REPUBLIC REBORN

TULSI 2020: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on warmongers in their ivory towers VIDEO

The American Conservative: Trump’s alarming abuse of executive power

Reason: Houston narc who lied to justify deadly raid had been previously accused of perjury

Consortium News: The FBI came close to staging a coup

Common Dreams: Despite ‘war crimes’ concerns in Yemen, Raytheon nabs $1.6 billion arms deal with UAE

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: The neocon revival

Jacobin: The tragic life of war criminal Elliott Abrams

TUCKER CARLSON: Why are these professional war peddlers still around?

PHILIP GIRALDI: Is Tulsi Gabbard for real? America is ready for a genuine peace candidate.

ERIC PETERS: Tasered 11 times over a turn signal

First World War Lord: Raytheon exec on sales to Saudi Arabia: “We don’t make policy”

Activist Post: Facebook “exploring additional measures” to fight anti-vaccine information

Reason: U.S. citizens sue border patrol agents who detained them for speaking Spanish

Techdirt: FBI’s internal investigations of shootings by agents clears agents 98% of the time

High Times: Children’s book aims to start the conversation about cannabis

As Jimmy Dore points out in the latest episode of the Jimmy Dore Show, American war criminals are never prosecuted, but rather commended, given medals, and positions of power and prestige. For compelling evidence of this, witness war-pig-at-the-trough Elliot Abrams being grilled by Minnesota rep. Ilhan Omar on what are by every civilized standard war crimes committed by U.S.-backed South American governments against their own populations. Aside from lying to Congress over the Iran-Contra scandal, Elliott was instrumental in the cover-up of hundreds of massacres, as we will see shortly.

Abrams was, of course, pardoned by George H.W. Bush for his role in lying to Congress about the selling of weapons to Iran in order to fund death squads, euphemistically dubbed ‘Contras’, in Nicaragua during the 1980’s, but let’s look at the far more heinous acts, those that can be considered real war crimes.

These war crimes took place almost entirely in South and Central America, but let’s look at Guatemala, where the most horrific atrocities took place. The Guatemalan Genocide of the early 1980’s is history erased from the history books. I have never heard of it before today, but the facts surrounding it are crucial to understanding not only why Abrams should be sitting in a windowless cell, but to understanding the modus operandi of U.S. foreign policy today.  To understand it, we must go to the beginning. In 1954, the CIA overthrew the elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz and installed the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas. The action was code-named PBSUCCESS, and the CIA armed, trained, and funded 480 Armas-led fighters to carry out the coup.  This coup was the first of a string of military coups, up to the 1982 coup that installed Efrain Rio Montt to power. Montt’s rule was a reign of terror, and he was the dictator that committed the worst of what is known as the Guatemalan Genocide, in which he sought to exterminate the indigenous Mayan people of Guatemala, as he saw them as a threat to his power and a haven for left-wing insurgents. Montt’s military wiped out over 600 indigenous villages, with soldiers decapitating and crucifying their victims, and committing wanton acts of infanticide. Abrams at the time was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, ironically enough, and concealed and defended Montt’s actions. Abrams thought the threat of Communist control of South America rationalized pro-U.S. rule-by-terror regimes. A self-fulfilling prophecy it seems. The resulting death toll of indigenous Maya stands at over 18,000 for just 1982.  Montt was convicted of war crimes charges, finally, in 2013, for the murder of 1,771 Maya Ixil Indians, and sentenced to 80 years in prison.

Another massacre took place at El Mozote in El Salvador in 1981 by the soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion, which had trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and then sent back to El Salvador to perform its function as a death squad of the US-back government. Over 800 civilians were murdered, with children separated from parents and grandparents before being gunned down. The battalion went on to commit several other massacres during its tenure.

There is so much history of U.S. funding of South American military dictators and I am just beginning my education. It’s ugly, horrifying, but necessary in order to break the hypnosis that we have regarding American foreign policy. Those massacres of the 80’s mirror, in many ways, the slow-motion genocide of Yemen by the U.S.-backed Saudi butchers. And there is no shortage of Elliott Abrams’ to cover for that slaughter as well.

Here is the Jimmy Dore segment:

Marijuana Business Daily: Oklahoma medical marijuana sales surge to $4 million in January

Free Beacon: Kamala Harris packed California prisons with pot peddlers

National Review: Why it matters if Amy Klobuchar is an abusive boss

BONNIE KRISTIAN: The unaddressed sins of Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar

Reason: ACLU releases model legislation to unlock ‘black box’ of prosecutor secrecy

The New Atlantis: How the new tech utopia fostered tyranny

SaveTheChildren.net: Yemen: 85,000 children may have died from starvation since start of war

Democracy Now!: Yemen: Grain supplies at risk of rotting as millions face famine

Kelley Vlahos: Walter Jones cried while the rest of them lied

Activist Post: Tulsi Gabbard wants to legalize marijuana, punish Big Pharma, and end private prisons

Marijuana legalization is the true ‘Green New Deal’: Colorado saw record $1.5 billion in marijuana sales in 2018

Headlines I never thought I’d see: Iowa GOP lawmaker introduces bill to legalize medicinal psilocybin, MDMA

Nick Gillespie: A border wall is a bad idea, but so is the “border security” Democrats say they want

The Intercept: Pro-Israel lobby caught on tape boasting that its money influences Washington

Techdirt: Minnesota judges spent only minutes approving warrants sweeping up thousands of cellphone users

Philip Giraldi: Being Marco Rubio: The boyish senator from Florida is owned by the Israel lobby.

Reason podcast: Green New WTF?

