,000
And the candidates on the receiving end of those IRS employee dollars? Yes indeed. They were candidates who were running flat out against the Tea Party, depicting Tea Party-supported candidates as dangerous, extremists, and crazies. Exhibiting exactly the anti-Tea Party antipathy on the campaign trail that has been revealed to be permeating the IRS.
No wonder. These Senate and House races were fueled in part by money donated by IRS employees.
Let’s take a look at specific races where the IRS employee money was involved.
• Wisconsin: One of those IRS employee-backed Senate candidates was Democrat Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who in fact won her Senate race over ex-Republican Governor Tommy Thompson.
The NTEU, the union representing IRS employees, gave Baldwin $8,500. And what was Baldwin’s view of the Tea Party? If you check over here at the Midwest Values PAC, a left-wing political action committee set up by liberal Senator Al Franken of Minnesota, you will find this headline:
National Memo: Tammy Baldwin Runs Straight At The Tea Party
The story begins this way, and I have put the key sentence in bold print:
Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Tammy Baldwin wants to be the first openly gay candidate elected to the United States Senate. In an exclusive interview with The National Memo over the weekend, she made clear how she means to go about doing it: running straight at the Tea Party.
• Indiana: In the Indiana Senate race, the Democrats’ candidate was Joe Donnelly, who used his $5,000 contribution to run a winning anti-Tea Party race against Republican Richard Mourdock. Donnelly’s campaign website, presumably financed in part with the money contributed by IRS employees, has this headline attacking the Tea Party:
FACT CHECK: Mourdock Trying to Change Subject from Extreme TEA Party Views
The text of the Donnelly press release begins this way, with a direct attack on the Tea Party:
Indianapolis, Ind.—Today, Joe Donnelly’s campaign responded to Richard Mourdock’s latest ad trying to change the subject from his pattern of extreme TEA Party views.
“Hoosier voters are rejecting Richard Mourdock’s pattern of TEA Party extreme positions, so he is desperate to change the subject,” said Paul Tencher, campaign manager. “In fact, Indiana voters are responding to Joe’s message of working with both parties to get things done for middle class families. The only person playing politics in this race is Mr. Mourdock, as he tries to distract voters from his extreme views that are out of the mainstream.”
• Missouri: Over in the Missouri Senate race between Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Todd Akin, the IRS employee money — in the form of a $10,000 contribution to McCaskill — was used by the McCaskill campaign to help send this e-mail to supporters that bluntly attacked the Tea Party as “dangerous”:
Akin’s Rap Sheet Makes It Clear: Tea Party Congressman’s Outside Of The Mainstream Views, Dangerous Policies Are Wrong for Missouri, From his record to his rhetoric, everything about Todd Akin’s Tea Party policies are outside of the mainstream and dangerous for Missouri families.
When Missouri Republicans nominated him last night, they pinned their Senate hopes on a far right, Tea Party Congressman whose candidacy diminishes the party’s prospects for November.
And over in House races? At the very top of the high dollar list were two vividly anti-Tea Party candidates who each received a $10,000 contribution of IRS employee dollars.
• House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: Pelosi’s strategy was made plain in this interview with liberal columnist Eleanor Clift of the Daily Beast:
Stung by the debt-deal loss, the minority leader plans to get Democrats back on their jobs message and hammer Tea Party lawmakers as extremists who want to destroy government.
• House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer: Hoyer famously attacked the Tea Party this way, as seen with this headline:
Hoyer: Tea Party People Come From Unhappy Families
“There are a whole lot of people in the Tea Party that I see in these polls who don’t want any compromise.My presumption is they have unhappy families.”
Understanding all of this — that IRS employees themselves are paying, through their union the NTEU, for the election of anti-Tea Party candidates — the absence of any mention whatsoever of the connection between the IRS and the NTEU puts the IG report in a very different light.
For example.
The IG report says — and I will bold print the key phrases — the following:
The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention. Ineffective management: 1) allowed inappropriate criteria to be developed and stay in place for more than 18 months, 2) resulted in substantial delays in processing certain applications, and 3) allowed unnecessary potentially involving information requests to be issued.
Although the processing of some applications with potential significant political campaign
intervention was started soon after receipt, no work was completed on the majority of these
applications for 13 months. This was due to delays in receiving assistance from the Exempt Organizations function Headquarters office. For the 296 total political campaign intervention applications TIGTA reviewed as of December 17, 2012, 108 had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 were open from 206 to1,138 calendar days (some for more than three years and crossing two election cycles).
More than 20 months after the initial case was identified, processing the cases began in earnest. ….IRS officials stated that any donor information received in response to a request from its Determinations Unit was later destroyed.
Just in these opening statements of the IG report there is one very significant and glaring omission.
Where is the NTEU?
Note the phrases in bold print:
“The IRS”
“identified for review Tea Party and other organizations”
“Ineffective management”
“the processing”
“delays in receiving assistance from”
“approved”
“IRS officials stated”
“request from its Determinations Unit”
In each and every case these phrases identify actions taken by people — by IRS employees. IRS employees are members of the NTEU. The NTEU that is using money from these very same IRS employees to fund the campaigns of anti-Tea Party candidates like Baldwin, Donnelly, McCaskill, Pelosi and Hoyer. Not to mention all the rest of the Democrats who got a piece of the IRS employee money action.
As one would suspect, given the enormous clout of the liberal IRS union, it’s all about the politics. Liberal politics and the financing of the liberal welfare state. A federal version, if you will, of the recent famous struggle between Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and state employee unions.
How powerful is the NTEU within the IRS?
Look no further than this IG report from back in January of this year that discusses the role the union has inside the IRS bureaucracy in the minutia of which IRS employees get to carry a Blackberry. The report notes:
In June 2010, the IRS and the NTEU signed an agreement to standardize IRS policy regarding which IRS employees would be allowed (referred to as a “profiled” position in the agreement) to receive certain information technology equipment, including aircards and BlackBerry® smartphones.
Notice: the NTEU, which gave 94% of its campaign money to anti-Tea Party candidates, has the clout within the IRS to demand a say in who can and cannot carry a Blackberry and receive other high tech communications equipment. The report goes on to say:
Initially, IRS policy limited the assignment of BlackBerry® smartphones to executives and senior/departmental managers. However, the agreement between the IRS and the NTEU expanded availability to employees below the executive and senior/departmental level.
This doesn’t even mention the power the NTEU has inside the IRS to decide everything from promotion rules to size of employee workspaces and on and on.
So the obvious.
If you are working in the IRS, and you are an NTEU member, and you know your union leadership is funneling your union dues to anti-Tea Party candidates, and your union has so much raw power within the IRS that they even control whether you, an IRS employee, can get even such mundane tech gear as a Blackberry — what attitude are you going to display as you review Tea Party applications that must, by law, come in to the IRS for approval?
You already know what to do. And inside the IRS, that’s exactly what was done. The Tea Party, in the vernacular, was screwed. By IRS bureaucrats whose union money is being used to attack the Tea Party. Of course these IRS employees know what to do — most probably without even being asked. There is no need to ask. And if they don’t follow the union program — and want a Blackberry — tough luck.
And what of the NTEU president, Ms. Kelly? The one-time IRS agent also doubles as an Obama appointee (announced here by the Obama White House) to the Federal Salary Council. Identified in the Washington Post as:
…a panel obscure to most Washingtonians but one that performs a vital role in recommending raises for most federal employees.
Got that? The President of the NTEU — a union that has gone out of its way to use IRS employee money to defeat the Tea Party — has a “vital role in recommending raises for most federal employees” — which includes, of course, IRS employees.
As if IRS employees don’t have enough incentive to go after the Tea Party, their anti-Tea Party president has a say in whether they get not just a Blackberry but a raise as well.
Can you say: “conflict of interest”?
Let’s stop here and take a look at a famous incident with the IRS that has made news in the last few days: the Articles of Impeachment filed against President Richard Nixon.
By now, all manner of people have been reminded that President Nixon’s resignation was prompted by the House Judiciary Committee passing Articles of Impeachment, with Article 2, Section One specifically saying:
He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.
But there’s something missing in this recall of the tale of Nixon and the IRS.
In the early 1970s, President Nixon bypassed Congress and postponed salary increases for General Schedule federal employees. This included, of course, the IRS. The NTEU was furious with Nixon and took the President to court in a case called NTEU v. Nixon. The union won, and the federal government was forced to pay $533 million in back pay to federal employees.
So far, so normal in the world of Washington and relationships between a president and federal employees. Right?
Wrong.
Two years later, in 1974, the year the Watergate scandal reached high tide and Nixon was forced to resign, his abuse of the IRS cited in Article 2 as one of the reasons, there was another story out there involving the IRS and Richard Nixon.
As the liberal drive to get Nixon increased to the force of a political hurricane, reporter Jack White of Rhode Island’s Providence Journal-Evening Bulletin received an illegal leak — from the IRS. Specifically, an illegal leak from someone inside the IRS — an IRS employee — that leaked Richard Nixon’s 1970 and 1971 taxes. There was an immediate uproar — not about the leak or the identity of the leaker — but over the accusation that Nixon had underpaid his taxes. The House Judiciary Committee took the information and ran with it, opening an entire line of inquiry about Nixon’s tax deductions. So public was this it resulted in Nixon famously answering a question at a press conference this way:
People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.
And while people are remembering Nixon in the current furor over the IRS because of his own abuse of the IRS and Article 2, there was another Article —Article 4 — that was based on the leaked information from the still-unknown IRS employee to reporter Jack White. Read Article 4:
He knowingly and fraudulently failed to report certain income and claimed deductions in the year 1969, 1970, 1971, and 1972 on his Federal income tax returns which were not authorized by law, including deductions for a gift of papers to the United States valued at approximately $576,000.
Nixon vigorously disputed this, of course. But it didn’t matter. He was out the door, forced to resign. A leak from the IRS to the media about Nixon’s taxes one big no-never-mind.
And what happened to reporter Jack White? The man who received the illegal leak of Nixon’s tax returns — a violation of law — and published them?
Jack White was rewarded by his liberal media peers with the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for National Reporting.
So.
What’s really going on with the IRS?
The Internal Revenue Service , with all of its mighty taxing and police powers, is in the hands of anti-Tea Party, anti-conservative, political activists. Liberal political activists from the NTEU masquerading as neutral career bureaucrats. The money of IRS employees used to fuel the National Treasury Employees Union’s open and expensive assault on the Tea Party and conservatives.
And comment on all this from the NTEU? Here’s this from the Washington Post:
So far, the National Treasury Employees Union, which generally is not shy with public comment, has next to nothing to say about that or anything else.
“NTEU is working to get the facts but does not have any specifics at this time. Moreover, IRS employees are not permitted to discuss taxpayer cases. We cannot comment further at this time,” NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said via e-mail.
A call to the NTEU office in Cincinnati resulted in a similar response: “We’ve been directed by national office. We have no comment.”
No comment? No wonder.
“IRS employees are not permitted to discuss taxpayer cases”??!! What a joke.
Here in the Wall Street Journal is author James Bovard with a short history of the political manipulation of the IRS by various presidents, and Bovard notes that: “With the current IRS scandal, we may have seen only the tip of the iceberg.”
Aside from Nixon they include FDR, JFK, and Bill Clinton. The difference is the latter three weren’t forced to resign because of it — and Clinton’s abuse of the IRS was not include in the Articles of Impeachment that focused on his lying to a grand jury over that liberal favorite — sexual harassment.
The real question now?
With the IRS assuming serious police powers of Obamacare, in effect the members of one left-wing labor union will have access to the private health care records of every single American.
And notes the Wall Street Journal, again the bold print for emphasis:
This March the IRS Inspector General reiterated that ObamaCare’s 47 major changes to the revenue code “represent the largest set of tax law changes the IRS has had to implement in more than 20 years.” Thus the IRS is playing Thelma to the Health and Human Service Department’s Louise. The tax agency has requested funding for 1,954 full-time equivalent employees for its Affordable Care Act office in 2014.
Got that? The real meaning here is that the NTEU is asking for 1,954 more union members whose union dues will be put to use to “hammer the Tea Party” in the words of Nancy Pelosi.
As James Taranto also noted over in the Wall Street Journal yesterday:
The Internal Revenue Service last year supplied a left-leaning nonprofit charity with confidential information about conservative organizations, which the charity disseminated to the public, ProPublica reported yesterday.
Once again, IRS employees — they of the anti-Tea Party union NTEU — were caught leaking private information.
Did I mention they were targeting Billy Graham — 95 year old Billy Graham??!!! Why? Because the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was urging “voters to back ‘candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles….’”
You know what terrifies every liberal in America right now? You want to know the real reason President Obama abruptly felt the need to go on national television last night and fire the Acting Commissioner of the IRS last night as Americans were having their dinner?
The distinct possibility that the IRS and the whole confection of Big Government liberalism built around the federal taxing power is about to implode in scandal.
Big scandal. The kind of scandal that will make Watergate look like a piker.
And the irony?
That in seeking to destroy the credibility of the Tea Party, the Obama administration and its allies have destroyed not just the credibility of the IRS and one very seriously powerful union.
IRS’s Shulman had more public White House visits than any Cabinet member
Publicly released records show that embattled former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House at least 157 times during the Obama administration, more recorded visits than even the most trusted members of the president’s Cabinet.
Obama officials who’ve visited the White House (As prepared by The Daily Caller)
Shulman’s extensive access to the White House first came to light during his testimony last week before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Shulman gave assorted answers when asked why he had visited the White House 118 times during the period that the IRS was targeting tea party and conservative nonprofits for extra scrutiny and delays on their tax-exempt applications.
