The Lee Canter Report: Persecution of the Truth-Tellers

Nazi Rally's at MSG are a Rough Venue for Comedy, Sorry Tony

Jordan Lee Canter — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 19:53:55 GMT

I’ll start by saying I clicked off of this week’s episode of Kill Tony on YouTube to write this, that’s my bias. After 5 years of following someone closely and seeing their career progression, you start to kind of understand who they are. In the age of 3 hour+ podcast in which people bare their whole souls, it’s hard to have like, hidden belief systems that don’t start to come to light. You can find even more evidence of the person by the friends he keeps and, in this case, the people he/she uplifts and how fucking multi-cultural is the group of people who owe their entire careers to Tony Hinchcliffe? Very. He’s brought more people, of varieties of different ethnicities, genders, and statuses in the world, together and out of poverty, than say…the Federal Government definitely! His help, at least, isn’t enforced by detention at the barrel of a gun.

Of the many careers he’s jump started there’s an Asian named Hans Kim, a black man named David Lucas, a black blind man who plays bass guitar for the Kill Tony Band—“the Best Damn Band in the Land”— who goes by the name Dee-Madness, a Spanish man plays drums for the band, he put on Drew Nickers who has a traumatic brain injury from the military, and an honorable discharge. He gives him stage time every week. The first time he made it up on the show they were asking Drew how he got the brain injury, and when Drew changed the subject, seemed dodgy, and nervous, Tony asked, “does it bother you to talk about this?”

Drew nodded his head insistently and said, “Yes it does!”

And Tony quickly moved on and said, “Ok then, let’s talk about something else.” Drew Nickens very obviously had special needs, and Tony was very empathetic to him.

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He’d been there every week for 9 months and hadn’t been called so when he finally got called, he came out with his energy on 10! Tony was so touched by his story, he brought him out 5 times in a row, every time someone bombed he brought him out to do another set. It was amazing! After this Tony made him a regular on the show. By the way, every single person that Tony has put up on his show has gone on to live out their dreams! This guy is single-handedly keeping the American dream alive! These are just to name a few. I’ll explain the stories in this piece of the more heartwarming stories to come out of the lore of KILL TONY, mainly the stories I seen unfold personally, but first…

Drew Nickens on stage at the Mothership

Let’s talk about what Kill Tony is… Tony Hinchcliffe and Brian Redban started developing this show in 2013 at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. It is a live podcast in front of a crowd once a week in a comedy club setting. He puts out a sign-up sheet that aspiring, amateur, or sometimes first-timers that want to put in their bid as the next ticket-selling comedian, come from all over to sign up for. Tony has a panel of different guests every week, mostly already established, professional comedians, but sometimes other guests of varying fame, such as Jordan Peterson, Post Malone, or Ric Flair. Mostly comedians though, that can give helpful feedback to performing bucket pull. He’s had such a diverse group of guests on, even more diverse than the people whose lives he’s saved! He puts all the names in a bucket to get drawn out during the show. If your name gets pulled out you get a minute on stage to try out whatever you prepared, and a 10+ minute interview afterwards, depending on how it goes, to discuss your minute with the panel and find out who you are. Based on how the bit went or how the interview went—I’ve seen people blow up from both—you might get booked for a gig that night, or you might get good advice on what to do next, or how you could make it better, or you might realize you want nothing to do with this, I’ve seen all of these options come into play. One of the comedians I’ll talk about below made it to America’s Got Talent, and all of them, at the very least are now touring comedians, living out their dreams. It’s a real door opener. If you don’t do so good, he encourages them not to give up and keep coming back, but the main thing is giving the chance to try. While watching this show every week, I’ve seen so many repeat bucket-pulls that didn’t start out so good, but during each appearance you can really see their progression. It’s such an amazing thing to see. It really puts a spotlight on the progression of hard tasks when you don’t give up.

Also, Tony’s a roast comedian so he’s gonna bust your balls a little bit, but it’s understood that it’s all in fun, and a lot of times how well you do, and progress coincide almost 1 for 1, with how well you can take a joke coming back at you and roll with the punches. It’s a tough business, show business in general is brutal, you have got to thicken your skin. I’ve not seen anyone take a couple roast jokes personal and also, have a good set or interview.

Lately, this show has grown so much, I think due to the successes that have come from it, they are now selling out stadiums. His guest a couple months ago, before Biden dropped out, the guests on the panel were Shane Gillis, impersonating Donald Trump and Adam Ray as Joe Biden, and it has now garnered, as of this writing, 20 million views. A year ago, this show was only breaking a million when someone really big was a guest, like Joe Rogan or Post Malone, or Joe Rogan and Post Malone! Even those, would barely break a million. A couple months ago they sold out Madison Square Garden’s two nights in a row. At which time new comedians, drawn out of the bucket got to perform in front of a Sold-Out Stadium!

Sometimes he gets a bucket-pull that is exceptional, and he presents that person with a Golden Ticket, which means that he/she doesn’t have to sign up anymore, any time they come through they automatically have a spot on the show. The meme going around on Reddit is, a Golden Ticket means they are someone with special needs, and Tony feels sorry for them. They don’t say special needs though, they call them “retarded”. Problem with this meme is they are always sharper and funnier than the retards making the comment!

Their homebase is Joe Rogan’s Comedy Mothership, and it’s been kind of the other side of uplifting these aspiring comedians, Joe only hires people who want to be comedians, so they can use the club as a home base to hone their craft. Joe’s entire philosophy for this comedy club since the beginning was to give back to the comedy community by fostering talent within their doors, giving healthcare to comedians who normally would have trouble getting it because their work is like gig work, and he pays them what they deserve. He’s said many times during his podcast, that he’s in a unique role in which, he makes more money than he needs from his own, already successful, careers. Three successful careers to be exact. So, all he’d like to do with the club as far as profits go is break even, and as far as comedians go, as foster talent, and provide another spot for touring comics from other places to perform when they’re in town. By the way, this isn’t just talk, I’ve heard damn near every comic who has performed there who go on to talk about it later, that the pay is exponentially better than any club in the country. By the way, it seems to be a good business model, every listing of tickets are sold-out in minutes from the time they’re posted. You have to catch them like 6 months out to even get tickets. KILL TONY is the same, it sells out in minutes months before the show date. Now back to Tony and his compassion for the needy of many cultures.

The KILL TONY Talent Pool

Michael Lehrer was a Second City Improv Alumni in his earlier days. When he developed ALS, and no doubt would be soon facing expiration, all he wanted was to get back to the stage live out his dream as a Professional Comedian. He’s passed on now. He was in a wheelchair for many years and after years of suffering he went to a state that supported Physician-Assisted Suicide and ended his pain. It was a very sad day in Kill Tony history. Even though it was difficult sometimes to coordinate his wheelchair getting to the stage, even though he was hard to understand (I would turn on the subtitles during his set), and even though his appearance would drag out sometimes 20-30 minutes, Tony had a spot for him on every episode of KILL TONY that he could make. Until his bittersweet end. When he passed away last year, they put together the most amazing, in remembrance video, which was a compilation of his most memorable moments on the show, and it was a tear-jerker.

Hans Kim is an Asian Comedian who became a regular on his show after one appearance. Tony has done so much for his life and his career. Hans was pulled out of the bucket—which is how he found everyone else—and during his interview we all found out that Hans was living in a van. Tony put him in his show as a regular, started taking him on the road, putting him in front of people and now Hans Kim is a national headliner, touring all over the country.

Kam Patterson, a black man from Orlando, FL, and this guy is a fucking renegade. He’s gonna be considered one of the best that ever did it one day, like without a doubt the next Dave Chappelle, or Richard Pryor, all thanks to KILL TONY, he showed up from a bucket pull, became a regular and now he’s a national headliner.

Jared Nathan, a Canadian man with special needs and an extreme stutter was given a golden ticket, which is an open door to skip the bucket and given a spot on the show any time he’s in town. Recently when he was on, he gave Tony an award from the special needs community giving him a “Hard-R Award”, which gives him a pass to use the “Hard R” any time he wants, you know the Hard-R…. It’s retard you racist! :-) It was a very funny moment.

Sara Mostajabi, God rest her soul passed away in 2022, and is the only one not doing better now, she was his very first regular, all the way back from episode #1 and was an Iranian.

Enrique Chacon is Spanish, Tony brings him on all the time, even put him into a sold-out show at Madison Square Gardens, when Kill Tony sold it out two-nights-in-a-row!

Ahren Belisle, the comedian who can’t speak (literally, he’s a mute), made it from Kill Tony all the way to America’s Got Talent, with his Bluetooth speaker hooked to his

phone, telling his jokes with text-to-speak. He’s currently on tour with Martin Phillips, and Tony gets him on stage every single time he comes in town, and every stadium show he’s done he’s put him on stage.

He has Nicole Tran on, every single time she comes to town, and she does whatever she wants to do even though sometimes it’s strange and hard to understand because of her thick Asian accent. If you didn’t guess, the thick Asian accent isn’t an Impression, she’s an Asian Woman.

Martin Philips has Muscular Dystrophy, his voice is like RFK Jr’s because he shakes all over, I have to use subtitles in his set but it’s always worth it, he’s so funny, and Tony’s influence has turned him into a touring comedian.

Ali Macofsky, a young very talented woman, who started on KILL TONY from a bucket-pull, became a regular and is now a successful comedian. Joe has taken her on the road a few times, as has Tony, she’s now a guest from time to time on KILL TONY and the Joe Rogan Experience.

As is Sara Weinshenk, Kim Congdon, Vanessa Johnston, and “Jet-Ski” Jessie Johnson, all talented woman, all living their dreams, all given their start by Tony Hinchcliffe. Also, not like Harvey Weinstein putting them on, casting couch type shit. He cared about these people and wanted to see them flourish. That’s what his entire platform is, uplifting comedians, finding talent, not like, so he could manage them or profit off them but simply to see them flourish.

Last, but not least, the “Estonian Assassin” Ari Matti, who is quickly becoming comedy’s top Eastern European accent. Thanks to Kill Tony and friends, he received a 9-month work visa here, to work as a comedian. And Tony has been putting him in on every single episode of the show, no matter where it’s at, and introducing him to all different podcasters, to get his notoriety up, he’s made an excellent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, that really showcased what an interesting guy he is. He was on Whitney Cummings show, Good for You, Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, and The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, to name a few of the big ones. Their plan is to get him famous before the Visa runs out so that they’ll let him stay. All people need to do is listen to him for 5-minutes and they’re sold! The guy is just so talented. Once they see him, they’ll be jumping to get him a green card.

These are all beautiful examples of how not a racist he is and how, actually, Tony Hinchcliffe is a caring and compassionate soul who wants people to succeed and has used his success to help people as best as he could. People that he has a deep understanding with, up & comers in the comedy world who otherwise might have given up before someone gave them a chance. Let’s be really honest here, how many potential school shootings do you think he might’ve saved us from, by giving hope to people who otherwise might’ve been so hopeless, that they were radicalized and believed their only hope was the next Sandy Hook Massacre. Instead, thanks to Tony Hinchcliffe, they are happy and hopeful and living out their dreams.That’s a bad joke, I should leave the comedy to the professionals.

So, now let’s talk about the reason this is relevant to talk about today. Sunday, October 27th, 2024, Tony opened a Trump Rally with 10min of comedy. The comedy was very Tony Hinchcliffe-esque, he made a few offensive jokes about things that the Trump campaign is running on, mainly immigration, after all the media had already coined this a Nazi Rally, why? Because as infuriating as it is to learn this, Adolf Hitler had a rally at Madison Square Gardens in 1939. Because there have been other presidents to have a rally there this was a wild claim to make. Bill Clinton had a rally there, FDR, Ronald Reagan, and many others besides the Nazi’s but, opening the rally with Tony Hinchcliffe, whose brand is taking it as far as you can, it was a weird choice. Tony even addresses this in the set, at one point he comes out with, “This is a strange place for comedy, not used to following the National Anthem!” At another point he says, after saying something offensive, he reacts to people groaning by saying, “This a real groaney morning crowd!”

And the reaction to him seemed to be people who do not understand comedy. Maybe it’s because everyone seen this, not just people looking for comedy, it hit the national stage. The video I posted at the top was from a local news channel. Personally, I loved the set, I love that offensive shit, could’ve done without the watermelon comment, but that was one he came up with in the moment, reacting to whatever he seen on some man’s head. This was all weird on a few levels, for a few different reasons. For one, why are we doing comedy at a Presidential Politics rally? This close to the election? Are you crazy? A morning crowd? Who the fuck books a comedian for a morning set??? These people are nocturnal, like vampires, they don’t come out at night! They’ll turn to dust, like the little girl in “Interview with a Vampire”. By the way, Tony did really good, he did what he was supposed to do, if you’re making a joke about any group, make jokes about ALL the groups, but this was on whoever organized that rally. They should’ve made themselves aware of what kind of comedy he does, he’s a roast comic, if he ain’t supposed to do his thing don’t hire him for your thing. You didn’t take a look at his last big appearance at the Tom Brady Roast on Netflix, he—in a very masterful roast joke said, “Sam Jay doesn’t eat pussy, she ah-hell-gnaws on it.”

Don’t now be upset that he Ah-Hell-Gnawed up your political rally! This is 100% the fault of whoever’s job it was to research guests and “Speakers”. Comedy at a presidential rally in the fucking morning of all times?! This is like mixing church and state. Anyone blaming Tony or hating on Tony, I hope you read this, and while you’re reading about the various levels of humankind that Tony has uplifted, ask yourself this, WHAT HAVE I DONE LATELY?! Thank you for reading…

Jordan Lee, Editor-at-Large, Declaration of Liberty

The J.D. Vance Files

Jordan Lee Canter — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:09:34 GMT

Tim Pools headline on his nightly livestream, Timcast IRL, the other night was “Woke Journalist LEAKS HACKED JD VANCE Dossier, Hacked By Iran” This is the same thing they said about Julian Assange, that he was putting out things that were hacked by Russia. Tim, I’ve been a fan of Tim since Occupy, he supports Julian Assange so why the fuck would he go there. , no doubt some would consider a woke journalist, I guess, but he did the right thing. Elon Musk said on X,

This is one of the most egregious, evil doxxing actions we’ve ever seen. Presidential candidates are not speculatively in danger – there have already been two attempts on @realDonaldTrump’s life. Moreover, the doxxing included detailed information on the addresses of their children.

JD Vance is a public figure, everything in that dossier was public information, the social security number was redacted, except for the part that is part of your state code where you were born. Mine is 590, because I was born in:

The first three digits of a Social Security number (SSN) used to indicate the state where the application was filed, but this is no longer the case:

Before 1972
The area number indicated the state, territory, or possession where the Social Security office that issued the number was located.
1972–2011
The area number was allocated based on the anticipated number of issuances in each state.
2011 and later
The Social Security Administration (SSA) changed the SSN assignment process to "SSN randomization". This eliminated the geographical significance of the first three digits of the SSN.

The numbering scheme was originally designed in 1936 to make it easier for the SSA to store applications in their files. The SSA published the highest group number issued each month for each area number. Any group numbers below the highest are valid.

The More You Know…

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By the way, how great was that speech gave at Rescue the Republic? is on the same team. If we start holding back information about public officials because of where it came from, why stop there, how about we burn the Pentagon Papers, shutdown Wikileaks, censor the Twitter Files. We’ve got to stand with the people on the side of exposing the truth. By the way, the dossier, to me, shined a really nice light on JD. Reading through it, I really started to like the guy. It’s a RESEARCH DOSSIER, that’s the first thing it says. Everything in it can be found by doing research. Which is why I’ll link to it right here, which is what anyone who calls themselves a journalist should also do. Some interesting things in it, to me anyways:

o Vance criticized student loan debt forgiveness proposals.
o However, Vance indicated support for Hillary Clinton’s free-college plan.

Might be the only good idea Hillary had.

o Vance criticized Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer for allowing abortion clinics to stay open under her Covid-19 lockdown order.
o Vance criticized public health experts and elected officials for supporting Black Lives Matter protests while condemning anti-lockdown protests.

I’m not sure where I stand on abortion, but as militant as Gretchen Whitmer was it seems like a principled position for him to take. From the looks of that second one, he supported protests, and I’m behind that. We must stand with all protesters right to protest even if we disagree.

Vance In 2016: “I Didn't Vote For Trump Or Hillary Where I Was Almost Saying Look, I Told You So, Hillary Is Going To Win, We Shouldn't Have Nominated Trump In The First Place…”

Vance Said He Voted For Evan McMullin And Said, “My Fear With Trump Was Always That He Didn’t Have Great Solutions.”

In 2017, Vance Defended People Who Had Voted For Trump Despite His Incendiary Rhetoric, Saying A Vote Against Trump Was A Vote For Hillary Clinton.

Vance Said Trump Diagnosed Problems In A Successful And Passionate Way, “But I Don't See Him As Offering Many Solutions.”

In 2016, Vance Said Of Trump: “Half Of The Things That He Says Don’t Make Any Sense Or A Quarter Of The Things That He Says Are Offensive.”

In A 2016 Op-Ed, Vance Wrote That “Trump’s Policies, Such As They Are, Offer Little Substance To Those Suffering From Addiction, Joblessness, And Downward Mobility.”

Vance: “I Think In Many Ways What Trump Is Is Just Another Opioid. He Is Something That Is Gong To Take The Pain Away, He Is Going To Make People Feel Better For A LittleWhile.” (MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” 7/1/16)
Vance: “But At The End Of The Day, The Problems Are Still Going To Still Be There And Donald Trump Isn’t Going To Make Them Any Better.” (MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” 7/1/16)

In 2016, Vance Wrote That He “Loathed” Trump’s “Obvious Personal Character Flaws.”

We all said this shit, except for those that really believed in Trump, the rest said all of the same things Vance said. A lot of the ones that said these things, still voted Trump because Hillary was a fucking MONSTER! “WE CAME, WE SAW, HE DIED! HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE!”

CBS to HRC: Do you think that had anything to do with your visit?

