Top Secret: Beijing has become One of the Greatest Cities on Earth

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by Andre Vltchek

For decades, smearing Beijing, while negating its greatness, has been one of the most effective weapons used by the US and Europe in their cultural anti-revolutionary war against all those great independent nations of the planet, especially China.

For those who want to taste the reality, the best advice would be: enter Beijing and let Beijing speak for itself, without an intermediary or ‘interpreter’. But could it be done? Aren’t biases already too deeply ingrained in the psyche of most of the people worldwide, people that are bombarded by professional disinformation campaigns manufactured by the Empire and its mouthpieces?

“I used to cry almost every night, from hopelessness and pain,” I was once told by one of the greatest contemporary concert pianists, Yuan Sheng, who decided to return to his native Beijing many years ago. “When I lived in New York, when I read and heard all those lies about my country and my city, I felt so helpless. I couldn’t explain the truth, as nobody around me was willing to listen.”

Old rattles have been played day and night on the BBC, the CNN and many other official channels of the West: the tear-jerking stories depicting the plights of the migrant workers, or some gruesome portrayals of China’s human rights record (all based on extremely arrogant Western dogmas, thoroughly incompatible with Chinese and Asian culture), or the mainstream interpretation of the Tiananmen Square events, or the loud and hypocritical laments about the disappearance of some old neighborhoods, and not to speak of the loud salvoes fired against Beijing’s ‘disastrous’ air pollution and traffic jams.

When a tremendous effort by the government had been made to accommodate the migrant workers arriving from the poorer provinces to Beijing and to other major cities, and when, simultaneously, the standard of living began to rise dramatically all over the Chinese countryside, the topic got quietly shelved. Hardly any credit has been given to the country’s leadership.


When new evidence about the 1989 Tiananmen events began to surface, when it was proved, again and again, that the West actually infiltrated and supported the so called ‘student pro-democracy movement’; and when the facts about the extremely violent nature of many of those ‘students’ became simply undisputable, the Western media clenched its fists and never backpedaled, never bothered to present arguments ‘from the other side’. On the contrary, it turned up the volume of its monotonous propagandist cacophony. Until now, in the eyes of the general Western public, Tiananmen Square is synonymous with ‘oppression’ and not with the great revolutionary history and stunning monumental beauty.

Brian Becker wrote for LiberationNews.org :

The fictionalized version of the “massacre” was later corrected in some very small measure by Western reporters who had participated in the fabrications and who were keen to touch up the record so that they could say they made “corrections.” But by then it was too late and they knew that too. Public consciousness had been shaped. The false narrative became the dominant narrative. They had successfully massacred the facts to fit the political needs of the U.S. government.

“Most of the hundreds of foreign journalists that night, including me, were in other parts of the city… Those who tried to remain close filed dramatic accounts that, in some cases, buttressed the myth of a student massacre,” wrote Jay Mathews, the Washington Post’s first Bureau Chief in Beijing, in a 1998 article in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Mathews’ article, which includes his own admissions to using the terminology of the Tiananmen Square massacre, came nine years after the fact and he acknowledged that corrections later had little impact.

As for violations of human rights in China in general and Beijing in particular, only one (Western) view is commonly presented in the West. As Tom Zwart (professor of cross-cultural law and human rights at Utrecht University) wrote on January 21st, 2017 for China Daily:

Generally, Western states seem to be strongly attached to promoting their own position and using it as a benchmark to judge others… While Western states are uncompromising about their own stance on human rights, China is keen on achieving harmony and therefore attaches less value to human rights dogma.

That is certainly a nobler approach, but the loud shouting, simplifications and vulgar insults coming from the Western media, politicians and academia, are effectively indoctrinating billions worldwide.

But let’s return to Beijing.

The Demolition of several old hutons in the capital was never presented (by Western media) for what it really was: as part of the great effort to improve living conditions and sanitation of the poor people. Instead it was portrayed as some atrocious crime against the city’s history and culture. Never mind that all truly architecturally valuable old neighborhoods were painstakingly preserved and restored, as were actually almost all important structures of the capital. Never mind that when asked, most huton dwellers are actually grateful for being awarded with comfortable and modern flats.

What about pollution? I encountered people in all corners of the world, who swore that they would never set foot in Beijing, as the pollution levels there are hazardous, almost murderous. Most of these same people said that they’d have no objections to travel to much more polluted cities which are located in the ‘client’ states of the West and therefore managed to escape the toughest criticism: Jakarta, Manila, Phnom Penh and Bangkok, to give just a few examples.

There is hardly any mention, at least in the West, that for years and decades Beijing has been engaged in an epic fight against pollution and in support of the environment: the massive improvement of ecological public transportation (already 17 mostly modern metro lines are in service, countless trolley bus lines, encouragement of electric vehicles, wide sidewalks and introduction of shared bicycles, plus several revolutionary new forms of public transportation soon to be introduced). There are tough emission controls in place, and a ban on scooters. There is also the huge expansion of green areas around and inside the city, as well as the recently imposed ban on smoking (one of the toughest in the world).

It was recently reported by local Chinese media outlets (including China Daily) that:

The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region saw improvements in air quality in 2016… the average concentration of PM2.5, a hazardous pollutant, has decreased by 33 percent compared to the level of 2013…

Many other indicators have improved as well, although mentioning this fact on regular basis in the mainstream Western media would be ‘unacceptably pro-Chinese’.

