Vegas Shooters Provide Justification for Police Militarization

More details are coming out about the two would be revolutionaries who murdered two Las Vegas police officers in cold blood as they were eating lunch on Sunday at a pizza chain. The two perps, a charming couple named Jerad and Amanda Miller are being tabbed by authorities and the media as “extremists” and their history is chock full of right-wing ideology of the worst sort. These are not just libertarians concerned with the militarizing of the American police and gross transgressions of a rogue government but two obvious nut jobs who bought into too much of the same sort of agitprop that has been used to incite threats of violence against freed prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl’s mother and father and his hometown of Hailey, Idaho which was forced to cancel a welcome home party due to the threat of a violent invasion by the same sort of deranged types as the Millers.

Reports have confirmed that the two left both a swastika emblem as well as a yellow Gadsden flag on the bodies of the slain officers  - Igor Soldo and Alyn Beck - and had come to see the police as oppressors and viewed law enforcement as fascism. That’s not too much of a reach in The Homeland where thanks to the federal government that local cops now more resemble soldiers in a war zone than peace officers. The two had bragged about attending the anti-government rally at the Cliven Bundy ranch in Nevada which was hyped by the usual pack of right-wing media and Republican political jackals who traffic in outrage and according to a Bundy relative they were run off as being too “radical”. The blog/website Little Green Footballs has several pictures that allegedly show Jared Miller at the ranch as well as of him being interviewed by a local television station. While it is not normally a place I would go on a regular basis for reliable information they have done a good job in compiling this stuff.

The activist talk radio host Alex Jones of Infowars.com is again being blamed for inciting an act of violence on police and a post that Jared Miller had written entitled “The Police (To Kill Or Not To Kill?)” has been published in the media. I have periodically listened to the Jones show over the years and long ago came to the conclusion that it is a front for the secretive ultra-conservative organization The Council For National Policy or CNP as well as the gun lobby and the John Birch Society but the actual host to my knowledge has never explicitly encouraged the killing of anybody let alone police officers. But it is the constant inflammatory rhetoric that incites troubled personalities to embark upon acts of violence such as what happened in Vegas over the weekend. I excerpt the following from Miller’s screed”

I believe in Gods law.  You know the ones.  Dont steal, dont murder, etc.  I fear that if they came, even with a warrant, that I feel they are being unlawfull and infringing upon my rights.  I feel that I have been violated and tread upon.  That the so called justice system has done me harm.  I do not wish to kill police.  I understand that most of them believe they are doing the right thing.  Yet, I will not go to jail, because I have not committed a crime!  I would rather die than be labeled as a criminal.  Let them call me a terrorist.  Let them label me as a fanatic, some nut job.  I know the truth, and so does God.  I’m sure our founding fathers were labeled as such.  Call me a radical, i will wear that badge with pride.  Because America is a radical idea!  Brought up upon radical thinking.  That each man has constitutional rights that are God given and cannot be taken away no matter what.  I refuse to stand by and let them dictate my life.  My family loves me, my neighbors love me.  I do good for the community, more than any cop can claim.  How can a police officer have a consience arresting people who have done nothing to harm a fellow american?  How can they sleep at night?  I wouldnt be able to.  So as i reflect, I’m being pushed further and further into a corner.  I am like a wild coyote.  You corner me, I will fight to the death.  I love America, i love the idea of it.  I am broken hearted tho to see people so pacified by materealism and obsession with hollywood stars.  It is our duty as American citizens to stand against tyranny.  To stand against corruption at all levels.  How did this happen?  That patriots like me could be resting under the boot of tyrants, and as i plead for help from my fellow americans they just walk on by.  All the while thinking, at least its not happening to me.  Yet, the sad thing is, it is happening to them.  So, do I kill cops and make a stand when they come to get me?  I would prefer to die than sit in their jail, when I have done nothing to hurt anyone.

