SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) -- “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” (Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
Sunday, October 09, 2022
Friday, October 07, 2022
Congressional Leaders of Both Parties Welcome Members of neo-Nazi Azov Battalion to Washington
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Last month leading members of both US political parties met with high-ranking soldiers of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion at the Capitol in Washington D.C.
The week-long meetings in Washington by the fascist delegations, who were warmly greeted by Republican and Democratic politicians alike, have gone virtually unreported in the press.
In their posts first exposing the visit, journalist Moss Robeson revealed that one of the Azov soldiers that visited the Capitol was Giorgi Kuparashvili. Robeson wrote that Kupraashvili is a “a co-founder of the Azov Regiment and the leader of its Yevhen Konovalets Military School, named for the founder of the fascistic Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.”
The Azov Battalion was founded in 2014 by white supremacist Andriy Biletsky. The organization is teeming with fascists and racists who idolize Stepan Bandera, a fascist who as a member of the OUN-B collaborated with the Waffen SS during World War II in carrying out the Holocaust in Ukraine.
The embrace of neo-Nazis in the Capitol by both big-business parties obliterates any pretense that the US government is fighting for “democracy” or “human rights” in Ukraine, or anywhere else.
In publicly available Telegram posts, the Association of Families of Azovstal Defenders, an organization comprised of family members of Azov soldiers, boasted that Kateryna Prokopenko, Yuliya Fedosyuk and Alla Somilenko joined Azov soldiers, Kupraashvili, Vladyslav Zhaivoronka and Artur Lypka in holding face-to-face meetings with Democratic and Republican legislators alike.
Kateryna Prokopenko is the leader of the Association of Families of Azovstal Defenders and is the wife of Denys Prokopenko, an Azov commander. Yuliya Fedosyuk is the leader of an antifeminist group linked to Azov according to Bellingcat journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko.
The meetings are part of a US and global tour that is being conducted by the groups to build support in Washington, and abroad, for more direct military funding to the Ukrainian military, including the Azov Battalion.
Since 2018, Azov has been nominally barred from receiving direct funding and training from the US military. However, since the reactionary Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, the US government, with media partners, has embarked on a historical whitewash of the organization’s neo-Nazi past in order to reverse this ban in name only.
Beginning in a September 20 Telegram post, which continued throughout the week, the Association of Families of Azovstal Defenders wrote their delegation and “Azov” soldiers met with “a number of American congressmen.”
In a September 20 photo, the fascists boast that they were met “at the Capitol” by Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (California) along with over 20 other representatives, Republican and Democratic alike.
In addition to McCarthy, other Republican congressmen who met with Azov fascists last month include Texas Republicans Dan Crenshaw, Pete Sessions, Tony Gonzales and Michael McCaul. McCaul is one of the wealthiest members of Congress and the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs committee.
Describing the warm reception they received on Capitol Hill, the Association of Families of Defenders of Azovstal, said “the congressmen….in particular, veterans of the US Army, expressed their admiration for the victory of the “Azov” regiment and declared full support for our “Azovstal” defenders, They were especially interested in the topic of the defense of Mariupol…”
The posts noted that “in general” the “American representatives ... expressed their sincere support to our delegation and Ukraine as a whole and assured that they have no doubts about the victory of our country in this war, and also repeatedly emphasized their admiration for the heroic Azov regiment.”
On September 21, Senator Rick Scott, who just this past Sunday defended ex-president Donald Trump putting a “DEATH WISH” on Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, was photographed meeting with the delegation.
While she did not meet with Azov members in Washington, “CIA Democrat” Mikie Sherrill was photographed with members of Azov in her home district last month.
In Washington, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff (California) was photographed with members of Azov and the Ukrainian military in the Capitol.
Michigan Democratic Representative Elissa Slotkin, another CIA Democrat, was not photographed with members of Azov, but did meet separately with another contingent of Ukrainian soldiers whose visit, not coincidentally, overlapped with the fascists’.
