War and Empire Links April 2019.

How the U.S. Creates 'Sh*thole' Countries: A Review. Danny Haiphong, Black Agenda Report. March 20, 2019.

Dr. Cynthia McKinney is the editor of "How the US Creates Shithole Countries"

Cynthia McKinney has been on the frontlines of the struggle for global peace for decades. Known first as a dissenting voice in Congress and then for her work in exposing the truth about the U.S.-led wars on the Palestinian, Libyan, and Black people here in the United States, McKinney’s voice is seldom heard in the arena of corporate politics. She has long understood that one of the most critical tasks of this historical juncture is the mobilization of the masses to stop the endless wars waged by U.S. Empire. In a series of essays written by activists, scholars, and analysts from across the political spectrum, McKinney shows through practice what this should look like. Her new book How the U.S. Creates ‘Sh*thole’ Countries is an invaluable piece of literature that seeks to transform anti-war ideas into an anti-war movement. 

The book challenges the liberal ethos that Trump’s vulgar “sh*thole” comments in January of 2018 were some aberration or detached from reality. Liberal elites work hard to erase the realities of racism and war by claiming the moral high ground of respectability politics. Their criticisms of Trump center around his foul language to distract from the role that they play in the creation of “sh*thole” countries. McKinney and the rest of the authors condemn Trump for characterizing Haiti and African nations such as Nigeria as “sh*tholes while attempting to answer a question that neither racist demagogues nor liberal elites dare to ask: What exactly causes the massive suffering experienced around the world?

Who Are the Real Terrorists in the Middle East? Maj. Danny Sjursen, TruthDig. Apr. 18, 2019.


The Obvious Dirty Dealings Behind Julian Assange’s Arrest. Kit Knightly, Off Guardian. Apr. 13, 2019.

The Prosecution Of Julian Assange Is Infinitely Bigger Than Assange. Caitlin Johnstone. Apr. 22, 2019.


Mueller, Trump, and 'two years of bullshit'. Byron York, Washington Examiner. Apr. 18, 2019.

Robert Mueller Did Not Merely Reject the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theories. He Obliterated Them. Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept. Apr. 18, 2019.

Russiagate is Dead! Long Live Russiagate! Gerald Sussman, CounterPunch. Apr. 18, 2019.

Now that Mueller’s $40 million Humpty Trumpty investigation is over and found wanting of its original purpose (to retire Trump), perhaps the ruling class can return without interruption to the business of destroying the world with ordnance, greenhouse gases, and regime changes. A few more CIA-organized blackouts in Venezuela (it’s a simple trick if one follows the Agency’s “Freedom Fighter’s Manual”), and the US will come to the rescue, Grenada style, and set up yet another neoliberal regime. There is a small solace that with Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton, there is at least a semblance of transparency in their reckless interventions. The assessed value of Guaido and Salman, they forthrightly admit, is in their countries’ oil reserves. And Russians better respect the Monroe Doctrine and manifest destiny if they know what’s good for them. Crude as they may be, Trump’s men tell it like it is. And when Bolton speaks of “the Western Hemisphere’s shared goals of democracy, security, and the rule of law,” he is of course referring to US-backed coups, military juntas, debt bondage, invasions, embargoes, assassinations, and other forms of gunboat diplomacy. 

... 

Although the US corporate media may have missed the news, the rest of the world gets the fact that the greatest threat to peace on the planet is Uncle Sam. 

Present at the Death. John Michael Greer, Ecosophia. May 1, 2019.

Well, the penny finally dropped.  I’m not sure why it took me this long to realize that the collective tantrum that’s seized America’s mass media, intelligentsia, and privileged classes generally for the last two and a half years, since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, was described right down to the small details back in the 1970s by pioneering grief researcher Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Granted, she was talking about the five psychological stages that people go through when coming to terms with the reality of a terminal illness, but it makes an accurate model for what we may as well call the five stages of Donald Trump.

Journalists Matt Taibbi and Aaron Mate explain how the Russiagate narrative helped Trump. Katie Halper, Truthdig / Alternet. March 31, 2019.


Russiagate: “Why did this ever start in the first place?” van Buren, WeMeantWell. March 30, 2019.


Putin Derangement Syndrome After Mueller. Patrick Armstrong, Strategic Culture Foundation. Apr. 9, 2019.

Clinton’s victory was 99% certain until it wasn’t and excuses were needed. Clinton went through a lot of them but “Russian interference” was always the big one. 

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. [9 November 2016] Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument. (From Shattered, quoted here.)

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(For those who now realise there is something they have to catch up on: Conrad Black has a good exposition of the overall conspiracy and here is a quick round-up of the mechanics of the conspiracy. This may show its very beginning, three years ago).

The Real ‘Bombshells’ Are About to Hit Their Targets. Julie Kelly, AG. April 29th, 2019.