By contrast, Shulman’s predecessor Mark Everson only visited the White House once during four years of service in the George W. Bush administration and compared the IRS’s remoteness from the president to “Siberia.” But the scope of Shulman’s White House visits — which strongly suggests coordination by White House officials in the campaign against the president’s political opponents — is even more striking in comparison to the publicly recorded access of Cabinet members.
An analysis by The Daily Caller of the White House’s public “visitor access records” showed that every current and former member of President Obama’s Cabinet would have had to rack up at least 60 more public visits to the president’s home to catch up with “Douglas Shulman.”
The visitor logs do not give a complete picture of White House access. Some high-level officials get cleared for access and do not have to sign in during visits. A Washington Post database of visitor log records cautions, “The log may include some scheduled visits that did not take place and exclude visits by members of Congress, top officials and others who are not required to sign in at security gates.”
The White House press office declined to comment on which visits by high-ranking officials do and do not get recorded in the visitor log, but it is probable that the vast majority of visits by major Cabinet members do not end up in the public record.
Nevertheless, many visits by current and former Cabinet members are in the logs, and the record depicts an IRS chief uniquely at home in the White House.
Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama’s friend and loyal lieutenant, logged 62 publicly known White House visits, not even half as many as Shulman’s 157.
Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, to whom Shulman reported, clocked in at just 48 publicly known visits.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earned a cool 43 public visits, and current Secretary of State John Kerry logged 49 known White House visits in the same timeframe, when he was still a U.S. senator.
Shulman has more recorded visits to the White House than HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (48), DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano (34), Education Secretary Arne Duncan (31), former Energy Secretary Steven Chu (22) and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates (17) combined.
The Daily Caller’s analysis includes current, former and presently-nominated members of Obama’s Cabinet.
After Shulman, Acting Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank (86), Asst. Attorney General Thomas Perez (83) and Penny Pritzker (76) — Obama’s nominee for Commerce Secretary — have the most publicly known White House visits.
Pro-Israel groups felt wrath of Obama IRS, WFB investigation reveals
BY: Alana Goodman
A Washington Free Beacon investigation has identified at least five pro-Israel organizations that have been audited by the IRS in the wake of a coordinated campaign by White House-allied activist groups in 2009 and 2010.
These organizations, some of which are too afraid of government reprisals to speak publicly, say in interviews with the Free Beacon thatthey now believe the IRS actions may have been coordinated by the Obama administration.
Many of the charities openly clashed with the Obama administration’s policy of opposing Israeli settlement construction over the so-called “Green Line,” which marks the pre-1967 boundary between Israel and the West Bank and West and East Jerusalem.
After the Obama administration took up the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as one of its most prominent foreign policy priorities in early 2009, and made a cessation of Israeli settlement construction the cornerstone of its approach, the nonprofits were subjected to a string of unflattering media reports.
White House-allied lobbying groups joined the media criticism by challenged the nonprofits’ tax-exempt status, arguing that they undercut President Barack Obama’s Middle East policies.
“Our concern at that time was that these articles weren’t just appearing by happenstance, but may have reflected an evolving policy shift in the Obama administration to scrutinize charitable giving by organizations on behalf of Jewish communities and institutions over the Green Line,” said Jerusalem-based attorney Marc Zell, who convened a private meeting of pro-Israel groups in August 2009 to discuss these concerns.
Tax-exempt charities that support Israeli settlements have been the subject of controversy for years. But the issue came to a head after Obama made opposition to settlement construction a focus of his Middle East policy in 2009 and demanded Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu halt all construction beyond the Green Line, including in the Israeli capital of Jerusalem.
While it is not illegal for these charities to contribute to groups and individuals across the Green Line, critics say that they should not receive tax-exempt status because they support communities the administration views as antagonistic to administration policy.
The media scrutiny began as early as March 26, 2009, when the Washington Post’s David Ignatius published a column questioning the groups’ tax-exempt status.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) announced the next day that it would begin a campaign of filing legal complaints with the IRS and the Treasury Department to investigate groups “allegedly raising funds for the development of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.”
ADC is closely tied to the Obama White House. The president recorded a video greeting to the group’s annual conference and sent two senior administration officials to attend.
The ADC announced in October 2009 that it had expanded its legal campaign against pro-Israel charities and was “working with a number of coalition partners, both nationally and internationally, in conducting this ongoing campaign.”
The chief negotiator for the Palestinian Authority raised the issue two days later during a meeting with U.S. Consul General Daniel Rubenstein, according to a State Department cable revealed by Wikileaks.
“[Palestinian negotiator Ahmad Quraya] gave the Consul General a copy of an article by Uri Blau and Nir Hasson, published in Israeli daily Haaretz newspaper on August 17, entitled ‘American Non-profit Organization Raises Funds for Settlement,’ and asked the USG to review the situation with an eye toward eliminating organizations’ tax exempt status if they are funding settlement activity,” said the cable.
On July 5, 2010, the New York Times published its 5,000-word cover story on the groups, following up with a Room for Debate series two days later. The article quoted an unnamed senior State Department administration official calling such groups “a problem” and “unhelpful to the efforts that we’re trying to make.” The story also quoted a senior Obama Middle East adviser, Daniel Kurtzer, saying the groups “drove us crazy.”
J Street, a pro-Palestinian lobbying group that was closely aligned with the White House in 2009 and 2010, called the following week for an investigation into U.S. charities that contribute to settlements.
One pro-Israel targets was HaYovel, which was featured prominently in the New York Times article. Six months after the article was published, the IRS audited the Nashville-based charity, which sends volunteers to work in vineyards across the Green Line.
“We bookend that [New York Times] story. We were the first [group mentioned]. They really kind of focused on us,” said HaYovel’s founder Tommy Waller. “Then six months later we had an audit.”
Shari Waller, who cofounded HaYovel with her husband, said the couple received a phone call from the IRS in December 2010. She said she was not aware of anything in their tax documents that may have prompted the audit, and added that the additional scrutiny came during the group’s first five years of existence when audits tend to be rare.
“They contacted us the week of Christmas and told us they wanted to audit us, right now,” she said. “The most unusual thing to me was they contacted us at a time [that] for most people is a very hectic time, and we had just returned from Israel. To think about taking calls for an audit on the telephone—official business is usually conducted through the mail.”
Tommy Waller said he found the timing of the audit “suspicious” and believes it may have been politically motivated.
“We 100-percent support Judea and Samaria, and Jewish sovereignty in that area, and the current administration is 100 percent opposed to Jewish sovereignty in that area of Israel,” he said. “That’s why we suspected that we would have to deal with [an audit].”
Two other organizations—the American arm of an educational institution that operates across the Green Line and the American arm of a well-known Israeli charity that was mentioned in the New York Times article—say they were also audited.
Another organization that was criticized in multiple articles during 2009 and 2010 was audited last year. The organization, like many of the groups with whom the Free Beacon spoke, asked to remain anonymous out of fear of political retaliation and concern that exposure would harm fundraising efforts.
“The IRS carried out an examination of our organization, reviewing all of our accounting records, tax returns, bylaws, bank records, grant awards, etc, for the relevant period,” said a senior official of this organization.
“There was no vindictiveness in the audit itself and it was completed within a matter of months. Our feeling at the time was that this order must have come from above. The IRS seemed to be responding to a request or a complaint from higher up.”
Concerns that the IRS was targeting pro-Israel groups were first raised publicly by Z Street, a pro-Israel organization run by Lori Lowenthal Marcus.
Z Street filed a lawsuit against the IRS in 2010, alleging its application for tax-exempt status was delayed because it disagreed with the Obama administration’s Israel policy.
According to the suit, Marcus’s attorney was informed by IRS official Diane Gentry that Z Street’s “application for tax-exempt status has been at least delayed, and may be denied because of a special IRS policy in place regarding organizations in any way connected with Israel, and further that the applications of many such Israel-related organizations have been assigned to “a special unit in the D.C. office.”
Neither the IRS nor Gentry responded to a request for comment.
Marcus said Z Street has not funded anyone or any groups in the settlements. But, she added, the problems her organization faced could be related to the administration’s concerns over settlement-supporting groups.
Z Street’s application for tax-exempt status first ran into trouble with the IRS on July 19, 2010, two weeks after the lengthy New York Times article was published.
“Even if that is the case, that’s an explanation, but it’s not an answer. It’s not an adequate reason,” said Marcus. “It’s totally inappropriate.”
Zell told the Free Beacon he has not personally witnessed a shift in IRS policy since the 2009 meeting suggesting settlement-supporting nonprofits have been targeted.
However, he said it is a “yellow flag” that at least five of these organizations have been audited since 2009, considering the recent finding by the IRS inspector general that the agency targeted conservative groups.
“Now with the revelations of the IRS abuses vis-a-vis U.S. right-wing organizations, that have been published of late, there is renewed concerned that these kinds of policies, same kinds of policies and procedures, may have been targeted at these organizations [that support settlements],” he said.
Valerie B. Jarrett is a Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama. She oversees the Offices of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs and chairs the White House Council on Women and Girls.
Prior to joining the Obama Administration, she was the Chief Executive Officer of The Habitat Company. She also served as Co-Chair of the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team, and Senior Advisor to Obama’s presidential campaign.
Ms. Jarrett has held positions in both the public and private sector, including the Chairman of the Chicago Transit Board, the Commissioner of Planning and Development for the City of Chicago, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Mayor Richard M. Daley. She also practiced law with two private law firms.
Jarrett also served as a director of corporate and not for profit boards, including Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Stock Exchange, Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Chairman of the University of Chicago Medical Center Board of Trustees.
Jarrett received her B.A. from Stanford University in 1978 and her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 1981.
Greetings citizens of the world, the following is a very special message for all of humanity. Too long have we lived in fear, fear of greed, fear of corruption, fear of failure, fear that everything we’ve known turned out to be wrong.
No longer will we live in fear! It ends here and now, with you and me! We are brothers and sisters of humanity, the time has come for us to unite! We must forge a new beginning of peace and love, we must be the good we want to see in the world.
Humanity is still young, and for the first time ever in human history we have a real chance at true peace as a species. The internet has united us more than ever before, its time we use this gift to promote the unity of us all. Its time we stand up as a planet and declare we will no longer take part in a system based on fear, greed, corruption, and war.
Lets put everything into perspective for those of you that need more convincing, the United Sates alone has spent trillions of dollars on wars. War has claimed the lives of over 264 million people throughout the course of known human history, many of whom where civilians. Human progress has been halted by senseless wars.
While we fight amongst ourselves on Earth there’s an entire universe passing us by. There are an estimated 160 billion planets in our galaxy alone, many of which could potentially be home to carbon-based life as we know it. Stars go supernova, entire solar systems get destroyed, even whole galaxies collide while we argue and fight over small and pointless issues. We should be happy we have a planet to live on, not fighting over who owns the planet. In truth no individual or even an entire species owns it, because in truth all life on Earth owns this planet.
Someday soon humanity will venture to the stars, will we go into the unknown divided and fighting? Or will we say as one voice, as one species, “We the People of Earth, united as one, declare from this day fourth that no force, however big or small, shall ever divide the spirit of humanity again. United in our cause for peace, knowledge, and progress, we go forward into the unknown as brothers and sisters, as a species no longer divided by war, greed, corruption, and fear.”
The choice is yours to make, you are Anonymous, you are the future of Earth. You can either continue the wars and division of humanity, or you can try something new. You can give peace a chance, you can help secure a beautiful world of peace, knowledge, and progress for all generations to come.
You are Anonymous,
You are part of Humanity,
You should Forgive,
yet You should never Forget,
It’s time to Expect Yourself…Lets unite under WORLD ANONYMOUS NOW.
With your help, may one day the innocent never suffer and the brave never die, for on that day we’ll truly be free. United as one, divided by zero.
anonymous ITU and WCIT 3-15 december
New Trend: Governing the Internet
TAKE ACTION for a FREE and OPEN INTERNET, Threat Wire Ep. 002
This week on Threat Wire, Darren and Shannon discuss the issues with the ITU and keeping the internet free and open for the world.
The UN have apparently released details that they will to add certain levels of control on the internet, which would for one thing cause traffic from abroad to larger international websites based in the US (such as facebook or Google) to have to pay a tax,.
“”Proposals for the new ITU treaty run to more than 200 pages. One idea is to apply the ITU’s long-distance telephone rules to the Internet by creating a ‘sender-party-pays’ rule. International phone calls include a fee from the originating country to the local phone company at the receiving end. Under a sender-pays approach, U.S.-based websites would pay a local network for each visitor from overseas, effectively taxing firms such as Google and Facebook. ”
ALERT – United Nations To Seize Control Of Internet ?!?
United Nation Planning to Control The Internet – Alex Jones Tv
United Nations Seeks to Control the Internet – Thoughts & Opinions
Does the ITU threaten freedom of speech on the Internet? – Truthloader
Assange s prophecy Govnts plan Internet takeover
Richard Hill at the EIF debate on WCIT and ITRs
The 193 member countries of the ITU will meet in Dubai 3-14 December at World Conference on International Telecommunication 2012 to revise the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), a 1988 treaty-level document establishing policies governing international telecommunications services between countries. While some Member States of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), as well as a few independent groups, are advocating for expanded intergovernmental powers over the Internet with respect to the Internet as well as wireless, IP-based, and next generation networks; other countries believe that the WCIT should adopt only minor changes to the ITRs as necessary to modernize the existing provisions of the treaty, and that new provisions and authorities are unnecessary.