This separate Ukrainian military contingent, as revealed in a Twitter thread by Daria Kaleniuk, an executive director at an “anticorruption” national government organization in Kyiv, met with several US senators over the exact same week members of Azov were in Washington. The female Ukrainian soldiers were photographed with Dan Sullivan (Republican-Alaska), Shelley Moore Capito (Republican-West Virginia), Jeanne Shaheen (Democratic- New Hampshire) and Joni Ernst (Republican -Iowa).
This same delegation also met with Robin Dunnigan, deputy assistant secretary at the bureau of European and Eurasian affairs at the US State Department.
A government profile of her notes that Dunnigan is a “career member of the Senior Foreign Service ... she has served overseas in Vietnam, Chile, Turkey, Cuba and El Salvador.” Dunnigan has been a longtime opponent of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, arguing in a 2015 conference that “Nord Stream 2 actually threatens not only Ukraine’s survivability and their resources, but it is a risk to fuel diversification in Europe, especially Southeastern Europe.”
After meeting in Washington with politicians, the Azov soldiers and the defenders of Avozstal group have embarked on a multi-city tour to gin up support for Azov. Speaking at a Ukrainian church in Detroit on September 24, Robeson reported that Azov commander Kuparshavili, recalled the reception the neo-Nazis received.
“We went to the Senators, Congressmen, from both parties. Honestly, the majority we met, there were like over fifty of them, and head of their [factions], they all gave 100% support. They started to work right from their office in front of us, picked up the phone, and started calling to different organizations which can influence—right now...”
The open embrace of Azov by US politicians in both parties shows that the only “unity” that can be forged in Washington is based on war abroad with the most reactionary and genocidal forces in world history. It is a further confirmation that there exists no constituency within the US ruling class for the defense of basic democratic rights and underscores that capitalism has nothing to offer humanity except war and fascism.
Monday, October 03, 2022
Friday, September 30, 2022
Thursday, September 29, 2022
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
Friday, September 23, 2022
Wednesday, September 21, 2022
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
Imposed Insanity – Royalty, Propaganda And The Coming Catastrophe. -- Media Lens
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EXCERPT:
As Harold Pinter liked to say, these deceptions are almost ‘witty’ in their audacity.
The new king said of his mother:
‘She set an example of selfless duty which, with God’s help and your counsels, I am resolved faithfully to follow.’
The ideal, endlessly repeated, is not to discover Truth, Happiness and Freedom for ourselves as creative, free-thinking individuals. Rather, it is to reject our personal needs and interests – rejected as ‘narrow’ and ‘selfish’ – to focus on ‘service’, on performing a ‘duty’ pre-defined for us by the mumbo-jumbo of patriotic ‘tradition’. Tolstoy captured his moment and ours exactly:
‘All these people do what they are doing unconsciously, because they must, all their life being founded upon deceit, and because they know not how to do anything else… Moreover, being all linked together, they approve and justify one another’s acts – emperors and kings those of the soldiers, functionaries, and clergymen; and soldiers, functionaries and clergymen the acts of emperors and kings, while the populace, and especially the town populace, seeing nothing comprehensible in what is done by all these men, unwittingly ascribe to them a special, almost a supernatural, significance.’ (Leo Tolstoy, ‘Writings On Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence,’ New Society, 1987, p.109)
Thus, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who said:
‘Her Majesty showed us that when we build our lives on God’s faithfulness, we are on the solid ground of eternity that cannot be shaken.’
There is indeed nothing comprehensible here. Alas, human folly is such that many of us find these comments all the more impressive for that reason – we are surely in the presence of truth so profound that it escapes our feeble understanding.
***
The Unquestioned Institution Of The Monarchy
Former diplomat Craig Murray also highlighted the absurdity of the notion of media ‘impartiality’ when press and broadcasting are so blatantly pro-monarchy:
‘Think seriously on this. 29% of the population want to abolish the monarchy. Think of all the BBC coverage of the monarchy you have seen over the last decade. What percentage do you estimate reflected or gave an airing to republican views? Less than 1%?’