While Jones’ bombastic style attracts the Jared Millers of the country and as it is so completely over the top that he is easily demonized – his website is now claiming that Batman has become the new Catcher in the Rye in seeking to defend the gun industry role in the ongoing wave of killings across the US as well as calling the killings a false flag – the real culprits are the accepted mainline “conservative” news organizations such as Fox and celebrity hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck as well as the wave of cunning politicians seeking to cash in on anti-Obama paranoia. While I am a defender of the Second Amendment and a law-abiding gun owner it disgusts me to see the sort who have come to represent the right to bear arms – when your moral avatars are degenerate freaks like draft-dodging baby daddy Ted Nugent, a man who shit his pants at the draft board to avoid going to Nam so as to not confront something that actually shot back it is a problem. The plague of open carry laws, particularly in states like Georgia only serve to fuel the fantasies of the lunatic fringe like Miller and encourage them to buy more even more guns, booking profits for the gun manufacturers and their lobby the NRA and stripping Americans of their own Constitutional right not to end up being shot by one of these freaks.

While the Miller couple may have ambushed and executed those two police officers out of some twisted hope that their actions would trigger an uprising against what is in effect a heavily armed and truly dangerous police state in America they have only served to provide more justification for it.  In their desperate and ill-conceived rampage they have also done more damage to the Second Amendment rights of Americans that are constantly undermined by the actions of those who can only be called domestic terrorists. Sadly the criminals will become martyrs to a good many Americans despite their gift to the supporters of police militarization. 

Iran-Contra Figure Behind Fox News Exclusive Bergdahl as "Jihadist" Tale

The latest attack in the week long rampage by right-wing fanatics to politicize the Obama trade with the Taliban for prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl predictably has been launched by Fox News which is portraying the soldier as a secret jihadist and a terrorist. One has to love the way that Fox and friends truly support the troops and were Sgt. Bergdahl's release to have been secured by Senators McCain and Graham the patriotic hogwash would have been as overwhelming as the smearing of Obama for his failure to do so. This latest slime job comes with an interesting twist though in that the information was provided by another of those Iran-Contra figures that keep turning up like the proverbial bad penny. The Fox scoop - entitled "EXCLUSIVE: Bergdahl declared jihad in captivity, secret documents show" paints the American serviceman as a sort of a sinister Muslim Manchurian candidate which meshes nicely with the now six years running narrative that President Barack Obama himself is running the secret operational headquarters of the new Islamic caliphate out of the White House basement and is further evidence of just how Republicans and conservatives are the most gullible (and stupid) species in America these days.

I have always loved the politically correct term for abject morons being "low information voters" but the opening line to this extravaganza is truly one for the ages:

U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl at one point during his captivity converted to Islam, fraternized openly with his captors and declared himself a "mujahid," or warrior for Islam, according to secret documents prepared on the basis of a purported eyewitness account and obtained by Fox News.

The reports indicate that Bergdahl's relations with his Haqqani captors morphed over time, from periods of hostility, where he was treated very much like a hostage, to periods where, as one source told Fox News, "he became much more of an accepted fellow" than is popularly understood. He even reportedly was allowed to carry a gun at times.

One really not bother reading any further than "according to secret documents prepared on the basis of a purported eyewitness account and obtained by Fox News" to immediately identify this story as total bullshit of the most malodorous nature. To any legitimate news outlet this sort of tale could end careers but it particularly appeals to the angry and aging demographic that Fox targets despite the fact that they continue to drop like flies with each election cycle. But it gets even better as I excerpt again from the Fox "EXCLUSIVE":

The reports are rich in on-the-ground detail -- including the names and locations of the Haqqani commanders who ran the 200-man rotation used to guard the Idaho native -- and present the most detailed view yet of what Bergdahl's life over the past five years has been like. These real-time dispatches were generated by the Eclipse Group, a shadowy private firm of former intelligence officers and operatives that has subcontracted with the Defense Department and prominent corporations to deliver granular intelligence on terrorist activities and other security-related topics, often from challenging environments in far-flung corners of the globe.

The group is run by Duane R. ("Dewey") Clarridge, a former senior operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s best known for having been indicted for lying to Congress about his role in the tangled set of events that became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. He was pardoned by the first President Bush in December 1992 while on trial.

