Chapter 1-The Rise of the Police State
Chapter 4 — Universal Public Surveillance
Chapter 5 — Other Surveillance
Chapter 6 — Searching for Anarchists, or Maybe Just Political Activists
Chapter 7 — Winning the Information War
Chapter 8 — Arbitrary and Unaccountable Law Enforcement
Chapter 9 — The Militarisation of the Police
Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street
Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press
Chapter 12 — The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism
Chapter 13 — The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil Unrest
Chapter 11 -- Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press
By Larry Romanoff
CHINESE ENGLISH
Police State America - Volume One free e-book
In all the world's fascist states, increasing state criminality and civil rights violations are always accompanied by an extreme and even obsessive determination to control information and fact, as well as a surprising viciousness in pursuing those revealing embarrassing truths. This is precisely the situation today in the US and, contrary to all claims about a prevailing rule of law, American authorities increasingly trash civil rights on the fictitious grounds of defending national security.Instead of enacting legislation to curb abusive surveillance and the multitude of crimes and abuses by all levels of the state, they are obsessed with hunting down and punishing whistleblowers. It is abundantly clear the US has no intention of ceasing any of its illegal practices anywhere in the world, and the viciousness of its witch hunts is entirely to instill sufficient fear in American hearts that soon nobody will dare to report even the most egregious crimes or violations.
At this early December 2010 summit in Kazakhstan, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (center left) expressed her regrets to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (far left) for the leaked disclosures regarding US diplomats spying on the UN.
When Wikileaks broke the news about Hillary Clinton's astonishingly stupid directive ordering State Department staff to spy on UN officials and other foreign dignitaries, it was a foregone conclusion the woman wouldn't rest until Julian Assange was dead or in prison for life.When Manning embarrassed the government with revelations of a widespread lust for killing, US officials acted with a Neanderthal vengeance simply to inflict as much lasting pain as possible. We can also expect that Edward Snowden’s life will be measurably shortened.
In 2021, we documented 142 assaults of journalists. For the second consecutive year, the majority of those assaults came during protests: 95 percent in 2020 and 77 percent in 2021. The year began with a protest that became a riot, as the US Capitol was stormed by a mob attempting to stop certification of election results. The Tracker documented at least 16 journalists assaulted in Washington, DC, while covering those events, many of whom were targeted. Source
The US media is not nearly so free as many people believe. Bernays' mythology machine tells us the US is today and has always been the world leader in media openness, the fabled "freedom of the press"for which Americans believe they are so famous, but that has never been true. Reporters without Borders published a report stating that the US is very low and still falling on the list of press freedom, being about 50th out of 180 countries, below many dictatorships and axis of evil republics, and far below China and other civilised nations.In particular, the US is accused of employing an "overly broad and abusive" interpretation of the concept of national securityto restrict information. Ever since Lippman and Bernays got their hooks into the White House, there has been a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception, misusing the media as the main channel of misinformation. The falsehoods, fabricated news stories, biased and twisted reporting will never be exposed because the media are not only reading from the same script but are in a real sense part of the origination, due to their ownership. If the media’s own interest in promoting the agenda is not strong enough, US authorities have exerted tremendous pressure to report events in an appropriate manner. Reporters criticizing those in power may be smeared by the government and targeted for arrest. Indeed, the government treats real reporters as terrorists, and journalists are often targeted under counter-terrorism laws.
Not only has the government imprisoned media owners and reporters for criticisms, it also claims the power to indefinitely detain journalists without trial or access to an attorney. When prize-winning journalists Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Wolf and Daniel Ellsbergsued the government over the indefinite detention of Americans, the judge insistently asked the government attorneys five times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about official criminality. The government refused to promise that such journalists would not be imprisoned for life without any right to ever see a lawyer, a judge or a courtroom. How is this materially different from the oppression, civil repression and secrecy we find in totalitarian and fascist dictatorships?
Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records. A WIRED analysis of leaked police documents verifies that a secretive government program is allowing federal, state, and local law enforcement to access phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime. Source
Leonard Downie, a former executive editor of The Washington Post, interviewed many reporters and editors and wrote in a 30-page analysis, "In Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press. The Obama administration's aggressive war on leaks and its determined efforts to control information that the news media needs to hold the government accountable for its actions are without an equal since the Nixon administration."Since that time, many journalist sources have been prosecuted on felony charges for talking to reporters. Today,journalists and any of their sources who are even 'suspected' of discussing embarrassing information are investigated and forcibly subjected to lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and e-mail records.In late 2013 it was revealed that US Federal investigators had secretly and without notice seized the home, office and mobile phone records of more than 100 reporters and editors of the Associated Press.These records apparently contain detail of months of communication with confidential sources that the NYT claimed provided a road map to all the AP's news gathering operations, activities and sources. This is part of an aggressive government policy to identify, intimidate and prosecute all those leaking information on the illegal activities of US government agencies. The Administration's McCarthy witch hunts are taking a further distressing turn with the creation of the "Insider Threat Program",a new internal surveillance program in every government agency whereby all co-workers spy on each other and report each other to the authorities.