He continued:
‘Now think of media coverage across all the broadcast and print media.
‘How often has the media reflected the republican viewpoint of a third of the population? Far, far less than a third of the time. Closer to 0% than 1%. Yes, there are bits of the media that dislike Meghan for being black or are willing to go after Andrew. But the institution of the monarchy itself?’
Murray concluded:
‘There can be no clearer example than the monarchy of the unrelenting media propaganda by which the Establishment maintains its grip.
‘The corporate and state media are unanimous in slavish support of monarchy. Thailand has vicious laws protecting its monarchy. We don’t need them; we have the ownership of state and corporate media enforcing the same.’
In 2015, author Irvine Welsh observed that:
‘The UK is now a pointless entity, existing solely to protect entrenched privilege and continue the transference of the country’s resources to a global elite.’
The Queen sat atop this unjust system of extreme inequality, just as her eldest son, King Charles, does now. She was the figurehead of an unhealthy and divided British society, corrupted by hereditary wealth, degraded by the racist and exploitative legacy of Empire, and scarred by a highly-stratified class structure in which most people are struggling to obtain a decent standard of living.
Sunday, September 04, 2022
Saturday, August 20, 2022
Dorli Rainey, A Friend Who Worked Tirelessly to Change Our Troubled World for Most of Her 95 Years---Will Miss Her
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| Palestine had a strong ally in Dorli |
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| Dorli knew how to enjoy life |
Pics are from my personal Dorli archive.
We didn't agree on strategies, but the many times I shared the street or meetings with Dorli, I couldn't help but marvel at her stamina and willingness to speak her truth to the powers that be. She was also a friend whom I will always miss. Below is David Gutman's SEATTLE TIMES remembrance of her. Linda
There’s a photo of an old woman, scarf bound snugly around her neck. She looks dressed for church, or the market. But her eyes and lips are red, burning. A thin, milky liquid drips off her face in white rivulets.
Two men, both much younger, one wearing safety goggles, help guide her. One holds her head, as he gazes solemnly down. The other puts his arms around her. Their passivity frames her intensity.
She stares dead at the camera, unbowed.
Dorli Rainey, the woman in the photo, briefly became the face of the Occupy Wall Street movement after Seattle police pepper-sprayed her at a protest in 2011. Rainey, a longtime Seattle political activist, died Aug. 12. She was 95.
Rainey was a fixture in local progressive protest movements for decades. Anti-war, pro-housing, racial justice, public transit, anti-drone strikes, anti-big banks — the list of causes Rainey fought for is almost too long and too myriad to catalog.
“She was so active because she loved this country, and she wanted to make sure that the country was good to its people,” said her daughter, Gabriele Rainey. “Anything that needed fixing to make the world a better place, she was involved in it.”
Rainey protested at the naval base on Whidbey Island, she rode the bus to Olympia to protest weapons shipments, she protested the nuclear missiles at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, she went to Nevada to protest a drone-testing facility.
She served on the Issaquah School Board and ran for King County Council a half-century ago and ran for Seattle mayor a decade ago. She was arrested in South Park, protesting evictions. She was arrested downtown, protesting Wells Fargo.
But she gained national headlines for her role in a downtown Seattle protest in the early days of the Occupy movement. On Nov. 15, 2011, Rainey, then 84, joined protesters in blocking downtown intersections.
When Seattle police used pepper spray to clear the crowd, Rainey was hit. Fellow protesters poured milk over her face to ease the sting.
A seattlepi.com photographer, Joshua Trujillo, captured the stunning image.
The photo become a worldwide symbol for the fledgling movement. She was profiled by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Associated Press, The Guardian. She was interviewed by The New York Times and Keith Olbermann. She went on Dori Monson’s local right-wing radio show and hung up on him.
Then-Mayor Mike McGinn apologized and ordered a review of the incident.