HRC: Oh, I’m sure it did

**As she pumps her war criminal fists** Back to Vance:

In 2016 After Trump’s Election, Vance Said, “I Continue To Worry That Trump Didn’t Fully Appreciate The Complexity Of What’s Going On” And Was Worried “About Whether He’s Going To Make The Problems A Whole Lot Better.” “Still, the 32-year-old remains somewhat nervous about the policies that Trump espoused on the campaign trail, though his fingers are crossed. ‘Solutions are complex,’ he noted, ‘and I continue to worry that Trump didn’t fully appreciate the complexity of what’s going on. Consequently, I worry about whether he’s going to make the problems a whole lot better. … But I am a Republican, and we really should give the guy a chance to govern and hope he’s successful.’” (James Hohmann, “The Daily 202: Why The Author Of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Is Moving Home To Ohio,” The Washington Post, 12/21/16)

So many of us felt, this way exactly!

In 2016, Vance Said, “If You Think Of The Republican Party Rhetoric, It Is Almost Designed To Turn Off Black Voters.”

In 2016, Vance Said If Trump Won, “We Could Have An Even Angrier White Working Class That Hates The Elites Or The Mexicans Or The Chinese, Or Whoever Trump Is Targeting, Even More.”

Dude, I can’t believe he was this critical of Trump. It’s almost funny. He said pretty much every bad thing about Trump that all the media and leftwing pundits say. It’s endearing. At least there was someone on the other side criticizing his own party, the same way there is so many on left criticizing their side. I’m sure there was others but this kind of makes me think of a rightwing Bill Maher. Giving tough love to his side.

Vance Said It Had Been The “Republican Party Strategy For 30 Years” And Trump “Seems To Be Taking That Strategy Just To The Next Level.” VANCE: “Unfortunately, that's been the Republican Party strategy for 30 years. I say that as a republican who wants the party to get more black voters. And Trump seems to be taking that strategy just to the next level. It shows in the polls, right, he's not going to do especially well on Election Day.” (CNN’s “CNN Tonight,” 10/24/16)

In 2017, Vance Criticized The Idea That Voter Fraud Impacted The 2016 Election “In Any Significant Way,” Claiming He Just Does Not “See The Evidence.”

In 2017, Vance Criticized Trump For Saying “Half-Truths Or Lies” So Frequently “That You Stop Actually Taking The President Literally.”

Vance: “Even Though You See Unemployment Numbers Doing Reasonably Well, What’s Happening In Places Like The Industrial Midwest, In Michigan And Ohio, Is That The Economic Recovery Still Hasn’t Fully Set In”

In 2016, Vance Said Problems In His Community Were “Not Going To Be Solved By A Mexican Border Wall Or Better Trade Deals With China.”

I’ve always thought the border wall was crazy, the criminals, at least the ones in the cartel are digging fucking tunnels into America. Hasn’t he seen the video of El Chapo leaving the prison in a tunnel? And the documentaries about the cartel tunnels running drugs? Is the wall going to run underground?

Now for some of the negatives in this Dossier, however you take it, it seems negative to me:

In A 2017 Op-Ed, Vance Targeted OxyContin. “Partially because of the high costs of those clinical trials, and partially because of the larger dynamics of the American health-care market, the development costs of new pharmaceuticals are extremely high. By some estimates, the cost of developing a new drug reaches as high as $2 billion. Yet the benefits of owning a popular drug are astronomical: Last year, the highest-selling drug in the United States netted more than $10 billion in revenues. This creates a conundrum for drug developers: how to maximize blockbuster new therapies without paying the skyhigh costs of drug development. In practice, this has created a remarkable incentive for big drug companies to repackage already tested and marketed therapies. And there are a variety of strategies pharmaceutical companies employ: They can seek extended patent protection for their blockbuster drugs, apply old drugs to new disease indications, or develop new formulations or delivery mechanisms. This latter strategy led directly to the nation’s most famous prescription opioid: OxyContin.”

That was well said.

Vance Noted That Purdue Pharmaceuticals’ Claims About OxyContin Were “Bogus” And Was The Subject Of Lawsuits Across The Country.

Vance Noted That Then-Attorney General Mike DeWine Sued Purdue And Other Companies And “Correctly” Argued The Companies “Misled Doctors And Their Patients About The Potential For Opioid Abuse.”

“Why was Purdue ever legally permitted to market these drugs as nonaddictive, all-day pain relievers? Purdue certainly acted unethically, and may have even acted illegally, but our legal system places one significant barrier between companies like Purdue and the American consumer: the FDA.”

“With Oxy, evidence of its potential problems arose almost immediately. A single dose, for instance, promised to relieve pain for 12 hours. But about half of the enrollees in OxyContin’s first clinical trial required additional medication before their 12 hours elapsed, according to one report. And despite the potential for addiction that any narcotic opioid possesses, Purdue never tested the drug as a six- or eight-hour pain reliever before selling it. The FDA never required that testing, and the rest is history: OxyContin became one of the most successful pharmaceutical products in the country, a number of other prescription opioids followed it onto the market, and America’s consumption of opioid pain medications skyrocketed.”

Vance was a staunch critic of Purdue Pharma, that is good. These drugs destroyed my family and friends, and friends families for generations! So, I’m down with everything he’s saying! Then I see this:

• While not a lobbyist himself, Vance’s old law firm, Sidley Austin, lobbied on behalf of several controversial clients during his tenure with the company.
o Between 2014 and 2015, Sidley Austin lobbied on behalf of Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, who has paid billions of dollars in criminal and civil penalties related to the opioid epidemic.
o Between 2014 and 2015, Sidley Austin lobbied on behalf of multiple Chinese Communist Party-affiliated companies including Alibaba and Kaisa Group.
▪ In 2020, Alibaba, is a Chinese company which operates e-commerce platforms, was named by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as a company. Pompeo (Fuck Pompeo) urged American companies to remove (them) from their digital networks.
▪ Kaisa Group is a Chinese real estate firm that was probed over alleged links to a former state official involved in a graft investigation.

Vance did address this on the Hugh Hewitt Show where he said—and this in the Dossier:

“No, I didn’t. I actually, I did spend a little bit of time at Sidley Austin in D.C., though.”

This is all interesting things to know, interesting, newsworthy and blocking this is the same as blocking the Hunter Biden laptop from being released. The laptop was a much more damning story but, the censorship of it was all the same.

All those who stand against the censors and against the militarized deep state, and the technocratic anti-disinformation complex, should stand with , because he’s on our side. Him and put out an article before the Twitter Files on the Intercept called Truth Cops and it was one of the first in on the anti-disinformation complex. He’s been writing and exposing the Security State for years. He’s not just some “Woke Journalist”. He’s on the same team as truth. X has censored him, their loss, our gain. And I must say, thank God for and for providing us with a platform where our voices can’t be shutdown. If Rumble is the free speech alternative to YouTube, Substack is the free speech alternative to X. It’s the only place where the truth, the actual truth, reigns supreme.

By the way, while searching for “Ken Klippenstein” on the Intercept website only showed his appearances on the Intercepted Podcast, it showed none of his articles. I had to Google his name and go to his Staff Page on the Intercept, and he has 16 pages of articles! WTF!? It popped up in Google when I searched his name, but I couldn’t find it by using the Intercept Search Bar, how weird? Here’s just a few examples of the work he does:

Pensions for the “Deep State”: Republicans Push Benefits for Air America, the CIA’s Secret Vietnam-Era Airline

Ken Klippenstein

- Jan. 22

Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Glenn Grothman want to recognize the contribution of Air America, the CIA airline that supported secret wars in Laos and Cambodia.

Israel’s War on Gaza

Exclusive: Israeli Military Censor Bans Reporting on These 8 Subjects

Ken Klippenstein, Daniel Boguslaw

- Dec. 23, 2023

The highly unusual, English-language order for the Gaza war breaks from the secretive and informal way IDF censorship normally works.

Pentagon Fails Sixth Audit in a Row, Claiming “Progress Sort of Beneath the Surface”

Ken Klippenstein

- Nov. 17, 2023

The Defense Department passed the same paltry number of sub-audits as it did last year — and would not say if would ever see a clean audit.

NSA Orders Employees to Spy on the World “With Dignity and Respect”

Ken Klippenstein

- Aug. 25, 2023

A digital rights advocate said, “This is like the CIA putting out a statement saying that going forward they’ll only waterboard people with dignity and respect.”

Pentagon’s Secret Service Trawls Social Media for Mean Tweets About Generals

Daniel Boguslaw, Sam Biddle, Ken Klippenstein

- June 17, 2023

A document shows the Protective Services Battalion uses sophisticated surveillance tools that can pinpoint anyone’s location.

The FBI Is Hunting a New Domestic Terror Threat: Abortion Rights Activists

Ken Klippenstein

- June 15, 2023

After GOP pressure, FBI abortion “terrorism” investigations increased tenfold, government data shows.

Inside the Pentagon’s New “Perception Management” Office to Counter Disinformation

Ken Klippenstein

- May 17, 2023

“Perception management” came to prominence during the Reagan administration, which used the term to describe its propaganda efforts.

The Government Created a New Disinformation Office to Oversee All the Other Ones

Ken Klippenstein

- May 5, 2023

The new Foreign Malign Influence Center oversees efforts that span U.S. military, law enforcement, intelligence, and diplomatic agencies.

Pentagon Tries to Cast Bank Runs as National Security Threat

Ken Klippenstein, Daniel Boguslaw

- Apr. 3, 2023

“When our financial system is under assault, that is a national security issue,” Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner told The Intercept.

Truth Cops

Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation

Ken Klippenstein, Lee Fang

- Oct. 31, 2022

Under the guise of counterterrorism, the government is accelerating pressure on social media companies to crack down on speech the feds deem disinformation.

Sorry, I got a little carried away, but there’s 16 pages of excellent articles lambasting the Deep State and the Military-Industrial Complex. is not just a “Woke Journalist”, he’s a fucking Truth-Teller in the purest form. We must protect our Truth-Teller’s at ALL costs. Like said at Rescue the Republic:

The end game is not controlling speech. They’re already doing that. The endgame is getting us to forget we ever had anything to say.

Thank you for reading Declaration of Liberty

Jordan Lee Canter, Editor-in-Chief

Persecution of the Truth-Teller's Part III.I

Jordan Lee Canter — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 21:29:59 GMT

Recently I wrote a piece about Gary Webb and how he was driven to suicide by journalists and mainstream media pundits across the country.

Persecution of Truth-Tellers Part V.V

Jordan Lee Canter — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 22:45:58 GMT

This is part 2 of 2, of the story of the persecution of Daniel Ellsberg by the liars in the Nixon White House. The first half tells the tale of how we got here. This part tells, well read on and you’ll see. This story, I’ll say again, should be a parable of the ages in a Liberal Democracy, without it, we may have fallen to dictatorship. Every child should know of Dan. He was a beautiful soul. And should be regarded with the like of MLK, Malcolm X, Lincoln, and other heroes of the ages. If you missed part 1 catch it here.

The Leak: Execution and Immediate Aftermath

In 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg arrived at a federal court in Boston, a journalist asked if he was concerned about the prospect of going to prison for leaking a 7,000-page top-secret history of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg responded with a question of his own: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”

The decision to leak the Study was not made lightly. Ellsberg understood the risks involved, including potential imprisonment and the end of his career. Ellsberg contacted his friend, Tony Russo, who was an ex-colleague at RAND and told him about the study and what he wanted to do. And Tony leapt off the cliff with him. Tony had a friend with a Xerox machine, and they began photocopying the report in October 1969. It was a long redundant job; at one point he brought his son to help. When questioned about this he said, “If I was going away for a long time, I wanted him to know it was for doing the right thing. And I hadn’t gone crazy.”

Dan at first approached Congress with the documents, targeting Senators who had been critical of the war even when he hadn’t been but, although they may have been critical, they were afraid of being labeled “unpatriotic”.

Patricia asked me how sure I was that it was worth putting out the papers, with the likelihood of prison for me. She said, “These senators don't seem to think it's worth the risk. Why are you so sure that they're wrong about that and you're right?"
I said, “Well, I can't be sure about that. They might be right. No one can say, and I don't know, what the effect will be. The problem is, I'm the only one who's read these documents. They haven't. So, I can't go by their judgment. I have to rely on my own."
But now that we were married, the prospect of my going to prison didn't affect me alone. Patricia deserved to have a voice in that decision, and she couldn't really do that when she didn't know what was in the papers. Up till now I had deliberately kept her from reading them. I wanted her to be able to say that she hadn't known what was in them. But if she was to keep going through this with me now, she needed to have a better understanding of what it was about. The only way to get that was, for her to read some of this material even if that increased her own risk. I thought the time had come for her to read some of the studies. She agreed.

After she read, and seen the lies, and the callous language of the people who were supposed to be in charge of our country, she knew what he had to do, and told him, “You have to put these out.”

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The Press

Dan had written an article in the New York Review of Books on war crimes in Vietnam which drew the attention of Thomas Oliphant from The Boston Globe who interviewed Dan in February of 1971, where he mentioned the Pentagon Papers in passing and when the story came out the headline on Oliphant's story March 7, 1971, read: “Only 3 have READ SECRET INDOCHINA REPORT; ALL URGE SWIFT PULLOUT.” In his lead he described the secret review of the history of the war ordered by McNamara and said, "Several individuals in the government at the time read parts of it, but as far as can be determined, only three men read every word of it. Significantly, every one of them today is of the opinion that the United States should withdraw from Indochina unilaterally and swiftly. Moreover, every one of them, before deciding to leave government service…. held sensitive jobs during the formative months of the Nixon Administration." This is the first time he had mentioned the papers to a reporter.

Earlier in March of 1971, he had decided to approach Neil Sheehan, a reporter for The New York Times whom he trusted to handle the sensitive material responsibly. He’d stuck out with Fulbright and McGovern. And even they had recommended the Times. He didn’t turn them over right away, so Neil, afraid that Dan was a loose cannon and would lose the story, broke into his room, took them, got them copied and returned them like nothing happened. There’s actually a much larger story to this. I’ll include it below. Here’s Neil Sheehan’s story of how he got the papers, this story was “Not to be published until he passed away 2021.” As an agreement Neil made with the writer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/pentagon-papers-neil-sheehan.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wU0.tKqw.OIZY0jwYPEKS&smid=url-share

Just a note on the story above. It’s a great story. It’s out from behind the paywall so you don’t need a NYT subscription to read it. Neil tends to express a negative opinion about Dan. That he was “only looking out for himself” and ‘“Sooner or later, I was afraid he was going to run into a politician who’d go right to the Justice Department,” That person would get on the phone to the attorney general “and say, ‘Hey, The New York Times has got some kind of big secret study, they got it from Dan Ellsberg.” But as you’ll learn further on in the story the NYT were shut down almost immediately and Daniel Ellsberg acted. By coordinating with the Washington Post and 17 others, the story did live on. It is however entirely understandable for Neil to not want this story released until after his passing. Neil comes off as slightly bitter and a bit grumbly. And Dan spent his whole life defying the “Powers that be”. That’s who Daniel Ellsberg was. The story could be 100% true from his perception. It’s just the most negative interpretation. Which is kind of an element of the persecution that people who tell the truth face.

On June 13, 1971, after months of stalling and diversion to Dan, and a company wide effort behind the scenes, firing and hiring of company attorneys, among many other struggles, The New York Times finally published the first of the 4-part series based on the Pentagon Papers, igniting a firestorm of controversy. The public was furious, Nixon was worried, the White House would soon go into attack mode.

Kissinger Aide, Alexander Haig: Yes, sir, very significant. This goddamn New York Times exposé of the most highly classified documents of the [Vietnam] war.
President Nixon: Oh, that. I see.
Haig: That—
President Nixon: I didn’t read the story. But you mean that was leaked out of the Pentagon?
Haig: Sir, the whole study that was done for [Robert S.] McNamara and then carried on after McNamara left by [Clark M.] Clifford and the peaceniks over there. This is a devastating security breach of the greatest magnitude of anything I’ve ever seen.
President Nixon: Well, what’s being done about it, then? I mean, I didn’t— Did we know this was coming out?
Haig: No, we did not, sir.
President Nixon: Yeah.
Haig: There are just a few copies of this—
President Nixon: Well, what about the—
Haig: —12-volume report.
President Nixon: Well, what about the—let me ask you this, though: what about the—what about [Melvin R.] Laird? What’s he going to do about it? Is—
Haig: Well, I talked with him [unclear]—
President Nixon: Now, I’d just start right at the top and fire some people. I mean, whoever—whatever department it came out of, I’d fire the top guy.
Haig: Yes, sir. Well, I’m sure it came from Defense, and I’m sure it was stolen at the time of the turnover of the administration.
President Nixon: Oh, it’s two years old, then.
Haig: I’m sure it is, and they’ve been holding it for a juicy time, and I think they’ve thrown it out to affect Hatfield–McGovern; that’s my own estimate. But it’s something that—it’s a mixed bag. It’s a tough attack on [John F.] Kennedy. It shows that the genesis of the war really occurred [President Nixon acknowledges] during the ’61 period.
President Nixon: Yeah, that’s Clifford. [chuckling] Yeah, I see.
Haig: And it’s brutal on President [Lyndon] Johnson. They’re going to end up in a massive gut fight in the Democratic Party on this thing.
President Nixon: Are they?
Haig: It’s a—there’s some very—
President Nixon: But also, massive against the war.
Haig: Against the war.
President Nixon: But it’s a Pentagon study, huh?
Haig: Done by McNamara. When I came back from Vietnam, he asked me to do the military portion, and I refused because I knew what it was going to be.
President Nixon: Who in the Pentagon? I will fire the SOBs.
Haig: They are all gone now. Clifford, [Morton H.] Halperin, [Leslie H.] Gelb.
President Nixon: How did they get the classified material out?
Haig: I don’t know. It has 4,000 highly classified documents from the [Dwight D.] Eisenhower days on through the end of the Johnson administration.
President Nixon: They won’t affect Hatfield–McGovern, this sort of thing. I would like to know if there are any other people of this type around.
Haig: I would suppose not at this point, but you can’t be sure. Everybody is attacked in this thing. [Henry Cabot] Lodge [Jr.] is brutally attacked.
President Nixon: What do they say about the [Ngô Đinh] Diệm thing?
Haig: They haven’t touched on it yet, but I am sure they have it.
President Nixon: That attacks Kennedy hard. They won’t put that out, huh?
Haig: It’s the most incredible thing. All of the White House papers, [Walt W.] Rostow papers, communications with ambassadors, JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] studies.
President Nixon: We have been more careful, haven’t we? We have kept a lot from State, I know, and enough from Defense.
Haig: Your White House papers are in very good shape.
President Nixon: That’s why we don’t tell them anything.
Haig: Actually, we are clean. Let them tear themselves apart. I told [Ronald L.] Ron Ziegler to keep out of that. It will keep Vietnam in the headlines for weeks. They are going to run a series on it.
President Nixon: Are they?
Haig: Yes, they are. It was really a sabotage act to McNamara. He wanted to have all the documents pulled together and minimize the analysis. As soon as he left, the peaceniks in the Pentagon got started.
President Nixon: Mainly nonmilitary people?
Haig: Yes, but there was a military guy in the study. They tried to show covert escalation without congressional liaison. Nothing has been said about what the enemy has been doing in the meantime.
President Nixon: They only carry it up to the time we came in.
Haig: Yes, sir. Nothing of ours. I told Ron he should take the position you inherited this thing and you have been trying to wind it down.
President Nixon: Yes, and to accomplish our goal. Let’s say, “Apparently this is a fight within the Democratic Party and we are not going to get into it.”
Haig: I have people coming in to analyze the report now.
President Nixon: Do you think the Times has it all?
Haig: I think they have.
President Nixon: Can we allow this sort of thing?
Haig: No. I think this is most serious.
President Nixon: Let’s cut off the Times ourselves for doing this thing. Don’t you think so?
Haig: Yes, sir.
President Nixon: Where is Henry [A. Kissinger]? Has he gone to the West Coast?
Haig: Yes, he will call as soon as he gets there.
President Nixon: That’s all right. I don’t need to . . . when will he get back?
Haig: He will be back tomorrow.
President Nixon: I think we ought to be awful rough on the New York Times in terms of future leaks. They can’t be trusted. OK, fine, Al.

