I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving. Today the gunshow kicks off for the weekend. This is as close to going out that I get on Black Friday weekend.
2nd Amendment, Iowa carry laws and Veterans concerns. Also anything else we want to talk about.
Friday, November 28, 2014
Monday, November 24, 2014
Stonewalled in Obama’s Garden of Beasts
Matt Bracken sends, if you don't read anything else all week, read this and share with your friends.
Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington
Sharyl Atkisson, 2014
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin
Eric Larson, 2011
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
– George Santayana
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
– Attributed to Mark Twain, unverified
“Goddammit, Sharyl! The Washington Post is reasonable, the L.A. Times is reasonable, the New York Times is reasonable, you’re the only one who’s not reasonable! So, Sharyl Atkisson is the only reporter who knows what she’s doing? Nobody else thinks this is a story. Just you. You’re the only one. Sharyl Atkisson is right and everybody else is wrong? Goddammit!”
This is how CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Atkisson described the response to a phone call she made to the White House to ask some questions about the Operation Fast And Furious scandal. On the other end of the line was a deputy White House press officer named Eric Schultz. The screaming tantrum was disturbing enough that she put the call on speaker phone in her office at CBS News, so that Schultz’s blistering tirade could be overheard by ear-witnesses.
Operation Fast and Furious was conceived and ordered by the Obama Justice Department, and executed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Its purpose was to deliver thousands of high-powered assault rifles to Mexican drug cartels. There was no attempt to follow or trace the weapons into Mexico, putting the lie to the cover-story that it was a “botched sting operation.” The Mexican government and Mexican law enforcement were not even informed of the program to smuggle deadly assault rifles into their nation. (Incidentally, that is considered an illegal act of war.)
The operation involved ATF field offices in several states, also putting the lie to the claim that it was the handiwork of a few “rogue agents” in Phoenix. In reality, Fast and Furious was ordered and directed from Washington D.C., from at least at the level of Attorney General Eric Holder. For months after the exposure of the plan Holder claimed to know nothing about it, but emails dragged out of his office after several years of the DOJ resisting Congressional subpoenas proved he was lying all along. His laughable defense to these disclosures of his dishonesty was that he did not read most of the emails sent from his office and signed with his name. The mainstream media didn’t care, and hardly gave this a mention.
When the hot trail grew too close to the White House, President Obama took the unprecedented step of shielding tens of thousands of documents and emails, claiming blanket “executive privilege.” Attorney General Holder was found in contempt of Congress for his part in the cover-up, something which has never happened before in American history.
An interesting clue about the true purpose of the operation was disclosed by gun-control advocate Sarah Brady when, before the disclosure of the operation, she related that President Obama told her, “I just want you to know that we are working on it [gun control]. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”
So what was the true purpose of Operation Fast and Furious? At the same time that it was secretly occurring, President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Attorney General Eric Holder were busy promoting a false narrative to the media that 90% of the guns found at Mexican murder scenes were from American gun shops. In reality, these were guns that ATF Special Agents forced gun store owners to sell in bulk to obvious cartel “straw purchasers,” against the store owners’ declared misgivings to the ATF agents who were giving them the orders to make these illegal gun sales.
At least 300 Mexicans have been murdered with these guns, in a plan conceived and carried out to sabotage and discredit the Second Amendment, and the right of Americans to keep and bear arms. Despite the hundreds murdered in Mexico (and the concurrent trumpeting by the administration of the “90% of guns” lie), this diabolical program was not uncovered in the U.S. until Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered in the Arizona desert in December of 2010 with one of the AK-47s “walked” to the Mexican cartels.
In her book Stonewalled, Sharyl Atkisson credits David Codrea, a writer for GUNS magazine and Examiner.com, and Mike Vanderboegh of the Sipsey Street Irregulars blog, for ultimately putting her into contact with whistleblowers within the ATF. Interviews with ATF whistleblower Special Agent John Dodson led to the explosive and widely seen CBS news reports in February and March of 2011 that blew the lid off Operation Fast and Furious.
It’s hard to imagine a more evil plan than to deliver assault weapons to cartel killers, in order to rack up a high body count of murdered Mexicans. By any fair comparison, Fast and Furious was orders of magnitude worse than the Watergate scandal, which resulted in the resignation of President Nixon and the imprisonment of Attorney General Mitchell.
In the recent case of Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration bosses who ordered this evil operation have never been held to account. CBS reporter Sharyl Atkisson and the rest of America have been successfully stonewalled with the active collaboration of a complicit media. Instead of the mainstream media leading the investigative charge, as they did with Watergate, this time they assisted in the cover-up. As Atkisson describes, the stonewalling even permeated CBS News, where instead of being given kudos for her ground-breaking investigative reports, she was isolated, ostracized, and considered a traitor to the network, for reporting the unwanted truth about a government mass-murder scheme.
So who was the Eric Schultz that was screaming at Sharyl Atkisson on the phone? Schultz was the former spokesman for New York Senator Charles Schumer, for decades a vocally rabid opponent of the Second Amendment. Schultz also worked for Al Franken’s 2008 Senate campaign, where the former SNL comedian’s amazing come-from-behind victory was decided by bundles of mysterious absentee ballots “found” after the election. Before working to help elect Senator Franken, Schultz worked for Senator John “Love Child” Edwards, Democrat of North Carolina. Schultz was also for a time the head of communications for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
In 2011, under the heat generated by reports such as those by Sharyl Atkisson, the White House hired Schultz (paid with our own tax money, of course) to run press interference against the burgeoning scandal surrounding Operation Fast and Furious. And Schultz did not appreciate that Atkisson had gone off the “reasonable” mainstream-media reservation with her hard-hitting investigative reporting on Operation Fast and Furious.
What made Atkisson’s reporting particularly dangerous to the regime was that she worked for CBS News, and had a 20-year career of reporting straight down the middle, investigating administrations and corporations on all sides of the political spectrum. If she had worked for FOX News, her work would have been dismissed as partisan in nature, but Atkisson had already been lauded for previous stories by left-wing luminaries such as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. Atkisson’s unassailable reputation for integrity made her a threat to the Obama administration. Subsequently, Obama’s flacks attacked her with all of the tools and tactics at their disposal, some of which were legal, even if they were sleazy, and some of which were both illegal and outrageous to the values of a free nation.
2. SLEAZY, BUT LEGAL
First, I’ll address the sleazy but legal side of character assassination as practiced by the Obama administration. The Obama media war room, as exposed by Atkisson, is tightly interwoven with what I call American Pravda, shorthand for ABCNNBCBS, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. These first-tier media outlets serve as “gate keepers” for what constitutes supposedly legitimate and “reasonable” news stories in America today.
If a story is only reported on FOX News, the internet, or talk radio, the story is deemed to be partisan and illegitimate, and despite its truthfulness, it is discounted as coming from the “political fringe.” The executives and program directors of American Pravda are not much for breaking news reports, but they are absolutely adept at killing stories, censoring the news by omission, and even coordinating whisper campaigns against determined reporters such as Atkisson, “unreasonable” reporters who dare to tread on forbidden ground. Their collective motto might as well be, “It’s not a story if we don’t report it!”
The networks and the other tier-one news outlets also work hand-in-glove with the Obama administration to generate and publicize false stories, “back-fires” lit in order to discredit truthful reportage that is perceived to damage the Obama White House. (Witness the infamous Benghazi video.) Atkisson, often the victim of these discrediting campaigns, provides a first-hand account of how the administration feeds false or deliberately misleading narratives to friendly blogs such as Media Matters, where they are consistently picked up by slightly more reputable outlets such as the Huffington Post or Politico, and from there are launched into the mainstream news, where they are eagerly lapped up as gospel truth and reported by American Pravda. These false or intentionally misleading White House narratives are often printed nearly verbatim as they rise through this chain of hacks and stooges, all the way up to ABCNNBCBS and the newspapers that constitute this charade of a free press.
3. ILLEGAL WARRENTLESS SURVEILLANCE
Following Atkisson’s explosive Fast and Furious reports, and later, her reports on the inconsistencies (to put in mildly) in the administration’s constantly changing versions of the events in Benghazi on 9-11-2012, Atkisson’s home and office computers begin turning on and off in the middle of the night. Not just installing routine updates, but loading new programs, installing and removing files, even turning her Skype account into a room-bugging device that operated around the clock, with her computer turned on or off.