Rainey was back out protesting downtown a couple of days later.
“This has been a wonderful week,” she said at the time. “I think we have accomplished something that we have been trying to get, and that is attention.”
“You only get real attention when you block a few streets.”
McGinn said that when he called her to apologize, she gave him a list of her concerns with the Police Department. He said the incident did cause Seattle police to modify its policy on use of pepper spray, a change that did not stick.
“Dorli is legendary, and deservedly so, for her activism,” McGinn said Friday. “She was just omnipresent and a conscience and a voice for change, and I deeply, deeply, deeply respected her.”
Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold called Rainey “a special kind of social change warrior.”
“She always centered the inherent humanity of others in her activism,” Herbold said.
Rainey was active with groups such as Veterans For Peace, and the local homelessness advocates Women in Black and Nickelsville.
Peggy Hotes, a friend and fellow activist, remembers meeting her for the first time at an Iraq War protest at a church in Ballard. Rainey had sent several emails to organize in advance.
The morning of the event, she sent one last one, saying the organizers still needed help.
Hotes listened to a speaker, and then a short, white-haired woman walked up to her.
“She said, ‘You’re Peggy Hotes,'” Hotes recalled. ” ‘You didn’t answer my email.’ “
“She was involved in just anything and everything.”
Rainey wrote on politics and activism at her blog, entitled Old Lady in Combat Boots. It is, alas, now lost to the attics of the internet.
Rainey was born in Austria in 1926.
Hotes remembers Rainey telling a story about the uniforms schoolchildren were required to wear, which she hated.
One day she folded together a paper hat and wore it to school in silent protest. She was called to the headmaster’s office.
“She was always able to stand up when an injustice confronted her,” Hotes said.
Austria, Rainey said, was a great country, but a very bureaucratic country.
“I used to really argue and fight against it when I was growing up,” she said in an interview for public access TV in 2010.
She was a Red Cross nurse and then worked in Europe as a technical translator for the U.S. Army for 10 years. She married Max Rainey, a civil engineer who got a job with Boeing, and they moved to the Seattle area in 1956.
“What I really was interested in was the freedom of speech, the Constitution,” she said of her new country.
She worked as a court-appointed special advocate, representing children who have experienced abuse or neglect. She worked as a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker for decades.
She had three children, Gabriele, of Asheville, North Carolina; Michael, of Boston; and Andrea, who died in 2014. She was also preceded in death by her husband, Max.
In retirement, she moved to a senior living facility in Queen Anne. Parking was an issue, so from then on she commuted by bus to all her activism.
In 2009, she launched a brief campaign for mayor. But one rainy night in May, after a late meeting, as she was standing waiting for her bus, she decided it was too much.
She withdrew from the race and, in a letter to supporters, wrote: “I am old and should learn to be old, stay home, watch TV and sit still.”
But she did no such thing.
Two years later, she would describe riding the bus home after being pepper-sprayed: “I must have looked a fright.”
“The bus driver said, ‘Hey, what happened to you?’ I said I got pepper-sprayed by Seattle’s finest,” she recalled.
“And the wonderful thing that happened was this bus full of people started talking about Occupy,” she said. “It became a really wonderful educational opportunity for me to convert a bus load full of people to our way of thinking.”
News researcher Miyoko Wolf contributed to this report.
Wednesday, August 17, 2022
Saturday, August 13, 2022
Friday, August 12, 2022
CDC Drops Quarantine Guidelines for Those Exposed to COVID-19--WSWS.org
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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced Thursday that it is no longer recommending that those exposed to COVID-19 quarantine in order to prevent the spread of the deadly disease. It is instead calling on those exposed to “wear a high-quality mask for 10 days and get tested on day 5.”
The CDC’s press release also reiterates its earlier reduction of isolation for those who test positive for COVID-19, stating that an infected person should only isolate for five days. It also explicitly notes that as long as “symptoms are improving” after day five, “you may end your isolation.” It only recommends isolation for 10 days for “moderate” or “severe” illness, while ignoring the fact that those with a “mild” case of the pathogen can spread it to others and that even those cases can be extremely debilitating and can lead to Long COVID.