*****

In the last two decades, Beijing has become one of the world’s most exciting cities.

Its cultural life is second to none.

One of the curators of the National Center for Performing Arts (also known as “The Egg”, the largest opera house and performing center in the world) once explained to me:

When I used to live in London, I was dreaming about all those great world-class musicians and performers. Now I’m having meetings and dinners with them, all the time. It is because almost all great artists want to come to Beijing; to perform here.

One of the greatest (and free for all) museums on Earth, the China National Museum, is presently hosting two parallel world-class exhibitions: on the archeological treasures of Saudi Arabia, and the other on the collection from the Louvre Museum. In that institution, some of the greatest masterpieces of Salvador Dali rub shoulders with Chinese revolutionary art and anti-imperialist manifestos.

But now there are actually dozens of world-class museums and concert halls all over Beijing. In the iconic “798” (an old and massive weapons factory located on the outskirts of the city, which used to cover several square kilometers), literally hundreds of avant-garde art galleries are exhibiting everything from Western mainstream art including Andy Warhol or fashion images of Conde Nast, to the most ‘outrageous’ and politically daring ‘radical’ art, critical of the West, of capitalism, in China, and even of the government itself, is on display. It is mind-blowing! There is nothing like this anywhere in the West. Beijing artists are without any doubt much more innovative, daring and free than those in Paris, London or New York.

And on the other side of the city, around the ancient lakes and canals, dozens of clubs are hosting great bands from Africa and other parts of the world.

A prolific writer based in China, Jeff Brown contributed to this essay:

Beijing is one of the world’s greatest repositories of ancient history and modern humanities, showing off hundreds of world class museums, galleries, parks, temples, squares, shrines, monuments, mountains, lakes and rivers – all within a one-hour drive of the city center. You don’t need a car anyway. Beijing has the world’s largest metro system, 1,000 public bus routes and 66,000 licensed taxis to get you to all these myriad sites.

Since 1949, metropolitan Beijing has planted over a half a billion trees, shrubs and flowering bushes, as well as millions of square kilometers of green belts along the fringes of the nearby Gobi Desert, to stop its southern advance and to reduce dust levels blowing in from the north. By 2050, Beijing will have planted 100 billion trees to its north, covering more than ten percent of the country’s landmass. This greenification program continues with a passion and love for nature. Beijing has identified and coddles, like rock stars, 40,000 urban trees that are over 100 years old, some dating back more than 1,000 years

Contrary to ceaseless propaganda in the West, Beijing and all of China’s cities have shown nonstop improvement in air quality, and Beijing is spending billions to keep bettering its environment. This has been going on since the 1990s, something I can personally attest to . Tetovo, Cairo, Kathmandu, Accra, Manila, Delhi, Beirut, Ulaanbaatar, Baku, Dhaka and Sao Paulo, among others, all had higher 2016 pollution indexes than China’s capital, but only Beijing gets the mainstream media black eye . Why? Because Beijing is the heart and soul of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and thus, is not a NATO doormat and puppet, an intolerable affront to Western capitalism.

Proud, forward-looking, full of hope and dreams, Beijing is marching forward.

The West, which is clearly in permanent decay, is shooting its poisonous but powerless arrows tinted with nihilism and spite, towards the great capital of this enormous nation which, after a long and dark period of humiliation and suffering, is finally reclaiming its rightful place in the world.

Trump State Visit Debate Gives U.K. Lawmakers Time to Sound Off

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by Robert Hutton

For the second time in just over a year, the British Parliament debated the prospect of a visit from Donald Trump. 

In Jan. 2015, the question was whether the U.S. presidential candidate should be allowed into the country. Trump opponents having suffered some setbacks since then, and the question this time was whether, when he comes, Trump should be allowed to visit with Queen Elizabeth II.

Theresa May’s decision to offer the new president a state visit to Britain -- meaning his host will be Her Majesty -- has upset some Britons, with more than 1.8 million people signing an on-line petition urging the prime minister to think again. To show their distaste, hundreds of people gathered outside Parliament on Monday evening for a noisy anti-Trump rally. Among their placards: "Dump Trump," and "Theresa the Appeaser."

The prime minister has been clear that she’s not going to be swayed by the opposition, so the only practical result was a debate in Parliament -- something else May has made it clear she’ll ignore. Instead, the debate was a chance for members of parliament to sound off.

“The power is enormous,” Paul Flynn of the opposition Labour Party said of the president. “But unfortunately the intellectual capacity is protozoan.”

‘Paths of Righteousness’

The reasons for criticism were well-rehearsed: May had extended the invitation within a week of Trump taking office and lawmakers were angry at his attempt to ban entry to the U.S. from some Muslim countries and his comments about women. The word “pussy” was uttered several times in the chamber. The reasons used to defend the visit were also straightforward: the U.S. is an important ally, Trump is the president, and that’s unlikely to change.

Members who wished to speak against the state visit often felt the need to open by expressing their enthusiasm for the U.S. in general. Labour’s David Lammy revealed he’d visited America more times than France. Members -- largely from May’s Conservative Party -- who wanted to speak in support of the visit seemed to feel it important to make clear that they disagreed with much of what Trump has said.

Their case was expressed by Julian Lewis, who praised May’s strategy towards the president. She is trying, he said, to “take him by the hand and try to lead him down the paths of righteousness.”