She made repeated calls over many months to Verizon asking for help with her sabotaged phones and computers with no success. When she enlisted the help of trusted former intelligence officers, they found an extra and unneeded fiber-optic line leading from her house to the side of her garage. On New Years Eve 2012, she called Verizon, but they disavowed any knowledge of the extra fiber-optic line, and advised her to contact law enforcement.
An hour after her call, Atkisson’s phone rang again. A new “Verizon supervisor” was suddenly so interested in her case that that she wanted to send a technician out on New Year’s Day to take a look. Atkisson said it was unnecessary, but the “Verizon supervisor” insisted. In fact, later checking proved that the “supervisor” and the “technician” did not work for Verizon at all, but they were extremely interested in removing the incriminating extra fiber-optic cable.
What was on the end of the cable? Putting the full picture together later, it all fit into a pattern of concentrated surveillance of Atkisson, her computers both at work and at home, her phones, and even her bedroom office. Before the New Year’s Day visit of the false “Verizon” technician, suspicious “utility vans” had been parking on her street in direct line of sight to her garage. They disappeared after the removal of the mystery cable and its more mysterious terminus, believed to be a transmitter or relay.
At this point, you would think that the intensive surveillance of a CBS News investigative reporter by what could only have been government entities would have been a major CBS News story on its own. This was not to be. CBS provide only reluctant and minimal help with what should have been a major scandal and news story, the bugging and hacking of one of their reporter’s computers, phones and even her home. Instead, they encouraged her to keep a low profile about it while they “looked into it” but did nothing.
Could there have been active collusion between the intelligence agencies, the White House, and American Pravda in burying stories of illegal surveillance such as the case described by Atkisson?
4. OUR HOPELESSLY CORRUPT INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
A glaring example of the log-rolling and back-scratching occurring between the Obama Administration, the media and the “three-letter” intelligence agencies may be found in the strange case of Mike Morell, who was the deputy director of the CIA under General Petraeus during and after the 9-11 Benghazi attacks. You will remember the constant evolution of the so-called “Benghazi talking points,” which were the administration’s attempt to manipulate the media into accepting a false narrative rejecting the terrorist origin of the attacks, and the prior warnings about the Benghazi diplomatic facility’s dangerously weak security.
Evidently, General Petraeus did not agree to scrub the Al Qaeda references from the CIA’s original report, the basis for the Benghazi talking points. His CIA deputy, Mike Morell was much more willing to do the administration’s bidding, and Morell was quite strangely given authority to edit the talking points that had supposedly been approved by the director of the CIA.
Enter the infamous Paula Broadwell infidelity scandal. Atkisson: “Fast-forward a week to November 6, the day of the election. Someone at the Justice Department, we’re told, has finally decided to tell Director of National Intelligence Clapper about Petraeus. (How good of a chief intelligence officer are you if you don’t know the head of the CIA had been under investigation by your FBI for months? And Republicans on the Hill know before you do?) Clapper calls Petraeus the same day and urges him to resign. It’s a stark reversal of the FBI’s pre-Benghazi determination that there was no harm in Petraeus staying on the job.”
Then, we are supposed to believe that Obama didn’t learn about the Petraeus scandal until November 7th when he read about it in the news media. The president “reluctantly” accepted the resignation of his CIA Director.
Deputy CIA director Mike Morell was called once again to a congressional hearing on the changing talking points memo eighteen months after 9-11, and his once fuzzy memory about the talking points were suddenly clear. Atkisson puts it this way: “Though he hadn’t offered up the information early on, he now tells Congress that he was the primary editing force behind the talking points. And that there were no political motivations behind removal of references to terrorism and prior warnings given to the State Department. That’s just the stuff of conspiracy theorists and right-wing crazies.”
Morell changes his testimony, and falls on his sword for the administration, but he is forgiven. Benghazi is a tired old story, water under the bridge. CBS and the rest of American Pravda gives a collective ho-hum to Morell’s admission that he had originally lied to Congress under oath. It’s time to move on. For American Pravda, it’s much more important to report the latest celebrity scandal, or outbreak of stormy weather, or product recall, than to report about the bald-faced duplicity of the CIA’s deputy director, acting behind his own director’s back.
Only one thing is consistent about Mike Morel: his ability to change stories while retaining the appearance of total sincerity. From Congressional hearing to hearing, the basic facts of his story changed in blatantly contradictory ways. First he solemnly swore that he had no idea who changed the Benghazi talking points. A year and a half later it changed to sure, I edited the talking points. So what?
Morell is more than just an Obama administration team player, he is literally willing to take one for the team. But not-to-worry about his future. Morell’s loyalty and flexibility in matters of truthful testimony was handsomely rewarded. He soon accepted a plum job at a Washington public relations firm that Atkisson says is “dominated by Hillary Clinton loyalists: Beacon Global Strategies.” A firm that essentially serves as an open funnel for Hillary Clinton slush funds disguised as payments for P.R. services rendered.
But wait, there’s more! From Atkisson’s book:
5. CBS HIRES BENGHAZI FIGURE
“In January 2014, Morell, the ex-CIA deputy director was hired as a consultant for CBS news. At the same time, the government was still very much embroiled in controversy over its monitoring of citizens and journalists, targeting of whistleblowers, and the handling of Benghazi. The hire drew immediate commentary from some of my sources.”
“CBS is employing one of the most controversial figures of the Benghazi controversy. Are you comfortable with that?” one asked.
“Once in the CIA, always in the CIA,” said another. “And now he’s in your newsroom.”
Atkisson took her concerns to the CBS ethics department. At the very least, Morell’s connections must be disclosed when he appeared as an expert consultant on CBS News. Her concerns were dismissed, and “former” spook Mike Morell began to appear on CBS news reports with no disclosures that he worked for the pro-Hillary public relations firm, or mention of his consistently inconsistent congressional testimony over the infamously malleable CIA talking points.
But the hiring of Mike Morrell at the CBS affiliate of American Pravda should not come as a shock. Not when CBS president David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, the deputy white house national security assistant. It was Ben Rhodes who collaborated with Mike Morell (and, one must believe, Obama’s long-time “Rasputin,” Valerie Jarrett) on editing the security lapses and terrorism links out of the Benghazi talking points.
6. SOME NOTABLE EXAMPLES OF PRESSTITUTION
But that is just CBS! Surely the picture must be better at the other networks. Let me mention just a few other glaring cases of sleazy, underhanded mainstream media cooperation with the Obama administration. First, recall the case of the presidential primary debate when ABC “news reporter” (and former head of the Clinton “war room”) George Stephanopoulos, from out of the blue, asked candidate Mitt Romney about his opinions on the availability of birth control to women. Birth control? Birth control! As we now know, this planted question was the very kernel, the genesis of the Democrat Party “Republican war on women” meme of the past few years.
More recently we only have to consider another presidential debate, when CNN “reporter” and debate moderator Candy Crowley leapt into the fray to support Obama’s false contention that he had called Benghazi a terrorist attack right from the beginning. This incident is covered in Stonewalled, because Atkisson was well-informed, in the course of her Benghazi investigations, about the truth of exactly what Obama had said, and did not say, about terrorism in the days following 9-11-2012.
This brings us back to CBS News, and 60-Minutes “investigative reporter” Steve Kroft. It turns out that on the day after the Benghazi attacks, Obama kept an already-scheduled interview with him. In the interview, Obama refused to call the attack an act of terrorism despite a series of questions from Kroft trying to pin him down.
What? Stop the presses! Send this blockbuster story straight onto the air, right? Wrong. CBS News shamefully hid the very existence of the Obama-Kroft interview for weeks, even after the debate where Crowley’s disgraceful assistance in furthering Obama’s lie became a national story. When Atkisson and others at CBS finally heard network-insider leaks about the suppressed Kroft interview, they went to the senior management and threatened to out the story on their own, if CBS did not finally report on it. The Obama-Kroft interview was only mentioned on the air the day before the election, buried among other stories.
This is all shamefully corrupt, and would be acutely embarrassing to today’s ABCNNBCBS reporters if they were at all interested in integrity and honesty. However, with only a few exceptions, they are not. They are, instead, handsomely paid “presstitutes” who are an integral part of the Obama administration’s gangster government.