The CDC also issued no change to its definition of “fully vaccinated” as two shots of the mRNA vaccines, despite the mass of data showing that the Omicron variant and its many subvariants have severely eroded the ability of two doses to prevent hospitalization. The agency also reaffirmed that it will continue to use hospitalization rates, a lagging indicator of the spread of the virus, as the chief measure of the level of danger from the pandemic in each county.
At a press conference Thursday, CDC spokesperson Greta Massetti attempted to justify the changes by claiming that, “We’re in a stronger place today … with more tools—like vaccination, boosters, and treatments.” She continued that the pandemic is at a point where it, “no longer severely disrupts our daily lives” and added ominously, “We know that COVID-19 is here to stay.”
In other words, according to the CDC, tens or hundreds of thousands of infections and hundreds or thousands of deaths each day from COVID-19 is to be the baseline going forward, with public health measures increasingly non-existent and mass death a daily occurrence. New variants and whole new pandemics, whether from monkeypox, polio or some other disease, are to be accepted by the population.
The agency also explicitly noted that the new regulations mean that the “test to stay” policy to check children for COVID-19 infection after exposure at schools is being dropped. There will be no attempt to stem the spread of the deadly disease in schools, despite the fact that COVID-19 has killed at least 1,736 children in the US alone, a number which is likely a significant undercount, and inflicted Long COVID on an untold number of young people.
Ignoring the mortal threat to children is, however, more or less state policy. The same day the CDC guidelines were released, Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders interviewed the Biden administration’s COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha. One of the topics was the impact of the virus on children. During the interview, Sanders made the extraordinary claim that, “children … are not dying” from COVID-19.
More remarkably, Dr. Jha made no effort to correct Sanders! He instead built off Sanders’ falsehood and justified the new CDC guidelines for schools, asserting, “we should look forward to a school year in which every child is in school, is in person, full-time, for the whole year. I think we have all the ability to do that, and that should be the only acceptable standard.” Dr. Jha’s enforcers will be the “teachers unions,” from whom he received “positive reviews” about the new CDC guidelines.
There is a clear aligning of forces among the capitalist state, from its nominal public health officials, leading politicians, and corporatist trade unions, to ensure that students are forced into schools so their parents can be more easily forced into factories and offices for the enrichment of the capitalist elite and their media and union toadies.
The new CDC guidelines provoked a flood of opposition among principled scientists and anti-COVID advocates on social media Thursday, with many commenting directly to the World Socialist Web Site.
Dr. Ellie Murray, an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, told the WSWS, “I am disappointed that they are advising fewer protections, despite the continued high case and death rates. I am even more disappointed to see them recommending less testing at the same time they roll back other precautions. With less testing we will not be able to properly assess the impact of this guidance.”
Dana Parish, a leading anti-COVID advocate, responded sharply to the CDC’s announcement, telling the WSWS, “The new CDC guidance is the figurative nail in their coffin, and will be the literal nail in the coffin for countless children and adults who counted on CDC to protect them. That they’re downright encouraging further spread of a deadly airborne virus that has a propensity to disseminate and persist in organs all over the body, cause strokes, heart attacks, multiple organ damage, dementia, and lead to an increased risk of sudden death, goes against the most basic principle of public health: to do no harm.
“They are again misleading the public by insinuating that vaccines and/or a less severe acute illness will protect them. But neither prevents long term damage, and that is a crucial message the public deserves to know. To be clear, an asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic infection still puts you at an unacceptably high risk for Long COVID. The initial infection is NOT the problem for most people now; the long term damage is.”