Perhaps the single greatest scam ever devised is the way the US-centralized empire found that it can kill and displace people in geostrategically crucial and resource-rich regions under the guise of fighting terrorism, then when violence and extremism inevitably arises out of that mass-scale trauma they can use it to justify even more interventionism under the guise of fighting terrorism. We are ruled by monsters. Source
Anything that might challenge the legality, wisdom or cause for the US so-called "war on terror" is treated brutally, with civil liberties not only being threatened but removed, and with some individuals losing their lives. Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent James Risen said, "The more direct part is to frighten people in the government from talking, to have a chilling effect on whistle blowers, to make them understand there is a big brother that will get them if they step out of line".These widespread attempts to instill fear, appear to be having the desired effect. Jeff Cohen, a New York journalism professor said there have been many incidents in the US where journalists were arrested, harassed, and detained for political reasons. "What shocked me when I worked at cable television news, at MSNBC and elsewhere, is how timid journalists were in this country". "In a survey performed by the Pew Research Center and the Columbia Journalism Review, it was documented that in the US there exists "a tremendous self-censorship by journalists", with almost half of journalists and broadcasters claiming they have purposely avoided newsworthy stories or changed the tone, to serve the economic or political interests of other parties. These might be advertisers, politicians, or some of the more powerful lobby groups."
The Russian Embassy in the United States sent a note of protest to the State Department after police officers sprayed RIA Novosti correspondent Mikhail Turgiev with tear gas in the face in Minneapolis. Source
Journalists and reporters in all parts of the US today are regularly threatened, roughed-up, beaten and injured, and often arrested and imprisoned by Federal agencies and local police, yet the mainstream US news media are both so indoctrinated and intimidated by US authorities that they almost never report these occurrences, preferring instead to sanctimoniously criticise journalistic disputes in other nations. The media in major cities like Washington, New York and Los Angeles complain that local police and federal authorities are consistently and increasingly hostile to reporters writing on government malfeasance or covering public instances of police brutality during protests and other such events. During the Occupy Wall Street protests, many dozens of media personnel were attacked by police, pepper-sprayed in their eyes, beaten with police batons, forcibly evicted from protest areas, and generally treated very aggressively. The police forces have become increasingly militaristic and belligerent with media personnel documenting that aggression against the public. In response to the publicity given their past brutalities, the police increasingly go to great lengths to identify journalists, demanding all reporters identify themselves and then physically transporting them far from the scene so they will be unable to see and report on police brutalities. In an article in the Huffington Post, police were quoted as claiming the rules were "to protect journalists from being harmed during the operation".
Barrett Brown, a well-known and well-published US investigative journalist is facing 105 years in prison for revealing US government secrets. Actually, he didn't "reveal" anything. What he did do was post an article on the internet that contained a link to information the US government considered not "top secret" but simply "sensitive". His sole "crime" was to post that link to information that was widely available on the Internet and that the public could have seen on many dozens of websites. Brown is now officially "an enemy of the state", has been charged with a 17-count indictment, and Federal prosecutors applied for a gag order preventing Brown, his lawyers and anyone else from commenting on the case or even admitting it exists. What better way to silence a "dissident" than to put him in prison for more than 100 years? It is frightening to think that a government can arbitrarily and without prior notice proclaim virtually anything as 'politically sensitive', including but not limited to criticism of the government, regardless of how widely-available that information might be, and have the simple posting of a link result in life imprisonment. This vicious and widespread abuse, coordinated with government agencies, law enforcement and the courts, is the major weapon used by the US government to silence political activism, now standard procedure by US prosecutors to intimidate and silence those who criticise questionable or illegal activities by US government agencies. As always, the US media are totally silent, preferring to deflect public attention in the US writing by outrageous articles on a CIA-sponsored seditious anarchist being detained in some other nation. One thing the US desperately needs, but does not have, is a 'free press'.