7. JUST HOW FAR ARE THEY WILLING TO GO?
But just how far are the gangsters running the Obama administration willing to take their attacks against our supposedly free press? After the murderous Operation Fast and Furious, it must be assumed that the Obama administration countenances the deaths of innocent foreign civilians—as long as their murders can be falsely attributed to evil American gun stores and the outdated Second Amendment of the Constitution. So by the end of 2014, it must be accepted as a given that the Obama administration has already crossed the murder Rubicon.
What about well-known but “unreasonable” individual investigative reporters? Just how far would the Obama administration go to silence them?
Journalist Michael Hastings had authored the award-winning Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal that led to McChrystal’s resignation. According to Atkisson, Hastings had also been screamed at and cursed out by White House press flacks. She said that Hastings also believed he was being targeted by the administration, and he spoke of their “insidious response…when you piss off the powerful. They come after your career; they try to come after your credibility. They do cocktail party whisper campaigns. They try to make you controversial. Sadly, the Powers That Be are often aided by other journalists.”
Atkisson relates a Huffington Post interview in June 2013 with the former U.S. national counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, where he said that the intelligence agencies are able to remotely seize control of a modern automobile through a ‘car cyber attack,’ by hacking into their computer modules through their cellular and Blue-tooth wireless connections.
Atkisson relates: “In that particular interview, Clarke is responding to questions about the fatal single car crash of reporter Michael Hastings, who was said to be researching a story related to the scandal that forced the resignation of CIA director Petraeus in 2012. Shortly before Hastings’s death, he reportedly said he thought the FBI was investigating him, which the FBI denied. Officials who investigated the car crash say no foul play was suspected and Clarke doesn’t dispute that. But Clarke says, hypothetically, ‘If there were a cyber attack on the car—and I’m not saying there was—I think whoever did it would probably get away with it’.”
So in 2012, Hastings was known to be working on a story about the forced resignation of CIA director Petraeus, and also about the current CIA director John Brennan. He expressed his fears about being spied upon by government intelligence services. And then he was burnt to an unrecognizable crisp when his Mercedes-Benz CLK 250 inexplicably accelerated to top speed, crashed into trees and burst into flames—without leaving any skid marks.
(Perhaps not coincidentally, Atkisson relates that even by 2010 John Brennan was rumored to be “behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists learning information from inside the beltway sources,” according to an email leaked from the intelligence-community-friendly private intelligence service Stratfor. In 2010, Brennan was the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security. He became the new director of the CIA in January of 2013, after the sudden fall from grace of General Petraeus.)
Michael Hastings was another “unreasonable reporter,” judged so not only for the content of the stories he had reported in the past, but because, like Atkisson, he didn’t write for a conservative media outlet that could be dismissed as partisan. Was Michael Hastings murdered by some kind of an Obama White House “plumbers unit”, harkening back to Nixon, Watergate, and G. Gordon Liddy? After Operation Fast and Furious, is it still outrageous to suspect that corrupt members of U.S. intelligence or law enforcement agencies could have murdered Hastings “in the line of duty,” following secret orders from above?
It is truly a great pity that in stark contrast to the Nixon Watergate era, today’s American Pravda reporters are not interested in uncovering the truth, but instead, they are an integral part of the cover-up. Today’s Woodwards and Bernsteins are secretly taking their marching orders from Obama’s White House. Welcome to the USSA, comrades.
We have already seen agents of the Obama administration (on or “off-duty”) illegally spying on reporters such as Sharyl Atkisson, even going to the extent of secretly planting classified documents deep within her remotely-hijacked computers. Classified documents presumably meant to be “discovered” at a future date, when her reporting might have become intolerably dangerous to the Obama administration.
And of course, we need to look no further than Operation Fast and Furious for an Obama administration mass-murder scheme. So what is one murder of one troublesome reporter, after the intentional murders of hundreds of Mexicans, and at least two U.S. federal agents? Especially if the pesky reporter’s death can plausibly be blamed on his 2013 Mercedes’ accelerator and brakes inexplicably going haywire, sending him into a fiery crash at 130 mph. It happens every day…right? Just a coincidence, I’m sure of it.
8. EXACTLY WHO CONTROLS CONGRESS?
In Stonewalled, Atkisson also has a lot to say about National Intelligence Director James Clapper, and his infamous straight-faced lies to Congress concerning the NSA’s mass-spying upon unsuspected ordinary American citizens. Like with the shape-shifting “former” spook and CBS News “consultant” Mike Morell, I am reminded of the famous (but unattributed) saying: “In acting, once you learn how to fake sincerity, the rest is easy.” (Question: is this a subject taught during CIA training? Undoubtedly it is. How else to recruit foreign agents of influence, which is the CIA’s bailiwick? Or at least, it used to be, before they started operating on domestic soil against Americans once again.)
After recounting Clappers’ apparently sincere but always changing testimony, Atkisson had this to say: “Allowing Clapper and other government officials to be in charge of solving their own surveillance controversies is like inviting the fox to guard the henhouse. Except the fox is also getting the keys to the henhouse and the recipe for chicken fricassee.
“In a fictitious world, one can imagine a meeting in which any member of Congress calling for Clapper’s head gets a closed-door visit from Clapper or his team. They slide a file bearing the name of the member of Congress or someone close to him across the desk, J. Edger Hoover-style. The file contains materials surreptitiously gathered under the auspices of a government leak investigation or surveillance program. The member of Congress opens the file. Perhaps his eyes flicker. Maybe his face becomes white. The materials are very…personal. The imaginary Clapper rubs his forehead with his four fingers. No words are spoken because no words are necessary. The file is closed and Clapper drags it back across the desk, never to be spoken of again. Unless necessary. Suddenly the member of Congress is no longer out for Clapper’s head.
“Or here’s another fictitious premise. CIA director Petraeus deviates from the Obama administration’s official line on Benghazi. Somewhere in a private room, a small group of government operatives culls through data to find out who Petraeus had been emailing and calling. Any skeletons in that closet? A review of his file reveals some unseemly contacts with his former biographer. That information could come in very handy.”
9. IT WAS JUST A RANDOM ACCIDENT
At this point, does anybody still doubt the depths of illegality that the Obama administration is capable of plumbing? Mass murder, (at least of Mexicans). Check. Spying on reporters’ computers, telephones, and homes without warrants or court orders? Check. Planting classified documents for later misuse? Check. Placing “former” intelligence agency operatives within the news rooms of American Pravda? Check. Very possibly the murder of “unreasonable” reporters such as Michael Hastings, in a fiery high-speed one-car crash? Check.
Although this in not in Stonewalled, we have certainly not forgotten about that perennial thorn in the side of the Obama administration, Andrew Breitbart, who supposedly died from a massive heart attack on a routine walk around his block. I’ve known for decades how easy it is to create an “instant heart attack” with a puff in the face of a certain organic compound, a heart attack that appears even to medical examiners to be totally natural. If ordinary civilians like me know how easy it is to trigger a false heart attack, you can be assured that our intelligence agencies do as well. And “rogue” or “off-duty” or “retired” or “contract” intelligence operatives would not forget this type of methodology when they are “sheep-dipped” (on paper) from official over to non-official status.
“Accidental deaths,” to be believable, must fit within expected parameters. Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings liked to drive fast cars. Breitbart was overweight and had a history of minor heart trouble. (For the record, I am in excellent health, and I don’t like fast cars any more.)
10. OBAMA’S AMAZING LUCK: A PATTERN OF BLACKMAIL
Next, please recall the bizarre history of President Obama’s unlikely string of incredible luck that resulted in his election victories first in Illinois and then to the United States Senate. At each level, sudden embarrassing personal disclosures about his rivals forced their last-minute withdrawals. Sealed divorce records, for example, suddenly became unsealed, and were handed to Obama-friendly reporters. Just as in the removal of General Petraeus, blackmail and the well-timed disclosure of hidden scandals are an established part of Team Obama’s modus operandi.
Therefore, is it reasonable to assume that agents of the Obama administration would not seek and then misuse embarrassing personal information in order to blackmail and control key members of Congress, or even the Supreme Court? Rumors surrounding Chief Justice Roberts, and his 11th hour conversion on the constitutionality of Obamacare come to mind.
I contend that after Barack Obama’s history of mysterious election victories resulting from last-minute disclosures about his opponents, and the manipulation and forced resignation of CIA director Petraeus, it would take an unwarranted leap of faith to assume that the Obama administration’s bad actors would not engage in spying upon and blackmailing Congressional leaders.