Several other epidemiologists and airborne transmission experts weighed in on the reckless and anti-social character of the new guidance. Nicolas Smit, an expert on masks and respirators, commented to the WSWS, “As COVID-19 continues to spread along with monkeypox, the decision to lift guidelines is another sign that the goal of the government is no longer stopping the damage both viruses have on Americans’ health or the already fragile economy—and instead to focus on winning votes for the midterms at all costs.
“During the 2020 election, President Biden said that anyone who was responsible for allowing 220,000 people to die should not be President of the United States and that it was important to role model mask wearing. Unfortunately, President Biden is now responsible for well over 600,000 deaths, yet still discourages mask use. The continued refusal to protect workers or the public from two preventable deadly and debilitating viruses means that the death toll will continue to grow.”
Yaneer Bar-Yam, co-founder of the World Health Network, warned that, “The CDC continues to abandon protections that prevent disease, death and disability through Long COVID. Everyone should recognize that we have to share responsibility to take care of and protect ourselves under these conditions. Prevention continues to be the best response to both the COVID-19 and monkeypox pandemics.”
Anti-COVID advocate Lazarus Long wrote, “It is ironic that it comes just as school starts. More teachers will be out sick, and children will lose even more quality education. Even if substitutes are brought in, it is likely they will be not qualified, such as college students or military personnel. These changes are not for Americans’ health, but for Biden’s political health.”
It is not merely, however, that the CDC has abdicated its role as the chief public health agency in the country. It is actively pursuing policies designed to generate private profits for a tiny minority of the American and world population as the rest are forced to live and work on an increasingly plague-ridden planet. Anti-COVID activist Theo Allen made this clear, noting that the CDC’s press release “is making explicit that the CDC implemented the Great Barrington Declaration of herd immunity.”
Thursday, August 04, 2022
Top Trump Officials at Department of Defense Erased Text Messages Following January 6 Coup--WSWS.org
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On Tuesday, CNN reported that top officials at the Department of Defense (DoD) and the US Army “wiped” text messages on their government issued phones following requests from Congressional committees and oversight groups to preserve records following Donald Trump’s failed coup on January 6, 2021.
DoD officials whose records were deleted include former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, his Chief of Staff Kash Patel and General Counsel Paul Ney. Army officials whose records were “wiped” include former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, Chief of Staff General James McConville, General Counsel James E. McPherson and Director of Army Staff Lt. General Walter Piatt.
American Oversight, a government watchdog group, filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for records of top Trump officials on January 12, 2021. After not receiving a reply, in March 2021 the group sued the agencies for the records and did not receive a reply until January 2022.
In a letter sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting he investigate the destruction of the records, American Oversight wrote that the DoD and the Army admitted to them in court documents filed on March 10, 2022, roughly three months before the US House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack held their first of eight summer hearings, that the “text messages were not preserved and therefore could not be searched.”
The letter revealed that “opposing counsel” confirmed to American Oversight that Ney’s phone was wiped on January 20, 2021, while Patel’s records were deleted on January 22, 2021, and Miller’s on February 2, 2021. These deletions occurred after American Oversight had filed their FOIA requests.
American Oversight was not able to confirm the exact date that McCarthy and McPherson wiped their phones although it too was also after they had made their FOIA requests.
In an attempt to characterize this blatant destruction of not only government records, but certainly criminal evidence, as just a standard bureaucratic operation, government lawyers justifying the erasure of the texts wrote to American Oversight on March 10, 2022: “[W]hen an employee separates from DoD or Army he or she turns in the government-issued phone, and the phone is wiped. For custodians no longer with the agency, the text messages were not preserved and therefore could not be searched.”
This flimsy excuse mirrors other dubious explanations proffered by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General Joseph Cuffari concerning Trump-aligned elements within the capitalist state deleting incriminating messages. Last week the Washington Post revealed that text messages sent on government phones by former top DHS officials including acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and his acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli had gone “missing.”
Despite several pending requests from congressional committees and oversight groups, Cuffari neglected to inform the Select Committee that the texts from the DHS heads had gone “missing” until five months later.