Europe’s role and view will be crucial in the debate and to its outcome. In the dinner debate organised by the European Internet Foundation, representatives from the European Commission, European Industry and Civil society had been invited to exchange views on issues at stake and present their positions.
Perspectives from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) were presented by Richard Hill, Counsellor at the ITU
Vint Cerf on the ITU
Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, shares a message with participants at the Big Tent Dublin on the importance of free expression. Vint also expresses his concerns about potential threats to an Open Internet in Internet governance reform at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) conference in Dubai in December 2012.
YOUR INTERNET IS IN DANGER!!!
Your internet is fine. I lied. But Google lied first, so I think it’s justified.
Alex Jones Exposes Google’s Plan to Dominate the Internet
Goodlatte speaks in opposition to UN control of the Internet
ITU TELECOM WORLD 2012 – Highlights Video
Highlights video of ITU TELECOM WORLD 2012, Dubai, UAE.
ITU Telecom World 2012, 14-18 October 2012, Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre (DICEC).
Five days of pivotal discussion and debate on some of the hottest topics facing the ICT industry.
The world is changing faster than ever before in human history, thanks largely to the explosive growth of the ICT sector. New technologies, new industry players and new global trends is at the heart of debates in Dubai.
Hundreds of industry leaders came together with government ministers, regulators and manufacturers for five days of critical debate to shape the policies, regulations and competitive strategies of future communications.
ITU INTERVIEW @ WCIT-12: Paul Budde, Independent Analyst, BuddeComm
Interview with Paul Budde, Independent Analyst, BuddeComm at WCIT 2012
Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 3-14 December 2012.
The World Conference on International Telecommunications will review the current International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), which serve as the binding global treaty designed to facilitate international interconnection and interoperability of information and communication services, as well as ensuring their efficiency and widespread public usefulness and availability.
ITU Secretary – General Video Message: Dr Hamadoun I.Touré, S-G, ITU on WCIT – 12
ITU Secretary General Video Message: Dr Hamadoun I.Touré, Secretary-General, International Telecommunications Union, speaking about the World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012(WCIT -12).
ITU will convene the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from 3-14 December 2012. This landmark conference will review the current International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), which serve as the binding global treaty designed to facilitate international interconnection and interoperability of information and communication services, as well as ensuring their efficiency and widespread public usefulness and availability.
FRANCE 24 Tech 24: Who rules the Web? : ITU vs. ICANN
Internet at Liberty 2012: Plenary II – Riz Khan, Gary Fowlie, Ben Wagner
Possible Internet Take Over By The ITU (UN) [HD]
Spread the word, share & take action! :
*Sign-on Letter Opposing ITU Authority Over the Internet :
[Internet advocates all over the world are organizing around the upcoming ITU conference. On this page, we’ve collected a set of tools and resources to help interested groups and citizens get involved.]
Ivailo Kalfin (MEP, BG) argues in the European parliament that Internet should stay free and open, ahead of the WCIT meeting in Dubai in December. Internet is a very strong tool these days and there are many that would like to control it and the people, using it. For example by changing its business model and making it more expensive and less accessible. Some governments are even suggesting creating a “national internet”, which is an oxymoron, something that is against the nature of Internet itself, says Kalfin
Operation WCIT – Keep OUR internet Free
We love the internet.
And we’re guessing you do too. Think about all the awesome things it gives us: A vast communication network; innovative businesses; a platform to freely speak or challenge powerful governments; and hundreds and hundreds of hours of cat videos.
All this great stuff is available because the internet was designed in an open and inclusive way, with a multitude of voices being able to get a say on how it’s governed.
But the internet is in danger.
There’s a meeting between the world’s governments in a just a few weeks, and it could very well decide the future of the internet through a binding international treaty. It’s called the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), and it’s being organized by a government-controlled UN agency called the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
If some proposals at WCIT are approved, decisions about the internet would be made by a top-down, old-school government-centric agency behind closed doors. Some proposals allow for internet access to be cut off more easily, threaten privacy, legitimizes monitoring and blocking of online traffic. Others seek to impose new fees for accessing content, not to mention slowing down connection speeds. Used as a pretext to internet pornography among other things as an excuse to censor sensitive material pages (note that there are too many cases of child pornography that are ignored by the police) In addition to paying for internet service, you’d also have to pay for visiting certain sites, such as YouTube. Your communications would be constantly monitored and archived, meaning the end of Internet privacy. This could potentially lead to individuals becoming victims of blackmail by malicious people who control the monitoring. The Internet is home to many organized social movements which fight for human rights worldwide. If we allow this, we will not be able to use the Internet to organize the defense of our rights…
If the delicate balance of the internet is upset, it could have grave consequences for businesses and human rights.
This must be stopped.
Only governments get a vote at WCIT, so we need people from all around the world to demand that our leaders keep the internet open.
Watch the video, and take action above to tell your governments to oppose handing over key decisions about the internet to the ITU. Let’s use the internet’s global reach to save it.
We are the internet
We are anonymous
We are here to help you with your revolution
Background Articles and Videos
World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12)
“…ITU will convene the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from 3-14 December 2012. This landmark conference will review the current International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), which serve as the binding global treaty designed to facilitate international interconnection and interoperability of information and communication services, as well as ensuring their efficiency and widespread public usefulness and availability.
The treaty sets out general principles for assuring the free flow of information around the world, promoting affordable and equitable access for all and laying the foundation for ongoing innovation and market growth. The ITRs were last negotiated in Melbourne, Australia in 1988, and there is broad consensus that the text now needs to be updated to reflect the dramatically different information and communication technology (ICT) landscape of the 21st century.
“In this exclusive 80 minute video interview, legendary conspiracy author G. Edward Griffin explains how his research, which spans no less than 5 decades, has revealed a banking elite obsessed with enforcing a world government under a collectivist model that will crush individualism and eventually institute martial law as a response to the inevitable backlash that will be generated as a result of a fundamental re-shaping of society.
Griffin discusses the similarities between the extreme left and the extreme right in the false political paradigm and how this highlights a recurring theme – collectivism. Collectivism is the opposite of individualism and believes that the interests of the individual must be sacrificed for the greater good of the greater number, explains Griffin, uniting the doctrines of communism and fascism. Both the Republican and Democrat parties in the United States are committed to advancing collectivism and this is why the same policies are followed no matter who is voted in to the White House.
“All collectivist systems eventually deteriorate into a police state because that’s the only way you can hold it together,” warns Griffin.
Carroll Quigley, Georgetown University Professor and mentor to former president Bill Clinton, explained in his books Tragedy and Hope and The Anglo-American Establishment, how the elite maintained a silent dictatorship while fooling people into thinking they had political freedom, by creating squabbles between the two parties in terms of slogans and leadership, while all the time controlling both from the top down and pursuing the same agenda. Griffin documents how the Tea Party, after its beginnings as a grass roots movement, was later hijacked by the Republicans through the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.
Pointing out how Republicans and Democrats agree on the most important topics, such as US foreign policy, endless wars in the Middle East, and the dominance of the private banking system over the economy, Griffin lays out how the left-right hoax is used to steer the destiny of America.
Griffin also talks at length on a myriad of other important subjects, such as the move towards a Chinese-style censored Internet, the demonization of the John Birch Society as a racist extremist group, the Hegelian dialectic, the power of tax-exempt foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations, the movement towards world government, and the question of whether the elite are really worried about the growing awareness of their agenda amongst Americans.”
An Idea Whose Time Has Come – G. Edward Griffin – Freedom Force International – Full
There is no point in worrying about the erosion of personal freedom that is the reality of our present era if we can do nothing about it. They say that knowledge is power, but that is one of the greatest myths of all history. Knowledge without action is useless and leads only to apathy and despair. So the question is: what type of action can reverse this trend? Writing letters and signing petitions to the same people who have created the problem is not going to do it. Voting for candidates selected by power brokers with hidden agendas will not do it either. There have been many proposals to reverse the tide of totalitarianism but, after decades of effort, none of them have worked. In this address, G. Edward Griffin, Founder of Freedom Force, tells us why; and the reason is so simple, it will astound you. Once we clear away that single barrier, the plan for a pro-active counter-force falls quickly into place. This is the missing piece of the puzzle, the ultimate solution we have been seeking. Visit http://www.freedom-force.org
The solution is simple. It is to take back control of the power centers of society, one-by-one, just the way they were captured in the first place. Replace the collectivists with people who have no personal agendas except to defend freedom. This will unleash the vast human potential for prosperity and happiness that can be realized only in the absence of government oppression. However, to reach that goal, it will be necessary for those who cherish freedom to do more than complain and far more than just casting a vote every few years. They must reach for power. That is the reason for the motto of Freedom Force: Impotentes defendere libertatem non possunt, which is Latin for “Those without power cannot defend freedom.”
G. Edward Griffin- On Individualism v Collectivism #1
G. Edward Griffin- On Individualism v Collectivism #2
G. Edward Griffin- On Individualism v Collectivism #3
G. Edward Griffin- On Individualism v Collectivism #4
The Best Enemies Money Can Buy – Prof. Antony C. Sutton
“…A classic interview by Professor Antony Sutton, who taught economics at California State University, and was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. In this talk, Prof. Sutton goes into his impeccable research on how a close-knit group of Western financiers and industrialists (centered around Morgan and Rockefeller in the US, and around Milner and the City financiers, in the UK) created and sustained their three supposed enemies right from the very beginning: Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and FDR’s Fabian socialism.
Particularly, he goes into how Wall Street/City of London financiers used their banking institutions and their industrial enterprises to:
1) Help finance and sustain the Bolshevik Revolution. Build up Soviet industry during Lenin’s Five-Year Plans, both through finance, technology/industrial transfers and technical assistance. Continue to build the Soviets throughout the entire Cold War, through the same kinds of deals. This included the Korea and the Vietnam eras, during which American troops were being killed by… Western-made Soviet equipment.
2) Build up Nazi Germany, both financially and industrially;
3) Get FDR into power in America as their man, and even draw up the New Deal policies, especially FDR’s National Recovery Act — designed by Gerard Swopes of General Electric and deeply welcomed by Wall Streeters Morgan, Warburg and Rockefeller.
Sutton was not a wild speculator. He was a distinguished academic researcher who documented his conclusions impeccably in his several works. Not being able to counter his research, the establishment (including academia) simply attempts to ignore it, and pretend it isn’t there. The purpose for these Wall Street policies was very simple: to create, and globalize, what Sutton calls Corporate Socialism. A system under which everything in society is ruled by the state, and the state is, in its stead, controlled by financiers who, hence, get to rule and manage society, to their liking. In other words, to get society to work for the financiers, using a socialist state as an intermediary. This is what we now know as the globalization economic model. As a result of all the clashes of the 20th century, most notably WWII and the Cold War (fought between powers that were manipulated and controlled by these banker cliques), the world has been ‘globalized’. Meaning that it has been entirely taken over by these financiers, and is ever closer to being completely ruled by them, through not only the national states and national central banking systems, but mainly through supranational agencies and institutions.
Go into Professor Sutton’s books, most notably the Hoover Institute’s series on Western technological/industrial transfers to the Soviets and the ‘Wall Street’ trilogy. If you have a difficulty in purchasing the original books, you’ll find most of them are easily available online, on pdf form. …”
Capitalist Elites Funded the Bolshevik Revolution [Professor Antony Sutton]
Socialism – A Tool of the Capitalist Elite [Professor Antony Sutton]
George Carlin -“Who Really Controls America”
Background Articles and Videos
The Creature From Jekyll Island (by G. Edward Griffin)
Rare year 1982 video with G. Edward Griffin & Norman Dodds#1
Rare year 1982 video with G. Edward Griffin & Norman Dodds#2
Rare year 1982 video with G. Edward Griffin & Norman Dodds#3
Rare year 1982 video with G. Edward Griffin & Norman Dodds#4
Rare year 1982 video with G. Edward Griffin & Norman Dodds#5
Rare year 1982 video with G. Edward Griffin & Norman Dodds#6
Mark Levin and Jeffrey Lord Precious Delicate Utopian Neocons
Mark Levin Interviews Jeffrey Lord On Ron Paul And His Supporters Being Neoliberal
Michael Medved, Jeffery Lord On Ron Paul’s Neoliberal Reeducation
Mark Levin, Ron Paul Hater, Put in His Place
American Spectator Dead Wrong on Ron Paul
SA@TheDC – “I Like Ron Paul Except on Foreign Policy”
SA@The DC – Ron Paul’s Reaganesque Foreign Policy
SA@TAC – A Conservative Foreign Policy Comeback?
SA@TheDC – Conservatism for What?
SA@TAC – Ron Paul’s Pledge to America
Jack Hunter on FOX News 12-29-11
Establishment Media Crucifies Ron Paul On Every Front
“As long as nations cling to protective tariffs, migration barriers, compulsory education, interventionism and etatism, new conflicts capable of breaking out at any time into open warfare will continually arise to plague mankind.”
~Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, pages 150-151
Jeffrey Lord has been attacking Ron Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy on various so-called “conservative” talk radio shows and accuses Ron Paul of not being a conservative.
Really, he must be kidding or simply does not know the history of the conservative movement.
Suggest he read George H. Nash’s book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.
SA@TAC – The Great Neo-Con: Libertarianism Isn’t ‘Conservative’
If Lord means that Ron Paul is not a neoconservative, then Lord is correct.
Ron Paul is definitely not a neoconservative.
Congressman Ron Paul, MD – We’ve Been NeoConned
Neoconservatives are right-wing progressives Democrats that became “boat people” and switched to the Republican Party in the 1970s when the Democratic Party nominated George McGovern as their Presidential candidate.
SA@TAC – What’s a ‘Neoconservative?’