One of the bombshells of the paper that angered the public was in one paragraph they describe “70% of the focus is to ‘save face’”. When Americans with family at war, dying or being maimed or broken mentally, hear that the majority of focus is ‘Saving Face’ they were rightly furious.

The following Monday a telegram was received from John Mitchell, Attorney General for Nixon. It read, “Stop Publication Immediately! If you don’t, we’re going to take appropriate action.” The Times continued.

James Goodale, General Counsel-NYT:

What in God's name have we been fighting for in this country for 2 or 300-years, to have the right to speak, and right to publish, the right to think, against a threat by the Government, if all we’re gonna do is give it up because someone sent you a telegram.

Nixon’s comments to this:

Now listen here. Printing “Top Secret” information, I don’t care how you feel about the war, whether they’re for it or against it, you can’t and should not do it. It’s an attack on the integrity of government. And by God I’m gonna fight that son-of-a-bitchin’ paper! They don’t know what’s gonna hit em’ now.

Gotta love how Nixon taped everything so we can get actual quotes.

The following day a Federal Judge, at request of the White House, halts the NYT series on Vietnam. The first time in American history that the federal government obstructed the free press. Unfortunately, it won’t be the last.

From Secrets:

Tuesday morning the third installment appeared. Attorney General John Mitchell sent a letter to the New York Times asking it to suspend publication and to hand over its copy of the study. The Times declined, and that afternoon the Justice Department filed a demand, the first in our country's history, for an injunction in federal district court in New York. The judge granted a temporary restraining order while he considered the injunction.
For the first time since the Revolution, the presses of an American newspaper were stopped from printing a scheduled story by federal court order. The First Amendment, saying “Congress shall pass no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” had always been held above all to forbid *“prior restraint”* of newspaper or book publication by federal or state government, including courts and the executive branch. The Nixon Justice Department was making a pioneering experiment, asking federal courts to violate or ignore the Constitution or in effect to abrogate the First Amendment. It was the boldest assertion during the cold war that “national security” overrode the constitutional guarantees of the Bill of Rights.

*Prior restraint being that the government cannot, under any circumstance restrain your speech before the fact. Even if it’s something you can be prosecuted for later, such as violence or incitement or in this case state secrets. They cannot stop you before you say it.

A friend of Neil Sheehan’s, Dunn Gifford contacted Dan. In their conversation Dunn told Dan that now that the NYT was shutdown, he should give a copy to The Washington Post so that they could publish them. Rightly, he was worried that the injunction might stand, and these revelations never be published in full. Dan reaction was, “I would never do that.” He had gotten over his irritation with the Times for putting him off and taking the documents without him knowing. He was so happy with how good of a job they did with the story. He felt Neil or the Times might win a Pulitzer Prize for this, and he wouldn’t want to undercut them by going to the Post.

Gifford pointed out that what was at stake here was much larger than how much credit the Times or Neil got. He believed it was essential to keep the momentum going, to maintain a continuity of public interest in the contents of the papers. Who knew how long it would be before the Times could resume publication? We couldn't even be sure that the injunction would be denied! This could be the end of the revelations—unless other newspapers were prepared to pick up the torch, in defiance of the Justice Department and the administration.
Thanks to administration's decision to treat the publication as a national crisis, and justifying unprecedented efforts to censor the press, the contents of the Pentagon Papers were getting amazing attention. Newspaper readers had to assume that the history the executive branch was so anxious to suppress was unusually worth their reading. I had always believed that the full impact of this story depended on the full sweep of the history being available. It wasn't any one page or volume or individual revelation that was so dramatic, it was the tenacity and nature of the patterns of deceit and recklessness and cynicism that were ultimately stunning. For that to register on any one reader or the country as a whole, much more had to come out.
The first three installments in the Times had dealt with the Johnson administration, but a teaser in Tuesday's paper had indicated that the next installment would focus on Eisenhower. I didn't want the history course to be short-circuited just there. The more I thought about it, the more Gifford's proposal appealed to me.

Ellsberg contacted Ben Bagdikian, Editor at The Washington Post. When he talks to Ben, he tells him:

Dan: If I get you the Pentagon Papers, will you print them?
Ben: You damn right I’ll print them.
Ben got the go-ahead from his managing editor, Ben Bradlee, who added, when Bagdikian called him from the airport, that if he got the goods and they weren't in the next day's newspaper, the Washington Post would have a new executive editor. Bagdikian checked into his Boston motel under the name Medford and, as he told me later, was dismayed when the clerk said he had a message for a Mr. Bagdikian, who was expected about the same time from Washington. Did that have anything to do with him? Apparently I had forgotten the cover name; I didn't have my friend's instincts. Ben identified himself, saying that he wrote under the name Medford. As he got to his room, he got a call from me to go to a Cambridge address to pick up the material and to tell the clerk to let some friends into his room while he was out.
When he came back in a taxi with one of two identical cardboard boxes he'd been shown in a Cambridge cellar, he found Patricia and me waiting for him in his motel room. I had meant for him to bring the second box as well; I had to call Cambridge, and before long someone delivered it to his room. Meanwhile we had been going through the first messy box of papers. It had nearly a full set of volumes, but they were out of sequence, and because of our several stages of “declassifying” with cardboard strips, scissors, and paper cutter, there were very few page numbers. Most of the numbers had coincided with a top secret marking that we'd removed. The second box, when it arrived, had the same contents. It reflected a condition I wanted to make on giving the material to him, which at first Bagdikian was very reluctant to accept. I wanted him to give the second box to Mike Gravel if the senator from Alaska was willing to use them. Ben's sense of professionalism conflicted with his acting as any kind of intermediary to Congress. As a layman I wasn't very sympathetic about that problem, under the unusual circumstances.

There was a vote happening in Congress for a new “Draft” and Dan knew Senator Mike Gravel was planning on filibustering the draft vote and Dan had contacted him and asked if he would like to use the Pentagon Papers as material to read into the record on the floor for the filibuster.

The Post picked up where the Times left off. With the installment on Eisenhower. They received an injunction the following day from Nixon’s Attorney General.

Dan would need other newspapers to join in or this could be as far as this story makes it.

At this point is when Patricia and Dan see their apartment on the Evening News. FBI agents knocking on the door. Neighbors asking “What’s going on?" “We’re looking for Daniel Ellsberg for questioning about the leak of the Pentagon Papers.” They can no longer go back home.

They get a hotel for a few days under false names. Dan didn’t want to be arrested before the story got out. They didn’t have as much as a toothbrush with them. Everyday following this they changed motels and changed names. This is how you would hide in the 70’s. Don’t use your real name and don’t go home. There was also allies in the Anti-war movement that helped put them up many nights.

Watching the news on the morning of Thursday, June 17, we soon learned why the FBI had chosen that day to call on our apartment. Late the night before, while we were working away in the motel trying to put the papers in some sequence, a journalist named Sidney Zion appea2red on the Barry Gray talk show in New York and announced that I was the source for the Times of the Pentagon Papers.

The legal battle that ensued was swift and intense. The case, New York Times Co. v. United States was heading to the Supreme Court, The Post was enjoined almost immediately, meanwhile the Pentagon Papers would continue being published in a different paper every couple days. Dan was committed to continuing the story to make a difference in the war, that was currently still escalating, and the news media was dedicated to upholding freedom of the press, guaranteed by the Constitution, and detrimental to holding power to account. These small newspapers had to see, if they can do it to the NYT and The Washington Post, they could do it to us.

For thirteen days we were subject to what was described in the press as “the largest FBI manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping.” FBI agents were reported interviewing people in so many parts of the world that I began to suspect that some were abusing the opportunity to take junkets. We were in Cambridge the whole time, in five different locations, moving sometimes after one night. The arrangements were made by several key friends, who drew on their own friends among graduate students and others in the neighborhood. It's notable that all these people cooperated in the face of widespread publicity that the FBI was hunting for me. In theory, they just wanted to question me, but it was clear that at any moment a warrant could be issued for my arrest, and our hosts could have been indicted for harboring a fugitive. It was a time in our country's history when you could reach out to almost any young person and say, “I’m doing an action against the war. It may help, it may be important, but it could be dangerous for you. Can you help?” One friend told us later that she simply called acquaintances from antiwar rallies and other activities and told them, “I need your apartment for a few days. We'll take good care of it. Please don't ask me any questions.” No one asked, and no one turned her down. To this day I've never known their names.
On one occasion, “Mr. Boston” went downstairs and across the street to a phone booth on the corner, about fifty yards from the apartment building where we were staying that afternoon. He talked for about ten minutes to my friend Lloyd Shearer in Los Angeles, relaying some questions I had for Shearer, who was giving me advice on whom to deal with in the media. We happened to be looking out the front window when he left the booth and came back. Just as he entered the front door, perhaps twelve minutes from the time he placed the call, four police cars converged on the phone booth from two directions. Brakes screeched, and police jumped out with guns drawn, though the booth was now empty. Evidently Shearer's line was tapped. We all dropped to the bare floor below the level of the windows, which had no curtains, as the police began looking up and down the street. When they left, we arranged to spend the night somewhere else.

Dan’s unnamed ally “Mr. Boston” was pivotal in the distribution of the stories to the other small papers. This next section describes that.

The Press Strikes Back

Our friend "Mr. Boston" turned out to be very talented at clandestine operations. When he had first contacted Ben Bagdikian for me, some of his arrangements for communicating or passing on the documents struck some editors as being more elaborate than necessary, but they worked. The FBI wasn't able to intercept one transfer, as parts of the papers turned up in one spot after another across the country. It was also his idea to parcel out subsequent portions to one paper at a time. He recalls that my own first inclination, after the second injunction, was to dump the rest of it out to a number of papers at once, to make sure it all got out before I was stopped. He quickly persuaded me, from his own earlier experience working for a member of Congress, that it would be better to keep the story going by approaching one at a time, which he undertook to arrange. He deferred to me to pick the next outlet each day, and he made the contact and arranged the handover.
What made all this somewhat easier was that no one had to do a lot of negotiating to get a newspaper to agree. Nearly every major paper wanted to get in on the action — impressively, given the unprecedented legal actions and evident fury of the administration — and not one we approached turned down the opportunity. After the Washington Post was enjoined, the Boston Globe was an obvious choice for the next recipient, not so much because it was our local paper as because it had been one of the first and strongest to oppose the war. That was also true of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which I thought had earned the right to invite an injunction. (It received one, along with the Globe.) As Sanford Ungar has noted, it may be a coincidence that the only four newspapers that were enjoined, out of twenty that printed sections of the papers, were all strong critics of the Nixon administration and skeptical about the war. Others I picked on more idiosyncratic grounds. The L.A. Times, which I thought had also done good reporting on the war, was my former hometown newspaper; the Knight chain of eleven newspapers included my father’s town of Detroit; and the Christian Science Monitor was my father’s main paper (he sent me subscriptions to it for many years).

To stop the war over seas, Dan was casting “His whole vote”, his entire influence. For this the White House was doing all they could to stop the dissemination of the Pentagon Papers. They were doing their best to suppress the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press. For this, the press went to war, with the help of Daniel Ellsberg, against the Nixon White House, to uphold the press freedom guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. There was a war being fought, at home and abroad. Foreign and Domestic. But behind the scenes there was, what one might call, a dirty war, being mulled over just out of sight. More on that very soon.

Besides the papers that were releasing stories directly from the documents, this, the whole story was taking up front pages everywhere, nightly news, morning news. It had garnered more attention than Dan ever expected.

To recap: So far, we have an Ex-Pentagon-Analyst-Turned-Anti-War-Activist with a 7,000-page, Government-funded study exposing the Official Lies of four-White House Administrations being released to the biggest newspapers in America, and in the biggest violation of the Constitution by press censorship in the history of the United States, the White House is using the courts to stop publishing of these Pentagon Papers, as they are now known, and launched a nationwide manhunt of Daniel Ellsberg and comically declaring him “The Most Dangerous Man in America.” This was being cel, Dan chose CBS. Hoping for Walter Cronkite to be the interviewer, he was. How poetically perfect, Walter Cronkite vs Daniel Ellsberg, The Most Trusted man in America meets The Most Dangerous man in America. Here’s this passage from the book:

In the late afternoon of June 23, Cronkite and his crew arrived at a large house in Cambridge, where I was waiting for him. Parts of the interview were shown on the early evening news, with a late, half-hour version from ten-thirty to eleven that same night. In the body of the interview, I had an opportunity to present at some length to a prime-time national audience an understanding of Nixon's secret strategy and how it resembled what I had done in the Pentagon in 1964.
Some of the passages, including the opening and end of the program:
Cronkite [opening]: During the controversy, a single name has been mentioned most prominently as the possible source of the Times documents. Daniel Ellsberg, a former State Department and Pentagon planner, and of late something of a phantom figure, agreed today to be interviewed at a secret location, but he refused to discuss his role, if any, in the release of the documents. I asked him what he considers the most important revelations to date from the Pentagon documents.
Ellsberg: I think the lesson is that the people of this country can't afford to let the President run the country by himself, even foreign affairs, any more than domestic affairs, without the help of the Congress, without the help of the public....
Cronkite: Isn't this correcting of this problem of public information more in the character of the leaders in Washington than it is in anything that can be legislated?...
Ellsberg: I would disagree with that. It seems to me that the “leaders”—by whom, I think, you're referring to the executive officials, the Executive Branch of government—have fostered an impression that I think the rest of us have been too willing to accept over the last generation, and that is that the Executive Branch is the government, and that indeed they are leaders in a sense that may not be entirely healthy, if we're to still think of ourselves as a democracy. I was struck, in fact, by President Johnson's reaction to these revelations as “close to treason,” because it reflected to me this sense that what was damaging to the reputation of a particular administration, a particular individual, was in effect treason, which is very close to saying “I am the state.” And I think that quite sincerely many Presidents, not only Lyndon Johnson, have come to feel that. What these studies tell me is we must remember this is a self-governing country. We are the government. And in terms of institutions, the Constitution provides for separation of powers, for Congress, for the courts, informally for the press, protected by the First Amendment.... I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions....
Cronkite: How was [this study] kept a secret from the White House?
Ellsberg: The fact is that secrets can be held by men in the government whose careers have been spent learning how to keep their mouths shut. I was one of those.
Cronkite: The documentation being somewhat incomplete, “flawed history” is what some have said of it.
Ellsberg: It's a start. It's a beginning toward history. I would say it's an essential beginning, but it's only a beginning.... In the seven thousand pages of this study, I don't think there is a line in them that contains an estimate of the likely impact of our policy on the overall casualties among the Vietnamese or the refugees to be caused, the effects of defoliation in a n ecological sense. There's neither an estimate nor a calculation of past effects, ever. And the documents simply reflect the internal concerns of our officials. That says nothing more nor less than that our officials never did concern themselves with the effect of our policies on the Vietnamese.
Cronkite: How would you describe the men who do not have the same emotional reaction to reading this, to knowing these, being privy to these secrets, as you? Are they cold? Are they heartless? Are they villainous?
Ellsberg: The usual assumption, of course, the usual description of them is that they are among the most decent and respectable and responsible men that our society has to offer. It's a very plausible judgment, in terms of their background. And yet, having read the history, and I think others will join this, I can't help but feel that their decency, their humane feelings, are to be judged in part by the decisions they brought themselves to make, the reasons for which they did them, and the consequences. I'm not going to judge them. The evidence is here.
I'm sure this story is more painful for many people at this moment than for me, because of course it is familiar to me, having read it several times, but it must be painful for the American people now to read these papers—and there's a lot more to come—and to discover that the men to whom they gave so much respect and trust, as well as power, regarded them as contemptuously as they regarded our Vietnamese allies.
Cronkite: What about the immediate effect [of these revelations] on the war as of these days in June 1971?
Ellsberg: Yes, the war is going on. ... I hope the Senate will go much further. I hope that they discover that their responsibilities to their citizens, the citizens of this country and to the voters, do go beyond getting reelected, and that they're men, they're free men who can accept the responsibility of ending this war. My father had a favorite line from the Bible, which I used to hear a great deal when I was a kid: “The truth shall make you free.” And I hope that the truth that's out now—it's out in the press, it's out in homes, where it should be, where voters can discuss it—it's out of the safes, and there is no way, no way to get it back into the safes—I hope that truth will free us of this war. I hope that we will put this war behind us...in such a way that the history of the next 20 years will read nothing like the history of the last 20 years.