Pimping the Queen

Much was made of the character of the Queen. Tory Nigel Evans said that Her Majesty had managed to put up with many worse visitors than the president. After all, he said, she had welcomed a Chinese leader a decade after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Opponents of the Trump trip were applying “double standards,” he said.

After one intervention that wasn’t to his taste, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Conservative, rose in anguish. “I don’t think it’s in order to refer to ‘pimping out our sovereign,”’ he complained.

It was Labour’s Naz Shah, a Muslim, who set out the case against a visit with the most passion, citing the president’s attitude towards her faith. “I am not an enemy of Western democracy,” she said, “I’m a part of Western democracy.”

The “Counter-terrorism” Campaign in Syria is Fake. “Dark State” Manipulations Serve as Barriers to Peace

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By Mark Taliano

The “West” and its allies are not leading a “counter-terrorism” campaign in Syria.  The publicly –disclosed, previously-planned Government-change war against non-belligerent, democratic, pluralist, secular Syria, is a terrorist campaign.

Known, documented, and amply proven, the West is using organizations, including ISIS and al Qaeda, in its attempts to destroy Syria[1].

We also know that the West used – and likely continues to use — depleted uranium ordnances throughout its illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.  Depleted uranium ordnances are weapons of mass destruction that continue to kill innocent Iraqis, and will do so for many years to come.

But the recently-disclosed story about the U.S using depleted uranium ordnances in Syria is suspect – not because there is reasonable doubt that the U.S used them – but because the story is being conflated in Western media with the notion that the weapons were used against ISIS.

While the West sometimes attacks “both sides” to prolong the destruction and warfare, and/or to create intra-Syrian conflict, the notion that the weapons were used against ISIS infrastructure is (intentionally) misleading in the sense that it creates the false perception that the West is trying to destroy ISIS (despite on-the ground evidence to the contrary). Prior to Russia’s legal intervention in Syria, ISIS territory expanded beneath the illegal western bombardments.[2]

The news story also ties in with the resignation of General Flynn, which appears to be the result of deep /dark state interventions that aim to upend President Trump and advance the causes of global war and poverty.  Consider, for example, that it was General Flynn who publicly confirmed that the West’s support for ISIS and other terrorist groups was a “willful decision”. Consider also Robert Perry’s assessment at Consortium News:

Flynn’s real “offense” appears to be that he favors détente with Russia rather than escalation of a new and dangerous Cold War. Trump’s idea of a rapprochement with Moscow – and a search for areas of cooperation and compromise – has been driving Official Washington’s foreign policy establishment crazy for months and the neocons, in particular, have been determined to block it.[3]

Time will tell, but domestic populations would do well to consider “Cui bono?”  The Military Industrial Complex “benefits” from global war and poverty, but the rest of us have literally everything to lose.

A Dangerous Time for the Press and the Presidency

Trump’s branding of the press as an "enemy" seems less an attempt to influence coverage than an invitation to repression and even violence.

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By JON FINER

At the dawn of a turbulent era in American history, an inexperienced but media-savvy President, early in his first term, was obsessing about negative press.

John F. Kennedy, who had grown accustomed to compliant coverage, was running up against the limits of his power to control the public narrative when neither the world nor the press would read from his script. Halfway around the globe, a small band of foreign correspondents were undercutting the White House with stories that showed the United States becoming more deeply involved (and less successfully) than the government acknowledged in what would become the Vietnam War.

Relations between the Saigon press corps and the United States Embassy had deteriorated into "a mutual standoff of cold fury and hot shouts––Liar! Traitor! Scoundrel! Fool!––with an American foreign policy teetering precariously in the void between," wrote William Prochnau in Once Upon a Distant War, an under-appreciated account of fraught relations between the government and the press.

At his wit's end one day in 1962, Kennedy dialed up his long-time friend James Reston, the legendary columnist and New York Times Washington Bureau Chief with an urgent request, in the interest of national security: fire war reporter David Halberstam. Reston declined. Halberstam persevered, the war proving every bit the disaster he had foreseen. And even the President eventually lamented, upon reading the Times one morning, "why can I get this stuff from Halberstam when I can't get it from my own people?"

I read Prochnau on the advice of my editor at The Washington Post, just before I flew to Kuwait in early 2003, to cover the invasion of Iraq, embedded with a U.S. Marine infantry unit. I spent the better part of the succeeding three years living in, and writing about, Iraq, and clashing occasionally, though never spectacularly, with the U.S. Embassy there.

More recently, from 2009 to 2017, I was on the other side of those clashes, working on foreign policy in the Obama White House and State Department, dealing frequently with my former journalism colleagues along the way, who were covering our efforts.

I have thought a lot about both experiences since Donald Trump's Friday night tweet labeling the media "enemies of the American people," and about why his repeated assaults feel so different from those of his predecessors. The Founding Fathers set a course for such collisions by both recognizing the need for the government to keep secrets, and codifying the right of the press to ferret them out.

The relationship between the government and the press should be adversarial, as their missions are often at odds. As those seeking to downplay the current confrontation have rightly pointed out, this has resulted in a power struggle between that is as old as the Republic itself.

But Trump’s relationship with the media represents something new and potentially dangerous to both. He is the first President to publicly question the place of the media in American society itself And his branding of the press as an "enemy" seems less an attempt to influence coverage than an invitation to repression and even violence.

The level of antipathy or collegiality between the government and the press has always moved in cycles of confrontation and detente.