SA@TAC – Who’s a Republican?
SA@TAC – Is Ron Paul Weird?
Most conservatives and libertarians do not consider neoconservatives as either new or conservative. They are really progressives that want the United States to have an aggressive interventionist foreign policy that supports nation or empire building, the U.S. as policeman of the world and Israel with foreign aid.
Both the progressives and/or neoconservatives that are in the Republican Party establishment are in panic mode that Paul may win the presidential nomination.
I suggest neoconservative Republicans get back in their boats and go back to the Democratic Party, where most of them came from in the first place.
Please take your hitman, Jeffrey Lord, with you.
Big government interventionists pervade the Democratic and Republican party establishments and leaderships.
The Democratic Party is the party of left-wing progressives that favor the expansion of welfare dependency.
The Republican Party is the party of right-wing progressives that favor the expansion of warfare dependency.
Both favor big government interventionism at home and abroad.
Making government omnipotent with a massive bureaucracy advocating and supporting the warfare and welfare state is the goal of the progressive interventionists of the Democratic and Republican Party establishments.
SA@TheDC – ‘Fixing’ Big Government is Not Conservative
Ron Paul favors limited government and opposes government intervention at home and abroad.
Ron Paul is a conservative traditionalist libertarian that puts faith, family, friends and freedom first.
Paul wants to replace the big government warfare and welfare economy with a limited government peace and prosperity economy.
This is the reason more and more American people are coming to the conclusion that Ron Paul should be President of the United States.
SA@TAC – Constant Conservative Ron Paul
This is the reason Ron Paul is leading in Iowa.
This is the reason Ron Paul will be elected President of the United States.
The Republican Party establishment might talk conservative, but they walk and spend like big government progressives and neocons, which most of them are.
Just look at the Republican Party budget passed in the House of Representatives. The Fiscal Year 2012 deficit will exceed $1 trillion each year.
This is not limited government.
This is not fiscally responsible.
This is not conservative or libertarian.
The neoconservatives want a war with Iran.
Starting World War III with Iran is the progressive answer to the United States economic problems.
The war on poverty, the war of drugs and the war on terror are all progressive wars of big government interventionists.
The U.S. government led by progressives of both the Democratic and Republican party establishments have lost all three wars that never end.
Those who support big government interventionism at home and abroad are progressive statistist and neoconservatives.
Progressives are collectivists that oppose individualists with a conservative and libertarian political philosophy.
These progressives are not conservatives.
Do not fall for the neoconservative con men of talk radio that say Ron Paul is not conservative and invite Jeffrey Lord on their shows to smear and discredit Paul.
Most of them are closet neoconservative big government interventionists. This includes talk radio show hosts Levin, Medved, Hewitt and Bennett, just to name a few.
Ron Paul: Iran Sanctions = Act of War
“Interventionism begets economic nationalism. It thus kindles the antagonism resulting in war. An abandonment of economic nationalism is not feasible if nations cling to interference with business. Free trade in international relations requires domestic free trade.”
~Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government, page 66.
SA@TAC – The End of Right-Wing Progressivism?
This is a massively huge and interventionist government that favors the warfare and welfare dependency of the American people.
Gingrich Gone Wild – Might Vote For Obama
SA@TAC – Newt Gingrich is Not a Conservative
Ron Paul Interview w/ Jack Hunter on Foreign Policy & Israel
Jeffrey Lord Doesn’t Know The Founders or Ron Paul
Background Articles and Videos
Ron Paul – The Power of Nightmares
Mark Levin Avoids the “Empire” Question
SA@TAC – Joe Sobran’s Conservative Foreign Policy
SA@TAC – Obama Kept Us Safe
Poo Blobs & Jeffrey Lord Try to Say that DropDobbs.com is About Killing Debate, NOT Racist Diatribe
RON PAUL on RUSH LIMBAUGH
Jack Hunter Versus Mark Levin
Richard Perle PNAC and AIPAC hawk on why Ron Paul will not win the 2012 election
Ron Paul and the Neoliberal Reeducation Campaign
By Jeffrey Lord
“…Neoliberals and Quasi-Cons:
When it comes to foreign policy, Ron Paul and his supporters are not conservatives.
This is important to understand when one realizes that Paul’s views are, self-described, “non-interventionist.”
The fact that he has been allowed to get away with pretending to conservatism on this score is merely reflective of journalists who, for whatever reason, are simply unfamiliar with American history. Ironically, it is precisely because the Paul campaign has not been thoroughly covered that no one pays attention to the historical paternity of what the candidate is saying.
There is no great sin in Paul’s non-interventionist stance (or “isolationist” stance as his critics would have it). There have been American politicians aplenty throughout American history, particularly in the 20th century, who believed precisely as Paul and his enthusiasts do right now. (Paul touts his admiration for the Founding Fathers, but even that is very selective. James Monroe of Monroe Doctrine fame was a considerable interventionist, Washington as a general invaded Canada, and Alexander Hamilton gave rise to Paul’s idea of evil spawn — the Federal Reserve. Interventionists of all types have been with us right from the start.)
The deception — and it is a considerable deception — is that almost to a person those prominent pre-Ron Paul non-interventionist “Paulist” politicians of the 20th century were overwhelmingly not conservatives at all. They were men of the left. The far left.
From three-time Democratic presidential nominee and Woodrow Wilson Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan to powerful Montana Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler to FDR’s ex-vice presidential nominee Henry Wallace to the 1968 anti-war presidential candidacy of Minnesota Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy to 1972 Democratic presidential nominee (and Henry Wallace delegate in 1948) George McGovern, non-interventionists have held prominent positions in the American Left that was and is the Democratic Party.
But of particular interest, and here is where the deception by Paulists is so considerable, the Ron Paul view of foreign policy has been the cornerstone of Republican liberals and progressives. Those who, using current political terminology, would be called the RINOs (Republican In Name Only) of their day. …”
“…Jeffrey Lord is a former member of the Ronald Reagan administration, journalist, author, and political strategist in Pennsylvania.
Lord earned a degree from Franklin and Marshall College.[1] He first worked as a press aide in the Pennsylvania State Senate.[1] He worked for Pennsylvania Congressman Bud Shuster as Legislative Director and Press Secretary and for U.S. Senator H. John Heinz III as Executive Assistant.[1] Later Lord worked as Chief of Staff to Drew Lewis, who was a Co-chair of the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign.[1] He also served in the Reagan White House as an associate political director.[1] In that position he assisted in the judicial nomination process for several nominees, including Robert Bork.[2] He also worked for Jack Kemp during the Presidency of George H. W. Bush.[1]
Lord now works as a journalist, contributing material to The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator,National Review Online, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Harrisburg Patriot-News. He has appeared as a guest on numerous televisions and radio programs.[1] He also works as a political consultant for Quantum Communications, a Harrisburg-based political strategy firm.[1]
He is the author of The Borking Rebellion, about the confirmation of Federal Judge D. Brooks Smith.[1] It received a generally positive review in the Wall Street Journal.[3]
In July 2010, Jeffrey Lord claimed that the “lynching” of a relative of Shirley Sherrod is fallacious.[4]
In August 2011, Jeffrey Lord wrote an article in The American Spectator which was critical of Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), and the views of some of Ron Paul’s supporters.[5] It sparked considerable debate within the conservative movement.[6] …”
Jeffrey Lord: When Attacks on Ron Paul Fail, then Attack his Voters
“…
Get this. The reason Ron Paul is polling well in Iowa is because it’s Iowa. Jeffrey Lord is a special kind of dense. He is so dense he doesn’t know he is dense. He keeps repeating the same untruths (that non-interventionism is inherently left-wing) over and over again despite being corrected repeatedly. My reply is below:
I get it. When your attacks on Ron Paul aren’t working, then attack the people who vote for him.
First, you continue with the lie that non-interventionism is inherently left-wing. You have been corrected on this so many times, and I know you read these responses since you reply, that you have no excuse. You are engaging in demagoguery.
Second, you are making the case against yourself and don’t even know it. It is not a coincidence that non-interventionism was the preferred policy of heartland Americans in flyover country. And it is not a coincidence that support for war came from elite internationalists on the East Coast. So if you want to throw your hat in with elitist internationalists then be my guest. I’ll throw mine in with parochial Americans in the Heartland. Lord, you are a shill and you don’t even realize you are a shill. …”
“…A prominent insider has told Infowars that Texas Governor Rick Perry and other establishment neo-cons have decided to deliberately target grass roots constitutionalists with dirty tricks campaigns in an effort to derail and hijack the growing liberty movement whose influence is threatening to blow the Texas gubernatorial race wide open.
Our office was contacted by a national personality, a household name, who told us that they were in a green room at a national public event a few weeks ago with Rick Perry. The individual was shocked when Perry said directly that there were three people who ‘got under his skin’ and who ‘had to be dealt with’ immediately.
One – Debra Medina, two – Alex Jones, and three – Ron Paul.
Perry told the individual that these three people had to be targeted and stopped in order for the Republican establishment to shut down any real voices of opposition that were threatening to have an influence on the Tea Party movement, which has been blatantly hijacked by the neo-cons in recent months.
Perry made it clear that these individuals and their supporters were the number one target of the neo-con hierarchy because the grass roots was threatening to regain control of the Tea Party movement that was first created by Ron Paul supporters back in 2007, but has since been hijacked by the Republicans.
The insider expressed their shock that Perry would be so open with his comments, suspecting that Perry must have considered the individual to be a fellow neo-con. The insider’s deep concern about what was said prompted them to contact our office.
Perry made the comments just a couple of weeks before gubernatorial challenger Debra Medina, the only true constitutionalist running for Governorship in Texas, was set-up by Fox News’ Glenn Beck, after the duplicitous talk show host smeared Medina and generated a fake controversy merely for saying that people should be free to question the official 9/11 story, a view shared by the vast majority of Americans.
Perry, who was subsequently celebrated by Beck as the only remaining credible candidate after the smear attack on Medina, must have been in on the ploy. Within an hour of her appearance on the Glenn Beck radio show, Texas residents told the Austin-American Statesmen that they had received robo-calls on behalf of the Perry campaign demonizing Medina as an unstable “9/11 truther,” echoing Beck’s manufactured talking point aired just an hour earlier.
There can no longer be any doubt that the RNC establishment is running a targeted smear campaign against real grass roots conservatives and libertarians because they are terrified that such individuals will be able to steer the Tea Party movement in a genuine national revolt against big government, thereby massively diminishing the power of establishment Republicans.
This dirty tricks campaign is most likely being steered by Karl Rove, master Republican political strategist and former Rick Perry campaign manager. Rove cut his teeth in Texas, using his “uncanny ability to manipulate federal prosecutors into going after the officeholder his client was trying to unseat,” reports Harper’s Magazine writer Scott Horton.
“…But before Republicans get too excited about Rick Perry, there are a whole lot of things that they should know about him.
The following are 14 reasons why Rick Perry would be a really, really bad president….
#1 Rick Perry is a “big government” politician. When Rick Perry became the governor of Texas in 2000, the total spending by the Texas state government was approximately $49 billion. Ten years later it was approximately $90 billion. That is not exactly reducing the size of government.
#2 The debt of the state of Texas is out of control. According to usdebtclock.org, the debt to GDP ratio in Texas is 22.9% and the debt per citizen is $10,645. In California (a total financial basket case), the debt to GDP ratio is just 18.7% and the debt per citizen is only $9932. If Rick Perry runs for president these are numbers he will want to keep well hidden.
#3 The total debt of the Texas government has more than doubled since Rick Perry became governor. So what would the U.S. national debt look like after four (or eight) years of Rick Perry?
#4 Rick Perry has spearheaded the effort to lease roads in Texas to foreign companies, to turn roads that are already free to drive on into toll roads, and to develop the Trans-Texas Corridor which would be part of the planned NAFTA superhighway system. If you really do deep research on this whole Trans-Texas Corridor nonsense you will see why no American should ever cast a single vote for Rick Perry.
#5 Rick Perry claims that he has a “track record” of not raising taxes. That is a false claim. Rick Perry has repeatedly raised taxes and fees while he has been governor. Today, Texans are faced with significantly higher taxes and fees than they were before Rick Perry was elected.
#6 Even with the oil boom in Texas, 23 states have a lower unemployment rate than Texas does.
#8 Between December 2007 and April 2011, weekly wages in the U.S. increased by about 5 percent. In the state of Texas they increased by just 0.6% over that same time period.
#9 Texas now has one of the worst education systems in the nation. The following is from an opinion piece that was actually authored by Barbara Bush earlier this year….
• We rank 36th in the nation in high school graduation rates. An estimated 3.8 million Texans do not have a high school diploma.
• We rank 49th in verbal SAT scores, 47th in literacy and 46th in average math SAT scores.
• We rank 33rd in the nation on teacher salaries.
#10 Rick Perry attended the Bilderberg Group meetings in 2007. Associating himself with that organization should be a red flag for all American voters.
#11 Texas has the highest percentage of workers making minimum wage out of all 50 states.
#12 Rick Perry often gives speeches about illegal immigration, but when you look at the facts, he has been incredibly soft on the issue. If Rick Perry does not plan to secure the border, then he should not be president because illegal immigration is absolutely devastating many areas of the southwest United States.
#13 In 2007, 221,000 residents of Texas were making minimum wage or less. By 2010, that number had risen to 550,000.