Friday, June 25th, U.S. Magistrate Venetta S. Tassopoulos, with the help of a couple unimportant informants, issued a warrant for the arrest of Daniel Ellsberg. He was contacted by his attorney Charlie Nesson with the bad news. He asked that Dan surrender immediately. Dan told him, “I can't do that. I still have some more copies of the papers to distribute.”

Charlie: If you don't turn yourself in, you'll be a fugitive.
Dan: Too bad. I'm not finished.
Charlie chewed that over and left to confer with Boudin.
Charlie: How long will it take you to get rid of the rest of the papers
Dan: A couple of days.
They called the Justice Department and tried out the idea, after checking it with me, that I would turn myself in immediately if Justice would guarantee that I would be released without bail over the weekend. As we expected, they did not get very far. Charlie called me back,
Charlie: When can you come in?
Dan: Monday morning.
Charlie called the U.S. attorney in Boston and told him that I would be surrendering on Monday morning, not till then.
The attorney said, ‘You know he can't do that.’
Charlie said, ‘Well, that's what he's going to do.’
There was a pause. The U.S. attorney said, ‘Oh, well, the FBI couldn't find him by then anyway.’
Charlie said to him, ‘You know, you're talking over a tapped line.’ That was the assumption my lawyers were going on, though they didn't actually know it.
‘You're kidding.’
‘No.’
The Justice Department official said, ‘Oh, God,’ and hung up.
Charlie relayed all this to me and said, ‘You've got two days.’

Dan managed to get the last of the papers out, to Newsday and the Christian Science Monitor, the last two on the list, by Sunday night. The next morning, Attorney Charlie Nesson showed up to accompany Dan and Patricia to his arraignment that morning in Federal court. They’d heard the FBI was desperate to pick him up somehow before court so as to seem like a flight risk. Also, you can imagine they were very embarrassed. Not sure how it was back then but today, if you run like that, make them look bad like that, they’ll take any chance they can to fuck you up. And there is no better way to appear in court than on your own, in your own clothes, on your own terms.

So, this is where we come to that famous moment in front of the courthouse, speaking to the press. If the FBI was still planning on arresting him before court, they didn’t stand a chance. He was completely blocked in by press and supporters there to show solidarity.

Dan: I did this clearly, at my own jeopardy, and I am prepared to answer to all consequences of these decisions.
Reporter: Dr. Ellsberg, do you have any concern for the possibility of going to prison for this?
Dan: Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?

Dan was released later that day on his Own Recognizance. This was June 28th, 1971.

Nixon’s War, “The calls coming from inside…

Something I should address now. The famous story of the “Watergate Scandal” has recently received some discrediting. I haven’t dug into it extensively so I’m not sure which parts have turned out to be untrue. A few facts I have learned on this, it is true that Bob Woodward was a ‘Naval Intelligence Officer’ a year earlier and worked in the White House for the Nixon Administration before being assigned the White House beat, a prestigious position in the Journalism world, as a ‘Rookie Journalist’ for the “Washington Post”. And was given the BIGGEST story in journalism out of nowhere. According to some ‘Veteran Journalists’ this doesn’t happen. Another fact, Carl Bernstein, his partner on the story covered the bombshell exposé on “Project Mockingbird” and the CIA’s control of the media in Rolling Stone. Woodward’s source, the famous “Deep Throat” was high up in the FBI. All the plumbers except one were CIA employees, former and current. And my god, his books, they sure sound like the writing of a White House employee, not an adversarial journalist. That part is just how I feel, it doesn’t change this story one little bit. The war on the free press, Daniel Ellsberg, and the persecution of truth-tellers was alive and well and carried out by Richard Nixon.

H. R. Haldeman to President Nixon, Oval Office tapes, June 14, 1971, on the impact of the Pentagon Papers:
To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong.

Nixon had many conversations behind the scenes about Daniel Ellsberg, the Times and the Pentagon Papers. At the beginning he found it almost humorous and thought it would help his team by seeming like the administrations before him did a bad job and that his administration was, in turn, doing a good job. It didn’t take long for his famous paranoia to take over and become convinced that his administrations war plans would be the next to come out. The following is conversations Nixon had with various officials of his administration from the release of the Pentagon Papers to Fielding Break-in, and puts a nice bow on the conclusion to this story:

Nixon: Well, that’s—Haig was very disturbed by that New York Times thing. I thought that—
Kissinger: Well, Mr. President, I think—
Nixon: Unconscionable damn thing for them to do.
Kissinger: It is unconscionable [unclear]—
Nixon: Of course, it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s unconscionable on the part of the people that leaked it. Fortunately, it didn’t come out on our administration. [Kissinger attempts to interject.] That appar—according to Haig, it’s all relates to the two previous administrations. Is that correct?
Kissinger: That is right.
Nixon: But I hope [Kissinger attempts to interject] the—but I—my point is if—are any of the people there who participated in this thing, who—in leaking it? That’s my point. Do we know?
Kissinger: In public opinion, it actually, if anything, will help us a little bit, because this is a gold mine of showing how the previous administration got us in there.
Nixon: I didn’t read the thing. Tell—give me your view on that in a word.
Kissinger: Oh, well, it just shows massive mismanagement of how we got there. And it pins it all on Kennedy and Johnson.
Nixon: [laughing] Yeah.
Kissinger: And McNamara. So from that point of view, it helps us. From the point of view of the relations with Hanoi, it hurts a little, because it just shows a further weakening of resolve.
Nixon: Yeah.
Kissinger: And a further big issue.
Nixon: I suppose the Times ran it to try to affect the debate this week or something.
Kissinger: Oh, yes. No question about it.
Nixon: Well, it—I don’t think it’s going to have that kind of effect.
Kissinger: No. No, because it’s—in a way, it shows . . . what they’ve tried to do—I think they outsmarted themselves, because they had put themselves—they had sort of tried to make it “Nixon’s War,” and what this massively proves is that, if it’s anybody’s war, it’s Kennedy’s and Johnson’s.
Nixon: Yeah.
Kissinger: So that these Democrats now bleating about where it went wrong—
Nixon: Yeah.
Kissinger: —or what we’re doing wrong, this graphically [chuckles] shows that—who’s responsible for the basic mess.
Nixon: Yeah.
Kissinger: So I don’t think it’s having the effect that they intend.
Nixon: Well, you know . . . it’s—it may not have the effect they intend. The thing, though, that, Henry, that to me is just unconscionable, this is treasonable action on the part of the bastards that put it out!
Kissinger: Exactly, Mr. President.
Nixon: Doesn’t it involve secure information, a lot of other things? [Kissinger attempts to interject.] What kind of people would do such things?
Kissinger: It has the most—it has the highest classifications, Mr. President.
Nixon: Yeah. Yeah.
Kissinger: It’s treasonable. There’s no question it’s actionable. I’m absolutely certain that this violates all sorts of security laws.
Nixon: What do we do about it? Don’t we ask for an—
Kissinger: I think I should talk to Mitchell.
Nixon: No, I think you should. You tell Mitchell that—
Kissinger: And this is not—an occasional leak is bad enough. But this is everything the Defense Department possessed.
Nixon: Yeah. Let me ask this: call Mitchell. I think you should talk to Mitchell and ask him about his just calling this—getting this fellow in on the purpose of . . . this was a security leak, and we want to know what does he have, did he do it.
Kissinger: Right.
Nixon: And put him under oath.
Kissinger: That’s right. I think we ought to do that. I think we ought to wait till after—
Nixon: Another thing to do would be to have a congressional committee call him in.
Kissinger: I think we ought to do it after Wednesday, Mr. President.
Nixon: A congressional committee could call him in, put him under oath, you know, and then he’s guilty of perjury if he lies.
Kissinger: But I think we ought to wait till after the vote before they get it all confused.
Nixon: Oh, I agree. Well, you couldn’t do it before then anyway, but, you know that—to get it all set up.
Kissinger: Because of the investigation.
Nixon: ‘Cause you’ve got to have the questions and the investigations and know what it is, but—well, we’re not going to get disturbed. These things happen, you know. Clifford pops off and this guy pops off. I would think it would infuriate Johnson, wouldn’t you?
Kissinger: Oh, God. Basically, it doesn’t hurt us domestically. I think—I’m no expert on that—but no one reading this can then say that this president got us into trouble. I mean, this is an indictment of the previous administration. It hurts us with Hanoi because it just shows how far our demoralization has gone.
Nixon: Good God.
Kissinger: But basically, I think they—the decision they have to make is, do they want to settle with you? They know damn well that you’re the one who’s held firm and no matter how much anyone else is demoralized, doesn’t make any difference.
Nixon: Yeah. Right. Right. Well, you’ll find things out there pleasant enough.
Nixon: Well, that’s a long trip for you, but I wouldn’t—that’s—and don’t worry about this Times thing. I just think we got to expect that kind of crap, and we just plow ahead, plow ahead.
Kissinger: Well, Mr. President, [President Nixon attempts to interject] if we succeed in two out of three, as you said [Nixon acknowledges throughout] this summer then this will look like picnic.
Nixon: If we can—[Chuckles.] But, boy, you’re right about one thing: if anything was needed to underline what we talked about Friday—or Saturday morning, about . . . about really . . . really cleaning house when we have the opportunity, by God, this underlines it.
Kissinger: Oh, yes.
Nixon: And people have got to be put to the torch for this sort of thing. This is terrible………
. . . . . . .
Nixon: We do. We do. We do. Well, anyway, I’ll tell you what: on the Mitchell thing, I’d just have them—have him examine what the options are.
Nixon: And the Times will justify it on the basis that it serves the national interest. Is that right?
Kissinger: Of course.
Nixon: My God! My God, you know, can you imagine the New York Times doing a thing like this ten years ago? Even ten years ago?
Kissinger: Mr. President, if—and then when [Joseph R.] McCarthy accused them of treason, they were screaming bloody murder! This is treason!
Nixon: That’s right. No, whatever they may think of the policy, it is treasonable to take this stuff out and—
Kissinger: That’s right. Oh, it’s one thing to—
Nixon: It serves the enemy.
Kissinger: It’s another thing to print ten pages of top secret documents that are only about two or three years old. Well, they have nothing from our administration, so actually, I’ve read this stuff. We come out pretty well in it.
President Nixon: [Chuckles.] Well, somebody over there got the stuff that we got, although we—I asked Haig about that, and he says, “Well, look, our file—as far as the White House is concerned, we’re pretty damn secure.” On the other hand, of course, naturally, whenever I’ve had to call [William P.] Rogers and [Melvin R.] Mel [Laird] in on some of these, on Laos and Cambodia, you can be sure all that’s in some file.
Kissinger: But, Mr. President, all the big things you’ve done in the White House, and—those files will leave with you.
President Nixon: Yeah. That’s right.
Kissinger: Go to the Nixon Library—
President Nixon: But what I meant, though—that’s true of the files. But I mean, these guys, of course, will have made in their own records—they’ll indicate what I’ve ordered, you know.
Kissinger: Oh, they indicate what you ordered, but they weren’t in on the reasoning.
President Nixon: Yeah. Well, let’s not worry about that.

June 15th, 1971 @ 10:39am 2-days later

Henry talks out of both sides of his mouth to convince Nixon that his NSC cabinet would never let something like this happen, but also that he should go hard on it, so it doesn’t happen to him again.

Kissinger: Well, we keep our files separately, Mr. President—
President Nixon: I know. I know.
Kissinger: They’d have to get them [unclear]—
. . . . . . . .
Kissinger: Yeah, but we don’t do business quite that way. We keep most of the files—
Nixon: I know you do, Henry, but you know, I’ve had these people in on Laos [Kissinger acknowledges] and we had the discussion—
Kissinger: [speaking over President Nixon] Oh, yeah, they have their memos.
President Nixon: —and Rogers, you know goddamn he dictated a memorandum.
Kissinger: Yeah.
Nixon: So it’s in their files. That’s what I’m [unclear].
Kissinger: Yeah.
President Nixon: Well, anyway. It’ll be their files that [unclear] they use [unclear].
Kissinger: But that they won’t—I don’t think any Cabinet member will leak his [President Nixon attempts to interject] personal file. Now, afterwards they may do it, but not in a campaign.

Same day, 5:13pm, Olof Palme causes an uproar, calling for the US to pull out of Vietnam.

Henry A. Kissinger: The Swedish prime minister [Olof Palme] has popped off, too. We’ve just got a press ticker. I talked to Bill [Rogers] about it.
President Nixon: The Swedish prime minister?
Kissinger: He said that this proves that it was a war prepared by deceit, that the American government has undermined democracy, and it must withdraw unconditionally from Vietnam. I told Bill we have to call our ambassador back, and he’s going to make a recommendation something to that effect tomorrow morning.
Nixon: But, you know, now, isn’t that a hell of a damn thing?
Kissinger: Yeah.
Nixon: “It proves the war—" But also it shows that that’s part of the conspiracy, in my opinion.
Kissinger: Oh, yeah.
Nixon: He wouldn’t otherwise pay any attention to it. Somebody got to him. Henry, there is a conspiracy. You understand?
Kissinger: I believe it now. I didn’t believe it formerly, but I believe it now.
Nixon: No doubt there is. The fellow who has leaked the papers, whether it’s Leslie Gelb or the RAND Corporation guy, he’s in a conspiracy. Neil Sheehan’s a bastard. I’ve known him for years.

You can truly feel the tension and the paranoia flaring up, this has gone from something to laugh at his predecessors about, to damn near, going to war over. Their claiming a “conspiracy”. Which by all definitions of the word, there is.

June 17th, 1971, 4pm, read along as they consider blackmailing Lyndon B. Johnson for what was contained on him in the Papers.

Haldeman: The—you can maybe blackmail [Lyndon B.] Johnson on this stuff.
Nixon: What?
Haldeman: You could blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing.
Nixon: How?
Haldeman: The bombing halt stuff is all in the same file. Or in some of the same hands.
… … … … … … … … …
President Nixon: To blackmail him.
Haldeman: The bombing halt—
President Nixon: Because he used the bombing halt for political purposes.
Haldeman: The bombing halt file would really kill Johnson.
Kissinger: Why do you think that? I mean, I didn’t see the whole file, but . . .
Haldeman: On the timing and strategy of how he pulled that?
Kissinger: I—
Nixon: I think it would hurt him.

Three-and-a-half hours later.

Same day, 7:39pm,

President Nixon: Hello, Henry. I think it’s important that you give [Walt W.] Rostow a call. Let me tell you the problem. He’s advising Johnson against doing a press thing. I think John—they’ve got to be told very directly that tomorrow I’ll have 200 press in Rochester, that I am prepared and I intend to defend Johnson on this whole thing, but that I can’t do it unless he’s prepared to defend himself. And that—what they’re trying to do, Henry, is just to let us take the heat on this thing. None of their people are speaking up. Now, you call him and you tell him that I think that—
Kissinger: I think he’s in Newport right now.
Nixon: I don’t care where he is. Call him and tell—who is? Johnson?
Kissinger: No, Rostow.
Nixon: Yeah. You call Rostow. He ought to get ahold of Johnson. He’s advising Johnson against this. Johnson ought to have a press conference. Now, we need it for reasons that you are, I’m sure, quite aware of.
Kissinger: Well, I’m aware of it, Mr. President. But I talked to Bill Jorden and Tom Johnson yesterday on the same topic.
Nixon: Yeah.
Kissinger: And I just don’t think the information is quite so correct. But I’ll call Rostow this minute……

…..Nixon wants Kissinger to contact LBJ’s camp and get LBJ to have a press conference admitting guilt for flubbing the whole Vietnam war. This way it will take the blame off of the Nixon Administration, Ya know, before the Nixon Administration gets the blame……

President Nixon: Well, you ought to tell Rostow this: That unless he has a press conference, I’m not prepared to defend him. Now, just as cold as that. They’ve just got to know. I’m not going to defend him. Why should I?
Kissinger: Well . . . I don’t think you should defend Johnson, anyway. I think you should defend the presidency. I don’t think you should get into the issue—
…….
President Nixon: Yeah. On the other hand, it amounts to a defense of Johnson, you know, when you really get down to it. They say, “I don’t think this is proper, you know, to put one side of the case out rather—and not of the whole case and that sort of thing.” That’s defending Johnson…………………..
Kissinger: Well, I’m not so sure—Mr. President, I will call Rostow about the press conference thing, but I think you should concentrate on this—on the theft of documents and on the unconscionable way of attacking somebody without giving him any chance of rebuttal, explaining where the documents came from and so forth. That, I think, is unanswerable. When we say “out of context,” then they’ll say, “Well, why don’t you supply the context?”
………………………………………….
President Nixon: Because Johnson should go to the mat on this. He really should. He’s—
Kissinger: Right.
President Nixon: He should speak up. Don’t you think so?
Kissinger: Well—
President Nixon: Not for his interest, but for ours.
Kissinger: I’m not so sure. Frankly, I think they’re also eager to . . . well, it would certainly get a tremendous brawl started between Johnson and the press.
President Nixon: That’s right, and it’d get off of us. You see what I mean?
Kissinger: Well, it would get it off us on the immediate problem, but it would also drag the whole issue down to the level of “was Johnson guilty or not?”
President Nixon: That’s a hell of a lot better than having whether I was guilty or not, Henry. That’s my point. We’ve got to get the—
Kissinger: Well, I believe—I honestly believe that this episode can be turned into an asset if we go on the offensive and say that these people are deliberately undermining confidence in government and that that’s what it’s all about. That what you’re resisting is the flouting of laws and the principle that the end justifies the means, and the so-called higher morality. I simply don’t find this—I just had Jerry Schecter in here from Time. Now, I know they never write it the way they talk.
President Nixon: Yeah, [chuckles] that’s for sure.
Kissinger: I immediately go on the attack. I always—I said, “Now, I just don’t understand how you people can even—" He began by saying, “How do we know you people aren’t doing the same thing?” And I said, “Don’t you give me that language.” I said, “How do I know you’re not stealing papers all over the place?” And they don’t feel at all confident of themselves. I have yet to meet a newsman who really is sticking to the Times for anything other than guild loyalty. But I may not see a representative sample.