Ironically, when I first left for Iraq 14 years ago, close watchers of media-government relations were most a burgeoning coziness epitomized by, for example, the star-studded White House Correspondents dinner, that resulted the appearance of journalists trading of favorable coverage for access. (Defense 

Secretary James Mattis, who broke with the president in his characterization of the press as “the enemy,” was the commander of the division I embedded in).

Before the invasion of Iraq, when the Pentagon decided to let reporters "embed" themselves in military units for the first time since Vietnam, press critics warned that reporters would become cheerleaders for an event deserving serious scrutiny. 

After all, the theory went, it will be hard to remain objective when you ride, eat and sleep among people who are literally defending your life.

"They are not your friends," one of my editors told me, referring to the military, in our last meeting before my departure. "Basically everything they tell you will be a lie."

It is clear, however, that the current standoff between Trump and the Washington press is a disturbing departure from these precedents.

But while the press had failed to interrogate the Bush Administration's rationale for invading, almost as soon as the war began, reports describing what was happening on the ground differed sharply from the official line. If you believed the major newspapers and television networks, you knew the country was descending into insurgency and civil war. If you listened to the Green Zone press briefings, you may have thought Iraq, and indeed the entire Middle East, were on the cusp of a democratic flourishing.

That divide, which, like so many others, eventually resolved in favor of the press, as confirmed by a now infamous quote from Dan Senor, an American spokesman in Baghdad: "Off the record: Paris is burning. On the record: stability and security are returning to Iraq."

To its credit, the Bush Administration knew the Iraq reporters were not on the team, per se, but it did seek to use them for its own purposes. Access was extraordinary, and deliberately so. The theory, which proved correct, was that reporters were more likely to be impressed by grunts risking their lives for their country than by senior officers briefing on a base far from the front lines. In the end, the arrangement worked out well for both sides. Embedded coverage did tend to be more positive, but it also produced vivid and damning reports on things like American casualties and the killing of Iraqi civilians, that helped turn the public against the war.

While the Obama Administration largely avoided major breakdowns in relations with the press, we were far from immune from tensions. One of the few aspects of our tenure I am not proud of is that we oversaw more frequent use of law enforcement tools against journalists.

I joined the Administration determined to avoid having to spin my reporter friends and former colleagues, and initially steered clear of press-related government jobs. I came to appreciate the give-and-take with journalists who covered the State Department and deeply respected their mission. Still, I occasionally complained about stories, sometimes sharply. I once even decided to bar a newspaper reporter from flying to Europe on Secretary Kerry's plane because he had, in my view, inappropriately passed on information given to him off-the-record. He took a commercial flight, and we got on with our jobs.

It is clear, however, that the current standoff between Trump and the Washington press is a disturbing departure from these precedents.

First, as I have written previously, his assault on the press seems calculated not to influence coverage, but to destroy the credibility of the media so he can usurp the its traditional role as the arbiter of facts on which policy decisions are based. If the goal was just to produce better coverage, it would simply not make sense to label the press "fake news,"which tells people not to believe anything it reports. If, on the other hand, you want to define your own reality so that an illogical agenda seem less so...

Second, as others have described in great detail, Trump chose a phrase ("enemies of the people") replete with ominous historical resonance in other societies as a prelude to violence. As with his adoption of the slogan "America First," which emerged in the 1930s, among Nazi sympathizers averse to U.S. intervention against Hitler, it is unclear whether Trump is dog whistling dark forces in society or just stumbled into what he considers a good line. Either way, there is no reason to expect him to drop the phrase, even if he knows its origins.

Third, while every one of our previous Presidents may have criticized particular reporters, on particularly issues––Halberstam on Vietnam, Woodward and Bernstein on Watergate, Walter Pincus or Knight-Ridder on Iraq––they never publicly questioned the press as an institution.

Kennedy paid frequent homage to the First Amendment, including in a 1961 speech entitled "The President and the Press," in which he said he deliberately eschewed the word "versus," because "that is not the way I see things."

Richard Nixon's attitude toward the press was perhaps the closest to what we see today from Trump. He regularly referred to the media as "the enemy," put journalists like Mary McGrory and Daniel Schorr on his "enemies list," and did everything he could to intimidate The Washington Post into dropping the Watergate investigation (we know how that one ended). But he also saved his most biting commentary for the seclusion of the Oval Office.

While journalists may have judged George W. Bush's Presidency harshly, helping drive his approval rating to unprecedented lows, he maintained cordial and respectful relationships with virtually all of them, whatever he may have felt about the coverage he received.

Indeed, no modern President showed anywhere near the degree of open hostility toward the press writ large that Trump displays on a near-daily basis, nor tried to enlist the public in a relentless demonization campaign.

Fox News’ Chris Wallace pressed White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on these points in an interview Sunday, as the White House defended the President’s comments as warranted, and urged reporters to take them seriously.

“I don't have a problem with you complaining about an individual story,” Wallace said. “But you went a lot further than that, or the President went a lot further than that. He said the fake media, not certain stories, but the fake media are enemies of the country. We don’t have a state run media in this country, that’s what they have in dictatorships.”

Priebus responded that it was not a single story the White House was concerned about, but “24 hours a day, seven days a week… talking about Russian spies, talking about the intelligence community” and other “total garbage, unsourced stuff.”

Wallace did not question how the Administration can equate adversarial coverage with somehow standing against the American people. But he did pointedly remind Priebus that “you don’t get to tell us what to do… any more than Barack Obama did.”