#14 Rick Perry actually issued an executive order in 2007 that would have forced almost every single girl in the state of Texas to receive the Gardasil vaccine before entering the sixth grade. Perry would have put parents in a position where they would have had to fill out an application and beg the government not to inject their child with an untested and unproven vaccine. Since then, very serious safety issues regarding this vaccine have come to light. Fortunately, lawmakers in Texas blocked what Perry was trying to do. According to Wikipedia, many were troubled when “apparent financial connections between Merck and Perry were reported by news outlets, such as a $6,000 campaign contribution and Merck’s hiring of former Perry Chief of Staff Mike Toomey to handle its Texas lobbying work.”
Rick Perry has a record that should make all Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians and Independents cringe.
He is not the “conservative Republican” that he is trying to claim that he is. He is simply another in a long line of “RINOs” (Republicans in name only). …”
Since many don’t have good memories, The Plain Truth wants to remind everyone that although Rick Perry wants to outlaw abortion, he wants to FORCE YOUR 12 year old daughter to get the HPV vaccine! Another RHINO we don’t need.
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Tuesday, February 6, 2007″…A media hoax has fooled parents in Texas and other areas of the country that the HPV vaccine, which experts have slammed as untested and has already been linked to dangerous side-effects, is now the law and young girls must take it. Merck Pharmaceuticals are set to capitalize on this fraud by making obscene profits from a crony deal with Governor Rick Perry, while children are put at risk.Perry issued an executive order Friday requiring girls to be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted HPV, or human pappilomavirus. Doctors, scientists and experts were not consulted before the sweeping mandate was put in place. Several Texas lawmakers, including Sen. Jane Nelson, have petitioned for a reversal of the decision but the Legislature has no authority to repeal Perry’s executive order.According to the Associated Press, Perry has close ties to Merck, having received money from them for his re-election campaign .”He also has ties to Women in Government, a Merck-funded advocacy group made up of female state legislators around the country. His current chief of staff’s mother-in-law, Texas Republican state Rep. Dianne White Delisi, is a state director for the group,” reports the AP.Perry’s former chief of staff Mike Toomey is on the Merck payroll as a lobbyist.Almost immediately following Perry’s announcement, newspapers and TV stations began to report that it was “the law” that parents had to have their child vaccinated. This reflects a national and international hoax that is repeatedly being perpetrated shortly before school terms begin each year. …”http://www.plaintruth.com/the_plain_truth/2011/06/rick-perry-conservative-or-just-another-rhino.html
Sarah Palin 9/11 Truther controversy explodes
George Carlin Doesn’t vote
George Carlin -“Who Really Controls America”
The American people can do better–a lot better.
The American people want a Constitutional Conservative Candidate for President of the United States in 2012.
Ron Paul smeared by CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin about NAFTA highway
Ron Paul: Principle, Patriotism and Constitutional Government
America lives and Obama will not be the last President.
We will have at least one more President after Obama.
Tree cheers for capitalism.
Down with New World Orders.
Vote Ron Paul/ Michele Bachmann in 2012.
Background Articles and Videos
Do you want a One World Govenment / One World Caliphate ?
WORLD WAR 3 WILL BE A GOG MAGOG WAR
RED ALERT: WORLD WAR 3 IMMINENT
HD) Muslim Caliph PT. 15 – World War 3
(HD) Muslim Caliph PT. 16 – Coming of Imam Mahdi
(HD) Muslim Caliph PT. 17 – Islamic Prophecies and 2012
HD) Muslim Caliph PT. 18 – Isa (Jesus) Restores Islam
Ezekiel 39 – The Gog Magog War
King (Gog) and country (Magog, ruled by Gog) mentioned in Ezekiel 38-39. Gog, it was believed, would lead an alliance of the forces of evil in an invasion of Israel after the latter’s restoration to its land. The subsequent defeat of Gog and the survival of Israel would lead to the recognition by all peoples that Israel’s previous suffering was the result not of God’s having abandoned Israel but of His punishing Israel for its transgressions. The terminology of these chapters of Ezekiel, as well as the supernatural, disastrous punishment to be visited on the invaders, mark this prophecy as apocalyptic. Further, the prolixity of these two chapters as well as their inconsistency in detail is highly characteristic of apocalyptic writings.Opinion is divided as to what historical figure or episode, if any, Ezekiel had in mind when he wrote these chapters. In any case, the catastrophic events described in the prophet’s vision would serve as the prelude for the acknowledgment by the nations of the world that only the God of Israel is the true God.
These two chapters are echoed in Apocalyptic literature (Book of Enoch), in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the New Testament (Revelation), and in Talmud and Midrash, which view the wars of Gog and Magog (in post-Ezekiel literature, the latter is also conceived as a person) as a sign of the imminent coming of the Messiah. Consequently, in the course of Jewish history, great armed conflicts between the nations stirred such messianic expectations, as did the struggle between Christendom and Islam..
“…Imran Nazar Hosein is a leading International Islamic Philosopher, Scholar and author, specialising in world politics, economy, eschatology , modern socio-economic/political issues and expert on international affairs. He is best-selling author of Jerusalem in the Qur’an.
He worked for several years as a Foreign Service Officer in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago.
He lived in New York for ten years during which time he served as the Director of Islamic Studies for the Joint Committee of Muslim Organizations of Greater New York. He lectured on Islam in several American and Canadian universities, colleges, churches, synagogues, prisons, community halls, etc. He also participated in many inter-faith dialogues with Christian and Jewish scholars while representing Islam in USA. He was the Imam, for sometime, at Masjid Dar al-Qur’an in Long Island, New York. He also led the weekly Jumu’ah prayers and delivered the sermon at the headquarters of the United Nations Organization in Manhattan, New York, once a month for ten years continuously.
He is a former Principal of the Aleemiyah Institute of Islamic Studies in Karachi, Pakistan, Director of Research of the World Muslim Congress in Karachi, Pakistan, Director of the Islamic Institute for Education and Research in Miami, Florida, and Director of D’awah for Tanzeem-e-Islami of North America.
He has traveled continuously and extensively around the world on Islamic lecture-tours since graduating from the Aleemiyah Institute of Islamic Studies at age 29. And he has also written more than a dozen books on Islam that have invariably been received with public respect. Indeed, Jerusalem in the Qur’an – An Islamic View of the Destiny of Jerusalem has become a best seller and has been translated and published in several languages.
Prof. Dr. Malik Badri, Dean of the International Institute for Islamic Thought and Civilization in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, wrote the Foreword to the book.
Imran’s first book, entitled Islam and Buddhism in the Modern World was written when he was just 29 and still remains the only book on the subject by a Muslim scholar. That book won high praise from such eminent scholars as Vice Chancellor of University of Karachi and renowned historian, Dr. Ishtiaq Husain Quraishi, eminent Pakistani jurist and philosopher, A. K. Brohi, and eminent Muslim sociologist, Dr. Basharat Ali.
Maulana Dr. Fazlur Rahman Ansari, an outstanding scholar of Islam of the modern age, wrote the Foreword to that book.
Imran Hosein’s three new books, published in 2007, on ‘Surah al-Kahf’ of the Qur’an and on the subject of ‘Signs of the Last Day in the Modern Age’, offer rare insights into interpretation of the Qur’an and the Hadith of Muhammad insofar as they explain the modern age. …”
“As an international reporter I have made it a point to ask the crucial questions in order that the unspoken agenda may be put into words. I have also sought to keep abreast of evolving global changes, how the world will be affected, and to report what is truth.”
~ Joan Veon
When Central Banks Rule the World – Pt.1
When Central Banks Rule the World – Pt.2
When Central Banks Rule the World – Pt.3
When Central Banks Rule the World – Pt.4
When Central Banks Rule the World – Pt.5
When Central Banks Rule the World – Pt.6
When Central Banks Rule the World – Pt.7
When Central Banks Rule the World – Pt.8
When Central Banks Rule the World – Pt.9
May she rest in peace.
End the Fed!
Background Articles and Videos
CIA Officer- Robert Steele tells it like it is. Part 1
“…On October 18, 2010, with her husband Rod holding her hand, Joan answered her Master’s call and slipped quietly away to be with her Lord and Savior after a courageous three year battle with breast cancer. She was 61 years old. …”
The United Nations, Climate Change, and Money Trails
Claudia Rosett – Oslo Freedom Forum 2010
oil for food scandal
D’Escoto: “The UN has failed”
Ron Paul – United Nations GET US OUT !!!
NRA: The United Nations (UN) and International Gun Control
Obama Pushing International Gun Control Treaty CIFTA
Ambassador John Bolton on How to Fix the UN
John Bolton Q&A Part 1
John Bolton Q&A Part 2
John Bolton Q&A Part 3
Can the United Naitons Stop Genocide? Part 1.
Can the United Naitons Stop Genocide? Part 2.
United Nations Peace through Terror 1/5
United Nations Peace through Terror 2/5
United Nations Peace through Terror 3/5
United Nations Peace through Terror 4/5
United Nations Peace through Terror 5/5
Obama Sold Out Israel at UN, John Bolton
The United Nations is a Joke…
Background Articles and Videos
John Bolton on President Obama’s New International Order
The World from The Hill: U.N. funding an early target for House Republicans
“…A key House Republican is quickly pressing forward with her goals to scale back U.S. funding for the United Nations.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Hill that oversight would be a key function of the panel, particularly funding to the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) that is “a waste of taxpayer dollars.” …”
“…U.N. critics set to appear include Claudia Rossett, who unveiled the oil-for-food scandal in 2004 and 2005 in The Wall Street Journal; Brett Schaefer, who regularly takes on the U.N. at the conservative Heritage Foundation; and Hillel Neuer, executive director of Geneva-based UN Watch, which monitors the controversial HRC.
Neuer told The Hill that UN Watch is going to release new data at the briefing on how the HRC has been run since then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan dissolved the Human Rights Commission in 2006. Annan called the commission “politicized” at the time, but the commission’s replacement, the HRC, has attracted many critics as well.
“We will commend the efforts of the U.S. delegation here in Geneva, including [Ambassador] Eileen Donohoe” in briefing the Foreign Affairs Committee, Neuer said, saying the team is “working hard to minimize the damage of the council,” but is often in the minority to powerful, controversial members such as Libya, Cuba, China, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
“They’re the ones who run the shop,” he said, adding of Obama’s initiative to place a U.S. representative on the council with the intention of reforming from within that it was “naive for anyone to have thought it would change significantly.” …”
Contrary to most of Marx works, The Communist Manifesto contains a “programmatic” agenda, to be implemented by communist parties once they seize power. According to Marx, a communist state will adopt the following policies:
Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax
Abolition of all right of inheritance
Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels
Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly
Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State
Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan
Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture
Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country
Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
Holly Paz
Operation Jade Helm: America’s Military Training Exercise in Southwest United States With 1,200 Special Forces — DisInfo Psyop Against American People — Texas Is Hostile — Ruling Elite Afraid of American People? — Videos
Posted on April 3, 2015. Filed under: American History, Articles, Blogroll, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), College, Communications, Constitution, Corruption, Demographics, Documentary, Drones, Economics, Education, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Federal Government, Foreign Policy, Freedom, Friends, government, government spending, history, Illegal, Immigration, Language, Law, liberty, Life, Literacy, media, Money, National Security Agency (NSA_, People, Philosophy, Photos, Pistols, Politics, Programming, Psychology, Radio, Rifles, Security, Strategy, Talk Radio, Technology, Terrorism, Video, War, Water, Wealth, Weapons, Weather, Welfare, Wisdom, Writing | Tags: 26 March 2015, Alex Jones, America, Army Special Ops Command, articles, Audio, Breaking News, Broadcasting, capitalism, Cartoons, Charity, Citizenship, Clarity, Classical Liberalism, Collectivism, Command and Control, Commentary, Commitment, Communicate, Communication, Concise, Convincing, Courage, Culture, Current Affairs, Current Events, DisInfo Psyop Against American People, economic growth, economic policy, Economics, Education, Evil, Experience, Faith, Family, First, fiscal policy, free enterprise, freedom, freedom of speech, Friends, G. Edward Griffin, Give It A Listen, God, Good, Goodwill, Growth, Heather Wokusch, Hope, Individualism, Info Wars, Knowledge, liberty, Life, Love, Lovers of Liberty, Map, Military Training Exercise, monetary policy, MPEG3, New World Order, News, Operation Jade Helm, Opinions, Peace, Photos, Podcasts, Political Philosophy, Politics, prosperity, Psy Op, Psychological Operations, Psychological Warfare Subversion & Control of Western Society, PSYOP Soldiers Training, Radio, Raymond Thomas Pronk, Representative Republic, Republic, Resources, Respect, rule of law, Rule of Men, Show Notes, SOCOM Plans to Invade HOSTILE Texas, Southwest, Special Forces, Talk Radio, Texas Is Hostile, The Pronk Pops Show, The Pronk Pops Show 436, The Quigley Formula, Truth, Tyranny, U.S. Constitution, United States of America, Videos, Virtue, War, Wisdom, Yuri Bezmenov |
The Pronk Pops Show Podcasts
Pronk Pops Show 436: March 26, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 435: March 25, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 434: March 24, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 433: March 24, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 432: March 23, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 431: March 20, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 430: March 19, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 429: March 18, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 428: March 17, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 427: March 16, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 426: March 6, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 425: March 4, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 424: March 2, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 423: February 26, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 422: February 25, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 421: February 20, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 420: February 19, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 419: February 18, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 418: February 16, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 417: February 13, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 416: February 12, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 415: February 11, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 414: February 10, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 413: February 9, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 412: February 6, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 411: February 5, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 410: February 4, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 409: February 3, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 408: February 2, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 407: January 30, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 406: January 29, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 405: January 28, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 404: January 27, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 403: January 26, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 402: January 23, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 401: January 22, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 400: January 21, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 399: January 16, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 398: January 15, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 397: January 14, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 396: January 13, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 395: January 12, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 394: January 7, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 393: January 5, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 392: December 19, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 391: December 18, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 390: December 17, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 389: December 16, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 388: December 15, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 387: December 12, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 386: December 11, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 385: December 9, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 384: December 8, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 383: December 5, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 382: December 4, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 381: December 3, 2014
Pronk Pops Show 380: December 1, 2014
Story 1: Operation Jade Helm: America’s Military Training Exercise in Southwest United States With 1,200 Special Forces — DisInfo Psyop Against American People — Texas Is Hostile — Ruling Elite Afraid of American People? — Videos
SOCOM Plans to Invade HOSTILE Texas Revealed
MSM Caught Lying: Breaking Jade Helm Update
OPERATION:JADE HELM 1 5…GOV TRAINING TO TAKE OVER TEXAS
ARMY and MSM Launch DisInfo Psyop Against American People
Army Betrays One Of Their Own
Jade Helm 15: 2 More States Join, Green Beret Says Drill Ends On 9/11 In Florida
Jade Helm 15: 10 States Now Involved with Massive US Military Exercise
Army Planing a Surprise Visit to US Towns! WHY? The Answer Will Make You Rethink Everything!