The deletion of records at DHS followed a July 13, 2022, letter Cuffari sent to the Senate and House Committee on Homeland Security revealing that text messages sent by dozens of Secret Service agents on January 5 and January 6, 2021, had been erased after after an alleged error during “data migration.”
As with the DoD and the DHS, Secret Service agents deleted their texts despite the fact that multiple congressional committees had requested the records prior to the alleged “data migration” that was blamed for the missing records. This pathetic excuse ignores the fact that agents had received specific instructions on how to retain data prior to being issued new phones at the end of January 2021.
The destruction of government records was not limited to the DHS, the Secret Service, the DoD and the Army. This past March it was revealed that the official White House phone logs had also been modified to conceal who exactly the aspiring dictator Trump was talking to during the attack on the Capitol. The logs omit nearly eight hours of phone calls, beginning at 11:17 a.m. through 6:54 p.m on January 6.
Seth Abramson author of theProof Substack blog, a lawyer, criminal investigator, Newsweek columnist and professor of journalism at the University of New Hampshire, tweeted on August 2 that the deletion of “critical evidence … continues to look like—at DHS, the Secret Service, and DoD—the biggest cover-up in American History.”
That none of these agencies have been able to present text messages to Congress over 18 months since the attack on the Capitol—and that this has not been made a major issue in the January 6 hearings or by the Department of Justice—confirms that the Biden administration and Democratic Party has been engaged in a cover-up of the role of the Pentagon, the Secret Service and other federal agencies in Trump’s coup plot.
Miller was the senior Pentagon official at the time of the coup. McCarthy was, by law, in charge of the D.C. National Guard, whose commander was requesting permission to send troops to the Capitol to drive off the mob of fascists. Patel was the principal link between them and the White House, and had been appointed Miller’s aide for that reason.
It is extremely significant that text messages from top Army officials McConville, McCarthy and Piatt were deleted. It was reported last year first by the Washington Post, and then substantiated in congressional testimony by former D.C. National Guard Commander William Walker and his subordinate, Colonel Earl Matthews, that Piatt, McCarthy and General Charles Flynn, brother of retired General and fascist Trump ally Michael Flynn, were on the initial phone call with D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee III and Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund as they were pleading for military reinforcements as the Capitol was under siege by Trump’s paramilitaries.
Walker, Sund and Contee have all claimed in testimony before Congress that the military denied their urgent requests for reinforcements. All three men testified that Piatt and Flynn claimed the generals did not like the “optics” of deploying uniformed soldiers to the Capitol as it was being overrun.
For roughly 3 hours and 19 minutes, Walker’s request to deploy a “quick reaction force” consisting of 155 soldiers was delayed. Normally, Walker would have been able to deploy his troops to Capitol with only the approval of McCarthy. However, in Walker’s words, an “unusual” memorandum was issued by Acting Secretary of Defense Miller on January 4, 2021, which forbade Walker from deploying his troops near the Capitol without explicit approval from Miller himself.
This approval was not forthcoming, as Matthews explained in a 36-page memorandum last year, because former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy was “incommunicado or unreachable for most of the afternoon” of January 6.
The scale of the cover-up confirms the analysis of the World Socialist Web Site and exposes the false narrative presented by the Democratic-led Select Committee, namely that Trump’s coup was the result of him and a few “crazies” in the Republican Party. The mass deletion of records from all the major agencies charged with defending the government from threats “foreign and domestic” indicates the wide support Trump’s coup had, and still retains, throughout the US government and substantial sections of the ruling financial oligarchy.
That the heads of these agencies were involved in Trump’s conspiracy also signifies the advanced breakdown of bourgeois democracy, which, despite the claims of the pseudo-left, has not lessened with the election of President Joe Biden and with Democrats gaining power in the House and Senate. Far from exposing and prosecuting Trump and his stooges throughout not only the military and intelligence apparatus, but in Congress as well, Biden and the Democrats have consistently called for “unity” with their fascistic colleagues and for a “strong Republican Party.”
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