A group of well-known American journalists jointly published a book in 2002 that contained examples from their personal experiences that effectively destroyed the American myth of a free press. The book was titled ‘Into the Buzzsaw’, and contains documented evidence of government intimidation, media suppression and control of news. Some of the stories involved massacres by US troops in North Korea, proof that the US abandoned many POWs in Vietnam, documented evidence of CIA direct involvement in trafficking cocaine and heroin, and the fraudulent 'news' that emanates from most US media newsrooms. Several wrote of government intimidation, loss of employment and their blacklisting, experienced when they either refused to back off on stories that almost certainly involved serious government crimes resulting in many deaths, or when they refused to falsify reports on the results of their investigations. Many were offered 'consulting contracts' of hundreds of thousands of dollars to cease their investigations, but refused and were terminated. Because these journalists challenged the US government and military on stories like the crash of TWA Flight 800, or threatened to expose discoveries about Monsanto and its GM seed or growth hormones in milk, they were not only harassed and threatened, but lost their jobs and careers.They are now what is termed "radioactive", in that no media outlet will hire them and almost no publishers will accept their books or articles; they have been totally excommunicated from the journalistic world for daring to challenge and expose those with power. The book has won nearly every journalism award that exists but its authors are nevertheless subjected to character assassination and denigrated in the mainstream media as incompetent or crazy.The book provides a rare insight into both the power and the willingness of the US government and its secret handlers to suppress truth, control public information and cover up vast crimes. Mostly, they just did their job of investigative reporting a bit too well, and paid a heavy price for their integrity.
More people have been prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act during the Obama-era than previous presidents combined. Photograph: Olivier Douliery/Olivier Douliery/Corbis. Source
Obama campaigned on a promise of open and transparent government, but all credible sources condemn him for creating precisely the opposite, squeezing the media and civil service to severely restrict any leaks.And these are not leaks of damaging top-secret information, but revelations of serious crimes. Far from being open and transparent, the White House rushes to seize journalists' records and files, with prosecution threats emerging seemingly everywhere. Yet the US still foolishly flaunts its "free press" mythology around the world while destroying that freedom at home and grossly interfering with that same freedom in other countries. David Sanger, the former chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times, described the Obama administration as "the most closed, control-freak administration I've ever covered". A New York Times reporter described the Obama administration as "the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation", and the New York Times's editor, Jill Abramson, called the Obama White House the "most secretive... that I have ever been involved in covering."
And in yet another 'black is white' narrative, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said the administration is committed to "unprecedented openness", with the government "more transparent and more accessible than ever". And Arch Puddington, the director of psychiatry for the mental institution known as Freedom House, said "The United States has the freest environment for the press in the world. Freedom of the press is the pillar of American democracy, thecornerstone of a free society." How do we respond to lies that big?
The Americans make huge waves in the media when China refuses to renew press visas for so-called journalists in China who are usually on the CIA or State Department payroll, but the US media are invariably silent when the US government cancels visas and deports foreign journalists from the US, an event which occurs more often than you might imagine. Al-Jazeera was one of the victims of this frequent 'journalistic cleansing', its reporters having made the mistake of telling truths the US didn't want told. Al-Jazeera journalists were praised as "excellent reporters" and made very welcome in America when they criticised China, but when they produced negative reports about the US, their credentials were immediately revoked, their visas cancelled, and the individuals deported. The US media, of course, were silent on these events. It's worth noting that China's trouble with al-Jazeera began only after the US bought control of it and began using it as a political tool inside China.
Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen in the Collateral Murder video. Photograph: WikiLeaks. Source
Numerous documented reports emerged from Iraq that the US military engaged in the unhesitating extermination of reporters attempting to broadcast the truth of the US invasion. In one case that received little media attention in the West, the military blew out most of a floor in a hotel in downtown Baghdad where reporters were staying. The military's version was that the event was an accident caused by "bad intelligence", a claim that was clearly a lie since the use of that hotel as a media residence had been well-known for many months. A large us battle tank navigated its way into downtown Baghdad, sought out a particular hotel, positioned itself with a particular orientation, then targeted and totally blew out one particular floor of that hotel - the floor where most of the journalists were located. Hardly an accident, and only one of many. A number of independent reports confirmed that the US had killed several hundred journalists in Iraq, in circumstances where only a very few might have qualified as non-deliberate.
Obama's legacy 'is one of near-total failure', according to Harvard professor Stephen Walt. Source
哈佛大学教授Stephen Walt表示，奥巴马的遗产几乎完全失败了
During the height of the war, al-Jazeera in Qatar was one of the most vocal regional media decrying American brutalities and lies about Afghanistan and Iraq, so much so that the US government eventually eliminated the threat by forcing the Emir of Qatar to sell a controlling interest in al-Jazeera to the CIA and silencing forever its dissenting voice. It has since been documented that George Bushhad made plans to launch a large air assault on Al Jazeera’s head office in Qatar with the intent to bomb it to rubble, destroying the building and killing the people.Prior to that, the US had bombed and put missiles into Al-Jazeera’s bureau in Baghdad, destroying the building, killing the staff, and warning other reporters of the dangers of telling the truth.The US claimed it was yet another "mistake", but Qatar had supplied the US with precise map coordinates of its office precisely to prevent such an accident. There are documented reports that the US military has deliberately killed reporters in almost every nation where it has launched its 'wars of liberation'or where it was 'protecting American interests'.
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 —Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
2186604556@qq.com
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