A fourth and perhaps most difference with Trump's crusade is that while journalism has always entailed risks, the world has become a far more dangerous place in which to practice it, as a privileged status in past conflicts has given way to deliberate targeting and authoritarians employ ever more coercive tactics.

The International Federation of Journalists points to steadily increasing levels of violence against media workers since it began keeping statistics in 1990. That year recorded the killing of 40 journalists worldwide. Over the last decade that number has never been under 100.

Like virtually every other journalist I know, I have friends and colleagues who paid the ultimate price to do their jobs, and I consider them no less heroic than the soldiers and diplomats who have done the same.

I wonder whether Trump has considered the impact his statements might have on authoritarian regimes around the world that are locking up reporters at an accelerating rate.

While he surely didn't know it, Trump tweeted at journalistic "enemies" a day after the five-year anniversary of the death in Syria of my friend Anthony Shadid, to my mind the greatest foreign correspondent of the 21st century, after a career marked by countless searing stories, and more than a few near-misses.

Intentionally or not, Trump's label also tarred people like Salih Saif Aldin, an Iraqi stringer in The Washington Post's Baghdad bureau, with whom I'd spent many sleepless nights huddled around a television set or computer screen, communicating in our broken versions of each other's languages. He was shot dead in Baghdad in the fall of 2007, conducting interviews in a part of Baghdad deemed too dangerous for American reporters to go.

I wonder whether Trump has considered the impact his statements might have on authoritarian regimes around the world that are locking up reporters at an accelerating rate.

During my time at the State Department, Secretary Kerry raised these cases, some of whom are American citizens, in literally dozens of meetings with counterparts from places like Turkey, Egypt, Iran, China and Russia. Sometimes he succeeded. Now it seems hard to imagine that such pleas, if the Trump Administration is even willing to make them, will carry anywhere near the same moral weight. And if the President of the only nation with a First Amendment can treat the press as not just his enemies, but enemies of the people he represents, there is little to stop other nations, with far fewer protections, from doing the same.

It is important to understand that being a reporter in the United States presents its own challenges. For one thing, the Washington press has the unenviable job of reporting on meetings in which they cannot participate, leaving them subject to the whims and agendas of people who can never provide the whole truth. And for a mix of reasons, including some self-inflicted wounds, journalists' approval rating in America has plummeted to around 20 percent, lower even than Trump's, which is the lowest of any new President in history.

The low regard in which they are held, and the way in which reporters were treated on Trump's presidential campaign––disparaged by the candidate, taunted and threatened by his supporters, occasionally even manhandled by his aides––had already raised legitimate, and virtually unprecedented, questions about how safe it is for American journalists to do their jobs. And that was before Trump labeled them enemies.

Wondering if I was overstating these dark scenarios, I contacted Jason Rezaian, an Iranian-American journalist for The Washington Post, who was released from an Iranian prison after being held for more than a year on trumped up charges. At the State Department, my colleagues and I had worked extensively on the negotiations that ultimately led to a prisoner exchange through which Jason was freed. I was curious, given his experiences, what he thought of Trump lashing out at his profession.

"Most of my reporting until now has been done from an authoritarian country so attacks on the American media by leaders is a phenomenon I've witnessed before. It  is absolutely not something I anticipated coming home to, though, after 18 months in prison in Iran for the crime of practicing journalism," Rezaian said.

"I worry about the new risks such anti-press attitudes, real or feigned, from this administration will create for reporters working in the US and abroad. A tense relationship between the government and the press can be a key to safeguarding core democratic values and principles, but a situation where basic notions of the other's legitimacy are being repeatedly and publicly questioned and undermined seems to me a dangerous road to start down."

The Breakthrough: Uncovering the FBI’s Secret Rules

Go to Originalby Annie Waldman

During the 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigations covertly targeted civil-rights leaders, women’s movements and anti-war protestors, all in the name of domestic security. The secret practices led to a Senate investigation — the so-called Church Committee — which revealed that the FBI had infiltrated civilian movements and attempted to damage the groups with smear campaigns and harassment.

In the fallout from the scandal, the FBI issued explicit guidelines in order to steer clear of abuses. These rulebooks have remained out of sight for decades. But recently, Intercept reporter Cora Currier received leaked copies, and along with her colleagues, released the confidential documents to the public.

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

This week on The Breakthrough, Currier reveals the story behind the FBI’s secret rules.

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher.

Enjoy the podcast and want more? Dive deeper into this week’s episode:

• Read the Intercept’s full investigation on the FBI’s rulebooks.
• Dig into the FBI’s unredacted documents online.
• Watch the Church Committee hearings on the FBI’s covert tactics.
• Dive into the FBI’s vault and read about their COINTELPRO practices.
• Watch a PBS documentary on what it’s like to be an FBI informant.

Trump Plans To Deport Anyone Caught Crossing Southern Border To Mexico, Regardless of Nationality

The idea is part of a raft of immigration proposals signed by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly that are likely to spur international and legal challenges.

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by Ginger Thompson and Marcelo Rochabrun

Buried deep in the Trump Administration’s plans to round up undocumented immigrants is a provision certain to enrage Mexico — new authority for federal agents to deport anyone caught crossing the southern border to Mexico, regardless of where they are from.

If present immigration trends continue, that could mean the United States would push hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Brazilians, Ecuadorans, even Haitians into Mexico. Currently, such people are detained in the U.S. and allowed to request asylum.