Let's see now, a "shadowy private firm of former intelligence officers and operatives" named 'The Eclipse Group" headed by yet another one of these former insiders parlaying their connections into fleecing the American taxpayer by providing total horseshit that justifies more of the same insider crony looting of the system. This is the way that is it with wars in that they attract legions of grifters and flim-flam artists as so many maggots feasting on a decaying dog carcass. Duane Clairridge in particular is a legendary nut case, who during the Reagan administration's murderous incursions into Central America was the man who was put in charge of the show by former CIA director William Casey (who conveniently was rendered incapable of speech by a rain tumor a mere hours before he was to have testified to Congress on Iran-Contra and subsequently died) and who as is summed up in Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's"The Untold History of the United States" as follows:

"He installed Duane Clarridge to head the Latin American division. Clarridge was the perfect foil. He knew nothing about Latin America, having never worked in the region, and spoke no Spanish"
Which of course makes him the perfect sort of authority to be trotted out on Fox News despite his being indicted for perjury along with several of his fellow felons - including the ubiquitous neocon manipulator Elliott Abrams - by President George HW Bush on Christmas Eve in 1992. Dewey Clarridge is a natural hero for Fox viewers as his classic hostile interview with Australian journalist John Pilger makes evident. Hey, the man was instrumental in the war crime of themining of Nicaraguan harbors - a violation of international law and as damned unapologeticabout it as Ollie North was in narcotics and weapons trafficking to support the murderers that Reagan himself once lovingly referred to as "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers".

As for Clarridge's private intelligence operation "The Eclipse Group" is described in a 2011 New York Times story entitled "Former Spy With Agenda Operates a Private C.I.A.":

Duane R. Clarridge parted company with the Central Intelligence Agency more than two decades ago, but from poolside at his home near San Diego, he still runs a network of spies.
Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut off his funding in May, he has relied on like-minded private donors to pay his agents to continue gathering information about militant fighters, Taliban leaders and the secrets of Kabul's ruling class.

Hatching schemes that are something of a cross between a Graham Greene novel and Mad Magazine's "Spy vs. Spy," Mr. Clarridge has sought to discredit Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Kandahar power broker who has long been on the C.I.A. payroll, and planned to set spies on his half brother, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in hopes of collecting beard trimmings or other DNA samples that might prove Mr. Clarridge's suspicions that the Afghan leader was a heroin addict, associates say.

Mr. Clarridge, 78, who was indicted on charges of lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal and later pardoned, is described by those who have worked with him as driven by the conviction that Washington is bloated with bureaucrats and lawyers who impede American troops in fighting adversaries and that leaders are overly reliant on mercurial allies.

His dispatches -- an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports -- have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.

It must be nice to be able to run a private intelligence service from poolside - it's not a gig that most would be able to land but if you are a credentialed crook, perjurer and right-wing ideologue with references from Lt. Colonel Oliver North to the aforementioned Abrams it is pretty easy to feed like a blood-sucking leech off of the taxpayer dole. The Fox News "EXCLUSIVE" was immediately dealt a blow when retired CENTCOM chief General James Mattis denounced it as the baseless piece of garbage that it is. A weekend story in The Tampa Tribune (the home city of CENTCOM) by Howard Altman says as much. I excerpt from the story entitled "Mattis: No evidence of Bergdahl collusion with Taliban":

During his time in Tampa as commander of U.S. Central Command, Marine Gen. James Mattis said he saw no evidence to confirm that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, released in a prisoner swap last week, collaborated with his captors.

"I have never seen one bit of verified or confirmed evidence of that," Mattis said in a phone interview with The Tampa Tribune. "Not one bit. You hear things and it was second- and third-hand."
Other information "specifically discounted" reports that Bergdahl, captured by the Taliban in June 2009 after leaving his outpost in Afghanistan, was working with his captors, he said. Mattis declined to comment on what that information was because it remains classified.
Mattis led the MacDill Air Force Base-headquartered command from August 2010 to March 2013, when he retired after a storied career. Mattis was asked to comment on a report by Fox News that a group run by Duane R. "Dewey" Clarridge, a former senior operations officer for the CIA, provided situation reports to Centcom showing Bergdahl was working with his captors at points during his five years as a prisoner. Clarridge, who gained notoriety in the 1980s after being indicted for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, was a civilian contractor at the time.