Nixon is tripping. He’s ready to direct any blame there is, drop everything on President Johnson, instead of himself, before anything has even come out against the Nixon Administration. Kissinger is a Fucking Evil Genius! He’s ten steps ahead of everyone including the president. In that exchange, Nixon sees an immediate quick fix, but Kissinger is looking at the long game. He believes he can turn the public against the media by going on the offense and accusing them of being traitors. Hmmmm…. who does that remind you of?…………. Also, in that exchange, you can feel Nixon’s irrationality leaking out. And it gets worse from there.

June 29th, 1971, Dan was arraigned the previous day. They felt like they needed to come down hard on this to keep it from happening again. They could see that he was gaining a lot of support from the public and the harder they come down on him the bigger hero he becomes. They decide it would be much easier to discredit the guy.

Colson: Yeah, from the Left [Nixon says something at the same time that is not clear]. Yup. And the, uh, argument is well he’s- he’s made a hero of himself and, uh, the harder we hit him the more we build him up but, uh, the way I size the fellow up is that building him up doesn’t-doesn’t help the other side because he’s not an uh…
He’s not an appealing personality. He’s a damn good guy to be against.
Now we’ve had all sorts of reports as you know of his tie in with other people. I think an awful lot of this’ll fall out. Jay Lovestone called me today to say that “we haven’t even scratched the surface” he said “this fellow’s really tied in with some bad [unclear-“actors”?].” And of course, he-

Nixon: If you get him tied in some with Communist groups, that would be good.

Colson: Well Jay thinks, Jay thinks he is, but of course that’s-

Nixon: That’s my guess, that he’s in with some subversives you know.

Colson: Well you know Jay Lovestone has an interesting intelligence network, as you know.

June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court delivered a landmark 6-3 decision in favor of the newspaper, affirming the right of the press to publish the Pentagon Papers without the risk of government censorship or punishment. This decision, set a precedent which still stands today. It was the most important moment in American History for Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press. At this time, all printing of The Pentagon Papers resumes……***Sigh of Relief***

But not for Dan. He battles on.

Nixon asks Attorney General Mitchell, “Don't you agree that we have to pursue the Ellsberg case now?"
Mitchell: No question about it.... This is the one sanction we have, is to get at the individuals. . . .
Nixon: . . . Let's get the son-of-a-bitch into jail.
Kissinger: We've got to get him.
President Nixon: We've got to get him. . . . Don't worry about his trial. Just get everything out. Try him in the press. Try him in the press. Everything, John, that there is on the investigation, get it out, leak it out. We want to destroy him in the press. Press. Is that clear?
Kissinger and Mitchell: Yes.

July 1st, 1971, Nixon loses his shit. It’s decided Ellsberg isn’t to be dealt with in the courts until after the election, it’s time to smear him “in the press”.

Nixon: The difficulty is that all the good lawyers around here . . . they're always saying, well, we've got to win the court case through the court. We're through with this sort of court case. It's our position — I don't want that fellow Ellsberg to be brought up until after the election. I mean, just let — convict the son of a bitch in the press. That's the way it's done...

So how does one handle it in the press, first you need a “press” but if you’re the president, there’s entire publications at your disposal. First problem solved. Next problem, what are you going to say? That’s an issue. You need information. Dirt. Credible, dirty, dirt. Where do you look? This guy has worked for y’all most of his life. Ahhhh….. but he’s seen a psychologist, a Dr. Fielding. But if he testifies against a patient or breaks the confidentiality agreement he’s finished. Confidentiality is a respected part of psychology's code of ethics. So, they’re not going to get info that way. Well before all this you need the people who are going to find this dirt. A crew to find leaks and fix them. Such as, a “White House Plumber”. This is how and why the “White House Plumbers” of the Watergate break-in were formed. And Watergate wasn’t their first burglary. The first was the Fielding office. It’s important to remember Dan is still fighting for his life right now.

He’s being charged with The Espionage Act of 1917, I’m sure all of my readers are familiar with that, just in case hears a link to it, it’s just life in prison for sharing, you go in front of a special court owned by the White House and there is not a chance of winning or them even hearing you out, they used it against him then and they’re using it against us now but that wasn’t enough for Nixon, after all, he’s worried about re-election, he needs the people to hate him too.

Share Declaration of Liberty

Egil Krogh, one of the leaders of the White House Plumbers team, wrote in the NYT in 2007,

In early August 1971, I attended a secret meeting in Room 16, a hideaway office in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. Huddled around the table were G. Gordon Liddy, a former F.B.I. agent; E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. agent; and David R. Young Jr., a member of the National Security Council staff. I was deputy assistant to the president.
Two months earlier, The New York Times had published the classified Pentagon Papers, which had been provided by Daniel Ellsberg. President Nixon had told me he viewed the leak as a matter of critical importance to national security. He ordered me and the others, a group that would come to be called the “plumbers,” to find out how the leak had happened and keep it from happening again.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
On Sept. 3, 1971, burglars broke into Dr. Fielding’s Beverly Hills office to photograph the files but found nothing related to Mr. Ellsberg. . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
President Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” To this day the implications of this statement are staggering.

That was our President, that was how he rationalized all of this. Also, he made the claim many times that he knew nothing about this. He knew about nothing illegal that the Plumbers might have done.

Here’s some Reporting by the Great Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize winning muckraker that still cannot be stopped, even now in 2024:

On Aug. 11, according to another memo, Mr. Ehrlichman approved a recommendation from Mr. Krogh and Mr. Young calling for “a covert operation [to] be undertaken to examine all the medical files still held by Ellsberg's psychoanalyst.”
Mr. Ehrlichman initialed his approval on the document and added the following words: “If done under your assurance that it is not traceable.” Mr. Ehrlichman told the Senate Watergate committee last summer that he assumed the operation would involve the compromising of an office nurse or someone similar. He said he had not expected a break‐in.
Last September Mr. Ehrlichman was charged with three state counts of burglary, conspiracy and perjury in Los Angeles in connection with his role in the Ellsberg break‐in. He pleaded not guilty and will face trial on Dec. 19, along with Mr. Young and Mr. Liddy, who have also pleaded not guilty to charges of burglary and conspiracy. All three may face Federal charges in connection with the still‐pending Watergate investigation here.
On Aug. 25, Mr. Hunt and Mr. Liddy managed to gain brief entrance to Dr. Fielding's office in Los Angeles under false pretenses. They took dozens of photographs of the office and surrounding area without being detected. After the successful reconnaissance, they began planning for the break‐in itself, which was scheduled to take place over the Labor Day holiday, in early September.
Reliable sources say Mr. Young has testified that he told Mr. Ehrlichman of the successful entry into Dr. Fielding's office on Aug. 27, two days after it took place. A few days Iater, the sources said, according to Mr. Young's testimony, he and Mr. Krogh discussed the break-in operation once again with Mr. Ehrlichman by telephone………………………
In addition, the sources said, Mr. Young will testify that he specifically discussed the failure of the burglary—which produced no psychiatric or other material—with Mr. Ehrlichman in a telephone call placed after Labor Day to Cape Cod, where Mr. Ehrlichman was vacationing with his family.
Testimony before the Los Angeles grand jury showed that the break‐in itself—committed the night of Sept. 3 by a three‐man Cuban American team, headed by Bernard L. Barker, two of whose members participated in the Watergate break‐in nearly a year later—was inept.
Mr. Hunt and Mr. Liddy served as lookouts during the operation, the grand jury was told, and did not enter Dr. Fielding's office during the burglary in which no material on Dr. Ellsberg was found.
At his request, Mr. Krogh will not begin his discussions with Federal officials until his sentencing — expected early next year — on the technical charge of criminal conspiracy to deny Dr. Ellsberg's civil rights, to which he has confessed. But one source said that he would testify that he “feels that everything was authorized,” before the Ellsberg burglary took place.
. . . . . . .
At one point during a grand jury appearance in Los Angeles last June, however, Mr. Ehrlichman testified that the HuntLiddy project had been discussed with President Nixon before it was approved. But Mr. Ehrlichman indicated that at no time was the discussion put in the context of a burglary.
During the California grand jury proceedings, the following colloquy between Joseph B. Busch Jr., the Los Angeles County District Attorney, and Mr. Ehrlichman took place:
Mr. Busch: “Did you approve that recommendation [from Mr. Krogh regarding the California operation]?”
Mr. Ehrlichman: “I believe the recommendation was discussed specifically with the President before it was approved.”
Mr. Busch: “By you?”
Mr. Ehrlichman: “No. I—as say, I believe he — he specifically approved it. And it's my recollection that he either discussed with—well, I know he discussed it with Mr. Hoover [the former F.B.I. director, who died in May 1972].”
The questions about Presidential involvement ended there, according to a transcript of the grand jury proceedings.

Here’s is an un-paywalled link to the NYT Hersh article. It really shows how calls from the White House claiming “Ellsberg is a Soviet spy” caused a continuous escalation in how far the “White House Plumbers” group should go to get information on Ellsberg.

The Final Countdown (emphasis my own)

Sorry, that was so long, if you’ve made it this far, I thank you and applaud you. It’s almost over.

All of these events caused a Dominoe effect leading to the full dismissal of all charges against Daniel Ellsberg.

WASHINGTON, May 24 —The Federal judge in the White House “plumbers” case ruled today that the President has no constitutional right to authorize break‐in and search without a warrant even when national security and foreign intelligence are involved.
In the ruling, Judge Gerhard A. Gesell of the United States District Court declared:
“The Fourth Amendment protects the privacy of citizens against unreasonable and unrestrained intrusion by Government officials and their agents. It is not theoretical. It lies at the heart of our free society.”
-Seymour Hersh, New York Times

The Judge in Los Angeles contacted the judge in Washington. Daniel Ellsberg was a free man. He spent the rest of his life as a peace activist, speaking and fighting for those continuing the battle. He was arrested 70 times in his career as an activist. All notches in his belt.

To discredit Ellsberg, at the approval of the White House, they used illegal wiretaps, violated the civil liberties of Dr. Lewis Fielding and the confidentiality of his office. Breaking the Fourth Amendment, Unlawful search & seizure. And the civil liberties of Daniel Ellsberg, and numerous others. The Nixon Administration received a double loss, and the American people got the win. This is now regarded as a principle of the free press to inform the people even if the information was received unlawfully, the people have a right to know. If it’s newsworthy, it’s news.

The “Pentagon Papers Principle” today is in trouble. By elites and government bureaucrats, dare I say, the Deep State, of being overturned.

Racket News

Who Helped Overturn the "Pentagon Papers Principle"? The Washington Post and New York Times

Last December, Michael Shellenberger reported in a #TwitterFiles thread that the Aspen Institute hosted a “Hack-and-Dump Working Group” exercise in the summer of 2020 titled, “Burisma Leak,” which predicted with uncanny accuracy an upcoming derogatory story in the…

3 years ago · 1417 likes · 578 comments · Matt Taibbi

The same people who benefit from having a monopoly on information want, wait for it…… A Monopoly on Information! This is the AGE of information. The gatekeepers are done, finished! These elite figures at the head of every industry are done. We can learn anything with a simple Google search. We can do anything, nothing can stop us.

If they take away our freedom of speech, they regain power. No matter what your position is, we MUST as a “Whole-of-Society” resist censorship in all its forms, especially speech you do not agree with, for the future of the human race. Declaration of ~~War~~Liberty Jordan Lee, Editor-in-Chief

When he passed away at 92, on June 16th, 2023, the world truly lost a hero. Rolling Stone published an article by Glenn Greenwald, We’re Told Never to Meet Our Childhood Heroes. Knowing Daniel Ellsberg Proved That Wrong….:

THAT YOU SHOULD never meet your heroes, as they are bound to disappoint you, has become such conventional wisdom that it requires no author to affirm it. In a 2020 satirical New Yorker article, Alex Witt attributed the proverb to the faceless “they” (“They say, ‘Never meet your heroes,’ ” adding, “It’s good advice. I’ve met all of my idols, and I’ve been disappointed by every single one”). Some internet pages attribute the quote to the British comedian Alan Carr after meeting Paul Newman, though that appears more apocryphal than reliable. It hardly matters who first said it; it just strikes one as intuitively true because the glaring, multifaceted imperfections of humans when seen up close make a heroic image unlikely to survive interpersonal scrutiny.
Daniel Ellsberg, the renowned Pentagon Papers whistleblower, single-handedly destroyed the validity of this advice for me. Ellsberg was one of my two or three top childhood heroes. Though I was only four years old in 1971, when he knowingly assumed a high probability of life in prison to inform the American people about systemic lying by the U.S. government regarding the war in Vietnam, I became engrossed by both the Pentagon Papers and Watergate dramas as I entered adolescence. Those became the formative events for my understanding of politics and journalism.

The Persecution of Truth-Tellers Ch. IV

Jordan Lee Canter — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 02:40:44 GMT

This is part 4 of an ongoing series, not sure how long I’ll carry it, maybe till ever, if I run out of persecution to talk about however, maybe the world is heading in the right direction, but as of now the number is not finite, more are being persecuted every day, as long as there are those that keep telling the truth. If you would like to read the other parts and catch up, they are here, here, and here. Thank you for your time.

“In times of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act…” -George Orwell

Orwell’s time was absolutely, a time of deceit. We live today, in a time of deceit. This generation has been, entirely, a time of deceit, as was Orwell’s or today’s subject, Chris Hedges.

To say Chris Hedges is an Activist would hold activism to such a high standard, one that activism alone could never live up to. Or that he is an Author, Storyteller, Journalist, Truth-Teller, Professor, Chris Hedges changes people’s lives for a better. He taught U.S. History following the “People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn, to New Jersey Prisoners, and taught them the truth that had been suppressed in school. He reported on the war crimes and torture of innocents by Saddam Hussein in the 80’s, and he tried to warn us of the lying deceitful war drums beating before and post-9/11, on our way into Iraq, the War currently being waged in Ukraine, Gaza, and the proxy involvement America is currently waste deep in. To this day, He is speaking out for his friend Julian Assange, as we should all be for No one is free, when others are oppressed, Chris Hedges is not any of these things, he is ALL of these things. Chris Hedges is a Revolutionary and I believe history will tell him to be, if justice exists in any capacity, the Most Revolutionary Truth-Teller to ever live, we should only wish to be as great as him. Julian Assange, as we speak is awaiting his final judgement on extradition to these murderous America’s where 3 administrations in a row has been, not just seeking his prosecution, but planning his kidnapping and assassination for the embarrassment that he subjected them to for simply committing the Crime of Journalism and Chris is there, holding event after event, speaking out for his friend. Even after being censored out of existence, He continues to rise, and tell the truth, and be that bulwark against the oppressors anywhere oppression may be. Chris has dedicated his life to the Revolutionary Act of telling the Truth that Orwell speaks of.

Chris was born September 18, 1956, I am including that to say that he shares a Birthday with my father who passed away in 2011, from rough life living and not taking care of his health, but my father with his shortcomings was the Greatest man I ever met. Must’ve been the Birthday, it seems Chris Hedges is the Greatest man I never met.

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Chris’ persecution started early, he was put on probation during his time at the boarding school Loomis-Chaffee for starting an underground newspaper which was banned, although I couldn’t find out the details of the ban, based on the rest of his career I can only imagine it was good. Damn I wish I could find that newspaper, lol.

Hedges graduated from Colgate University with a BA in English Literature and went on to receive a Master of Divinity (MDiv) from Harvard University. During his time at Harvard he lived in the depressed community of Roxbury in Boston where he ran a small church. And was a member of the YMCA Boxing Team where due the crime and economic hardship was the only place, he felt safe.

He’s written 15 books, each one revolutionary in its own, I am linking each one to the Amazon link in case you want to buy one or read about the book, you can’t pick up one of these books without learning something:

2002: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
2003: What Every Person Should Know About War
2005: Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America
2007: American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
2008: I Don't Believe in Atheists
2008: Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians, with Laila Al-Arian
2009: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
2010: Death of the Liberal Class
2010: The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
2012: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, with Joe Sacco
2015: Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt
2016: Unspeakable, with the Great David Talbot
2018: America: The Farewell Tour
2021: Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison
2022: The Greatest Evil is War
All excellent and all hated by the, shall we say, rent-seeking elites.

Chris was a scholarship student; his parents couldn’t put him through college, so he had to work hard to stand out, and stand out, he did. After receiving a BA in English Literature from Colgate, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) from Harvard University, Hedges became a Freelance Journalist. Chris talks about that time in the intro to his show The Chris Hedges Report, in an episode with Robert Cox, a fellow Journalist:

In the fall of 1980, I was a second-year student at Harvard divinity school. I intended, like my father, to become a Presbyterian Minister, but I was by nature a writer and a news junkie, who devoured at least two newspapers a day and had already published freelance articles in papers such as the Christian science Monitor. I could not, however, reconcile the Social Activism of my father who was involved in the Vietnam Anti-War Movement and the Civil Rights Movement with the supposed neutrality and objectivity demanded by American Journalism, it was then that I met Robert Cox, the former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, who was a Neiman Fellow for the year at Harvard. Bob had reported on the crimes of the dirty war in Argentina which saw some thirty-thousand Argentines “disappeared” by military death squads in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the victims were held in secret prisons, savagely tortured, and murdered. Many families to this day do not know the fate of their sons, daughters, siblings, and spouses. Bob received frequent death threats, in a climate where some 60 Argentine Journalists were also kidnapped, by the military, and “disappeared”. He fatally accepted that he too would be killed, which he said, “gave him a strange kind of comfort”, and continued to doggedly persist in making public the names of those who had disappeared, and the anguish of their families. In his example, I saw that journalism did not have to be divorced from morality, that while the truth was always paramount, and should never be twisted to serve one side or another, we have an obligation as journalists to give a voice to the vulnerable. Especially, those who are being silenced, and persecuted by the powerful.
I took a leave from Divinity School to study Spanish at the language school, run by the Marinol Society in Bolivia, and report on the heinous dictatorships in Latin America. I covered the Falkland War from Buenos Aires for NPR, and then after returning to get my degree from Harvard left for El Salvador, where I would spend the next five-years reporting on the conflicts in Central America. The last piece of Sage advice Bob gave me before I left for Bolivia, was to take with me the four-volumes of “George Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and, Letters” which became my secular bible.