President Trump wants them to do so from Mexico, communicating via videoconference calls with U.S. immigration officials from facilities that Mexico would presumably be forced to build.

The new authority for immigration agents is among the dramatic, some would say untenable, tactics the Trump Administration is preparing to deploy as it upends President Obama’s policies on illegal immigration.

A pair of memos signed by John Kelly, the Homeland Security secretary, and disclosed over the weekend by McClatchy outline the plans for what present and former government officials say will be a massive roundup of undocumented immigrants.

Officials disclosed that two former Senate aides to Attorney General Jeff Sessions drafted the plan without input from career DHS policy staffers. The ideas aren’t new. Many of the approaches described in the memos come from a law that Congress passed in 1996, which policy makers and law enforcement agents disregarded as either unenforceable or absurd.

Among them was the Mexico part of the plan, for example, which calls for returning undocumented immigrants “to the foreign contiguous territory from which they arrived.” The memo goes on to point out how foisting the immigrants onto Mexico would benefit DHS’s budget, saying that it would, “save the Department’s detention and adjudication resources.”

However, former senior Mexican and American immigration officials said it could very well create new security problems along the border, as authorities in each country push unwanted migrants back and forth.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association said that the proposal would violate U.S. law and international treaty obligations. Mexico is as likely to embrace the plan as it did the notion of paying for a wall. “I would expect Mexico to respond with an emphatic ‘No,’” said Gustavo Mohar, a former senior Mexican immigration and national security policy official. Spokespeople for DHS and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Whether viable or not, the Trump administration’s deportation plans mark a dramatic departure from decades of policy and practice. Current and former immigration policy officials say that while the details of how the administration intends to carry out the plans remain unclear — if not insurmountable — the administration’s overall message to enforcement agents across the country is clear: limits have been lifted.

President Obama attempted to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants who had been convicted of serious crimes, and on those who were caught while or shortly after illegally entering the country. His administration deported record numbers of immigrants, most of whom had only been accused of minor crimes and immigration violations.

The Trump administration says it, too, is focused on deporting criminals, but it has redefined crimes to include any activity that might bring a conviction, including entering the U.S. without permission. Effectively, that makes virtually everyone in the U.S. without a proper visa subject to roundup at their workplace or home. The only clear exception, according to the enforcement plan, is for immigrants who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children, known as Dreamers.

“Anyone who complained about Obama as the deporter-in-chief,” said David Martin, formerly DHS’s principal deputy general counsel, “is unfortunately going to get a taste of what it’s like when someone is really gung-ho.”

Greg Chen, the policy director at AILA, said the Trump plan would “effectively unleash a massive deportation force with extremely broad authority to use detention as the default mechanism for anyone suspected of violating immigration law.”

The question looming over the proposals is how many of them, with all their legal and logistical obstacles, will the president actually be able to carry out.

The memos, for example, authorize the Border Patrol to hire 5,000 new agents, even though the force has never been able to fill the slots it has already been allotted. Some 60 percent of applicants to the Border Patrol fail the required polygraph, and those who pass take 18 months to get sent out into the field.

The Trump plan calls for the expansion of a George W. Bush-era program, known as 287g, which allows DHS to deputize state and local police as immigration agents. It was touted after 9/11 as a critical “force-multiplier.” But by 2010, some of the country’s largest police departments were refusing to participate because they believed it would shatter the trust between their officers and the communities they were sworn to protect. Meanwhile, participating agencies, which foot the bill for the program, were suddenly saddled with new debts and hounded by accusations of racial profiling and other abuse, forcing the Obama administration to suspend expansion of the program.

Until now, the enforcement of summary deportation laws, known as “expedited removal,” have been limited to those apprehended within 14 days of illegally entering the country and within 100 miles of Canada or Mexico. The memos signed by Kelly would allow use of those laws anywhere in the country against anyone who entered illegally within the past two years.

Lucas Guttentag, a DHS adviser and Stanford law professor, said this would “unleash chaos,” violate due process, and meet challenges in court, similar to those that scuttled the administration’s travel ban.

There would also be aggressive challenges, lawyers said, to plans that would allow immigration agents to deport unaccompanied minor children who crossed the border illegally, rather than uniting them with parents or other relatives in the U.S. They also expect legal opposition to a proposal that would strip undocumented immigrants of existing privacy protections, allowing personal information such as asylum cases or immigration violations to be publicly disclosed.

“The Trump people have clearly bought into the model of harsh enforcement. They apparently think, ‘we’ll be tough, and a lot of people will leave on their own,’” said Martin, an immigration law professor at the University of Virginia. “They believe they’ll win in the court of public opinion. I’m not sure about that. A lot of Americans know hard-working undocumented immigrants. The kind of enforcement Trump’s people are talking about will visibly create many more sympathetic cases than unsympathetic ones.”

The White House has said the memos are still under review, with final versions expected on Tuesday. And some of the provisions explicitly acknowledge that it could take years before DHS has the manpower and money to pull off what the president has ordered. Immigration enforcement agents, however, have already begun filling the policy void by launching raids and deportations, including some that advocates worry are meant to test the limits. Meanwhile panic has taken hold in many immigrant communities.

“The level of fear is more than anything we’ve ever seen,” said Marielena

Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. She said the plan’s sweep, “sent a chill to my bones,” because it threatens to do irreparable harm to millions of families. She added, “This all seems aimed at changing who we are as a nation.”