In the Fox News story, Mattis made similar comments discounting the notion that, according to Fox, "Bergdahl had evolved into an active collaborator with the Haqqani network or the Taliban."
The Fox News story says information about Bergdahl converting to Islam, fraternizing openly with his captors and declaring himself a "mujahid," or warrior for Islam, came from a source new to Clarridge's Eclipse Group "whose trustworthiness had not been fully vetted by the group. However, the report stated, the informant "does have plausible access to the information reported."

AND

The Pentagon "is not aware of any contract, subcontract or otherwise" between SOLIC and the Eclipse Group, Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost, Defense Department spokeswoman, said late Friday afternoon. Clarridge declined comment. Public affairs staff for Ashley, since promoted to major general and now serving as the commanding general of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence & Fort Huachuca, did not respond to a call for comment from the Tribune. Officials from Centcom did not respond to requests for comment and officials from Fox News did not immediately respond to a call and email late Friday afternoon.

Mattis, who took command of Centcom a little more than a year after Bergdahl's disappearance, told the Tribune that Clarridge's reports "were simply one bit of information coming in. You do your normal due diligence. We found nothing to support it."

The Pentagon statement denying knowledge of "contract, subcontract or otherwise" should be viewed with the usual skepticism that the American war machine should be subjected to but that they are commenting on this at all shows just how toxic that Duane "Dewey" Clarridge is. So goes the latter years of the career of a loose cannon who was associated with one of the most flagrant violations of the United States Constitution of the 20th Century that was Iran-Contra. If the Pentagon won't admit any funding of "The Eclipse Group" that subsidizes Duane Dewey Clarridge's ability to spend his waning days poolside rather than in the prison cell in which he belongs then who really is providing the funding- that is an interesting question that begs an answer.

That this is even taken seriously at all is a sad indictment of our current national state of decline. Americans, at least a good amount of them are at the point where they are so brainwashed and cast adrift in fantasy worlds that the crap that they see on television and reality are bleeding over. Evidence of this are the comparisons of Bowe Bergdahl to the Muslim terrorist sleeper "Brody" in Showtime's smash hit Homeland series. In terms of politics and the ongoing manipulation of the angry white lynch mob demographic it also builds on the original attacks of Barack Obama as a secret Muslim who was embedded within the American power structure to transform the USA!, USA!, USA! into a country ruled by Sharia law where white Christians would be transformed into slaves for Allah with their straw bosses being Obama's militant Negro Gestapo ACORN. It would be a great dark comedy if it was not so terrifyingly real.

Being an election year this is only the beginning of the tsunami of anti-Muslim demagoguery that will be invoked by Republicans conducting their own jihad against America.

Keep those televisions tuned to Fox News.

CBS Retracts Benghazi Report: Another Black Eye for State-Corporate Media

It is Rathergate redux, another ugly retraction of a highly inflammatory political story by the CBS news program that presents itself as the gold standard of American journalism. In fast-breaking events the network was forced to repudiate its recent report on what really happened at Benghazi during that ugly night of September 11, 2012.  The tale told by Lara Logan was based on the account of a private security contractor (translation: a mercenary) named Dylan Davies who conveniently happened to have just had a book published by a CBS subsidiary Simon & Schuster under the product line of Threshold Editions which primarily peddles right-wing rot. The book entitled The Embassy House written under the pseudonym of Sergeant Morgan Jones was the basis for the 60 Minutes piece where the exploits of Jones/Davies were given a legitimate forum for a shocking eyewitness account that was a fantasy.  The “contractor” claimed to have been on the spot that night, engaged in some Jason Bourne style fighting with the attackers, allegedly killing one and then sneaked into the hospital to view the body of the murdered U.S. ambassador Christopher Stephens, according to the promo for the book which was described by the  publisher as an insider account where: “the embassy’s secret access that no one but Jones knew about – and that allowed him entry as the savage firefight raged on” and promises readers “Jones’s discovery of the murdered ambassador’s body and his confirmation that the killing was indeed targeted and sadistically brutal”. It was all hogwash and tepid hogwash at that.