Later on in that episode they talk of an incident where a Tex Harris saved Chris’ career from destruction by the powerful, applying pressure on the editors of the Christian Science Monitor:

Reagan wanted to go on selling arms to Argentina, I just have to say that Tex Harris saved my career, you probably don't know that, well I didn't know he was a man of, of course great moral probity, and courage, and uh, there was a war in the Reagan Administration against reporters, who were covering and writing, about the atrocities committed by the military in El Salvador, and they framed me, accusing me of falsifying a story, and did a pretty good job of convincing. I was writing for the Christian Science Monitor at the time, the editors that, that story was falsified and suddenly, the foreign editor got a call from a guy named Tex Harris, and he explained, who he was and, “I want to”, he said, “I want to tell you, everything your reporter wrote is true, and there, this is a campaign to crush him and stop his reporting” and it absolutely saved my career. I was a young Freelance Journalist.

Hedges continued his career as a freelance journalist in Latin America. From 1983 to 1984, he covered the conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala for The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.He was hired as the Central America Bureau Chief for The Dallas Morning News in 1984 and held this position until 1988. Noam Chomsky wrote of Hedges at the time that he was one of the "few US journalists in Central America who merit the title."

In one of his early stories for the paper he tracked down Robert Manning in the settlement of Kiryat Arba in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.Manning, linked to the militant Jewish Defense League and allegedly behind several murders including the 1985 bombing death in California of Alex Odeh, was extradited to the United States in 1991 where he is serving a life sentence for a separate bombing incident.

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In 1988, Chris took some time off to study Arabic, which from what I understand would be a difference in life and death for the coming decade for Chris. More on that soon.

Hedges was hired by The New York Times in 1990. He covered the first Gulf War for the paper, where he refused to participate in the military pool system, The Pool System is pretty crazy, the military picks what journalists are allowed in, they do the reporting, and the other Journalists report, what the selected reporters, reported, you can see how that might raise some eyebrows. Basically, the Military can pick people who will report their propaganda correctly so they can control the narrative, and anyone who disputes whether our Military would do that, need not look any farther than, Vietnam, Afghanistan, or practically every war we’ve been involved in. The officials back home think the effort is going great, based on what’s being reported back to them, when what’s really happening is the war is failing, as wars often do. He was arrested by the U.S. military and had his press credentials revoked but continued to defy the military restrictions to report outside the pool system.

Here Chris describes being kidnapped, and possibly his learning Arabic, saving his life:

In March of 1991, I was in Basra, Iraq during the Shiite uprising as a reporter for The New York Times. I had entered Kuwait with the Marine Corps and then left them behind to cover the fighting in Basra. I was taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard, who in the chaos – whole army units had defected to join the rebels – had ripped their distinguishing patches off their uniforms so as not to be identified with the regime of Saddam Hussein. I was studiously polite, because of Omar, with my interrogators. I swiftly struck up conversations with my guards. My facility in Arabic rendered me human. And when I ran out of things to say I told the long, shaggy dog jokes taught to me by Omar. Perhaps it was my accented Arabic, but my guards found these jokes unfailingly amusing.

Hedges was appointed the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief in 1991. His reporting on the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein in the Kurdish-held parts of northern Iraq saw the Iraqi leader offer a bounty for anyone who killed him, along with other western journalists and aid workers in the region. Several aid workers and journalists, including the German reporter Lissy Schmidt, were assassinated, and others were severely wounded.

In 1995, Hedges became the Balkan Bureau Chief for The New York Times reporting from the besieged city of Sarajevo. In his first book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, the book opens with a description of Sarajevo, in which Chris says:

SARAJEVO IN THE SUMMER OF 1995 CAME CLOSE TO Dante’s inner circle of hell. The city, surrounded by Serb gunners on the heights above, was subjected to hundreds of shells a day, all crashing into an area twice the size of Central Park. Ninety-millimeter tank rounds and blasts fired from huge 155-millimeter howitzers set up a deadly rhythm of detonations. Multiple Katyusha rockets—whooshing overhead—burst in rapid succession; they could take down a four- or five-story apartment building in seconds, killing or wounding everyone inside. There was no running water or electricity and little to eat; most people were subsisting on a bowl of soup a day. It was possible to enter the besieged city only by driving down a dirt track on Mount Igman, one stretch directly in the line of Serb fire. The vehicles that had failed to make it lay twisted and upended in the ravine below, at times with the charred remains of their human cargo inside.
Families lived huddled in basements, and mothers, who had to make a mad dash to the common water taps set up by the United Nations, faced an excruciating choice—whether to run through the streets with their children or leave them in a building that might be rubble when they returned.

A couple paragraphs later he describes his trajectory:

War and conflict have marked most of my adult life. I began covering insurgencies in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then went on to Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, the civil war in the Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellion in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia, and finally to Kosovo. I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian Mig–21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments. I have seen too much of violent death. I have tasted too much of my own fear. I have painful memories that lie buried and untouched most of the time. It is never easy when they surface.

That explained better in a paragraph than what i said above it, in 1,000 words.

Censorship in the U..S..A..U..S..A..U..S..A…

If you take the time to watch this, it is unbelievable and a perfect model of the world after 9/11. Chris, who by this time has been reporting on terrorism committed by Al Qaeda while stationed in Paris. Being Arabic speaking, and spending most of the 90s in the Middle East, 9/11 was no surprise, Alex Jones seen it coming from Texas, so there’s no doubt Chris could hear the war-drums beating. He spoke about it at every opportunity. Here he again, in Unspeakable:

But before all that, you’re part of the team that covers 9/11?
Yeah, I reported from cities such as Paterson, New Jersey where six of the hijackers had been living. Then I was sent to Paris to cover Al Qaeda in Europe and the Middle East.
And you’re finding out that the facts on the ground don’t go along with the emerging Bush-Cheney story line, that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.
The French government was apoplectic about the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq. It made no sense to them. They knew Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks, that its army and military was severely degraded. Iraq was not a threat to its neighbors, much less to Europe and the United States. It did not have weapons of mass destruction!

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After the incident in the video above, if you didn’t watch it, Chris spoke for 22-minutes, in which he gives a scathing take down of the current invasion that was taking place, and if you listen to his words you realize, he knows what the fuck he’s talking about. Even looking back on this moment historically, he gets it. It’s infuriating to watch, that these fucking brats should be so lucky, and what do they do? They shout him down. They chant “U S A U S A….” They were propagandized, he tried to warn them, they got him off campus so fast he didn’t have time to get his jacket. What followed was persecution, all the Right-wing outlets, and not just them, just about every media outlet at this time was war crazy, ready to kill, kill, kill. Even his own the NYT, with Judith Miller they led the invasion, with false reporting on Saddam and his underlings, “purchasing random parts to make nukes” and “Yellow Cake” which is a Uranium deposit that looks like the name and is a must in making the bombs.

After just a year before, receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Exploratory Reporting on the terrorist attacks committed post-9/11, they are now telling him he can no longer report on the war, they issued him a formal reprimand for "public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality". Hedges cited this reprimand as a motivation for resigning from the Times in 2005. People who tell the truth are not meant for the “Times” anyways, the pushing out of Chris Hedges was another notch in the bedpost of corporatism. They are corporate media, a state apparatus for, as Chomsky called it “Manufacturing Consent”. If you read about Hersh’s time there, they were afraid EVERY TIME he released a story, and were TERRIFIED to talk about Watergate until it was almost at its end. Not to mention, Michael Malice talks about this in his book “The White Pill”, when there was starvation and famine in the Soviet Union the New York Times was saying things like, RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING;……Russians and Foreign Observers In Country See No Ground for Predictions of Disaster. This was during the Holodomor, when Ukrainian children were in the streets, dying of starvation. He was quite literally, too good for them anyways. Chris says of the NYT in his book, Unspeakable:

like me now. The New York Times is primarily populated by careerists. They do journalism on the side. The careerists always get you in the end

Post-New York Times

After NYT Chris didn’t lay down, or retire. I’m sure he could have, but he was just getting started and so were they. It seems he used his perspective and wisdom, gained over the decades, Chris Hedges did what he had been doing for the last three decades. Searching for truth in a decaying world, advocating for peace and human rights, challenging the war happy ruling class. And they were not done with him yet.

Hedges has worked for a decade teaching writing classes in prisons in New Jersey through a program offered by Princeton University and later Rutgers University. A class that Hedges taught at East Jersey State Prison in 2013 went on to collaborate in the creation of a play titled Caged. Hedges has become a fierce critic of mass incarceration in the United States, and his experience as an educator in New Jersey prisons served as inspiration for his 2021 book, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison.

Hedges was active in 2011 Occupy Wall Street. He and Cornel West held a People's Hearing of Goldman Sachs that culminated with a march on Goldman Sachs where Hedges and other activists were arrested.

In 2012, after the Obama Administration signed the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, Hedges sued members of the U.S. government, asserting that section 2021 of the law unconstitutionally allowed presidential authority for indefinite detention without habeas corpus. He was later joined in the suit, Hedges v. Obama, by activists including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg. In May 2012 Judge Katherine B. Forrest of the Southern District of New York ruled that the counter-terrorism provision of the NDAA is unconstitutional. The Obama administration appealed the decision, and it was overturned. Hedges petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, but the Supreme Court denied certiorari in April 2014.

Hedges became a senior fellow at the Type Media Center and a columnist for Truthdig, where he remained until 2020.

On March 11, 2020, nine employees of Truthdig signed a statement announcing a work stoppage to protest what they described as "unfair labor conditions and the effort by the publisher, Zuade Kaufman, to remove the site's founding Editor-in-Chief and co-owner Robert Scheer". On March 27, 2020 Kaufman responded in an open letter that attributed the matter to "negotiations to end the business partnership" between her and Scheer.On March 25, 2020 Truthdig employees received emails they characterized as "Truthdig LLC was being dissolved and that our positions at the publication had been terminated". According to the full statement, 15 employees would be affected.The "Truthdig" website concomitantly posted an announcement that "Truthdig" was "going on a hiatus”.

Hedges produced a weekly column in Truthdig for 14 years. He was fired along with all of the editorial staff in March 2020. Hedges and the staff had gone on strike earlier in the month to protest the publisher's attempt to fire the Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer, demand an end to a series of unfair labor practices and the right to form a union.Hedges resumed work with Scheer after the launch of Scheerpost.

While doing research on this piece, I received this from Bing:

Content Shift?:

Some users have noticed a shift in content on Scheerpost, including pro-China content and a focus on blaming NATO for the war in Ukraine.
Chris Hedges, another prominent journalist, resumed work with Scheerpost after leaving Truthdig³
It was quite hilarious how blatant that is:

a focus on blaming NATO for the war in Ukraine.

Anyway, they tried to get rid of Robert Scheer, who I will have to do some research on, and maybe one of these pieces on. Chris wasn’t having that shit, they moved to protest, and instead of the Truthdig guy working shit out, he shut it down. Really shows what kind of “stand-up guy” we were dealing with there. And go figure, BING, owned by MICROSOFT, is criticizing the ‘Scheerpost’ for criticizing NATO, a military alliance that takes all of our tax money, Wages war around the world, with OUR children flipping the bill, and the blood of OUR people at risk of war, It’s NOT Putin that’s trying to conquer Europe, it’s NATO. Lusting for Empire, long since gone. They don’t want to conquer Europe, they want the whole world in the palm of their little hands. If you don’t believe that, just watch the way they move, look at how many of there minions and mouthpieces come out of the wood work, outraged, when someone tries to expose the truth. When someone tries to talk to Putin, why is intelligence so worried about what he’s gonna say? Or Donald Trump, why do I have to point out first that I don’t like the guy because I can’t get over the ‘Central Park Five’ debacle before I say, Why are they so terrified of what this guy will say? It’s fine when he lies, but telling the truth????

One of Chris’ many accolades is, or was his show ‘ON Contact’, which was an Emmy Nominated show on the channel Russia Today, or RT. When I first learned of his show being deleted into oblivion, post-invasion of Ukraine by Russia, I thought, What the Fuck is RT? And being very familiar with Chris’ material, I thought, Why the fuck is Chris Hedges on Russia Today? I know for a fact that Chris opposes the illegal invasion by Putin, so what gives. Then I realized Abby Martin, Jesse Ventura, and many other voices in the Anti-War movement were also there, Matt Taibbi explained it very well in his series, Meet the Censored, with Chris as the feature:

By the 2010s, one of the last places where media figures pushed off the traditional career track could pick up a paycheck was Russia Today. In an arrangement Hedges plainly describes as a cynical marriage of convenience, the Russian state was happy to give voice to figures covering structural problems in American society, and those quasi-banned voices were glad for the opportunity to broadcast what they felt is the truth, even understanding the editorial motivation. Hedges ended up working at RT for six years hosting On Contact, where he interviewed authors and thinkers resting outside the cultural mainstream, from Nathaniel Philbrick to Cornel West to Nils Melzer to Noam Chomsky to many others (disclosure: I’ve also been a guest).

Chris, although critical of practically every war since Vietnam, after six years of work, an Emmy nomination, and thousands of hours of knowledge, packed into this show, they simply clicked delete. Thats what they would like to do with us all, thats what they would like to do with Chris, and anyone else looking for the truth. They want to click DELETE, In conversation with Matt, Chris said this is what is expected:

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Meet the Censored: Chris Hedges

This past weekend, celebrated journalist and author Chris Hedges woke up to find six years of episodes of his Russia Today show On Contact vanished from the show’s account on YouTube. Though almost none of the shows referenced Russia or Vladimir Putin directly, and the few that did tended to be unflattering, his association with Russian state media was enough to erase hundreds of interviews about topics ranging from Julian Assange’s imprisonment to censorship to police brutality to American war crimes in the Middle East…

4 years ago · 452 likes · 415 comments · Matt Taibbi

MT: What happened with YouTube?

Chris Hedges: My entire archive of shows from On Contact was taken down. I was in London last week for Julian Assange — I was supposed to be a guest at the wedding, but then, the prison didn’t let me in of course. When I came back, I got a text from a friend of mine, with whom I’d done a half hour show, about a girlfriend who’d overdosed on fentanyl. And because I knew him, my interview with him is quite a powerful segment. And he said, the show doesn’t exist anymore. Then I checked, and nothing exists.

The RT On Contact website is still up, but everything on YouTube is gone, and people watched it on YouTube. Some of that stuff had hundreds of thousands of views.
MT: This two-step process feels like a backdoor way of getting rid of unorthodox voices. In other words, weren’t you on RT in the first place because you’d been bounced out for opposing the war in Iraq? Now, because of your association with RT, you’re off YouTube. Is this a way to get at, not just people connected with Russians, but people with unpopular views generally?

Chris Hedges: Yeah. That’s how it works. They push you to the margins and then, they demonize those spaces on the margins. This has long been the habit of the dominant ruling elites. So for instance, Robert Scheer, whose website I write for, Scheerpost — and of course, we were all fired from Truthdig, this is just a never ending saga — but he ran Ramparts. I think it was Spiro Agnew said, “It’s a magazine with a bomb in every issue.” We could never get advertisers.

So they push you into a space that they then demonize, and then use it as an excuse to shut you down. But they’ve already in essence created the space in which you exist.

I have a couple strikes against me. One, I was pushed out of the New York Times, because I spent so many years in the Middle East, and many years in Gaza. And of course, I was the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times. I’m very outspoken about Israel, and I’m a very strong supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Which alone is enough — I just saw my friend, Cornel West, denied tenure at Harvard over this. And I’m also a fierce critic, as you are, of the Democratic party. Those are all flags that will get you locked out of even the quote- unquote “liberal media” like MSNBC.
MT: This freeze-out led to your tenure at RT?
Chris Hedges: I’d been marginalized for a long time because of those issues. RT gave me space, and I took it. But it wasn’t a show about Russia. We never did a show on Russia. The irony is that, in fact, the very few times Putin was mentioned, he was not described in flattering terms — it was as an autocrat. There was one show where Syria came up, and Russian war crimes. So there was nothing on the show, ever, that was in any way flattering to the Putin regime.
But the point of the show was, of course, critiquing and looking at our own society, and that was the problem.
It was a very wonky show. It was mostly about books. I was very conscientious about reading the books, because as a writer, I don’t like it when people interview me, and never read my books. The last few shows, it was Nathaniel Philbrick, on his book on Washington, Kai Bird, on his biography of Jimmy Carter, and then also, his brilliant biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
I did a show on the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, with a Joyce scholar from Trinity College, Dublin. A biography of Susan Sontag, by Benjamin Moser. And then, very high powered, thoughtful, social critics Cornel West, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Wendy Brown from UCLA, Naomi Wolf, Slavoj Žižek. It was the kind of show that should have been on public broadcasting, if we had a functioning public broadcasting system. Probably run at like one in the morning, or something.
I used to work for NPR — covered the Falklands War for NPR, Buenos Aires. But of course, public broadcasting has been destroyed.