Therefore, in light of the recent extra-constitutional “executive actions” taken by President Obama, it is dangerously naive to assume that we can expect remedies to this creeping tyranny either from Congress or the Supreme Court. I would contend that for our national safety, we must assume that many of our key leaders are already under the control of blackmail and the threat of scandalous disclosures.
Spying upon and then blackmailing opponents is in President Obama’s political DNA down to the center of his bone marrow. Consider that key Obama advisors such as Valerie Jarrett have been part of his team since his early political life in Chicago, when the blackmail pattern first became evident.
Now let me move briefly to another book that I hope you will read before or after Sharyl Atkisson’s Stonewalled, to both complement and reinforce its warning message.
11. IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS: LOVE, TERROR AND AN AMERICAN FAMILY IN HITLER’S BERLIN
“In the Garden of Beasts” is an award-winning bestseller by Eric Larson, published in 2011. You will find it on the shelves of your local library, if you wish to save the few dollars it will cost to download it to your e-reader. The book is about William Dodd and his 22-year old daughter Martha during Dodd’s time as the U.S. ambassador to Germany, during the years from 1933 to 1937. The book is based upon their journals, letters and other primary sources. The Garden of Beasts in the title refers to the embassy row area of Berlin, across from the Tiergarten or animal park. The beasts of the title also refer to Hitler’s inner circle of goons and thugs including Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, Ernst Rohm (of the SA) and others.
The book is extremely well written and is highly engaging on several levels, especially since Ambassador Dodd’s feisty 22-year-old daughter fraternized with various Berlin social circles, and had romantic affairs and liaisons with notable power players including Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo, and a Russian living in Germany who turned out to be a Soviet spy.
To me, what is most valuable about this book is the uniquely placed view it provides into German politics and society during the period when Adolf Hitler was elevated from the rabble-rousing leader of the radical Nazi Party, to become the absolute dictator of Germany. In January of 1933, the same month that FDR became president of the United States, Hitler was elected Chancellor. He won by masterfully employing the first modern media-blitz campaign, flying from city to city and making constant radio broadcasts while almost literally promising “hope and change.” But although elected Chancellor, his Nazi party held only the third highest number of seats in the German parliament.
Then in February of 1933, the Reichstag was destroyed by a fire. This Nazi arson attack was blamed on the Communists in a spectacularly successful false-flag operation. In March, parliament passed the Enabling Act, making Hitler absolute ruler for a period of four years. In June of 1934 came the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler’s enemies and competitors were murdered, cementing his status as unquestioned tyrant.
During this period, as described in Garden of Beasts, ordinary Germans first considered Hitler to be an embarrassing buffoon, and later a growing threat to their personal freedom. And many good Germans believed that as a last-chance exit from disaster, patriots among the honorable officers leading the German military would stop Hitler from launching their nation into a disastrous world war. As we know from history, this threadbare hope was not to be.
But by the time that Hitler’s evil programs were enacted, the Nazis had already laid the groundwork for their ultimate total control. The old brake lines and control levers had been cut. Newspapers, magazines and radio came under Nazi control at first voluntarily (since many in their management supported the Nazis), but eventually, their self-censorship became codified into law and was rigidly enforced. By the time of the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, there were no more restraints upon Hitler’s actions.
Guns were collected from the Jews, using old Weimar Republic registration lists. The Jews, already marginalized and scapegoated in the German media, were then fired from government and media jobs in accordance with newly enacted laws. From there, it was a steady progression of downward steps leading to the Jewish ghettoes and finally to the gas chambers.
Before Hitler could embark openly upon his insane plans, the Nazis first installed able and effective henchmen at the top of the media, the intelligence services, the universities and the military, after purging those who were not 100% loyal to Hitler. Only then did they move forward to building concentration camps and making invasion plans.
12. BARACK OBAMA’S GARDEN OF BEASTS
Does this perhaps ring a tiny bell, with able and effective Obama henchmen being installed at the top of the DOJ, FBI, CIA, NSA, DNI and the military? Not to mention the Obama henchmen installed at the top of American Pravda, ABCNNBCBS. (Not able and effective in terms of conducting or communicating policies beneficial to Americans, but able and effective in terms of furthering the goals and plans of their Dear Leader, President Barack Obama.)
By the time that the true scope of Der Führer’s horror was revealed and put into action, there were no levers or controls remaining within German society capable of resisting his march to tyranny, much less of stopping it. And now it must be asked: at this point in America’s history, do we retain sufficient levers and controls to check Dear Leader Obama’s march toward assuming complete dictatorial control?
We can depend upon the fact that American Pravda’s “reporters” will only serve as Obama administration cheerleaders, no matter what “executive actions” he declares by fiat. Almost all military generals and admirals serving when Obama came into office have been forced into retirement and replaced by go-along-to-get-along politically-correct officers. Bear in mind that all flag-rank promotions are approved by the Senate, which has been under Obama’s Democrat Party control. And we have already seen the subversion of our intelligence services under Clapper, Brennan et al, and the “justice” department under Obama-loyalist Eric Holder.
So from what direction can we expect relief? Are we to wait for Congress to somehow check Obama’s rise to total power? Recall Obama’s modus operandi of not moving forward until key opponents are already under the control of blackmail.
Can we realistically expect entrenched Republican leaders (or even the Supreme Court) to stop President Obama from assuming more and more power by executive fiat, when we should already operate under the assumption that many of them are, even now, being blackmailed into secret submission? In fact, I believe that we are seeing a slow-motion virtual “Obama Enabling Act” being put into practice by Congressional default, one unconstitutional “executive action” at a time.
One day after announcing his executive immigration amnesty declaration, Obama even laughed about the grim subject of presidential tyranny, joking, “I didn’t dissolve the parliament…they can still pass a bill!”
But then, Obama doesn’t need to dissolve Congress, or burn down the Capitol in a false-flag Reichstag Fire operation. Not if he is already controlling enough of the key Congressional leadership through his well-established method of achieving political victory through by the acquisition and misuse of private, sealed or secret information for the purpose of blackmail.
Under these conditions, will Obama’s Garden of Beasts prove to be any easier to stop than Hitler’s?
We know that the leaders of the mainstream media have largely been co-opted and corrupted by the Obama administration. They will not even attempt to break the high and soundproof stone walls that they have helped to build around Obama’s many scandals. These include Operation Fast and Furious, IRS political targeting, the intelligence agencies illegally spying on Obama’s perceived political enemies, and so on. Breaking the American Pravda embargo against truthful reporting is a lost cause.
But are there no actively serving (or even recently retired) military generals or members of the federal Senior Executive Service who retain a shred of honor? Who will place Duty, Honor and Country ahead of paycheck, pension, and self-promotion? Is there not one real hero left with stars on his shoulders?
Not even one?
13. A CALL FOR ANSWERS
General Petraeus, where is your book? Is your agent planning to release it in a few years to maximize its profits? Aren’t you already making a ton of money sitting on all of those boards? Only a coward and scoundrel (like a certain recent Secretary of Defense) would wait to release a book only after its information was too late to prevent disaster. And knowing what I now know, I would not be surprised to learn that threats had been made against your family in order to ensure your silence. After all, today, gangsters rule our government. It’s the Chicago Way.
But General Petraeus, before your book finally comes out, possibly after many years, can you please answer two very simple questions? Put your answers on the public record now, instead of waiting for your book, when it’s too late to matter. As a man of honor, please answer these two questions sooner, rather than later:
1. Where was President Barack Obama on the night of the Benghazi attacks, hour by hour, dusk ’til dawn?
2. Does President Obama’s mysterious MIA status on the night when his “good friend” Ambassador Chris Stevens and the other Americans were being killed relate to his failure to grant “cross-border authority” for an external rescue mission?
Necessary permission that only the president, in person, can give. Did President Obama literally hide, so that no external rescue could be mounted? A rescue that might have turned into a “Blackhawk Down” disaster just weeks before the election? General Petraeus, an honorable man would not hesitate to put these facts on the record.
The American people deserve to know exactly what kind of man their Commander-in-Chief is. The fact that years after Benghazi we still don’t know the answers to those questions indicates that we are far along in the process of losing our freedom, with the mainstream media and the intelligence services colluding in the establishment of tyranny.