The inconsistencies between the Jones/Davies account that CBS was pimping were so blatant that one wonders how such a ‘reputable’ news program could have made such amateurish blunders in vetting the damned thing prior to airing it. The book and CBS report both ignored accounts that contradicted the story by the merc’s employer Blue Mountain (he said that he lied to them) as well as an account that was provided to the FBI. Whoops, game over. On Friday morning Lara Logan appeared on the program CBS This Morning to personally apologize for the false story and the network has since issued a retraction, an apology and will reportedly air a corrected version this Sunday. Simon & Shuster/Threshold has also announced that it is pulling the book and requesting that stores return their copies which likely will be pulped and dumped into some toxic landfill where such garbage belongs. Another shining example of just dismal that the media has become in this desecrated country.

It will be interesting to see whether the FOX News, red state fascist, Republican dead-enders will own up to the lies of the 60 Minutes Benghazi ‘scoop’ now that it has been debunked and retracted. It wasn’t really that long ago when they pranced around with the scalp of a bowed and beaten Dan Rather on a stick after the notorious 2004 piece on how then president George W. Bush weaseled his way out of Nam into a National Guard unit in Alabama and rarely bothered to show up and his records "scrubbed" was similarly retracted. I would imagine that there will just be some sort of conspiracy theory floated that the Obama administration threatened CBS to pull the story and quite honestly given the Nixonian nature of Barry's war on journalists I can see how this could be believed by some outside of the normal right-wing media bubble. As much as I detest the false equivalence that so thoroughly permeates the corrupt mainstream media I am not just trying to kick Republicans and conservatives in the balls as the entire national media is complicit when it comes to selling the lies of the state, pushing for wars and engaging in political chicanery. This is why I avoid the American media like it were the black plague and get my news from foreign sources, aggregator websites that have proven reliable over the years and only use the domestic press for context and to see what the propaganda meme of the day is.

But as far as 60 Minutes goes, whether it was Dan Rather getting burned on forged documents about Dubya’s National Guard service or  a scandal merchant with a pseudonym pimping a book about the murder of ambassador Christopher Stephens CBS’s flagship program has now been punked again and no matter how many apologies, retractions and rebroadcasts it engages in the credibility is done and to anyone with any sense it’s not coming back. I can remember when the show used to be relevant instead of a forum for celebrity worship, the burnishing of the image of war criminals like Dick Cheney and a vital piece of the neocon Lie Factory. Back in the day the show actually WAS a great example of serious investigative journalism but that was before actually news reportage became subservient to corporate profits. The Michael Mann movie The Insider with Al Pacino and Russell Crowe is an excellent portrayal of how CBS began to stray from legitimacy when a report by tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand was censored by network management. It’s well worth the two hours spent to watch it.

Logan is probably doomed at CBS but there is always hope for recycled hacks who were caught pushing right-wing propaganda. Maybe  she can join disgraced Syrian war shill Elizabeth O’Bagy in a second act on Senator John McCain’s staff.  This all probably will work out in her favor rather than her main claim to fame being that she was gang-raped in Egypt during the Arab Spring uprising she now can hang her hat on the discredited 60 Minutes Benghazi story.  CBS, as it did in the aftermath of Rathergate will need to offer up a blood sacrifice for this latest debacle which as described by top executive Jeff Fager is "as big a mistake as there has been" in the history of the program.  This puts a huge ding in the (undeserved) credibility of the program and will need to be addressed in order to keep the advertisers and investors placated. When the heads eventually roll and the resignations are tendered it will be surprising of Logan isn't among the casualties.

The next question is will Senator Lindsay Graham, the princess of the Palmetto State  also retract his latest bitch fit threatening to filibuster all Obama nominations as he did when he called a press conference the day after the October 27^th ‘bombshell’ story?  Not likely, he will just slither onto the Sunday morning propaganda shows again tomorrow with the usual liars and scumbags, spin the CBS retraction to his benefit and begin the jeremiads against any deal with Iran to normalize relations with the U.S. It has already been well promulgated that Israeli megalomaniac Bibi Netanyahu has blown his stack over an impending deal and likely now plans to muster all of his congressional cat paws to torpedo any such agreement. It is bad enough to live in a country that is totally controlled by corporations, predatory financial gambling houses and a fascist element intent at eradicating privacy for all but it is even worse when foreign countries have become power brokers that are able to use their payrolled whores in D.C. to trump the will of American citizens by pushing for more wars that only they benefit from.

It sucks to be us in these sordid times of imperial collapse and tainted institutions and the worst is yet to come.