The next bombshell report to drop from the Justice Department likely will earn none of the breathless fanfare and media coverage that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report received, but it could be far more incriminating. 

In the next several weeks, Inspector General Michael Horowitz is expected to issue his summation of the potential abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by top officials in the Obama Administration and holdovers in the early Trump Administration who were overseeing the investigation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

And the perpetrators of the so-called FISAgate scandal now are scrambling for cover as the bad news looms.

Will the Mueller Report Make the New Cold War Even Worse? Stephen Cohen, The Nation. Apr. 17, 2019.

How the long-anticipated report addresses—or ignores—Russiagate allegations will be vital for US-Russian relations.

Obstructiongate! CJ Hopkins, OffGuardian. Apr. 26, 2019.

 I owe the corporate media an apology. For the last few years, I’ve been writing all these essays explaining how they were perpetrating an enormous psyop on the American public... a psyop designed to convince the public that Donald Trump “colluded” with Russia to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton. Up until a few days ago, I would have sworn that they had published literally thousands of articles and editorials, and broadcast countless TV segments, more or less accusing him of treason, and being a “Russian intelligence asset,” and other ridiculous stuff like that. 

Also, and I’m still not sure how this happened, I somehow got the idea in my head that the investigation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was meticulously conducting had something to do with Donald Trump conspiring or “colluding” with Russia, or being some kind of “Manchurian president,” or being blackmailed by Putin with a pee-tape, or something. 

In any event, the publication of the Mueller report has cleared things up for me. I get it now. The investigation was never about Trump colluding with Russia. It was always about Trump obstructing the investigation of the collusion with Russia that the investigation was not about. Mueller was never looking for collusion. It was not his job to look for collusion. His job was to look for obstruction of his investigation of alleged obstruction of his investigation of non-collusion, which he found, and detailed at length in his report, and which qualifies as an impeachable offense.

Not that he proved that there was no collusion! On the contrary, as professional hermeneuticists have been repeatedly pointing out on Twitter, given that Mueller wasn’t looking for collusion, and that collusion could never have been legally established, and isn’t even a legal term, Mueller’s failure to find any actual evidence of collusion is evidence of collusion, notwithstanding the fact that he couldn’t prove it, and wasn’t even looking for it, except to the extent it allowed him to establish a case for the obstruction he was actually investigating. 

In other words, his investigation was launched in order to investigate the obstruction of his investigation. And, on those terms, it was a huge success. The fact that it didn’t prove “collusion” means nothing — that’s just a straw man argument that Trump and his Russian handlers make. The goal all along was to prove that Trump obstructed an investigation of his obstruction of that investigation, not that he was “colluding” with Putin, or any of the other paranoid nonsense that the corporate media were forced to report on, once an investigation into his obstruction of the investigation was launched. 

See, and this is why I owe the media an apology. All those thousands of hysterical articles, editorials, and TV segments accusing Donald Trump of treason, and of literally being a Russian agent, and probably Putin’s homosexual lover, were not just ridiculous propaganda. The corporate media were not engaged in a concerted campaign to convince the public that Trump conspired with a foreign adversary to brainwash millions of African Americans into refusing to vote for Hillary Clinton with some emails and a handful of Facebook posts. No, the media were simply covering the story of his obstruction of the investigation of the made-up facts the intelligence agencies got them to relentlessly disseminate to generate the appearance of a story, which, once it was out there, had to be reported on, regardless of how it came into being, or whose nefarious purposes it served. 

Moreover, regardless of whether Mueller did or did not establish obstruction (or attempted obstruction, which is just as impeachable) of his non-investigation of collusion, he absolutely established that Russia attacked us by brainwashing all those African Americans who were definitely going to vote for Clinton until they saw those divisive Facebook ads and those DNC emails that Putin personally ordered Trump to order Paul Manafort to personally deliver to Julian Assange, who was hunkered down in the Ecuadorean embassy poking holes in King-size condoms, abusing his cat, and smearing invisible poo all over the walls of his kitchen. 

Now, these are all indisputable facts, which Mueller establishes in his report by referencing the repeated assertions of a consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies, and the corporate media’s relentless repetition of those agencies’ assertions, and the feeling a lot of people have that they must be factual to some extent, given how often they have been repeated, and referenced, and authoritatively asserted, and how familiar they sound when they hear them, again. The fact that there exists no evidence whatsoever of any “Russian attack,” and that all we’re actually talking about is the publication of a bunch of emails that DNC members actually wrote, and some ridiculous social media posts, should not in any way detract from the fact that the Russians launched a totally devastating, virtually Pearl Harbor-scale attack on the fabric of American democracy, which Trump obstructed an investigation of, or attempted to obstruct an investigation of, or conspired to attempt to obstruct an investigation of obstruction of. 