History will judge us very harshly if we don’t find a way to stop Obama’s Garden of Beasts from fundamentally transforming the United States into a one-party socialist dictatorship, while we watch it happen, helpless to resist. We watch and we wait, like insects already injected with paralyzing poison and wrapped in silk, awaiting the spider.
How can we escape from Team Obama’s web of deceit?
Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington
Sharyl Atkisson, 2014
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin
Eric Larson, 2011
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
– George Santayana
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
– Attributed to Mark Twain, unverified
“Goddammit, Sharyl! The Washington Post is reasonable, the L.A. Times is reasonable, the New York Times is reasonable, you’re the only one who’s not reasonable! So, Sharyl Atkisson is the only reporter who knows what she’s doing? Nobody else thinks this is a story. Just you. You’re the only one. Sharyl Atkisson is right and everybody else is wrong? Goddammit!”
This is how CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Atkisson described the response to a phone call she made to the White House to ask some questions about the Operation Fast And Furious scandal. On the other end of the line was a deputy White House press officer named Eric Schultz. The screaming tantrum was disturbing enough that she put the call on speaker phone in her office at CBS News, so that Schultz’s blistering tirade could be overheard by ear-witnesses.
Operation Fast and Furious was conceived and ordered by the Obama Justice Department, and executed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Its purpose was to deliver thousands of high-powered assault rifles to Mexican drug cartels. There was no attempt to follow or trace the weapons into Mexico, putting the lie to the cover-story that it was a “botched sting operation.” The Mexican government and Mexican law enforcement were not even informed of the program to smuggle deadly assault rifles into their nation. (Incidentally, that is considered an illegal act of war.)
The operation involved ATF field offices in several states, also putting the lie to the claim that it was the handiwork of a few “rogue agents” in Phoenix. In reality, Fast and Furious was ordered and directed from Washington D.C., from at least at the level of Attorney General Eric Holder. For months after the exposure of the plan Holder claimed to know nothing about it, but emails dragged out of his office after several years of the DOJ resisting Congressional subpoenas proved he was lying all along. His laughable defense to these disclosures of his dishonesty was that he did not read most of the emails sent from his office and signed with his name. The mainstream media didn’t care, and hardly gave this a mention.
When the hot trail grew too close to the White House, President Obama took the unprecedented step of shielding tens of thousands of documents and emails, claiming blanket “executive privilege.” Attorney General Holder was found in contempt of Congress for his part in the cover-up, something which has never happened before in American history.
An interesting clue about the true purpose of the operation was disclosed by gun-control advocate Sarah Brady when, before the disclosure of the operation, she related that President Obama told her, “I just want you to know that we are working on it [gun control]. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”
So what was the true purpose of Operation Fast and Furious? At the same time that it was secretly occurring, President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Attorney General Eric Holder were busy promoting a false narrative to the media that 90% of the guns found at Mexican murder scenes were from American gun shops. In reality, these were guns that ATF Special Agents forced gun store owners to sell in bulk to obvious cartel “straw purchasers,” against the store owners’ declared misgivings to the ATF agents who were giving them the orders to make these illegal gun sales.
At least 300 Mexicans have been murdered with these guns, in a plan conceived and carried out to sabotage and discredit the Second Amendment, and the right of Americans to keep and bear arms. Despite the hundreds murdered in Mexico (and the concurrent trumpeting by the administration of the “90% of guns” lie), this diabolical program was not uncovered in the U.S. until Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered in the Arizona desert in December of 2010 with one of the AK-47s “walked” to the Mexican cartels.
In her book Stonewalled, Sharyl Atkisson credits David Codrea, a writer for GUNS magazine and Examiner.com, and Mike Vanderboegh of the Sipsey Street Irregulars blog, for ultimately putting her into contact with whistleblowers within the ATF. Interviews with ATF whistleblower Special Agent John Dodson led to the explosive and widely seen CBS news reports in February and March of 2011 that blew the lid off Operation Fast and Furious.
It’s hard to imagine a more evil plan than to deliver assault weapons to cartel killers, in order to rack up a high body count of murdered Mexicans. By any fair comparison, Fast and Furious was orders of magnitude worse than the Watergate scandal, which resulted in the resignation of President Nixon and the imprisonment of Attorney General Mitchell.
In the recent case of Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration bosses who ordered this evil operation have never been held to account. CBS reporter Sharyl Atkisson and the rest of America have been successfully stonewalled with the active collaboration of a complicit media. Instead of the mainstream media leading the investigative charge, as they did with Watergate, this time they assisted in the cover-up. As Atkisson describes, the stonewalling even permeated CBS News, where instead of being given kudos for her ground-breaking investigative reports, she was isolated, ostracized, and considered a traitor to the network, for reporting the unwanted truth about a government mass-murder scheme.
So who was the Eric Schultz that was screaming at Sharyl Atkisson on the phone? Schultz was the former spokesman for New York Senator Charles Schumer, for decades a vocally rabid opponent of the Second Amendment. Schultz also worked for Al Franken’s 2008 Senate campaign, where the former SNL comedian’s amazing come-from-behind victory was decided by bundles of mysterious absentee ballots “found” after the election. Before working to help elect Senator Franken, Schultz worked for Senator John “Love Child” Edwards, Democrat of North Carolina. Schultz was also for a time the head of communications for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
In 2011, under the heat generated by reports such as those by Sharyl Atkisson, the White House hired Schultz (paid with our own tax money, of course) to run press interference against the burgeoning scandal surrounding Operation Fast and Furious. And Schultz did not appreciate that Atkisson had gone off the “reasonable” mainstream-media reservation with her hard-hitting investigative reporting on Operation Fast and Furious.
What made Atkisson’s reporting particularly dangerous to the regime was that she worked for CBS News, and had a 20-year career of reporting straight down the middle, investigating administrations and corporations on all sides of the political spectrum. If she had worked for FOX News, her work would have been dismissed as partisan in nature, but Atkisson had already been lauded for previous stories by left-wing luminaries such as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. Atkisson’s unassailable reputation for integrity made her a threat to the Obama administration. Subsequently, Obama’s flacks attacked her with all of the tools and tactics at their disposal, some of which were legal, even if they were sleazy, and some of which were both illegal and outrageous to the values of a free nation.
2. SLEAZY, BUT LEGAL
First, I’ll address the sleazy but legal side of character assassination as practiced by the Obama administration. The Obama media war room, as exposed by Atkisson, is tightly interwoven with what I call American Pravda, shorthand for ABCNNBCBS, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. These first-tier media outlets serve as “gate keepers” for what constitutes supposedly legitimate and “reasonable” news stories in America today.
If a story is only reported on FOX News, the internet, or talk radio, the story is deemed to be partisan and illegitimate, and despite its truthfulness, it is discounted as coming from the “political fringe.” The executives and program directors of American Pravda are not much for breaking news reports, but they are absolutely adept at killing stories, censoring the news by omission, and even coordinating whisper campaigns against determined reporters such as Atkisson, “unreasonable” reporters who dare to tread on forbidden ground. Their collective motto might as well be, “It’s not a story if we don’t report it!”
The networks and the other tier-one news outlets also work hand-in-glove with the Obama administration to generate and publicize false stories, “back-fires” lit in order to discredit truthful reportage that is perceived to damage the Obama White House. (Witness the infamous Benghazi video.) Atkisson, often the victim of these discrediting campaigns, provides a first-hand account of how the administration feeds false or deliberately misleading narratives to friendly blogs such as Media Matters, where they are consistently picked up by slightly more reputable outlets such as the Huffington Post or Politico, and from there are launched into the mainstream news, where they are eagerly lapped up as gospel truth and reported by American Pravda. These false or intentionally misleading White House narratives are often printed nearly verbatim as they rise through this chain of hacks and stooges, all the way up to ABCNNBCBS and the newspapers that constitute this charade of a free press.
3. ILLEGAL WARRENTLESS SURVEILLANCE
Following Atkisson’s explosive Fast and Furious reports, and later, her reports on the inconsistencies (to put in mildly) in the administration’s constantly changing versions of the events in Benghazi on 9-11-2012, Atkisson’s home and office computers begin turning on and off in the middle of the night. Not just installing routine updates, but loading new programs, installing and removing files, even turning her Skype account into a room-bugging device that operated around the clock, with her computer turned on or off.
She made repeated calls over many months to Verizon asking for help with her sabotaged phones and computers with no success. When she enlisted the help of trusted former intelligence officers, they found an extra and unneeded fiber-optic line leading from her house to the side of her garage. On New Years Eve 2012, she called Verizon, but they disavowed any knowledge of the extra fiber-optic line, and advised her to contact law enforcement.