Currently Chris writes here on Substack, at The Chris Hedges Report, the last place left for Truth-Telling, until they sink their tentacles into us here too. And you can find him on Scheerpost Chris is currently as always speaking out against the genocide currently happening in Gaza, and the public torture being committed against his friend, and our hero, Julian Assange. They are the two biggest issues currently in the world, and he is the greatest advocate, I’ve already made this waaaaaaaay too long, so I shall end it here. If you don’t know about Gaza, turn on the news and assume it’s ALL a lie, they were lying three ago, as much if not more, than they do today:

You talked earlier about how you didn’t follow the pattern of Middle East bureau chiefs at the Times in how you covered Israel—can you explain that a bit more?
When I visited Israel [from the Times’ Cairo office], I lived in Gaza. In those days Gaza did not have a hotel. I lived in a run-down boarding house. Most reporters, especially Times reporters, didn’t want to go to Gaza. It was physically uncomfortable—I don’t know if it was that dangerous, but it wasn’t pleasant. The Times ran my stories almost always on the front page. They did not bury them. Most reporters drove down from Jerusalem, went through the Israeli checkpoint, stayed for a few hours to get the dateline and were home for dinner. They wrote canned stories, stories that had already been written in your head on the drive down from Jerusalem. This meant that the real stories rarely got out.
If the Israelis bombed Gaza, I’d go into the streets and count the bodies. The Israelis were furious. But what could they do? I was there. It blew a hole in the fiction they put out about surgical strikes.
So Israel’s official reports would minimize the casualties?
They lied. Constantly. They claimed not to target civilians while using their air force, tanks, naval gunships and heavy artillery to obliterate civilian neighborhoods. Their dishonesty is quite breathtaking.

Or get online and read The Chris Hedges Report, because no matter how many times he’s dragged through the mud, he has proven that he will keep getting up, and if you don’t know about Julian Assange, you should be ashamed! Not really, the news won’t mention him, but read Chris Hedges, or his wife Stella Assange, or check out Part II of the Persecution of Truth-Tellers, thank you for your time, and remember, you can lie forever, they love liars, no one who lies ever feels persecution, only the ones who tell the truth.

-Declaration of ~~War~~ Liberty.

Persecution of Truth-Tellers Part III

Jordan Lee Canter — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 22:44:38 GMT

This being one of my early pieces—I’m writing a piece that refers back to it—I took a look at this and was embarrassed by how poorly edited it was so this will be rightfully edited now. When I wrote this, I had no clue how important it was to proof-read and edit. I hope this is much better once I finish it. I guess I need to do this with all me early pieces because I even had misspelled words! UGH!!!!

This story marks the moment that the industry of journalism started its decline. The Information-Gatekeepers started to lose control, and in an act of desperation, threw everything in their power at someone threatening this power, destroyed the reputation and ability to support his family. By the way, not because he was a liar, a grifter, or a charlatan as they would like you to believe. Because he told the truth on a chapter that they would rather keep forgotten, memory holed, just a lost thought of the many. Gary Webb was a truth-teller, and a great journalist.

For this, he faced a contemporary demise. Gary didn’t deserve this, and American citizens didn’t deserve the crack epidemic, both things came from the same hands . This is Gary’s story.

In 2003 I started high school, and there were different groups that everyone broke into, I was really into the punk/skater group. I wanted so bad for them to accept me. One of them was wearing a shirt that said Anti-Flag, with a big white circle and an X through it, pictured below, apparently that is now a $150 shirt. I ended up buying the same shirt, and my aunt threw it away, she swears she didn’t but, I know.

In the pursuit of getting these people to accept me I started looking up the music on their clothes. I was an instant fan; The first punk rock cd I ever bought was “Mobilize”, it had the coolest Anti-War symbol, five broken rifles in the shape of a star. This cd was a response to the militarism we were facing at that time, post-9/11. This cd was everything to me. I held onto every word of every song. There is a song called “Mumia’s Song”, for the journalist, Mumia Abu Jamal, a political prisoner serving life in Pennsylvania for capital murder of an officer. In the second verse he calls on the names of many political prisoners throughout the years. I had no idea who they were, but I wanted to know! So, I went digging around on my neighbor’s dial-up internet, in my scour of the net I ran across the story of the Iran-Contras and the CIA. I remember reading that story and thinking, “This is a GREAT story, but not a chance, that it really happened! No way. Our government is messed up and crooked, but they wouldn’t do that, it’s like the plot to a crazy movie”. It was many years later when the Tom Cruise movie Made in America came out that I revisited this story, and realized, not only was it possible, there were Senate hearings about it, resignations, and the media, all except for one brave AP reporter, Robert Parry, who would go on to start Consortium News, still breaking stories that other media outfits wouldn’t DARE to break, the rest were mute. Until one reporter, for San Jose Mercury News, broke the blockbuster story of Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion.

First some background on what exactly was the Iran-Contra Affair, explained by PBS on their website:

Ronald Reagan's efforts to eradicate Communism spanned the globe, but the insurgent Contras' cause in Nicaragua was particularly dear to him. Battling the Cuban-backed Sandinistas, the Contras were, according to Reagan, "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers." Under the so-called Reagan Doctrine, the CIA trained and assisted this and other anti-Communist insurgencies worldwide.

This was a belief that started at the beginning of the Cold War, the only way to protect us from communism over here is by stopping it over there. Which led us into losing several wars in Vietnam, Korea, and many regime change wars. This was a madman assumption, led to untold deaths and destruction worldwide. Protect us from the “Ghost of Communism Past”.

PBS continues:

“Assisting involved supplying financial support, a difficult task politically after the Democratic sweep of congressional elections in November 1982. First Democrats passed the Boland Amendment, which restricted CIA and Department of Defense operations in Nicaragua specifically; in 1984, a strengthened Boland Amendment made support almost impossible. A determined, unyielding Reagan told National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, "I want you to do whatever you have to do to help these people keep body and soul together."

So, it was made illegal for American dollars to be sent by Congress to support these anti-communist rebels. And basically, Reagan said without saying, you do whatever you got to, to continue supporting them.

Back to PBS:

In 1985, while Iran and Iraq were at war, Iran made a secret request to buy weapons from the United States. McFarlane sought Reagan's approval, in spite of the embargo against selling arms to Iran. McFarlane explained that the sale of arms would not only improve U.S. relations with Iran, but might in turn lead to improved relations with Lebanon, increasing U.S. influence in the troubled Middle East. Reagan was driven by a different obsession. He had become frustrated at his inability to secure the release of the seven American hostages being held by Iranian terrorists in Lebanon. As president, Reagan felt that "he had the duty to bring those Americans home," and he convinced himself that he was not negotiating with terrorists. While shipping arms to Iran violated the embargo, dealing with terrorists violated Reagan's campaign promise never to do so. Reagan had always been admired for his honesty.

There was a low-key request to buy weapons from the U.S. by the Iranian Government. McFarland turned to Reagan, who had sworn to uphold the weapons embargo on Iran, placed there by President Carter on the grounds that Iran supports Terrorism. Reagan hoped that this deal could ease relations with the Iranian Government and Lebanon and would help bring the American hostage’s home. There was a plan put in place of ‘arms for hostages.

PBS:

The arms-for-hostages proposal divided the administration. Longtime policy adversaries Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz opposed the deal, but Reagan, McFarlane and CIA director William Casey supported it. With the backing of the president, the plan progressed. By the time the sales were discovered, more than 1,500 missiles had been shipped to Iran. Three hostages had been released, only to be replaced with three more, in what Secretary of State George Shultz called "a hostage bazaar."

There was an Exposé released by Lebanese Newspaper Al-Shiraa in November of 1986 which exposed these dealings.

While probing the question of the arms-for-hostages deal, Attorney General Edwin Meese discovered that only $12 million of the $30 million the Iranians reportedly paid had reached government coffers. Then-unknown Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council explained the discrepancy: he had been diverting funds from the arms sales to the Contras, with the full knowledge of National Security Adviser Admiral John Poindexter and with the unspoken blessing, he assumed, of President Reagan.

What’s not mentioned here is the money diverted directly to the Contras wasn’t enough, and CIA assets here and in Nicaragua started using the money made by cocaine traffickers involved with Noriega and the Medellin Cartel to fund the Contras losing war against the Leftist Communist Government of Nicaragua. When this discrepancy is discovered, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North is put on the burner, he eventually gets fired, John Poindexter resigns. There was an investigation of this spanning 8-years, there was convictions, and cover-ups, resignations, and pardons, but no talk of the cocaine, now being converted to crack and blowing up the inner cities all across America. Until Gary Webb ran across this story, reading through some Senate Judiciary transcripts. This turned his world, and the Black Community upside-down.

Before we go any further, I think it would be prudent to explain “Operation Mockingbird”. If you don’t know this about Mainstream News Publications it might seem unbelievable to think all the biggest news publications, with the greatest credibility would do what comes next, but they did. And Operation Mockingbird explains why, During the Cold War, the CIA launched its “Operation Mockingbird”, which aimed to collect intelligence by bribing journalists and institutions around the world and affecting public opinion by manipulating news media.

Carl Bernstein, the investigative journalist of Watergate fame, the first of the GATES, broke this story in Rolling Stone in 1977, here it is for free, this exposed how the CIA recruited journalists that were put on a payroll by the CIA and instructed to write fake stories, with the plan of changing hearts and minds. The CIA admitted that at least 400 journalists and 25 large organizations around the world had secretly carried out assignments for the agency. These fake stories weren’t like, “I see a blue dog walking down the street”. More like this:

“Available information” did not support the series' claims and that “the rise of crack” was “a broad-based phenomenon” driven in numerous places by diverse players. The article discussed Webb’s contacts with Ross’s attorney and prosecution complaints of how Ross’s defense had used Webb's series.”

That was from The Washington Post. “The CIA and Crack: Evidence Is Lacking Of Alleged Plot”. Washington Post.

The New York Times described the series' evidence as thin. None of them said it didn’t happen. Or came even close to saying that.

From the subcommittee report seven-years before Gary Webbs story:

On the basis of this evidence, it is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter.

To this day, the CIA still attempts to monitor and manipulate public opinion through this practice. The so-called truth that underpins a news story, from the perspective of the U.S. government, is not worth mentioning at all, with news media just being used as a tool to safeguard the country’s hegemony in the world.

The Intercept 18-years later reported on the attack against Gary Webb and his reporting in Managing a Nightmare: How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb, they explained:

“Newspapers like the Times and the Post seemed to spend far more time trying to poke holes in the series than in following up on the underreported scandal at its heart, the involvement of U.S.-backed proxy forces in international drug trafficking. The Los Angeles Times was especially aggressive. Scooped in its own backyard, the California paper assigned no fewer than 17 reporters to pick apart Webb’s reporting. While employees denied an outright effort to attack the Mercury News, one of the 17 referred to it as the “get Gary Webb team.” Another said at the time, “We’re going to take away that guy’s Pulitzer,” according to Kornbluh’s CJR piece. Within two months of the publication of “Dark Alliance,” the L.A. Times devoted more words to dismantling its competitor’s breakout hit than comprised the series itself.”

This is especially despicable. Bitter because he beat them to the story, and it should be one of Special Interest to them, since it’s in their home, they should be the paper of record for Los Angeles. No doubt their pockets were padded with funding from the CIA.

Intercept:

“The CIA watched these developments closely, collaborating where it could with outlets who wanted to challenge Webb’s reporting.”

The CIA watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster, and, in the process, destroyed the reputation of an aggressive, award-winning reporter.

In 2013, Jesse Katz, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, said of the newspaper's coverage

“As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope, and we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California." And we really didn't do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a real kind of tawdry exercise. ... And it ruined that reporter's career.”

The Caving of Ceppos

In a brilliant act of cowardice The Mercury News's executive editor Jerome Ceppos totally caved to the scrutiny put on the publication over this story. On one hand, Gary Webb put Mercury News on the map with this. If you visited their website during this time, Gary Webbs’s “Dark Alliance” was the biggest thing on the screen, it took up the entire homepage and brought over a million visitors a day to the page which was UNHEARD of in the late 90’s. Can you imagine a million dial-up connections, all dialing to this page all in the same day. It sounds like chaos!!! In Ceppos defense he responded to the criticism with letters and interviews, as was Gary. This story went to the Moon real fast. The Senate blew up, the black community, it was loud and clear what this story implied. This is just 2-years out from the controversial ‘94 Crime Bill, which changed the laws on cocaine so that a person who had powder cocaine would get a slap on the wrist but, a person with crack cocaine was looking at a life sentence. And OUR GOVERNMENT helped funnel some of it in.

Then he caved, and threw Gary Webb under the bus, Ceppos wrote a column in response to all the criticisms they had gotten. In the column, Ceppos defended parts of the article, writing that the series had “solidly documented” that the drug ring described in the series did have connections with the Contras and did sell large quantities of cocaine in inner-city Los Angeles.

“But,” Ceppos wrote, the series “did not meet our standards in four areas. 1) It presented only one interpretation of conflicting evidence and in one case, did not include information that contradicted a central assertion of the series. 2) The series' estimate of the money involved was presented as fact instead of as an estimate. 3) The series oversimplified how the crack epidemic grew. 4) The series created impressions that were open to misinterpretation through imprecise language and graphics.”

The series never claims that the blame of the crack epidemic lays solely at the feet of the CIA. No one giving this a serious look could ever claim that. This is one area of the country and crack was a nationwide epidemic, but this is the hill they decided to take the story down on.

Gary was very upset about this, his view was Ceppos had sold him downstream and so is mine. In June 1997, The Mercury News responded to his criticism of Ceppos by transferring him from the paper's Sacramento bureau and offered him a choice between working at the main offices in San Jose under closer editorial supervision, or spot reporting in Cupertino; both locations were long commutes from his home in Sacramento. 150-miles from his home where his wife and three children were. They were pushing him out, and He knew it. He resigned from the paper in November 1997.

In interviews after leaving The Mercury News, Webb described the 1997 controversy as media manipulation. The government side of the story is coming through the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, he stated. They use the giant corporate press rather than saying anything directly. If you work through friendly reporters on major newspapers, it comes off as The New York Times saying it and not a mouthpiece of the CIA. Webb's longest response to the controversy was in The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On, a chapter he contributed to an anthology of press criticism:

If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me ... And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job ... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.

Within this chapter, Webb stated he believed there was an active “collusion between the press and the powerful” to report freely on inconsequential matters, “but when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff... We begin to see the limits of our freedoms”. He also stated, “the series presented dangerous ideas” by suggesting “crimes of state had been committed” (such as the “federal government bore some responsibility, however indirect, for the flood of crack that coursed through black neighborhoods in the 1980s")

He told the Truth.

In the years that follow, Gary works a couple jobs but eventually gets a divorce. His reputation is destroyed so the jobs aren’t great, he can’t pay his mortgage, so he sells his house, and pre-pays for his cremation.

December 10th, 2004. He is found dead in his home. Two gunshot wounds to the head, it seems the first shot missed but the second didn’t. It sounds fishy, but no one doubts it. Not his family, not his friends. They seen him seemingly depressed, unable to make ends meet. He took out a life insurance policy. And ended his suffering, so he could no longer be a burden to his family.

Make no mistake, Gary Webb was murdered but not like you think, they don’t have to sneak in like assassins in the age of technology, that’s so 1900’s. They have Psychological Operations; they don’t even need to get dressed for…

Thank you for reading, this REMASTERED version of Persecution of the Truth-Teller’s Part III

Jordan Lee, Editor-at-Large, Declaration of ~~war~~Liberty

The Persecution of Truth-Tellers Part-II

Jordan Lee Canter — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 05:29:33 GMT

*Note: Recent version claimed Julian was Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ in 2010. I was duped by a photoshopped image of him on the cover of Time under ‘Person of the Year’ and I ran with it. He was however a runner-up for ‘Person of the year’ and was beat out by MARK ZUCKERBERG of all people. Who I’m not even sure is a person.

This is part II of a series on the Persecution of Truth-Tellers. I’ve tried my best to make each one a standalone that you can start reading without any previous knowledge. If you’ve missed a part and are interested in reading the others, you can find them Here and Here. Thank you for reading.

So, was planning on doing this one, maybe at the end of the series, but then I thought, I dont really gotta do any research, I know the main points. How much is there to say, he exposed truths, now he’s in Belmarsh, being tortured by isolation. Fighting for his life to evade extradition, because the CIA, Mike Pompeo, and Donald Trump have already made it clear that once he’s in American custody, in our prisons, his days are numbered. Then I dug into this story and realized I KNOW NOTHING!

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This is the story of the Great, Journalist and Publisher, Creator of WikiLeaks, accused hacker, accused cheater, liar, traitor but, above all things, the worst sin of all, Truth-Teller, Julian Assange.

Part One: From Darling of Liberal’s to Hero of Conservatives to Political Prisoner of Both

In his career arc Julian managed to go from internationally renowned to internationally hated by the top institutions of the world for the truths he exposed, here’s an overview of the big ones, to me at least. From the Cult of Scientology to the Cult of the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA). Julian is internationally loved and loathed, but none more consequential to his persecution then the American Left(Democratic Party) and the Right(Republican Party).

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006, In December of 2007 he released the US Army User Manual for soldiers dealing prisoners at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, and thanks to this and Seymour Hersh it was exposed that we were torturing prisoners, who were, not only not terrorists, they were innocent of any wrong doing, except maybe “HATING US FOR OUR FREEDOM!!!”

So already the State Dept and White House DO NOT like him, but the Democratic Party loves him, as of now.

March of 2008 a release of internal documents from the Church of Scientology containing their secret bibles called ‘Operating Thetan One-Eight’ and they were pissed! Apparently, as I am learning right now, these bibles are super secret, so they can charge a person their life savings, to get these bibles and learn how to NEVER BE MISERABLE, EVER AGAIN. They reacted with a Cease and desist, pictured below.

September 2008 emails from the Yahoo account of Sarah Palin were posted, this embarrassed the right and emboldened the left, Sarah Palin denounced him as a terrorist, said he should be “HUNTED DOWN AND KILLED! LIKE AL QAEDA….”