Or whatever. The point is, now they’ve got him! His justice obstructing days are numbered! Break out the pussyhats and vuvuzelas, because next stop is Impeachment City! So what if he’s not a Russian agent and didn’t conspire or collude with anyone? He got elected without permission, and insulted a lot of powerful people, and … well, who cares what they impeach him for, as long as they impeach him for something!

They kind of have to do it, at this point, don’t they? They just spent most of the last three years rolling out an official narrative in which the Russians are running around attacking democracy, poisoning ducks with Novichok perfume, fomenting populist uprisings in France, and just generally being the evil enemies that the Islamic terrorists used to be, before they turned into freedom fighters and helped us try to take over Syria. 

If the Democrats don’t impeach Donald Trump, that official narrative might fall apart. Liberals might have to face the fact that Americans elected Donald Trump president, not because they were brainwashed by Russians, or had any illusions about what a thuggish, self-aggrandizing buffoon he is, but because they were so disgusted with the neoliberal Washington establishment, and the global capitalist elites that own it, that they leapt at the chance to vote against it, and probably would have elected anyone who promised to even marginally disrupt it … but there I go drifting off into my crazy conspiracist thinking again. 

Anyway … I’m really sorry about all that stuff I wrote about the corporate media. Rest assured, that won’t happen again. Admittedly, I blew the Russiagate thing, but I promise to do better with Obstructiongate, or Tax-Returnsgate, or Whatevergate. 

It doesn’t really matter what we call it, right? 

The important thing is to teach the masses what happens when they vote for unauthorized candidates. We’re only halfway through that lesson. Stay tuned … there’s much, much more to come!

A Satirical Russiagate Requiem. CJ Hopkins via zerohedge. Apr. 2, 2019.

So the Mueller report is finally in, and it appears that hundreds of millions of Americans have, once again, been woefully bamboozled. Weird, how this just keeps on happening. At this point, Americans have to be the most frequently woefully bamboozled people in the entire history of woeful bamboozlement. 

If you didn’t know better, you’d think we were all a bunch of hopelessly credulous imbeciles that you could con into believing almost anything, or that our brains had been bombarded with so much propaganda from the time we were born that we couldn’t really even think anymore.

That’s right, as I’m sure you’re aware by now, it turns out President Donald Trump, a pompous former reality TV star who can barely string three sentences together without totally losing his train of thought and barking like an elephant seal, is not, in fact, a secret agent conspiring with the Russian intelligence services to destroy the fabric of Western democracy. After two long years of bug-eyed hysteria, Inspector Mueller came up with squat. Zip. Zero. Nichts. Nada. Or, all right, he indicted a bunch of Russians that will never see the inside of a courtroom, and a few of Trump’s professional sleazebags for lying and assorted other sleazebag activities (so I guess that was worth the $25 million of taxpayers’ money that was spent on this circus). 

Notwithstanding those historic accomplishments, the entire Mueller investigation now appears to have been another wild goose chase (like the “search” for those non-existent WMDs that we invaded and destabilized the Middle East and murdered hundreds of thousands of people pretending to conduct in 2003). Paranoid collusion-obsessives will continue to obsess about redactions and cover-ups, but the long and short of the matter is, there will be no perp walks for any of the Trumps. No treason tribunals. No televised hangings. No detachment of Secret Service agents marching Hillary into the White House. 

The jig, as they say, is up. 

But let’s try to look on the bright side, shall we? 

Disgraceful as this Russiagate fiasco has been, at least it was all just an honest mistake, and not any kind of plot, or conspiracy, or anything as disturbing as that. It’s not like the majority of the corporate media perpetrated a massive, coordinated, intelligence agency-initiated psyop on the Western public for two and half years. No, they just “got it wrong,” again … like they did with those Iraqi WMDs. 

The corporate media, after all, are comprised of dedicated, professional journalists, who maintain the highest ethical standards, and who would never knowingly bombard the masses with hysterical McCarthyite propaganda based on absolutely nothing but the word of a bunch of deep state types who were trying to force a president out of office and delegitimize a populist backlash against the spread of global neoliberalism. 

Plus, there is no “deep state.” Not really. That’s just one of those right-wing conspiracy theories that only Trump-loving fascists believe in.

I mean, it’s not as if elements of the FBI, the DOJ, and the DNC paid a former MI6 spook working for a Washington PR firm contracted by a Washington law firm contracted by the Clinton campaign to fabricate a “dossier” alleging that “the Russian regime [sic] has been cultivating, supporting, and assisting Trump for at least five years” in order “to sow discord” within the Transatlantic Alliance, and then fed that fabricated dossier to their contacts in the corporate media, who used it to generate mass hysteria, which the Congress then used to justify the appointment of a special prosecutor, whose investigation of the allegations contained in the fabricated dossier the corporate media and deep state types used to generate even more mass hysteria … and so on, until hundreds of millions of people actually believed that Donald Trump was some kind of Russian intelligence asset, and was going to be impeached and tried for treason. 