An hour after her call, Atkisson’s phone rang again. A new “Verizon supervisor” was suddenly so interested in her case that that she wanted to send a technician out on New Year’s Day to take a look. Atkisson said it was unnecessary, but the “Verizon supervisor” insisted. In fact, later checking proved that the “supervisor” and the “technician” did not work for Verizon at all, but they were extremely interested in removing the incriminating extra fiber-optic cable.
What was on the end of the cable? Putting the full picture together later, it all fit into a pattern of concentrated surveillance of Atkisson, her computers both at work and at home, her phones, and even her bedroom office. Before the New Year’s Day visit of the false “Verizon” technician, suspicious “utility vans” had been parking on her street in direct line of sight to her garage. They disappeared after the removal of the mystery cable and its more mysterious terminus, believed to be a transmitter or relay.
At this point, you would think that the intensive surveillance of a CBS News investigative reporter by what could only have been government entities would have been a major CBS News story on its own. This was not to be. CBS provide only reluctant and minimal help with what should have been a major scandal and news story, the bugging and hacking of one of their reporter’s computers, phones and even her home. Instead, they encouraged her to keep a low profile about it while they “looked into it” but did nothing.
Could there have been active collusion between the intelligence agencies, the White House, and American Pravda in burying stories of illegal surveillance such as the case described by Atkisson?
4. OUR HOPELESSLY CORRUPT INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
A glaring example of the log-rolling and back-scratching occurring between the Obama Administration, the media and the “three-letter” intelligence agencies may be found in the strange case of Mike Morell, who was the deputy director of the CIA under General Petraeus during and after the 9-11 Benghazi attacks. You will remember the constant evolution of the so-called “Benghazi talking points,” which were the administration’s attempt to manipulate the media into accepting a false narrative rejecting the terrorist origin of the attacks, and the prior warnings about the Benghazi diplomatic facility’s dangerously weak security.
Evidently, General Petraeus did not agree to scrub the Al Qaeda references from the CIA’s original report, the basis for the Benghazi talking points. His CIA deputy, Mike Morell was much more willing to do the administration’s bidding, and Morell was quite strangely given authority to edit the talking points that had supposedly been approved by the director of the CIA.
Enter the infamous Paula Broadwell infidelity scandal. Atkisson: “Fast-forward a week to November 6, the day of the election. Someone at the Justice Department, we’re told, has finally decided to tell Director of National Intelligence Clapper about Petraeus. (How good of a chief intelligence officer are you if you don’t know the head of the CIA had been under investigation by your FBI for months? And Republicans on the Hill know before you do?) Clapper calls Petraeus the same day and urges him to resign. It’s a stark reversal of the FBI’s pre-Benghazi determination that there was no harm in Petraeus staying on the job.”
Then, we are supposed to believe that Obama didn’t learn about the Petraeus scandal until November 7th when he read about it in the news media. The president “reluctantly” accepted the resignation of his CIA Director.
Deputy CIA director Mike Morell was called once again to a congressional hearing on the changing talking points memo eighteen months after 9-11, and his once fuzzy memory about the talking points were suddenly clear. Atkisson puts it this way: “Though he hadn’t offered up the information early on, he now tells Congress that he was the primary editing force behind the talking points. And that there were no political motivations behind removal of references to terrorism and prior warnings given to the State Department. That’s just the stuff of conspiracy theorists and right-wing crazies.”
Morell changes his testimony, and falls on his sword for the administration, but he is forgiven. Benghazi is a tired old story, water under the bridge. CBS and the rest of American Pravda gives a collective ho-hum to Morell’s admission that he had originally lied to Congress under oath. It’s time to move on. For American Pravda, it’s much more important to report the latest celebrity scandal, or outbreak of stormy weather, or product recall, than to report about the bald-faced duplicity of the CIA’s deputy director, acting behind his own director’s back.
Only one thing is consistent about Mike Morel: his ability to change stories while retaining the appearance of total sincerity. From Congressional hearing to hearing, the basic facts of his story changed in blatantly contradictory ways. First he solemnly swore that he had no idea who changed the Benghazi talking points. A year and a half later it changed to sure, I edited the talking points. So what?
Morell is more than just an Obama administration team player, he is literally willing to take one for the team. But not-to-worry about his future. Morell’s loyalty and flexibility in matters of truthful testimony was handsomely rewarded. He soon accepted a plum job at a Washington public relations firm that Atkisson says is “dominated by Hillary Clinton loyalists: Beacon Global Strategies.” A firm that essentially serves as an open funnel for Hillary Clinton slush funds disguised as payments for P.R. services rendered.
But wait, there’s more! From Atkisson’s book:
5. CBS HIRES BENGHAZI FIGURE
“In January 2014, Morell, the ex-CIA deputy director was hired as a consultant for CBS news. At the same time, the government was still very much embroiled in controversy over its monitoring of citizens and journalists, targeting of whistleblowers, and the handling of Benghazi. The hire drew immediate commentary from some of my sources.”
“CBS is employing one of the most controversial figures of the Benghazi controversy. Are you comfortable with that?” one asked.
“Once in the CIA, always in the CIA,” said another. “And now he’s in your newsroom.”
Atkisson took her concerns to the CBS ethics department. At the very least, Morell’s connections must be disclosed when he appeared as an expert consultant on CBS News. Her concerns were dismissed, and “former” spook Mike Morell began to appear on CBS news reports with no disclosures that he worked for the pro-Hillary public relations firm, or mention of his consistently inconsistent congressional testimony over the infamously malleable CIA talking points.
But the hiring of Mike Morrell at the CBS affiliate of American Pravda should not come as a shock. Not when CBS president David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, the deputy white house national security assistant. It was Ben Rhodes who collaborated with Mike Morell (and, one must believe, Obama’s long-time “Rasputin,” Valerie Jarrett) on editing the security lapses and terrorism links out of the Benghazi talking points.
6. SOME NOTABLE EXAMPLES OF PRESSTITUTION
But that is just CBS! Surely the picture must be better at the other networks. Let me mention just a few other glaring cases of sleazy, underhanded mainstream media cooperation with the Obama administration. First, recall the case of the presidential primary debate when ABC “news reporter” (and former head of the Clinton “war room”) George Stephanopoulos, from out of the blue, asked candidate Mitt Romney about his opinions on the availability of birth control to women. Birth control? Birth control! As we now know, this planted question was the very kernel, the genesis of the Democrat Party “Republican war on women” meme of the past few years.
More recently we only have to consider another presidential debate, when CNN “reporter” and debate moderator Candy Crowley leapt into the fray to support Obama’s false contention that he had called Benghazi a terrorist attack right from the beginning. This incident is covered in Stonewalled, because Atkisson was well-informed, in the course of her Benghazi investigations, about the truth of exactly what Obama had said, and did not say, about terrorism in the days following 9-11-2012.
This brings us back to CBS News, and 60-Minutes “investigative reporter” Steve Kroft. It turns out that on the day after the Benghazi attacks, Obama kept an already-scheduled interview with him. In the interview, Obama refused to call the attack an act of terrorism despite a series of questions from Kroft trying to pin him down.
What? Stop the presses! Send this blockbuster story straight onto the air, right? Wrong. CBS News shamefully hid the very existence of the Obama-Kroft interview for weeks, even after the debate where Crowley’s disgraceful assistance in furthering Obama’s lie became a national story. When Atkisson and others at CBS finally heard network-insider leaks about the suppressed Kroft interview, they went to the senior management and threatened to out the story on their own, if CBS did not finally report on it. The Obama-Kroft interview was only mentioned on the air the day before the election, buried among other stories.
This is all shamefully corrupt, and would be acutely embarrassing to today’s ABCNNBCBS reporters if they were at all interested in integrity and honesty. However, with only a few exceptions, they are not. They are, instead, handsomely paid “presstitutes” who are an integral part of the Obama administration’s gangster government.
7. JUST HOW FAR ARE THEY WILLING TO GO?
But just how far are the gangsters running the Obama administration willing to take their attacks against our supposedly free press? After the murderous Operation Fast and Furious, it must be assumed that the Obama administration countenances the deaths of innocent foreign civilians—as long as their murders can be falsely attributed to evil American gun stores and the outdated Second Amendment of the Constitution. So by the end of 2014, it must be accepted as a given that the Obama administration has already crossed the murder Rubicon.