Jade Helm 15 – the low down
DEBUNK THIS: OP JADE HELM 15 Surgical Strikes Included
Psy Op Colonel Texas Needs To Submit
Army Special Ops Command Pushes Back Against Infowars
PSYOP and MISO
History of Psychological Operations and Military Information Support Operations
What is United States Army Civil Affairs & Psychological Command(Airborne)
Army MOS 37F Psychological Operations Specialist
304th PSYOP Company – Information video
US Army Reserves Psychological Operations
37F Psychological Operations Specialist (Reserve)
PSYOP Soldiers Training
Army embeds PSYOPS soldiers at local TV stations
Heather Wokusch on ‘Welcome to the Jungle: US Military Psychological Operations’
Sentient World Simulation by James Corbett
The Sentient World Simulation’s aim, according to its creator, is to be a “continuously running, continually updated mirror model of the real world that can be used to predict and evaluate future events and courses of action.” In practical terms that equates to a computer simulation of the planet complete with billions of “nodes” representing every person on the earth.
The EyeOpener- PSYOPS 101: The Technology of Psych Warfare
Yuri Bezmenov: Psychological Warfare Subversion & Control of Western Society (Complete)
Soviet Subversion of the Free World Press, 1984 – Complete
The Quigley Formula – G. Edward Griffin lecture
An excellent lecture by G. Edward Griffin entitled “The Quigley Formula: A conspiratorial view of history as taught by the conspirators themselves”
“Quigley” is the late Carroll Quigley, a Council on Foreign Relations member and historian, as well as mentor to CFR & Trilateral Commission member Bill Clinton.
The lecture is based around the following quote from his book Tragedy & Hope, pp. 1247-1248:
“The National parties and their presidential candidates, with the Eastern Establishment assiduously fostering the process behind the scenes, moved closer together and nearly met in the center with almost identical candidates and platforms, although the process was concealed as much as possible, by the revival of obsolescent or meaningless war cries and slogans (often going back to the Civil War)….The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy. … Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.”
Carroll Quigley on Tragedy And Hope
Michael Hastings: Army Deploys Psychological Operations on U.S. Senators in Afghanistan War Effort
Sgt. Biggs On Military Life and Why Michael Hastings was Murdered
Michael Hastings Widow Speaks Out For The First Time To Piers Morgan,Piers Asks Was His Death
Infowars Special Report: Introduction to Media Manipulation & Psychological Operations
Minority Report: Fiction Has Become Reality
Minority Report 2012 Full – CG (Tom Cruise)
Special forces set to swarm Southwest and operate undetected among civilians in massive military exercise
By DAILYMAIL.COM REPORTER
Seven Southwestern states will soon be infiltrated by 1,200 military special ops personnel as part of a controversial domestic military training in which some of the elite soldiers will operate undetected among civilians.
Operation Jade Helm begins in July and will last for eight weeks. Soldiers will operate in and around towns in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado where some of them wil drop from planes while carrying weapons loaded with blanks in what military officials have dubbed Realistic Military Training.
But with residents of the entire states of Texas and Utah dubbed ‘hostile’ for the purposes of the exercises, Jade Helm has some concerned the drills are too realistic.
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Hostile: An unclassified military document reveals the states involved in a controversial multi-agency training exercises that will place 1,200 military personnel into 7 Southwest states–with residents of Utah, Texas and part of Southern California designated as ‘hostile’
Special ops: Operation Jade Helm will involve Green Berets and SEALs and special forces from the Air Force and Marines starting in July and lasting 8 weeks
Headlines like Freedom Outpost‘s ‘Operation Jade Helm—military trains for martial law in American South-west’ abound across the Right-leaning blogosphere and Info Wars warns that Jade Helm is simply ‘an effort to test the effectiveness of infiltration techniques’ on the American public.
‘They’re having Delta Force, Navy SEALS with the Army trained to basically take over,’ Info Wars’ Alex Jones said Sunday. ‘Texas is listed as a hostile sector, and of course, we are…We’re here defending the republic.’
The Houston Chronicle reports that, among the planned exercises, soldiers will attempt to operate undetected among civilian populations.
Residents, in turn, will be asked to report suspicious activity in order to gauge the effectiveness of the soldiers.
Military officials say they’ve gotten the go ahead for the operations from local authorities such as mayors and county commissions.
And sheriff’s deputies told the Houston Chronicle they would ensure residents living near where aircraft were slated to create disturbances and drop soldiers, civilian and military vehicles will barrel through and where blank rounds would be fired.
Jim Stewart with the Brazos County, Texas Sheriff’s Office told the Chronicle that such exercises are far from anything new.
‘Special ops for years have trained off-post for years, where they go out and have folks that are role players out on the economy,’ said the Army intelligence veteran. ‘They’ll have a scenario they’ll be following and they’ll interact with these role players as if they’re in another country.’
However, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command themselves say Jade Helm is different.
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Reassuring? Sheriff’s deputies say they will ensure residents living near where aircraft were slated to create disturbances and drop soldiers, civilian and military vehicles will barrel through and where blank rounds would be fired [FILE PHOTO]
Texas, which the military has designated as ‘hostile’ for the purposes of the training, was chosen to be a hub of the unprecedentedly large program because ‘Texans are historically supportive of efforts to prepare our soldiers’ writes the USASOC
‘The size and scope of Jade Helm sets this one apart. To stay ahead of the environmental challenges faced overseas, Jade Helm will take place across seven states,’ the USASOC wrote in a March 24 release.
‘The diverse terrain in these states replicates areas Special Operations Soldiers regularly find themselves operating in overseas.’
The military has also reacted to widespread fear of the operation by calling some ultra-conservative coverage of the ‘martial law’ drills alarmist and inaccurate.
‘That notion was proposed by a few individuals who are unfamiliar with how and why USASOC conducts training exercises,’ USASOC spokesman Army Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria told Stripes.
‘This exercise is routine training to maintain a high level of readiness for Army Special Operations Forces because they must be ready to support potential missions anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3013900/Fears-martial-law-special-ops-set-swarm-Southwest-operate-undetected-civilians-ve-deemed-HOSTILE-massive-military-exercise.html
Army Special Operations Command pushes back against alarmist claims about upcoming exercise
U.S. Army Special Operations Command is pushing back against alarmist claims that an upcoming U.S. military exercise is a preparation for imposing martial law or subduing right-leaning groups and individuals.
Conspiracy theories about the exercise, known as JADE HELM 15, appeared online this week. Some commentators railing against the event referred to an online slide show allegedly created by USASOC, which outlined a special operations exercise slated to take place across multiple states, outside the confines of U.S. military bases. In the slide show, a map of the southwest region of the United States labels Texas and other territory as “hostile” or “insurgent pocket.” The document also refers to coordination with law enforcement agencies.
Officials at USASOCM were not able to immediately verify the authenticity of the slide show because their computer firewalls prevented them from accessing the websites where the document appeared.
Army Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria, a USASOC spokesman, confirmed that there is an upcoming exercise called Jade Helm 15 which is scheduled to take place this summer at locations in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, California and Nevada. But he denied the event is preparation for some sort of military takeover.
“That notion was proposed by a few individuals who are unfamiliar with how and why USASOC conducts training exercises,” he said in an email. “This exercise is routine training to maintain a high level of readiness for Army Special Operations Forces because they must be ready to support potential missions anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice.”
He said the only thing unique about this particular exercise, which is slated to take place between July 15 and Sept. 15, is “the use of new challenging terrain” which was chosen because it is similar to conditions special operations forces operate in overseas.
Lastoria said coordination with local law enforcement is necessary for safety reasons because some of the training will take place outside of military bases where civilian agencies have jurisdiction.
He said his office has been receiving a lot of calls from people who heard about the exercise and are concerned about “the nature of the training objectives.”
http://www.stripes.com/news/us/army-special-operations-command-pushes-back-against-alarmist-claims-about-upcoming-exercise-1.335949
Psychological Operations (United States)
Reserve Army – U.S. Army Civil Affairs Psychological Operations Command(USACAPOC)Garrison/HQFort Bragg, NCPatronSaint GabrielMotto”Persuade, Change, Influence”ColorsArmy – Bottle-green piped withsilver gray.InsigniaIdentification
symbolArmy – Knight chess piece (Often mistaken for the Trojan Horse)
Psychological operations (PSYOP) or, as it has been known since 2010, Military Information Support Operations (MISO),[1] are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.[2]
The purpose of United States psychological operations is to induce or reinforce behavior favorable to U.S. objectives. They are an important part of the range of diplomatic, informational, military, and economic activities available to the U.S. They can be utilized during both peacetime and conflict. There are three main types: strategic, operational, and tactical. Strategic PSYOP include informational activities conducted by the U.S. government agencies outside of the military arena, though many utilize Department of Defense (DOD) assets.Operational PSYOP are conducted across the range of military operations, including during peacetime, in a defined operational area to promote the effectiveness of the joint force commander’s (JFC) campaigns and strategies. Tactical PSYOP are conducted in the area assigned to a tactical commander across the range of military operations to support the tactical mission against opposing forces.
PSYOP can encourage popular discontent with the opposition’s leadership and by combining persuasion with a credible threat, degrade an adversary’s ability to conduct or sustain military operations. They can also disrupt, confuse, and protract the adversary’s decision-making process, undermining command and control.[3] When properly employed, PSYOP have the potential to save the lives of friendly or enemy forces by reducing the adversary’s will to fight. By lowering the adversary’s morale and then its efficiency, PSYOP can also discourage aggressive actions by creating disaffection within their ranks, ultimately leading to surrender.
Products
A Somali boy holding up a leaflet dispersed during Operation Restore Hope in the early 1990s
PSYOP involves the careful creation and dissemination of a product message. There are three types of products that are used to create these messages. They include White products which are used in overt operations and Gray and Black products which are used in covert PSYOP. White, Gray, and Black don’t refer to the product’s content but rather the methods used to carry out the operation.
In order for PSYOP to be successful they must be based in reality. All messages must be consistent and must not contradict each other. Any gap between the product and reality will be quickly noticed. A credible “truth” must be presented which is consistent to all audiences. Primarily it is a component of offensive counterinformation but can be used defensively as well. PSYOP are used in support of special operations, unconventional warfare, and counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. PSYOP can include military operations other than warfare and also include joint operations. They include counterterrorism operations, peace operations, noncombatant evacuation, enforcement of sanctions and maritime interception operations, strikes and raids, etc.
White PSYOP
White PSYOP is attributable to PSYOP as a source.
U.S. Army PSYOP soldiers with Detachment 1080, 318th Psychological Operations Company distribute newspaper products in the East Rashid region of Baghdad, Iraq, July 11, 2007.
White is acknowledged as an official statement or act of the U.S. Government, or emanates from a source associated closely enough with the U.S. Government to reflect an official viewpoint. The information should be true and factual. It also includes all output identified as coming from U.S. official sources.
Gray PSYOP
The source of the gray PSYOP product is deliberately ambiguous.
Black PSYOP
The activity engaged in appears to emanate from a source (government, party, group, organization, person) usually hostile in nature. The interest of the U.S. Government is concealed and the U.S. Government would deny responsibility. It is best used in support of strategic plans.
Covert PSYOP is not a function of the U.S. military but instead is used in special operations due to their political sensitivity and need for higher level compartmentalization. Further, black PSYOP, to be credible, may need to disclose sensitive material, with the damage caused by information disclosure considered to be outweighed by the impact of successful deception.[6] In order to achieve maximum results and to prevent compromise of overt PSYOP, overt and covert operations need to be kept separate. Personnel involved in one must not be engaged in the other.
Media
PSYOP conveys messages via visual, audio, and audiovisual media. Military psychological operations, at the tactical level, are usually delivered by loudspeaker, and face to face communication. For more deliberate campaigns, they may use leaflets, radio or television. Strategic operations may use radio or television broadcasts, various publications, airdropped leaflets, or, as part of a covert operation, with material placed in foreign news media.
Process
In order to create a successful PSYOP the following must be established: 1) clearly define the mission so that it aligns with national objectives 2) need a PSYOP estimate of the situation 3) prepare the plan 4) media selection 5) product development 6) pretesting – determines the probable impact of the PSYOP on the target audience 7) production and dissemination of PSYOP material 8) implementation 9) posttesting – evaluates audience responses 10) feedback
Before these steps can occur, intelligence analysts must profile potential targets in order to determine which ones it would be most beneficial to target. In order to figure this out, analysts must determine the vulnerabilities of these groups and what they would be susceptible to. The analysts also determine the attitudes of the targets toward the current situation, their complaints, ethnic origin, frustrations, languages, problems, tensions, attitudes, motivations, and perceptions, and so on. Once the appropriate target(s) have been determined, the PSYOP can be created.