REX TILLERSON PURGES REMNANTS OF “SHADOW GOVT” AT STATE DEPARTMENT

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By WHITNEY WEBB

According to pundits, politicians, and even the executive branch itself, the Trump administration is at war with the so-called “Deep State.” Though the Deep State – sometimes also called the Shadow government – is hard to define, it is essentially the part of the political establishment that are permanent power factions operating within Washington. These factions guide policy according to a unified agenda regardless of who is in office, often exercising their power secretively which frees them of any sort of accountability.

Recently, this “Deep State” has seemed determined to undermine, discredit, and destroy the Trump administration, having allegedly been responsible for the leaks that led to Michael Flynn’s resignation among other controversies. Though much of the Deep State’s activities intended to undermine Trump has so far largely been attributed to the Intelligence Community, it extends much deeper including many other federal departments and agencies, including the State Department.

Last year, prior to the election, the FBI released heavily redacted interview summaries of the Bureau’s investigation into Trump’s challenger Hillary Clinton. Among the allegations in the documents was the disclosure of a highly-secretive, high-level group within the U.S. government which the FBI named the “Shadow Government,” a group which had allegedly intervened in the FBI’s investigation into Clinton in order to prevent her indictment.

According to the FBI’s interview summary:

“There was a powerful group of very high-ranking STATE officials that some referred to as ‘The 7th Floor Group’ or ‘The Shadow Government.’ This group met every Wednesday afternoon to discuss the FOIA process, Congressional records, and everything CLINTON-related to FOIA/Congressional inquiries.”

The other name used by the FBI – “The 7th-floor group” – refers to the fact that this facet of the Shadow Government is located on the State Department’s 7th floor where long-serving, elite diplomats are employed.

Though all previous administrations have left the “7th-floor group” more or less untouched, the newly-minted Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, abruptly chose to fire most of the State Department employees working on this floor. Last Friday, Tillerson’s top aides told the vast majority of the Department’s seventh-floor staff that “their services were no longer needed,” CBS News reports.

This is the second round of firings at the State Department since Trump took office as four other top officials had been let go at the end of January. One of the employees fired recently, Tom Countryman, told CBS News he was worried that the White House was showing its intent to cut out the State Department in order to prevent allegedly “nonpartisan” officials from challenging the executive branch on foreign policy matters.

The firings came soon after Trump’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a meeting which drew criticism from the U.S. political establishment as not a single State Department official was included in the meetings. A State Department official told CBS News that the decision to change the meeting’s normal procedures was done to facilitate “a more personal discussion.” This, along with the recent firings, once again make plain the great rift between those “Deep State” elements that stay in place throughout Presidential administrations and the fledgling Trump administration.

Though this latest move by Tillerson and the Trump administration may serve to lessen some of the Deep State’s influence in U.S. politics, it is worth noting that such entrenched elements will not go off quietly into the night. At the very least, there will be some sort of retaliation for this latest move, meaning that even more controversy can be expected in the months ahead for Trump and the executive branch over which he now presides.

The "Blind Sheik" And The CIA - Media Again Bury U.S. Support For Radical Islamism

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Two days ago the Takfiri Islamist leader Omar Abdul-Rahman , the so called "Blind Sheik", died in a U.S. prison. He had been found guilty of involvement in the 1993 attempt to bring down the World Trade Center in New York and of other crimes.

The obituaries of Omar Abdul-Rahman in U.S. media are an example of white washing of the U.S. exploitation of radical Islamism for its imperial purposes. While extensively documented in earlier media and official reports the CIA's facilitation and involvement with Abdul-Rahman is seemingly stricken from history.

Since the 1970s Omar Abdul-Rahman was involved in the growth of radical Sunni Islamism:

Founded in 1976, Faisal Islamic Bank of Egypt (FIBE) is part of the banking empire built by Saudi Prince Mohammed al-Faisal. Several of the founding members are leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including the “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman.

Financed by Saudi sources Abdul-Rahman created various groups of radicals in Egypt and gets deeply involved with Al-Qaeda, recruiting fighters for Afghanistan in cooperation with the CIA and the Pakistani secret services. He was the ideological leader of Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Islamic radical organization in Egypt responsible for several terrorist attacks. He traveled to the U.S. several timed between 1986 and 1990 to further his violent ideology. His visas were issued by CIA agents despite his appearance on a State Department terrorism watch list. In 1990 he moves to the U.S. where he preached his violent Islam and continued to recruit fighters for radical causes.

In December 1990 the New York Times reported:

The 52-year-old religious leader, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, entered the country more than five months ago despite being on a State Department list of people with ties to terrorist groups, the authorities said. He illegally obtained a tourist visa from a consul in the United States Embassy in Khartoum, the Sudan, in May, according to records of the Federal Immigration and Naturalization Service and State Department officials.

In July 1993 the NYT reported that "illegally obtained tourist visa" was not illegal at all:

Central Intelligence Agency officers reviewed all seven applications made by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman to enter the United States between 1986 and 1990 and only once turned him down because of his connections to terrorism, Government officials said today.
...
Mr. Abdel Rahman helped to recruit Arab Muslims to fight in the American-backed war in Afghanistan, and his lawyer and Egyptian officials have said he was helped by the C.I.A. to enter the United States.
...
American officials had acknowledged last week that the diplomat at the United States Embassy in Khartoum who signed the May 1990 visa request that allowed Mr. Abdel Rahman to enter the United States was in fact a C.I.A. officer.