What about well-known but “unreasonable” individual investigative reporters? Just how far would the Obama administration go to silence them?
Journalist Michael Hastings had authored the award-winning Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal that led to McChrystal’s resignation. According to Atkisson, Hastings had also been screamed at and cursed out by White House press flacks. She said that Hastings also believed he was being targeted by the administration, and he spoke of their “insidious response…when you piss off the powerful. They come after your career; they try to come after your credibility. They do cocktail party whisper campaigns. They try to make you controversial. Sadly, the Powers That Be are often aided by other journalists.”
Atkisson relates a Huffington Post interview in June 2013 with the former U.S. national counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, where he said that the intelligence agencies are able to remotely seize control of a modern automobile through a ‘car cyber attack,’ by hacking into their computer modules through their cellular and Blue-tooth wireless connections.
Atkisson relates: “In that particular interview, Clarke is responding to questions about the fatal single car crash of reporter Michael Hastings, who was said to be researching a story related to the scandal that forced the resignation of CIA director Petraeus in 2012. Shortly before Hastings’s death, he reportedly said he thought the FBI was investigating him, which the FBI denied. Officials who investigated the car crash say no foul play was suspected and Clarke doesn’t dispute that. But Clarke says, hypothetically, ‘If there were a cyber attack on the car—and I’m not saying there was—I think whoever did it would probably get away with it’.”
So in 2012, Hastings was known to be working on a story about the forced resignation of CIA director Petraeus, and also about the current CIA director John Brennan. He expressed his fears about being spied upon by government intelligence services. And then he was burnt to an unrecognizable crisp when his Mercedes-Benz CLK 250 inexplicably accelerated to top speed, crashed into trees and burst into flames—without leaving any skid marks.
(Perhaps not coincidentally, Atkisson relates that even by 2010 John Brennan was rumored to be “behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists learning information from inside the beltway sources,” according to an email leaked from the intelligence-community-friendly private intelligence service Stratfor. In 2010, Brennan was the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security. He became the new director of the CIA in January of 2013, after the sudden fall from grace of General Petraeus.)
Michael Hastings was another “unreasonable reporter,” judged so not only for the content of the stories he had reported in the past, but because, like Atkisson, he didn’t write for a conservative media outlet that could be dismissed as partisan. Was Michael Hastings murdered by some kind of an Obama White House “plumbers unit”, harkening back to Nixon, Watergate, and G. Gordon Liddy? After Operation Fast and Furious, is it still outrageous to suspect that corrupt members of U.S. intelligence or law enforcement agencies could have murdered Hastings “in the line of duty,” following secret orders from above?
It is truly a great pity that in stark contrast to the Nixon Watergate era, today’s American Pravda reporters are not interested in uncovering the truth, but instead, they are an integral part of the cover-up. Today’s Woodwards and Bernsteins are secretly taking their marching orders from Obama’s White House. Welcome to the USSA, comrades.
We have already seen agents of the Obama administration (on or “off-duty”) illegally spying on reporters such as Sharyl Atkisson, even going to the extent of secretly planting classified documents deep within her remotely-hijacked computers. Classified documents presumably meant to be “discovered” at a future date, when her reporting might have become intolerably dangerous to the Obama administration.
And of course, we need to look no further than Operation Fast and Furious for an Obama administration mass-murder scheme. So what is one murder of one troublesome reporter, after the intentional murders of hundreds of Mexicans, and at least two U.S. federal agents? Especially if the pesky reporter’s death can plausibly be blamed on his 2013 Mercedes’ accelerator and brakes inexplicably going haywire, sending him into a fiery crash at 130 mph. It happens every day…right? Just a coincidence, I’m sure of it.
8. EXACTLY WHO CONTROLS CONGRESS?
In Stonewalled, Atkisson also has a lot to say about National Intelligence Director James Clapper, and his infamous straight-faced lies to Congress concerning the NSA’s mass-spying upon unsuspected ordinary American citizens. Like with the shape-shifting “former” spook and CBS News “consultant” Mike Morell, I am reminded of the famous (but unattributed) saying: “In acting, once you learn how to fake sincerity, the rest is easy.” (Question: is this a subject taught during CIA training? Undoubtedly it is. How else to recruit foreign agents of influence, which is the CIA’s bailiwick? Or at least, it used to be, before they started operating on domestic soil against Americans once again.)
After recounting Clappers’ apparently sincere but always changing testimony, Atkisson had this to say: “Allowing Clapper and other government officials to be in charge of solving their own surveillance controversies is like inviting the fox to guard the henhouse. Except the fox is also getting the keys to the henhouse and the recipe for chicken fricassee.
“In a fictitious world, one can imagine a meeting in which any member of Congress calling for Clapper’s head gets a closed-door visit from Clapper or his team. They slide a file bearing the name of the member of Congress or someone close to him across the desk, J. Edger Hoover-style. The file contains materials surreptitiously gathered under the auspices of a government leak investigation or surveillance program. The member of Congress opens the file. Perhaps his eyes flicker. Maybe his face becomes white. The materials are very…personal. The imaginary Clapper rubs his forehead with his four fingers. No words are spoken because no words are necessary. The file is closed and Clapper drags it back across the desk, never to be spoken of again. Unless necessary. Suddenly the member of Congress is no longer out for Clapper’s head.
“Or here’s another fictitious premise. CIA director Petraeus deviates from the Obama administration’s official line on Benghazi. Somewhere in a private room, a small group of government operatives culls through data to find out who Petraeus had been emailing and calling. Any skeletons in that closet? A review of his file reveals some unseemly contacts with his former biographer. That information could come in very handy.”
9. IT WAS JUST A RANDOM ACCIDENT
At this point, does anybody still doubt the depths of illegality that the Obama administration is capable of plumbing? Mass murder, (at least of Mexicans). Check. Spying on reporters’ computers, telephones, and homes without warrants or court orders? Check. Planting classified documents for later misuse? Check. Placing “former” intelligence agency operatives within the news rooms of American Pravda? Check. Very possibly the murder of “unreasonable” reporters such as Michael Hastings, in a fiery high-speed one-car crash? Check.
Although this in not in Stonewalled, we have certainly not forgotten about that perennial thorn in the side of the Obama administration, Andrew Breitbart, who supposedly died from a massive heart attack on a routine walk around his block. I’ve known for decades how easy it is to create an “instant heart attack” with a puff in the face of a certain organic compound, a heart attack that appears even to medical examiners to be totally natural. If ordinary civilians like me know how easy it is to trigger a false heart attack, you can be assured that our intelligence agencies do as well. And “rogue” or “off-duty” or “retired” or “contract” intelligence operatives would not forget this type of methodology when they are “sheep-dipped” (on paper) from official over to non-official status.
“Accidental deaths,” to be believable, must fit within expected parameters. Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings liked to drive fast cars. Breitbart was overweight and had a history of minor heart trouble. (For the record, I am in excellent health, and I don’t like fast cars any more.)
10. OBAMA’S AMAZING LUCK: A PATTERN OF BLACKMAIL
Next, please recall the bizarre history of President Obama’s unlikely string of incredible luck that resulted in his election victories first in Illinois and then to the United States Senate. At each level, sudden embarrassing personal disclosures about his rivals forced their last-minute withdrawals. Sealed divorce records, for example, suddenly became unsealed, and were handed to Obama-friendly reporters. Just as in the removal of General Petraeus, blackmail and the well-timed disclosure of hidden scandals are an established part of Team Obama’s modus operandi.
Therefore, is it reasonable to assume that agents of the Obama administration would not seek and then misuse embarrassing personal information in order to blackmail and control key members of Congress, or even the Supreme Court? Rumors surrounding Chief Justice Roberts, and his 11th hour conversion on the constitutionality of Obamacare come to mind.
I contend that after Barack Obama’s history of mysterious election victories resulting from last-minute disclosures about his opponents, and the manipulation and forced resignation of CIA director Petraeus, it would take an unwarranted leap of faith to assume that the Obama administration’s bad actors would not engage in spying upon and blackmailing Congressional leaders.
Therefore, in light of the recent extra-constitutional “executive actions” taken by President Obama, it is dangerously naive to assume that we can expect remedies to this creeping tyranny either from Congress or the Supreme Court. I would contend that for our national safety, we must assume that many of our key leaders are already under the control of blackmail and the threat of scandalous disclosures.