It appears that any criticism of Israel, any at all, is anti-Semitic. Or so the major news outlets would have us believe. Criticize the out-sized influence Israel holds over our own government, criticize the murder of medics, unarmed protesters, and children, and you will be dubbed an anti-Semite. It’s a race card, and, as it is with all race cards, is brandished by a coward who  realizes he has no real argument to counter with. Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar recently experienced this firsthand, when she pointed out the obvious-to-everyone fact that Israel, via AIPAC and other entities, wields enormous influence over our own government. That influence does include large sums of money, which Omar acknowledged with the statement, “It’s all about the Benjamins.” Cries of anti-Semitism erupted from the four corners, along with the usual sob stories of historical Jewish plight and persecution. And in my effort to learn a bit about the history of Israel, I came upon a recent piece by Philip Giraldi, entitled, Israel’s Story, with the subtitle, “Lies from start to finish”. Giraldi writes about an historical incident I had not known, specifically, the massacre at Deir Yassin:

“Israel was founded as a product of terrorism, some would say the “first modern” style terrorism, to include bombings of non-military targets and random massacres of civilians. In a notorious attack on the village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, more than two hundred Palestinians may have been slaughtered by Jewish terrorists affiliated with the Irgun and Lehi groups. The exact count of the victims is unknown because a subsequent Zionist clean-up team systematically destroyed many of the bodies.”

The massacre at Deir Yassin triggered the massive 1948 Palestinian exodus, where 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled their homes in face of the real threat of more massacres to come.

He also mentions another historical tidbit on the founding of the modern state of Israel, the assassination of Folke Bernadotte by the murderously fanatical Zionist group, Lehi. Bernadotte’s murder is ironic in the extreme, because he had previously negotiated the release of 31,000 prisoners from Hitler’s concentration camps. He was unanimously chosen to be the mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1947-48, only to be killed by members of Lehi who didn’t take kindly to the split-down-the-middle approach. Lehi wanted everything, and wanted the Arabs out of Palestine. His assassins fled to Israel, and the few Lehi members arrested by Israeli police were pardoned and released.

This is history that no one I’ve ever met knows. But mention it, and you’re an anti-Semite!

Anti-war Republican and vociferous opponent of the Iraq War, Walter Jones, has died

FEE: Red flag gun laws turn due process on its head

Reason: San Francisco’s accidental surveillance state and the future of privacy

At least we aren’t England. Yet. London to require GPS trackers for certain residents convicted of “knife possession”

MIKE GRAVEL: How to legalize cannabis throughout the U.S.

Reason: Journalists criticize CNN for planning journalism about Howard Schultz Ed: One puzzling aspect of the 2016 campaigns was the almost-constant coverage that almost every mainstream outlet gave Trump, despite clearly despising him. Of course, they wanted the ratings, but it’s fairly apparent that that very coverage played a part in Trump’s eventual victory.

GEORGE WILL: Limited government requires a limited President

BARNEY FIFE THINKS HE’S THE PUNISHER: Watch Glendale cops taser a man 10 times, handcuff him, pull his pants down, and taser his groin

JIM BOVARD: Trump’s absurd claim that Americans are free from government coercion

GLENN GREENWALD: Jeff Bezos protests the invasion of his privacy, as Amazon builds a sprawling surveillance state for everyone else

Finland learns a new economic concept, specifically capital consumption: Finland abandons ‘helicopter money’ experiment: No new jobs created

High Times: Getting in the mood: How marijuana could change depression and anxiety treatment

Wired: Inside the push to legalize magic mushrooms for depression and PTSD

Kamala Harris, former DA of San Francisco and current US senator, is running for President on the Democratic ticket. Back when she was a DA, Harris had an affinity for prosecuting and jailing the parents of truant children, something that she took great joy in, as this video of her speaking about it attests:

Watch the video and you will see someone completely convinced of their rationalization for abuse of power.  The greatest evil in the world comes from people who are able to rationalize that evil as some sort of moral crusade. What’s more fascinating, though, is her body language. Her facial expressions, her slimy glee in discussing the topic of incarcerating the parents of poor families, is indicative of someone completely possessed, and intoxicated by, power. The power to hurt others, to intimidate, to threaten, scare, and then sic the armed enforcers of the state on anyone she wishes. Except, of course, people who aren’t poor, because they can hire a lawyer and fight back.

Here’s a recent Jimmy Dore Show episode focused on Kamala’s sleaziness, and her penchant for avoiding “paper cases”, which refers to attempting to prosecute people who have the money to fight her wickedness:

The smear campaign currently ramping up against Tulsi Gabbard mirrors almost exactly that of the one against Trump, with baseless accusations of anti-Semitism, being a puppet of Putin and Syria’s Assad, supporter of terrorism, etc. For a representative taste of this attitude, see New York Time’s Bari Weiss on Joe Rogan. Weiss here appears extremely inarticulate, uninformed, and vicious, as she fails to defend her claim that Tulsi Gabbard is “monsterous”, and is the “motherlode of bad ideas”:

Weiss’ flustered attitude to Rogan’s polite, soft-ball questioning of her claims that Tulsi is monsterous is evidence of the bubble that these propaganda churners live in. Weiss in all probability has never been challenged to her face for any of her positions. As Jimmy Dore says, mockingly, : “When I go back to the New York Times I just say ‘Assad Toadie’ and everyone pats me on the head!” The elite propagandists that have been pushing endless war for the past two decades live in this same bubble. They have access to the mainstream media outlets, and even these outlets have been peppering their staff with “ex” intelligence analysts, sure to give the respectable sheen to any military action abroad.

For more info on that last fact, see this piece in Politico from about a year ago: The Spies Who Came in to the TV Studio