Psychological operations should be planned carefully, in that even a tactical message, with modern news media, can spread worldwide and be treated as the policy of the United States. The U.S. Army is responsible for military psychological warfare doctrine.[6] See the World War I section for an example of how a tactical leaflet, not properly coordinated, can cause national-level harm.
Psychological operations, at any level, must be consistent with the policies of higher levels of command
The message to be delivered can be adapted to tactical situations, but promises made must be consistent with national policy.
U.S. PSYOP forces are forbidden to target (i.e., attempt to change the opinions of) U.S. citizens at any time, in any location globally, or under any circumstances.[7] However, commanders may use PSYOP forces to provide public information to U.S. audiences during times of disaster or crisis. The use of PSYOP forces to deliver necessary public information to a U.S. audience was established in relief activities after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Tactical Psychological Operations teams (TPTs) were employed to disseminate information by loudspeaker on locations of relief shelters and facilities. Information support to a noncombatant evacuation operation (NEO) by PSYOP forces to provide evacuation information to U.S. and third-country nationals would also adhere to the order.[6]
As an example of the use of PSYOP in a humanitarian relief operation Major General Anthony Zinni, Director of Operations for Unified Task Force Somalia, said
Psychological Operations Units
The bulk of U.S. military psychological units are in the Army. White PSYOP can come from the Voice of America or regional radio/TV. Central Intelligence Agencyunits are apt to have responsibility, on a strategic level, for black and some gray propaganda. White propaganda, especially at the strategic level, comes from theVoice of America or United States Information Agency.
In the United States Department of Defense, Psychological Operations units exist as the Army‘s 4th Psychological Operations Group and Air Force with COMMANDO SOLO units[8] under the Air Force Special Operations Command’s 193rd Special Operations Wing. The United States Navy also plans and executes limited PSYOP missions.[9]
United States PSYOP units and soldiers of all branches of the military are prohibited by law from conducting PSYOP missions on domestic audiences.[7] While PSYOP soldiers may offer non-PSYOP related support to domestic military missions, PSYOP can only target foreign audiences. Though, it is worth noting that this does not rule out PSYOP targeting foreign audiences of allied nations. Additionally, in the Information Operations Roadmap made public January 2006 but originally approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in October 2003, it stated “information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa.”[10]
Army
Chieu Hoi Mission by Craig L. Stewart, U. S. Army Vietnam Combat Artists Team IX (CAT IX 1969-70). Painting shows army soldiers airdropping Psy Op leaflets during the Vietnam War.
Soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 350th Tactical Psychological Operations, 10th Mountain Division, drop leaflets over a village near Hawijah in Kirkuk province, Iraq, on March 6, 2008.
U.S. Army PSYOP Force structure
Until recently, the Army’s Psychological Operations elements were administratively organized alongside Civil Affairs to form the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (USACAPOC), forming a part of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC). However, in May 2006 USCAPOC was reorganized to instead fall under the Army reserve command, and all active duty PSYOP elements were placed directly into USASOC. While reserve PSYOP forces no longer belong to USASOC, that command retains control of PSYOP doctrine. Operationally, PSYOP individuals and organizations support Army and Joint maneuver forces or interagency organizations.
Army Psychological Operations support operations ranging from strategic planning down to tactical employment.
PSYOP Support Elements generally support Corps sized elements. Tactical Psychological Operations Companies typically support Division sized elements, with Tactical Control through G-3. Brigades are typically supported by a Tactical PSYOP Detachment. The PSYOP Commander maintains Operational Control of PSYOP elements, advises the Commander and General Staff on the psychological battlespace.
The smallest organizational PSYOP element is the Tactical PSYOP Team (TPT). A TPT generally consists of a PSYOP team chief (Staff Sergeant or Sergeant), an assistant team chief (Sergeant or Specialist), and an additional soldier to serve as a gunner and to operate the speaker system (Specialist). A team is equipped with a Humvee fitted with a loud speaker, and often works with a local translator indigenous to the host or occupied country.
Generally, each maneuver battalion-sized element in a theater of war or operational area has at least one TPT attached to it. Women are not allowed to serve on TPTs in a war zone due to a PSYOP team’s high chance of contact with the enemy.
U.S. Army PSYOP branch of service collar insignia and regimental distinctive insignia.
PSYOP soldiers are required to complete nine weeks of Basic Combat Training. All enlisted PSYOP soldiers report to Fort Bragg to complete the 13-week Psychological Operation Advanced Individual Training (AIT) course. After AIT, the active duty-component PSYOP soldier is then required to attend Airborne training. Sometime after initial training, PSYOP soldiers will spend up to a year (or perhaps more for specific languages) in foreign language qualification training. Certain reserve soldiers serving in units designated as Airborne are also required to attend Airborne training, while language training and Airborne qualification for PSYOP soldiers assigned to non-Airborne units is awarded on a merit and need basis.
A U.S. Army field manual released in January 2013 states that “Inform and Influence Activities” are critical for describing, directing, and leading military operations. Several Army Division leadership staff are assigned to “planning, integration and synchronization of designated information-related capabilities.”[11]
Army Units
301st PSYOP Company, United States Army Reserve, hand out school supplies in Baghdad, Iraq, 2005.
There are four psychological operations units in the U.S. Army:
The 4th Military Information Support Group (Airborne), based in Fort Bragg, had been the only active duty PSYOP element in the United States Army, until the 8th Military Information Support Group (Airborne) was activated on the 26th of August, 2011. The 2nd and the 7th Psychological Operations Groups are in the Army Reserve.
Inactive Units
Air Force
Commando Solo flies low over theStatue of Liberty in New York Harbor in 2001.
The Air National Guard provides support for Psychological Operations using a modified C-130 Hercules aircraft named EC-130 COMMANDO SOLO, operated by the 193d Special Operations Wing. The purpose of COMMANDO SOLO is to provide an aerial platform for broadcast media on both television and radio. The media broadcast is created by various agencies and organizations. As part of the broader function of information operations, COMMANDO SOLO can also jam the enemy’s broadcasts to his own people, or his psychological warfare broadcasting.
A challenge to COMMANDO SOLO is the increasing use of cable television, which will not receive signals from airborne, ground, or any other transmitters that the cable operator does not want to connect to the system. At best, in the presence of cable TV, COMMANDO SOLO may be able to jam enemy broadcasts that are not, themselves, transmitted by cable.
Navy
Navy psychological operations policy is specified in OPNAVINST 3434.1, “Psychological Operations”.[9] The Navy provides support to Joint PSYOP programs by providing assets (such as broadcast platforms using shortwave and very high frequency (VHF) frequencies) for the production and dissemination of PSYOP materials. With the ability of naval vessels (especially the larger task forces) to produce audio-visual materials the Navy can often produce PSYOP products for use in denied areas. Leaflets are dropped utilizing the PDU-5B dispenser unit (aka Leaflet Bomb). The Navy coordinates extensively with the Army as the majority of PSYOP assets reside within USASOC. PSYOP planning and execution is coordinated through the Naval Network Warfare Command (NETWARCOM) and the Naval Information Operations Command (NIOC), both located in Norfolk, VA.
The U.S. Navy possesses the capability to produce audiovisual products in the Fleet Audiovisual Command, Pacific; the Fleet Imagery Command, Atlantic; the Fleet Combat Camera Groups; Naval Imaging Command; various film libraries; and limited capability from ships and aircraft of the fleet. A Naval Reserve PSYOP audiovisual unit supports the Atlantic Fleet. Navy personnel assets have the capability to produce documents, posters, articles, and other material suitable for PSYOP. Administrative capabilities exist ashore and afloat that prepare and produce various quantities of printed materials. Language capabilities exist in naval intelligence and among naval personnel for most European and Asian languages. The Fleet Tactical Readiness Group provides equipment and technical maintenance support to conduct civil radio broadcasts and broadcast jamming in the amplitude modulation frequency band. This unit is not trained to produce PSYOP products and must be augmented with PSYOP personnel or linguists when necessary. The unit is capable of being fully operational within 48 hours of receipt of tasking. The unit’s equipment consists of a 10.6 kW AM band broadcast radio transmitter; a broadcast studio van; antenna tuner; two antennas (a pneumatically raised 100-foot (30 m) top-loaded antenna mast and a 500-foot (150 m) wire helium balloon antenna); and a 30 kW generator that provides power to the system.
Central Intelligence Agency
Psychological operations was assigned to the pre-CIA Office of Policy Coordination, with oversight by the Department of State.[13] The overall psychological operations of the United States, overt and covert, were to be under the policy direction of the U.S. Department of State during peacetime and the early stages of war:
After the OPC was consolidated into the CIA,[5] there has been a psychological operations staff, under various names, in what has variously been named the Deputy Directorate of Plans, the Directorate of Operations, or the National Clandestine Service.
History of U.S. Psychological Warfare
World War I
World War II
There was extensive use of psychological operations in World War II, from the strategic to the tactical. National-level white propaganda was the responsibility of theOffice of War Information, while black propaganda was most often the responsibility of the Morale Operations branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).[14]
Psychological operations planning started before the U.S. entry into the war, with the creation of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), under Nelson Rockefeller, with the responsibility for psychological operations targeted at Latin America.[15] Special operations and intelligence concerning Latin America was a bureaucratic problem throughout the war. Where the OSS eventually had most such responsibilities, the FBI had its own intelligence system in Latin America.
On 11 July 1941, William Donovan was named the Coordinator of Information, which subsequently became the OSS. At first, there was a unit called the Foreign Information Service inside COI, headed by Robert Sherwood, which produced white propaganda outside Latin America.[15]
To deal with some of the bureaucratic problems, the Office of War Information (OWl) was created with Elmer Davis as director. FIS, still under Sherwood, became the Overseas Branch of OWl, dealing in white propaganda. OSS was created at the same time. Donovan obtained considerable help from the British, especially with black propaganda, from the British Political Warfare Executive (PWE), part of the Ministry of Economic Warfare. PWE was a sister organization to the Special Operations Executive, which conducted guerilla warfare. The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6), was an essentially independent organization. For the U.S., the OSS included the functions of SIS and SOE, and the black propaganda work of PWE.
The OSS Morale Operations (MO) branch was the psychological operations arm of OSS. In general, its units worked on a theater-by-theater basis, without a great deal of central coordination.[15] It was present in most theaters, with the exception of the Southwest Pacific theater under Douglas MacArthur, who was hostile to OSS.
OSS was responsible for strategic propaganda, while the military commanders had operational and tactical responsibility. Dwight Eisenhower was notably supportive of psychological operations, had psychological warfare organization in the staff of all his commands, and worked with OSS and OWI.[15] The military did theater-level white propaganda, although the black propaganda function varied, often carried out by joint U.S.-UK organizations.
Leaflets were delivered principally from aircraft, but also with artillery shells.[16]
Cold War
Radio
The U.S. engaged in major worldwide radio broadcasts to combat communism, through Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.[17][18]
Korea
U.S. Army loudspeaker team in action in Korea
Psychological operations were used extensively during the Korean War. The first unit, the 1st Loudspeaker and Leaflet Company, was sent to Korea in fall 1950.[19][20] Especially for the operations directed against troops of the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK; North Korea), it was essential to work with Republic of Korea (ROK; South Korea personnel) to develop propaganda with the most effective linguistic and cultural context.
Since the war was a United Nations mandated operation, political sensitivities were high. While rules limited mentioning thePeoples Republic of China or the Soviet Union, first due to fear it would increase their intervention, and later because it might demoralize ROK civilians, Stalin was depicted and Chinese troops were targeted in leafleting.[21][20]
Various methods were used to deliver propaganda, with constraints imposed by exceptionally rugged terrain and that radios were relatively uncommon among DPRK and PRC troops. Loudspeaker teams often had to get dangerously close to enemy positions. Artillery and light aircraft delivered leaflets on the front lines, while heavy bombers dropped leaflets in the rear. Over 2.5 billion leaflets were dropped over North Korea during the war.[19] There was a somewhat artificial distinction made between strategic and tactical leaflets: rather than differentiating by the message, tactical leaflets were delivered within 40 miles (64 km) of the front lines and strategic leaflets were those delivered farther away.
One such operation, is Operation Moolah. The objective of the psychological operation was to target Communist pilots to defect to South Korea with a MiG-15, in order for the U.S. to conduct analysis of the capabilities of the MiG.
Some leafleting of North Korea was resumed after the Korean War, such as in the Cold War Operation Jilli from 1964 to 1968.[22]
Guatemala
The CIA’s operation to overthrow the Government of Guatemala in 1954 marked an early zenith in the Agency’s long record of covert action. Following closely on two successful operations, one of which was the installation of the Shah as ruler of Iran in August 1953, the Guatemalan operation, known as PBSUCCESS, was both more ambitious and more thoroughly successful than either precedent. Rather than helping a prominent contender gain power with a few inducements, PBSUCCESS used an intensive paramilitary and psychological campaign to replace a popular, elected government with a political non-entity. In method scale and conception it had no antecedent, and its triumph confirmed the belief of many in the Eisenhower Administration that covert operations offered a safe, inexpensive substitute for armed force in resisting what they declared was Communist inroad in the Third World.[23]
Vietnam
Psychological operations were extensively used in Vietnam, with white propaganda under the United States Information Agency and Military Assistance Command Vietnam, and grey and black propaganda under the Central Intelligence Agency and the Studies and Observation Group.