November of 2009 Wikileaks posted a chronological dump of 500,000 messages received by military, and official personnel on 9/11/2001 throughout the day which laid out the reactions of that day, in real time.
Then on April 5^th of 2010, what in my opinion was the greatest release of WikiLeaks history, the video of a US Apache helicopter(See Below) firing on and killing two journalists and 10 other Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, 2007. The two journalists were war correspondents for Reuters, an American media company. In the 38-minute video, titled “Collateral Murder”, you can hear the soldiers in the copter talking among themselves, callous, emotionless. The victims were all completely unarmed, they stood in a group, the soldiers above stalked them like a hawk, until they got a good shot, a flash, cloud of dust, it clears, the group is on the ground, their worlds destroyed. They circled around and unloaded on the emergency vehicle that came to save them, there was kids, the murderers said, “they shouldn’t have had their kids out here” but these people weren’t at war, they lived here. There was one left alive, crawling on the ground, they let him crawl until he puts his hand on his camera. Then killed him too. It’s the most horrific thing I’ve ever laid eyes on. They had so many chances to change their minds, to back out, no one was pushing them, they weren’t in any danger, whatsoever. The person crawling on the ground to his camera was Saeed Chmagh, a photojournalist for Reuters, the other Reuters Journalist was Namir Noor-Eldeen.

Reuters had been trying to find out for years what happened that day and found out nothing, no one told them anything, in fact, up until this release the official story was no video existed.

As you probably guessed, this caused some stirs in the State Department, but done yet? He was not. I’m actually leaving out some pretty big releases in between. In May of 2010, the next month his source, Private-First-Class Chelsea Manning(formerly Bradley) is tracked down and detained by the U.S. military for leaking the video, “Collateral Murder”.

July 25th 2010, WiliLeaks releases more 900,000 documents on the Afghanistan war, the biggest leak since the Pentagon Papers. They’re divided into 100 categories of everything you can imagine from “friendly-fire” to “Hoax IED Reports” to “Unreported Casualties”. Which is named “The Afghan Files”. That’s followed up by the “Iraq War Logs”, Released on October 22, 2010. Which was 400,000 classified military documents from the Iraq War. This provides a new picture of how many Iraqi civilians have been killed, the role that Iran has played in supporting Iraqi militants and, many accounts of abuse by Iraq's army and police. All of which had been withheld from the public, or blatantly lied about to lead the public to believe things were going much better than was let on. Next on November 28, 2010 - WikiLeaks begins publishing approximately 250,000 leaked State Department cables dating back to 1966. The site says the documents will be released "in stages over the next few months."

November 28, 2010 - The WikiLeaks website suffers an attack designed to make it unavailable to users. A Twitter user called Jester claims responsibly for the attack.

*2010, A voluminous year for WikiLeaks, although he was eventually beat by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Julian was a Runner-up for Time’s Person of the Year although he received the most votes in a Readers’ Choice poll:

The man behind WikiLeaks has won the most votes in this year’s Person of the Year poll.
Readers voted a total of 1,249,425 times, and the favorite was clear. Julian Assange raked in 382,020 votes, giving him an easy first place. He was 148,383 votes over the silver medalist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey.*

2010 seems to go off without a hitch, besides of course, Chelsea Manning, Julians biggest source being arrested for her releases, by October, the following year, things start to take a turn.

April 24, 2011 - Nearly 800 classified US Military documents obtained by WikiLeaks reveal details about alleged terrorist activities of al Qaeda operatives captured and housed in Guantanamo Bay.

September 2, 2011 - WikiLeaks releases its archive of more than 250,000 unredacted US diplomatic cables.

October 24, 2011 - WikiLeaks announces that it is temporarily halting publication to "aggressively fundraise." Assange states that a financial blockade by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union has cut off 95% of WikiLeaks's revenue.

December 16, 2011 - Manning's Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury hearing that will determine whether enough evidence exists to merit a court-martial, begins.

February 23, 2012 - Manning is formally charged with aiding the enemy, wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the Internet, transmitting national defense information and theft of public property or records.

February 26, 2012 - WikiLeaks begins releasing what it says are five million emails from the private intelligence company, Stratfor, starting with a company "glossary" that features unflattering descriptions of US government agencies.

July 5, 2012 - WikiLeaks begins publishing more than 2.4 million emails from Syrian politicians, government ministries and companies dating back to 2006.

By this time there are investigations into Julian, They are attacking him financially but this doesn’t stop him.

August 21, 2013 - A military judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison. Julian is still a threat, more and more people everyday are finding WikiLeaks, and learning of the war crimes and out and out lies and atrocities committed for empire and financial gain.

Julian is charged with Rape and Sexual Molestation out of Sweden, the persecution begins.

‘Ecuadorian’ London

If you’re familiar with the most recent case, Russell Brand then you kind of know what’s next, they oppose the War Party, they attack your livelihood, it doesn’t work, so the media hit pieces start coming out. People start digging through your past, approaching old girlfriends, maybe they find one who sees your success, thinks that could’ve been me. Maybe things didn’t go as they wish they had, so they think, “well there is that one time we were drunk together… Maybe I wasn’t drunk, maybe I was asleep….” They are approached by journalists and tell this story, that’s all the media needs. In Julian’s case it wasn’t the media who did this, it was the state, Rape charges come out in Sweden, soon after, and you’ll remember this from Part I, Julian is charged with the Espionage Act of 1917, that good old piece of tyrannical legislature seems to never let us down. Now he must avoid extradition to the US, he’s granted asylum by Ecuador, but can’t get there safely so his home becomes the Ecuadorian Embassy, in London. They’ve just given Miss Manning 35-years so he can’t get sent back to the US, he must stay there. But he never took anything, as Bradley did. He wasn’t the one granted a security clearance and violated it. He sympathizes, and is eternally grateful as am I, and so many others worldwide. He simply published them, he was given documents that exposed lies and he reported on them. The blatant violation of civil rights and freedoms held holy by Western Civilization here, is grounds to defect from the whole damn experiment and head “Off The Grid”. This would be like charging the New York Times for publishing Dan Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, back in 1971.

But “what about the Rape?” You might say, “Those sex crimes are a stench that’s really hard to scrub off, no matter the circumstances”,

“Even if they are untrue?”

Truly, of all the weapons available to the war party, it’s their greatest weapon. They tried to get Ellsberg with it back in the Vietnam days but they ‘Fumbled the bag’ lol. The infamous “Whitehouse Plumbers”, were busted breaking into Dan’s therapist’s office, which overturned the entire ‘Pentagon Papers’ case, Completely and Permanently. They wanted to know, “what he had told her, and what kinda skeletons he had hiding, that they could use against him”. Epic FAIL for Them, Astronomical WIN for Freedom of the Press, Disclosure, and the American people being forced onto a plane to be butchered in Vietnam.

At some point following Julian’s entrance into the Embassy in London, after many statements agreeing to appear in court in Sweden, if they agree NOT to turn him over to the US, his Rape charge just…. disappears. No clue where it went, maybe it never existed, who knows. Officially, it was dismissed for “lack of evidence” but, I’m pretty sure it served its purpose.

2016 Election, “Aaahh!!! Real Russians”, the DNC Hacks Itself, and Tosses the Game to Trump

On July 22, 2016, following a disappointing Primary lose for Bernie Sanders, after receiving nationwide support, unlike anything seen for a candidate refusing donor money from lobbyists/interest groups, WikiLeaks releases nearly 20,000 emails from Democratic National Committee staffers. The emails “appear” to show the committee ~~fucking~~ favoring Hillary over Bernie during the US Presidential Primary. In fact, they show that Bernie Sanders won the primary but the numbers were fudged by the “wundawful” Debbie Wasserman Schultz (pictured below exclaiming, ‘YOU! Are you done in the kitchen yet?’)

Debbie was a Hillary supporter, so even though she was a pretty terrible ~~person~~ politician she set the deck in favor of Hillary and probably ushered in a win for Donald Trump. With this, the Russian hacker claims begin. It has been all but screamed, that the source of the leaks was a Bernie supporter, Seth Rich. Seth was patriotic, he believed in America, he was a Democrat and worked for the DNC, why wouldn’t he leak these files to expose how Hillary Clinton, a standard establishment warmonger, who was running on a continuation of the last two terms, was rigging the Primary against someone who really had plans to make things better for regular Americans. Seth Rich was tragically murdered soon after, unrelated, I’m sure.

Officially, the explanation for the leak was that Assange was working with Russian hackers, who were trying to subvert American Democracy. The Left-Wing darling had fallen.

Soon after the first DNC leak, Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned.

On October 7, 2016 - More than 2,000 hacked emails from Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, are published by WikiLeaks. They claim to have 50,000 more and pledges to continue releasing batches of documents during the weeks leading up to the election. This is met with more crazy Russophobia, and a real change of consensus.

January 3, 2017 - During an interview on the Fox News Network, Assange says that Russia did not give WikiLeaks hacked emails. Of course no one believed this, at least none of his previous supporters, the ones who supported him because they assumed he had the same bias as them. By this time Donald Trump was elected, and RussiaGATE was a full on feeding frenzy. Julian Assange, was one of its pawns. And the State Department was OH SO HAPPY, to lend a nod of support to anything that shows there old enemy in a bad light. So when asked if Julian is helping Donald Trump, they definitely didn’t say “no.”

On January 12, 2017, WikiLeaks tweets that Assange will agree to be extradited to the United States if Obama grants clemency to Manning. Five-days-later before officially leaving office, Barack Obama commutes Manning's sentence. She is set to be released on May 17, the same year.

March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks has one more drop left to publish, before planning to turn himself in, Vault 7(Pictured and linked below) which details and proves the existence of covert hacking programs, the development of spy software for targeting cellphones, smart TVs and computer systems in cars, by the CIA. In a statement, Assange says that the website published the documents as a warning about the risk of the proliferation of "cyber weapons”.

Vault 7 is very embarrassing to the CIA and the State Department. They take it very serious. At this time Julian no longer believes he will be safe in US custody. As it did for Snowden, time has proven Julian correct.

After stating how he “Loved WikiLeaks” on the campaign trail, Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump, and Trump Administration officials, had made plans to kidnap and assassinate Julian during this time at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

The Arrest from the Embassy

After seven-years, stuck in the Embassy in London, not able to leave ever. CIA had been bugging the place for years to keep an eye on him. Pictures surfaced online of President Moreno, of Ecuador. Moreno became embroiled in a corruption scandal. Julian was blamed for this, and Ecuador decided to say, “Fuck Asylum, and you snore too much….”

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They cut a Turncoat deal with the United States to Receive a loan from the International Monetary Fund, or IMF to pay for Moreno’s corruption scandal. So, after six-years, Assange was tossed to the wolves.

On the 11th of April 2019, the Ambassador of Ecuador to the UK extended an invitation to the Metropolitan Police to enter the embassy where he had been living since 2012. Subsequently, Assange was apprehended and transported to a police station in central London and charged with breaching the Bail Act 1976. For this he was convicted, and sentenced to 11-months in prison, and sent to Belmarsh, Nicknamed “Europe’s Guantanamo”,

He has now been there for over 4-years, completely isolated, according to torture specialists with the United Nations, he’s being tortured, psychologically. No one is ever supposed to live in isolation. He has no charges against him, he doesn’t need any, they’ll hold him forever for us, and if we ever get our hands on him, he’s as good as dead.

As long as they leave him a shell of his former self, they don’t care if ever gets to see his son smile, ever again. Or kiss the lips of his love, Stella, whom he’s married since his incarceration. They don’t care if he never shuts up, or never speaks again, as long as it’s NOT the truth.

From Free Assange to Freed Assange

Not sure if it was a plea for Biden votes, a good deed, the right person in the right ear. but Julian Assange was offered a plea deal of Plead Guilty-Receive Sentence of 62 Months (TIME SERVED) which saves the state from having to pay him for damages but dammit he’s free. The torture is over. There was a global movement to free this man for it was a public service he did that helped every single person on this planet in some way. Even I was tweeting at that if Julian was pardoned he’d have earned mine and a bunch of others. Now it looks like a Media Coup D’etat since our Corporate Media must have gotten the nod. Imagine if we were still believing everything, we were being told. Julian never started Wikileaks, and we never knew Hillary Clinton stole the Primary from Bernie Sanders or that our soldiers were killing American journalists in Baghdad or that the CIA has the ability to take over control of someone’s vehicle (Vault 7), accelerate like your mad and swerve into a tree causing instant death. How peculiar, this is what happened to Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings whose story on General Stanley McChrystal embarrassed the entire military establishment and cost him his job. Julian suffered for many years for us. Now he’s free but the fight isn’t over. We must defy all fans of censorship, war, and the partisans who want us to kill each other. For the sake of truth. For the sake of truth-tellers.

Jordan Lee Canter, Editor-in-Chief, Declaration of Liberty

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The Persecution of Truth-Tellers

Jordan Lee Canter — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 17:03:53 GMT

This is part I of a series on the Persecution of Truth-Tellers. I’ve tried my best to make each one a standalone that you can start reading without any previous knowledge. If you’ve missed a part and are interested in reading the others, you can find them Here and Here. Thank you for reading.

Listening to a speech recently by one, Tucker Carlson, who tends to be very much opposite of me one many issues, however, Ive found myself listening to him more and more, the more he supports free speech and antiwar the more I listen. The basis one his speech was, ‘No one is ever persecuted for telling a lie, only the truth’. Which was an unbelievable revalation. So I spent some time thinking on it and, reading into it. Unfortunately, it seems to be true. So I thought I should write about this, and then i realized, I cant just run through all them in one peice! Theres WAY too many examples, so this is the start of a series. I’ll try to do one every week, and with the reading of the memior ‘Permanent Record’ by Edward Snowden I thought where else should I start, but with Ed himself, So here goes.

Im not going to go into parts of his life unless it pertains to his persecution, Im going to specifically talk about the things he has endured due to him speaking the truth about the vast surveillance aparatus he exposed and the persecution he faced because of it

THE LEAK

I remember paying zero attention to this when it happened, it was one of many things to catch up on later when I started caring and becoming extremely curious about what Id missed. What I do remember from growing up in paranoid circles is people always said to me, “dont say that over the phone”, “You cant say that out loud”, “why are we talking over the phone about this”, and my constant reply was, Dude youre not important! No one cares what youre saying, and this normally shut them up but there was a point I started hearing, “No man, they got a whole database of everything we say, who we talk to, a guy from the NSA has came out with it” and this time, I shut up. For those that dont know about this, maybe youre still under the same rock I was, Edward Snowden contacted Laura Poyntras, and in turn was put into contact with Glenn Greenwald, another truth teller who has been exiled from, not just polite society, actual society.

Edward realized the work he was doing for the NSA, CIA, and DHS was creating a massive surveillance network named Stellar Wind, in which everything was surveilled about every US citizen in America, what they did, what they saw, what they ate, within their ability, and their ability was VAST! At the time it was believed by Intelligence that there was “Sleeper Cells” of terrorists all across the country, time has told us otherwise, In fact they caught ZERO terrorists with this program, except maybe one with special needs who they had given a “bomb” to and coerced him to set it off, then arrested him and took the credit for a “Job Well Done”. Their idea with this was to store it all(phone calls, text messages, email, every possible peice of data they could record) in a database until they needed it, which you might say, “why should I care? I don’t do anything wrong.” I would respond, first thing, it is a violation of your constitutional rights, and if you turn over this today, you’re opening the door for what they might do tomorrow. In this case they absolutely were, this surveillance was a reaction to the War on Terror, what they used it for was to entrap Americans, go after drug dealers, white collar criminals, protesters, civil rights activists, and others with dissenting opinions. Well how many people saying, “I don’t have anything to worry about” also have disagreed with something they’re government has done, if you’re American, as I am, I am sure EVERYONE. So Snowden, as a supporter of the constitution, considered it his constitutional duty, to leak this archive to the public and show the evil deeds our government has been keeping a secret. How did they respond? They sure as hell didn’t apologize.

Persecution: Media, Military and, Intelligence

So at the time the narrative was that Snowden had released all of these documents without regard for National Security, but thats not true. Time has told that wasnt true but also, if this was true he would have released all the documents. To this day there is still tens of thousands of documents that have not been released due to the worry of putting someone in danger. Mike Pompeo is still proclaiming to mainstream media pundits that Snowden should be locked up forever. When he released these documents Edward fled to Honk Kong due to its "spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent" because of this he was labeled a chinese spy, a Russian newspaper claimed in a since debunked article that Snowden was staying in Russia before he went to Hong Kong, for this he was called a Russian spy, Rachel Maddow said on her mainstream news show, “Why doesnt he come back and stand trial?” Theyre charging him with Treason under the Espionage Act of 1917, Which is a fascist law from WW1 that has historically been used against whistleblowers. Its a lose lose scenario where they bypass all the principles of due process. You dont get a jury, youre seen in front of a different court, and practically pre-convicted. He had made it to Moscow before his American Passport was revoked, leaving him stuck. In a July 1 statement, Snowden said, "Although I am convicted of nothing, [the U.S. government] has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum." In order to assure he would have no trouble in Russia and expelling any accusations that he was a spy for Russia, Snowden left all documents with American reporters before he left Hong Kong for Moscow. The US State Department expressed disappointment to Hong Kong for letting him go. To which they said, “Hung Chau BITCHES!!!! We remember ‘45!” i couldnt resist that, sorry.

Four countries offered to give Snowden permanent asylum: Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Venezuela. However, the U.S. pressured countries along his route to hand him over. Leaving no direct routes between Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Venezuela, which left only Ecuador. However as history has proven the American Intelligence Community very much loves to break laws so on advice from Julian Assange, a fellow persucuted Truth-Teller Edward stayed in Russia and sought asylum there, Julian Assange commented: "While Venezuela and Ecuador could protect him in the short term, over the long term there could be a change in government. In Russia, he's safe, he's well-regarded, and that is not likely to change. That was my advice to Snowden, that he would be physically safest in Russia." While all this was going on the Mockingbird Op owned media, were smearing him to ends of this Earth and back, “Russian Spy” “Traitor” “Millennial Snowflake” all of which were untrue, and nothing has proven this better than time.

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Edward Snowden’s revelations, have proven to be true and important as the national security state has drawn further down the road of turning the mechanisms developed by the War on Terror inward against the American people as terrorism abroad has ceased to be the enemy and been replaced by Domestic Terror at home in the form of Trump Supporters, BLM activists, AntiWar Activists, We are now the new enemy, and if it wasnt for whistleblowers like Snowden revealing the truth we would be completely blind.

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