Several attempts to remove Abdel-Rahman from the U.S. mysteriously failed. In 1991 he was inexplicably granted a Green Card despite still being blacklisted.

His involvement in the 1993 WTC bombing was a typical "blowback" from the CIA's chronic support of radical takfiri Islamism, supported by Saudi Arabia, whenever it helps its "regime change" plans here or there. Over the last years such CIA support led to the growth of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

After the recent death of Omar Abdul-Rahman several obituaries appeared in U.S. media. But none of them mention or dig into his deep and long CIA connections and the continuing CIA support for radical Islamism.

There is zero mentioning of the CIA and the visa shenanigans in his NYT obit, despite its earlier reporting. Neither the Associated Press nor AFP mention any connection to the CIA. The British service Reuters buries the visa story in one sentence in the 12th paragraph.

That the deep involvement over the years of the CIA (and FBI) in the crimes Omar Abdul-Rahman is now swept under the carpet and forgotten is not just coincidentally. It is a distinct feature of U.S. political culture.

The British poet Harold Pinter referred to this in his 2005 Nobel lecture:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest.

I have called this chronic forgetfulness the concept of immaculate conception of U.S. (foreign) policy. There never is an acknowledged history of U.S. misdeeds that may have led to this or that current blowback. When there is one it immediately gets buried, pushed out of sight, never to be talked about. The same applies to partisan policies within the U.S.

Currently the fake "resistance" against a Trump presidency blasts his policy of seeking better relations with Russia, his temporary travel ban reference to seven specific countries and his words against media leaks. But it was the Secretary of State Clinton who initiated a "reset" with Russia, it was the Obama administration that set a ban on those seven countries and it was the Obama justice department that used the espionage act against journalists for publishing leaked material. That all is now forgotten and not to be talked about.

Likewise the deep CIA connection with Omar Abdul-Rahman is now scrubbed from any of the semi-official media reporting. This at the same time the CIA continues its involvement with radical Islamists in Syria and elsewhere.

SPAIN SETS MASSIVE PRECEDENT — CHARGES ITS CENTRAL BANKERS IN COURT

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By CLAIRE BERNISH

First, Iceland, and now Spain has taken on the Big Bankers responsible for financial calamity, as the country’s highest national court charged the former head of Spain’s central bank, a market regulator, and five other banking officials over a failed bank leading to the loss of millions of euros for smaller investors.

This, of course, markedly departs from the mammoth taxpayer giveaway — commonly referred to as the bailout — approved by the U.S. government ostensively to “save” the Big Banks and, albeit unstated, allow the enormous institutions to continue bilking customers without the slightest fear of penalty.

Errant bankers and financiers, it would seem, typically manage to either evade actually being charged, or escape hefty fines and time behind bars.

Spain’s Supreme Court last year ruled “serious inaccuracies” in information about the listing led investors to back Bankia in error, thus the bank has since paid out millions of euros in compensation.

But Spanish authorities could not abide the telling findings of a yearslong investigation into the failed listing, as Wolf Streetexplains,

“As part of the epic, multi-year criminal investigation into the doomed IPO of Spain’s frankenbank Bankia – which had been assembled from the festering corpses of seven already defunct saving banks – Spain’s national court called to testify six current and former directors of the Bank of Spain, including its former governor, Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordóñez, and its former deputy governor (and current head of the Bank of International Settlements’ Financial Stability Institute), Fernando Restoy. It also summoned for questioning Julio Segura, the former president of Spain’s financial markets regulator, the CNMV [National Securities Market Commission] (the Spanish equivalent of the SEC in the US).

“The six central bankers and one financial regulator stand accused of authorizing the public launch of Bankia in 2011 despite repeated warnings from the Bank of Spain’s own team of inspectors that the banking group was ‘unviable.’”

As AFP reports, “The National Court validated conclusions made by prosecutors who concluded that when ‘an unviable entity has been listed on the stock market, its administrators or auditor should not shoulder all the responsibility.’”

Specifics of the charges have not yet been made apparent, but as The Economist reports:

“The court is questioning why they allowed Bankia to sell shares in an initial public offering in 2011, less than a year before Bankia’s portfolio of bad mortgage loans forced the government to seize control of it. It said there was evidence the regulators had ‘full and thorough knowledge’ of Bankia’s plight. After its nationalisation, it went on to report a €19.2bn ($24.7bn) loss for 2012, the largest in Spanish corporate history.”

Internal emails and documents played a crucial role in ultimately bringing the central banking officials to task for the failure of Bankia — inspectors bringing issues to the attention of superiors were allegedly ignored. One email cited by the Economist came from an inspector who warned Bankia was “a money-losing machine,” for which an IPO would not solve.

Another report, deemed “devastating by the court,” saw an inspector advise Bankia to seek a private buyer rather than proceed with the listing.

An inquiry into “the participation of other players, such as officials in the central bank,” was also urged by the National Court.

As the Economist points out, Spanish judges are generally reluctant to sentence first-time financial criminals to prison; though five Novacaixagalicia executives had five-year suspended sentences — levied for embezzlement in 2015 — abruptly enforced in January.

Meanwhile, taxpayers in the United States have yet to see Big Bankers criminally responsible for the financial ruin of so many Americans brought to any semblance of justice for their wrongdoing.