Now, that would be scary, if that had happened! 

Another thing that (thank Christ!) didn’t happen was when the corporate media hired a bunch of ex-intelligence agency officials to appear on their “news” shows every other night disseminating Russiagate propaganda while at the same time effectively banning journalists with dissenting views from challenging their lies. Well, and OK, to the degree they did that (and they certainly did it to some degree), they didn’t do it intentionally, or knowingly, or with malice aforethought or criminal intent. They probably just misplaced the telephone numbers (and the email addresses and Twitter handles) of Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Mate, and other infamous “collusion rejectionists,” so they had no choice but to bring in the spooks. 

Look, I don’t want to beat this to death. The important thing is that we can all be grateful that none of that stuff I just mentioned happened, and, basically, just shut up and get back to work. This is not the time to remind everybody how totally insane and hysterical things got, and how they ran around like headless chickens squawking about “Russians” coming out of the woodwork, accusing anyone they disagreed with of being “Kremlin agents” or “Russian bots,” and begging corporations to censor the Internet. 

No, it’s time to, you know, let bygones be bygones, and just forget about all this “Russiagate” business, and the FBI, and that made-up dossier, and how respected publications like The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and others published completely fabricated stories about secret meetings that never took place, power grid hackings that never happened, Russia-linked servers that never existed, imaginary Russian propaganda peddlers, and … well, too many other examples to list. 

Talking about all that is just a distraction (as my former colleagues on what has recently become the radical Rooskie-hunting Left wasted no time in advising everyone). Worse, it only helps Donald Trump, who, OK, maybe isn’t a Russian intelligence asset anymore, but is still almost literally Adolf Hitler … or at least some sort of inhuman monster that bears no resemblance whatsoever to Obama or any other normal president, and who is certainly going to declare martial law, proclaim himself Führer, and unleash his underground white supremacist army on us, or something more or less along those lines. 

And as for the non-existent deep state, and the Democrats, and the corporate media, and the millions of Americans they accidentally bamboozled … well, I imagine they’re feeling pretty silly right now. So this is not the time to demand a full accounting from the patriots in the intelligence community, or to compare the professionals in the corporate media to the keys of an enormous Goebbelsian piano mechanically hammering out whatever tune the ruling classes decide to play. 

Yes, they made a few mistakes, and got a little carried away, but they’re only human, after all. I’m sure they’re all very, very sorry, and will never, ever, do it again.

The Russian collusion hoax meets unbelievable end. Rep. Devin Nunes, Washington Examiner. April 05, 2019.

It’s now clear that top intelligence officials were perfectly well aware of the dubiousness of the dossier, but they embraced it anyway because it justified actions they wanted to take — turning the full force of our intelligence agencies first against a political candidate and then against a sitting president.

Trump is going to repeat this until November 2020. Thanks MSNBC. Caitlin Johnstone. March 25, 2019.


Can we lock up Rachel Maddow now? Raul Ilargi Meijer, Automatic Earth. March 25, 2019.


Leaked Mueller Report Proves Barr Lied; Collusion Theorists Vindicated. Caitlin Johnstone. April 1, 2019.

I feel a bit sheepish writing all this, because I’ve been a very vocal critic of the Russian collusion narrative from the very beginning. It turns out that by voicing skepticism and demanding evidence for a news story that dominated political discourse to the near exclusion of all else, I was actually assisting the Russian government in its war against democracy, truth, and justice. 

Obviously I owe the world a very big apology. I’m sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles, stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers, oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and oxygen, and an embarrassment to the human species. 

Clearly, because of their indisputable vindication this April the first 2019, they are definitely none of these things.

CNN Publishes Real News Story for April Fools' Day. The Babylon Bee. April 1, 2019.

Fooling thousands of readers in a prank that the cable news organization said was "just for fun," CNN published a real news story for April Fools' Day this year.

The story simply contained a list of facts, with no embellishment, editorializing, or invented details. The story also didn't cite shaky "anonymous sources" and only quoted firsthand witnesses to the event. It was completely factual without any errors whatsoever. 

Baffled CNN fans immediately knew something was up. 

"I was reading this story, and I was like, 'Wait, what is this?'" said one man in New York who relies on CNN for his fake news every morning. "They really got me good. Then I looked up at the calendar and I realized I'd been duped. A classic gag!" 

"Those little rascals!" he added, shaking his head and laughing good-naturedly. "As long as they return to their regularly scheduled fake news tomorrow, we're good. We're good."

The Official Skripal Story is a Dead Duck. Craig Murray. Apr. 17, 2019.