Spying upon and then blackmailing opponents is in President Obama’s political DNA down to the center of his bone marrow. Consider that key Obama advisors such as Valerie Jarrett have been part of his team since his early political life in Chicago, when the blackmail pattern first became evident.
Now let me move briefly to another book that I hope you will read before or after Sharyl Atkisson’s Stonewalled, to both complement and reinforce its warning message.
11. IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS: LOVE, TERROR AND AN AMERICAN FAMILY IN HITLER’S BERLIN
“In the Garden of Beasts” is an award-winning bestseller by Eric Larson, published in 2011. You will find it on the shelves of your local library, if you wish to save the few dollars it will cost to download it to your e-reader. The book is about William Dodd and his 22-year old daughter Martha during Dodd’s time as the U.S. ambassador to Germany, during the years from 1933 to 1937. The book is based upon their journals, letters and other primary sources. The Garden of Beasts in the title refers to the embassy row area of Berlin, across from the Tiergarten or animal park. The beasts of the title also refer to Hitler’s inner circle of goons and thugs including Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, Ernst Rohm (of the SA) and others.
The book is extremely well written and is highly engaging on several levels, especially since Ambassador Dodd’s feisty 22-year-old daughter fraternized with various Berlin social circles, and had romantic affairs and liaisons with notable power players including Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo, and a Russian living in Germany who turned out to be a Soviet spy.
To me, what is most valuable about this book is the uniquely placed view it provides into German politics and society during the period when Adolf Hitler was elevated from the rabble-rousing leader of the radical Nazi Party, to become the absolute dictator of Germany. In January of 1933, the same month that FDR became president of the United States, Hitler was elected Chancellor. He won by masterfully employing the first modern media-blitz campaign, flying from city to city and making constant radio broadcasts while almost literally promising “hope and change.” But although elected Chancellor, his Nazi party held only the third highest number of seats in the German parliament.
Then in February of 1933, the Reichstag was destroyed by a fire. This Nazi arson attack was blamed on the Communists in a spectacularly successful false-flag operation. In March, parliament passed the Enabling Act, making Hitler absolute ruler for a period of four years. In June of 1934 came the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler’s enemies and competitors were murdered, cementing his status as unquestioned tyrant.
During this period, as described in Garden of Beasts, ordinary Germans first considered Hitler to be an embarrassing buffoon, and later a growing threat to their personal freedom. And many good Germans believed that as a last-chance exit from disaster, patriots among the honorable officers leading the German military would stop Hitler from launching their nation into a disastrous world war. As we know from history, this threadbare hope was not to be.
But by the time that Hitler’s evil programs were enacted, the Nazis had already laid the groundwork for their ultimate total control. The old brake lines and control levers had been cut. Newspapers, magazines and radio came under Nazi control at first voluntarily (since many in their management supported the Nazis), but eventually, their self-censorship became codified into law and was rigidly enforced. By the time of the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, there were no more restraints upon Hitler’s actions.
Guns were collected from the Jews, using old Weimar Republic registration lists. The Jews, already marginalized and scapegoated in the German media, were then fired from government and media jobs in accordance with newly enacted laws. From there, it was a steady progression of downward steps leading to the Jewish ghettoes and finally to the gas chambers.
Before Hitler could embark openly upon his insane plans, the Nazis first installed able and effective henchmen at the top of the media, the intelligence services, the universities and the military, after purging those who were not 100% loyal to Hitler. Only then did they move forward to building concentration camps and making invasion plans.
12. BARACK OBAMA’S GARDEN OF BEASTS
Does this perhaps ring a tiny bell, with able and effective Obama henchmen being installed at the top of the DOJ, FBI, CIA, NSA, DNI and the military? Not to mention the Obama henchmen installed at the top of American Pravda, ABCNNBCBS. (Not able and effective in terms of conducting or communicating policies beneficial to Americans, but able and effective in terms of furthering the goals and plans of their Dear Leader, President Barack Obama.)
By the time that the true scope of Der Führer’s horror was revealed and put into action, there were no levers or controls remaining within German society capable of resisting his march to tyranny, much less of stopping it. And now it must be asked: at this point in America’s history, do we retain sufficient levers and controls to check Dear Leader Obama’s march toward assuming complete dictatorial control?
We can depend upon the fact that American Pravda’s “reporters” will only serve as Obama administration cheerleaders, no matter what “executive actions” he declares by fiat. Almost all military generals and admirals serving when Obama came into office have been forced into retirement and replaced by go-along-to-get-along politically-correct officers. Bear in mind that all flag-rank promotions are approved by the Senate, which has been under Obama’s Democrat Party control. And we have already seen the subversion of our intelligence services under Clapper, Brennan et al, and the “justice” department under Obama-loyalist Eric Holder.
So from what direction can we expect relief? Are we to wait for Congress to somehow check Obama’s rise to total power? Recall Obama’s modus operandi of not moving forward until key opponents are already under the control of blackmail.
Can we realistically expect entrenched Republican leaders (or even the Supreme Court) to stop President Obama from assuming more and more power by executive fiat, when we should already operate under the assumption that many of them are, even now, being blackmailed into secret submission? In fact, I believe that we are seeing a slow-motion virtual “Obama Enabling Act” being put into practice by Congressional default, one unconstitutional “executive action” at a time.
One day after announcing his executive immigration amnesty declaration, Obama even laughed about the grim subject of presidential tyranny, joking, “I didn’t dissolve the parliament…they can still pass a bill!”
But then, Obama doesn’t need to dissolve Congress, or burn down the Capitol in a false-flag Reichstag Fire operation. Not if he is already controlling enough of the key Congressional leadership through his well-established method of achieving political victory through by the acquisition and misuse of private, sealed or secret information for the purpose of blackmail.
Under these conditions, will Obama’s Garden of Beasts prove to be any easier to stop than Hitler’s?
We know that the leaders of the mainstream media have largely been co-opted and corrupted by the Obama administration. They will not even attempt to break the high and soundproof stone walls that they have helped to build around Obama’s many scandals. These include Operation Fast and Furious, IRS political targeting, the intelligence agencies illegally spying on Obama’s perceived political enemies, and so on. Breaking the American Pravda embargo against truthful reporting is a lost cause.
But are there no actively serving (or even recently retired) military generals or members of the federal Senior Executive Service who retain a shred of honor? Who will place Duty, Honor and Country ahead of paycheck, pension, and self-promotion? Is there not one real hero left with stars on his shoulders?
Not even one?
13. A CALL FOR ANSWERS
General Petraeus, where is your book? Is your agent planning to release it in a few years to maximize its profits? Aren’t you already making a ton of money sitting on all of those boards? Only a coward and scoundrel (like a certain recent Secretary of Defense) would wait to release a book only after its information was too late to prevent disaster. And knowing what I now know, I would not be surprised to learn that threats had been made against your family in order to ensure your silence. After all, today, gangsters rule our government. It’s the Chicago Way.
But General Petraeus, before your book finally comes out, possibly after many years, can you please answer two very simple questions? Put your answers on the public record now, instead of waiting for your book, when it’s too late to matter. As a man of honor, please answer these two questions sooner, rather than later:
1. Where was President Barack Obama on the night of the Benghazi attacks, hour by hour, dusk ’til dawn?
2. Does President Obama’s mysterious MIA status on the night when his “good friend” Ambassador Chris Stevens and the other Americans were being killed relate to his failure to grant “cross-border authority” for an external rescue mission?
Necessary permission that only the president, in person, can give. Did President Obama literally hide, so that no external rescue could be mounted? A rescue that might have turned into a “Blackhawk Down” disaster just weeks before the election? General Petraeus, an honorable man would not hesitate to put these facts on the record.
The American people deserve to know exactly what kind of man their Commander-in-Chief is. The fact that years after Benghazi we still don’t know the answers to those questions indicates that we are far along in the process of losing our freedom, with the mainstream media and the intelligence services colluding in the establishment of tyranny.
History will judge us very harshly if we don’t find a way to stop Obama’s Garden of Beasts from fundamentally transforming the United States into a one-party socialist dictatorship, while we watch it happen, helpless to resist. We watch and we wait, like insects already injected with paralyzing poison and wrapped in silk, awaiting the spider.
How can we escape from Team Obama’s web of deceit?
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