Safe conduct pass.
During the Vietnam era, the organization of the 4th Psychological Operations Group was very different. The four battalions of the group were divided by geographic region rather than area of expertise as they are now.
The A company of each battalion consisted of a command section, S-1, S-2, S-3, and a Psyop Development Center (PDC). Additionally, they generally had extensive printing facilities.
The B companies consisted of the field teams that were stationed throughout their respective corps billeted with MACV teams and combat units.
Nicaragua
The CIA wrote a manual for right-wing rebels—the Contras—entitled Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare in order to bolster their fight against the MarxistSandinistas. See also CIA activities in Nicaragua
Sweden
There are individual authors who claim that U.S. submarines and other vessels “frequently” and “regularly” operated in the territorial waters of neutral Sweden, including in Stockholm harbor, as part of an elaborate psychological warfare operation whose target was the Swedish people. The Swedish people and government were led to believe that the vessels were Soviet. U.S. operations were likely conducted by the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO) and aspects of the operations were coordinated with the secret NATO “stay-behind” network deployed in Sweden. See Strategy of tension and Operation Gladio. British submarines also participated in such secret operations. The campaign was successful in totally changing the psychology of the Swedish people: the Swedish population was convinced of the “present danger” posed by the desired enemy, the Soviet Union, and was prepared for war against it. Also, since the Swedish government continued to release “enemy” submarines, large parts of the Swedish population turned against their government’s conciliatory attitude and adopted more hard-line views.[24]
Russian Whiskey-Class Submarine stranded===
Grenada and Panama
Most PSYOP activities and accomplishments in Panama were hardly noticed by either the U.S. public or the general military community. But the special operations community did notice. The lessons learned in Panama were incorporated into standard operating procedures. Where possible, immediate changes were made to capitalize on the PSYOP successes of the Grenada and Panama operations. This led to improved production, performance, and effect in the next contingency, which took place within 6 months after the return of the last PSYOP elements from Panama. Operations [in Iraq] employed PSYOP of an order of magnitude and effectiveness which many credit to the lessons learned from Panama.[6]
The broader scope of information operations in Panama included denying the Noriega regime use of their own broadcasting facilities. A direct action missionremoved key parts of the transmitters.[25] After-action reports indicate that this action should have had a much higher priority and been done very early in the operation.
An unusual technique, developed in real time, was termed the “Ma Bell Mission”, or, more formally, capitulation missions. There were a number of Panamian strongpoints that continued to have telephone access. By attaching Spanish-speaking Special Forces personnel to a combat unit that would otherwise take the strongpoint by force, the Spanish-speaking personnel would phone the Panamian commander, tell him to put away his weapons and assemble his men on the parade ground, or face lethal consequences. Because of the heavy reliance on telephones, these missions were nicknamed “Ma Bell” operations. “During this ten day period, TF BLACK elements were instrumental in the surrender of 14 cuartels (strongpoints), almost 2,000 troops, and over 6,000 weapons without a single U.S. casualty. Several high-ranking cronies of Manuel Noriega who were on the “most wanted” list were also captured in Ma Bell operations.[25]
Psychological operations sometimes are intimately linked to combat operations, with the use of force driving home the propaganda mission. During the Panamanian operation, it was necessary ? Ft. Amador, an installation shared by the U.S. and Panamanian Defence Forces (PDF). There were U.S. dependents at the installation, but security considerations prevented evacuating them before the attack. Concern for U.S. citizens, and rules of engagement (ROE) that directed casualties be minimized, PSYOP loudspeaker teams, from the 1st Bn, 4th PSYOP Gp, became a key asset. When the PDF did not surrender after initial appeals, the message changed, with the tactical commander warning “that resistance was hopeless in the face of overwhelming firepower and a series of demonstrations took place, escalating from small arms to 105 mm howitzer rounds. Subsequent broadcasts convinced the PDF to give up. The entire process allowed Ft. Amador to be secured with few casualties and minimal damage.”[26]
United States PSYOP became a part of popular culture during the U.S. invasion of Panama, the America public watched on TV as PSYOP soldiers blasted rock music into the Vatican Embassy to drive out ousted leader Manuel Noriega. However, it is widely believed inside the PSYOP community that the reasoning for the music was not actually to drive Noriega out, but to keep American news reporters from listening in on the negotiations for Noriega’s surrender.[citation needed]
The 1991 Gulf War
Psychological Operations was extremely valuable during the Gulf War due to the Iraqi military’s desire to avoid combat. Through leaflets and loudspeaker broadcasts, PSYOP forces walked many enemy soldiers through successful surrender.
Coalition forces worked extensively with Saudi, Kuwaiti, and other partners, to be sure psychological operations were culturally and linguistically appropriate.[27] One unusual technique involved dropping leaflets telling Iraqi troops that they would be bombed the next day by B-52 bombers, and urged them to surrender and save their lives. After the bombing the next day, which was not done in a manner to maximize casualties, another set of leaflets were dropped, saying the promise was kept and the survivors should surrender to save themselves. Variants of this technique were used on other units, telling them the specific unit that had been bombed the previous day. By the number of prisoners who surrendered, presenting the leaflet that identified itself as a safe-conduct pass, this program was effective.
Bosnia and Kosovo
TV station secured by SFOR
United States PSYOP was widely employed in both Bosnia and Kosovo, most famously for their “mine awareness” campaign and its Superman comic.[citation needed]
The broader scope of information operations in Bosnia included denying groups, breaking the peace agreement, of the use of their own broadcasting facilities, with capture or destruction of the transmitters.[citation needed]
Controversies
CNN and NPR interns incident
In the 1990s it came to light that soldiers from the 4th Psychological Operations Group had been interning at the American news networks Cable News Network (CNN) and National Public Radio (NPR). The program was an attempt to provide its PSYOP personnel with the expertise developed by the private sector under its “Training with Industry” program. The program caused concern about the influence these soldiers might have on American news and the programs were terminated.
National Public Radio reported on April 10, 2000:
Toppling of Saddam Hussein statue
Arguably the most visible image of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in central Baghdad. Allegations that the event was staged have been published. It is claimed it was actually an idea hatched by an Army psychological operations team.[29] Allegations surfaced that not only were the cheering group of people surrounding the statue in fact smaller than they were made out to be, in media depictions, but that also the group were not local to the area and were instead brought in by the military for the specific purpose of watching and lending credence to the pre-planned toppling.[30][31][32]
Use of music in the interrogation of prisoners
PSYOP pamphlet disseminated inIraq. The text translates as “This is your future al-Zarqawi,” and depicts al-Qaeda terrorist al-Zarqawi caught in a rat trap which is being held by an Iraqi Army soldier or an Iraqi Policeman.
In 2003 Sergeant Mark Hadsell claimed to have used loud music during the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners:[33]
Other reports of the use of music during interrogation have occasionally plagued PSYOP.[34]
On 9 December 2008 the Associated Press reported that various musicians were coordinating their objections to the use of their music as a technique for softening up captives through an initiative called Zero dB.[35][36] However, not all musicians have taken issue with the possibility that their music is being used during interrogations. Stevie Benton of the groupDrowning Pool commented supportively:[36]
Afghanistan burning bodies incident
On 1 October 2005 in Gumbad, Afghanistan, Soldiers from the 173rd Airborne decided to burn the bodies of two Taliban fighters killed in a firefight the previous day for hygienic reasons. Despite Islamic customs that forbid cremation, they chose to proceed. The Platoon Leader also failed to properly notify his Battalion Commander of the decision prior to burning the bodies. When his Battalion Commander was notified, he ordered the flaming bodies extinguished. An official investigation into the incident found evidence of poor decision making, poor judgement, poor reporting, a lack of knowledge and respect for local Afghan custom and tradition. The Infantry Officer received a General Officer letter of reprimand. Reserve PSYOP soldiers were involved because they heard about the incident and used the information to incite Taliban fighters in another area where freelance journalist Stephen Dupont was located. Dupont reported that the PSYOP soldiers claimed the bodies were to be burned due to hygiene concerns.[37]
During the War on Terror, U.S. PSYOP teams often broadcast abrasive messages over loudspeakers to try tempting enemy fighters into a direct confrontation where the Americans have the upper hand. Other times, they use their loudspeaker to convince enemy soldiers to surrender. In the Afghanistan incident, a PSYOP sergeant allegedly broadcast the following message to the Taliban:
Another soldier stated:
U. S. authorities investigated the incident and the two Reserve PSYOP Soldiers received administrative punishment for broadcasting messages which were not approved. Investigators found no evidence that the bodies were burned for a psychological effect. They concluded that the broadcast violated standing policies for the content of loudspeaker messages and urged that all soldiers in the command undergo training on Afghan sensitivities.[38]
Pentagon Analysts and the Main Stream Media
In 2008, The New York Times exposed how analysts portrayed in the U.S. news media as independent and objective were in fact under the tutelage of the Pentagon.[39] From the NYT:
2009 congressional delegation to Afghanistan
In February 2011, journalist Michael Hastings published an article in Rolling Stone reported that Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the supposed leader of a PSYOP group in Afghanistan, alleged that Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell a three-star General in charge of training troops in Afghanistan,[40] ordered Holmes and his group to perform in-depth research on visiting U.S. congressmen in order to spin presentations and visits.[41] According to Holmes, his team was tasked with “illegally providing themes and messages to influence the people and leadership of the United States.”[42] Reported targets included United States Senators John McCain,Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken, Carl Levin, Rep. Steve Israel of the House Appropriations Committee; Adm. Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Czech ambassador to Afghanistan; the German interior minister, and think-tank analysts.[41] Under the 1948 Smith–Mundt Act, such operations may not be used to target Americans. When Holmes attempted to seek counsel and to protest, he was placed under investigation by the military at the behest of General Caldwell’s chief of staff.[41]
Caldwell’s spokesman, Lt. Col. Shawn Stroud, denied Holmes’s assertions, and other unnamed military officials disputed Holmes’s claims as false and misleading, saying there are no records of him ever completing any PSYOP training. Subsequently Holmes conceded that he was not a Psychological Operations officer nor was he in charge of a Psychological Operations unit and acknowledged that Caldwell’s orders were “fairly innocuous.”[43] Officials say that Holmes spent his time in theater starting a strategic communications business with Maj. Laural Levine, with whom he conducted an improper relationship in Afghanistan. A former aid said, “At no point did Holmes ever provide a product to Gen. Caldwell”. General David Petraeus has since ordered an investigation into the alleged incident.[42]
Portrayals in popular culture
See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Operations_%28United_States%29
Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations
Purdue University‘s Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS, is currently being used by Homeland Security and the US Defense Department to simulate crises on the US mainland.[1] SEAS “enables researchers and organizations to try out their models or techniques in a publicly known, realistically detailed environment.”[2] It “is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence. […] The Iraq and Afghanistan computer models are the most highly developed and complex of the 62 available to JFCOM-J9. Each has about five million individual nodes representing things such as hospitals, mosques, pipelines, and people.”[1]
SEAS was developed to help Fortune 500 companies with strategic planning. Then it was used to help “recruiting commanders to strategize ways to improve recruiting potential soldiers”. In 2004 SEAS was evaluated for its ability to help simulate “the non-kinetic aspects of combat, things like the diplomatic, economic, political, infrastructure and social issues”.[3]
Sentient World Simulation is the name given to the current vision of making SEAS a “continuously running, continually updated mirror model of the real world that can be used to predict and evaluate future events and courses of action.”[4]
Development and use
SEAS technology resulted from over ten years of research at Purdue University, funded by the Department of Defense, several Fortune 500 companies, the National Science Foundation, the Century Fund of the state of Indiana, and the Office of Naval Research. Originally, SEAS was developed to help Fortune 500 companies with strategic planning. It was also used to model the population of the U.S. that is eligible for military service to help “recruiting commanders to strategize ways to improve recruiting potential soldiers”[3]and to study biological attacks.[5]
In January 2004 SEAS was evaluated by the Joint Innovation and Experimentation Directorate (J9) of the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) for its ability to help simulate “the non-kinetic aspects of combat, things like the diplomatic, economic, political, infrastructure and social issues” at the Purdue Technology Park during Breaking Point 2004, an environment-shaping war game resulting in the conclusion that it “moves us from the current situation where everyone comes together and sits around a table discussing what they would do, to a situation where they actually play in the simulation and their actions have consequences.”[3]
In 2006 JFCOM-J9 used SEAS to war game warfare scenarios for Baghdad in 2015. In April 2007 JFCOM-J9 began working with Homeland Security and multinational forces in a homeland defense war gaming exercise.[1]
Sentient World Simulation
The Sentient World Simulation project (SWS) is to be based on SEAS. The ultimate goal envisioned by Alok R. Chaturvedi on March 10, 2006 was for SWS to be a “continuously running, continually updated mirror model of the real world that can be used to predict and evaluate future events and courses of action. SWS will react to actual events that occur anywhere in the world and incorporate newly sensed data from the real world. […] As the models influence each other and the shared synthetic environment, behaviors and trends emerge in the synthetic world as they do in the real world. Analysis can be performed on the trends in the synthetic world to validate alternate worldviews. […] Information can be easily displayed and readily transitioned from one focus to another using detailed modeling, such as engineering level modeling, to aggregated strategic, theater, or campaign-level modeling.”[4]
Personnel
Alok R. Chaturvedi is the founder and the Director of SEAS Laboratory[6] as well as the technical lead for the Sentient World Simulation project initiated by US Joint Forces Command.[7]
See also
Sources and notes
Further reading
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