US Mired in Cold War Mentality as Cuban Twitter Scheme Exposed

It's back to the future in The Homeland circa 2014. When the neocons and the dimwitted Obama administration are not actively poking the bear in Russia, for example the destabilization and overthrow of the democratically elected leader in Ukraine and hurling propaganda stink bombs at the Sochi Winter Olympic games they are still to this day trying to foment revolution in Cuba. Jesus Christ, have any of the lunatics who are running this great star-spangled asylum ever studied history? The government that Castro built - after kicking out mobsters and rapacious corporate interests, not that there is much if any difference - has endured for nearly sixty years and eleven US presidents. It would just have to be the ultimate narcissist, Barack Obama who thinks that he can be the one to finally stick a fork into it.

The latest example in an endless series of botched plots is that of ZunZuneo, or the "Cuban Twitter" that was revealed to be a covert attempt by the Obama regime to destabilize the government. Hell, we can't do anything rational such as to normalize relations and open Cuba to American investment and trade the proverbial rising tide that would lift all boats, if anything the ongoing debacle in Iran is proof of that, the dirty trick bag has to be opened and the Cuban government subverted in the finest of post WW II US foreign policy tradition. The story of this show of stupidity by Team Obama was broken by the Associated Press. I excerpt the following from the piece entitled "US SECRETLY CREATED 'CUBAN TWITTER' TO STIR UNREST":

In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a U.S. government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government.

McSpedon and his team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit executives who would not be told of the company's ties to the U.S. government.

McSpedon didn't work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the U.S. Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in U.S. humanitarian aid.

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones "Cuban Twitter," using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba's strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the Internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird's tweet.

Documents show the U.S. government planned to build a subscriber base through "non-controversial content": news messages on soccer, music and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize "smart mobs" — mass gatherings called at a moment's notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society."

So the cover is now blown on USAID as being just another front for the endless series of escapades by the US government and the NGO's which are really for the most part front groups in the meddling in the affairs of other countries. The Cold War may officially be over but the dead enders just never stop. Just look at the escalating mess in Ukraine where the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which took place of the more ostentatious CIA in doing the dirty work of toppling governments not sufficiently following the Washington line. Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland during a speech to predatory corporations looking to feast on the spoils of the carved up Ukraine boasted of the $5 billion that the US government had plowed into the country - hell, it's not like it could be used to actually do some investment in America. The NED's role in spreading "democracy" at gunpoint and beating the concept into all who refuse to go along with the corporate colonization in the torture chambers of the murderous despots that we the US taxpayers fund was already well established but USAID. at least had some semblance of legitimacy - good job Obama, there that one goes as well. Is it too late to get George W. Bush to come back?

The White House naturally denied that the Cuban Twitter plot was a covert operation but there are Congressional (yes those worthless bastards) probes forthcoming. With Senator Robert "whore chaser" Menendez already chiming in approvingly:  "The whole purpose of our democracy programs, whether it be in Cuba or other parts of the world, is in part to create a free flow of information in closed societies" - the sheer hypocrisy is incredible, given that the New Jersey based kingpin of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee continue to be one of the most vocal advocates of the unconstitutional NSA Stasi mass domestic surveillance and data-mining programs. For further elaboration on the ZunZuneo operation as well as other more nefarious aspects of the collaborative program between the NSA and those Norsefire fascists across the pond at GCHQ Glenn Greenwald has just published a very good piece over at his new platform The Intercept entitled "The “Cuban Twitter” Scam Is a Drop in the Internet Propaganda Bucket", it like all of his work is strongly recommended reading.

So on and on it goes with this sick obsession with Cold War style skullduggery and an absolute refusal to become an honest partner in what is an increasingly globalized world where the US establishment as well as the deep state and shadow government that lie underneath continue with their wretched, dishonest and murderous ways. The one place that is so badly in need of one of those regime changes is right here in the US of A. 

Mendacious Meddler Obama Warns Putin Not to Meddle in Ukraine

Those groaning, creaking and popping noises that were barely audible during  Barack Obama’s hastily announced  Friday afternoon White House statement was the sound of an empire of lies on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own bullshit. The President of the most exceptional, god-kissed, special nation in the history of the planet warned the reviled Russian leader Vladimir Putin not to dare to intervene in Ukraine after a joint US-EU instigated coup d’etat that effectively ousted democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych. While Obama’s lies are dutifully and unquestionably communicated by a corrupt, careerist state media for domestic consumption one has to wonder just how much longer that the American war machine will have any credibility whatsoever abroad. The propaganda blitzkrieg touting the ‘freedom fighters’ whose mob violence led to the chasing of Yanukovicych from power only to be replaced by some of the most vile thugs and neo-Nazis in Eastern Europe has been as withering as it is dishonest. Months of shrill and egregious demonizing of Putin after he dared to offer asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and then swept to the rescue to keep the American political class and their expensive toy the military from another Middle Eastern war in Syria had Barry and the boys itching for payback.

It was revenge of the dish served cold nature that they extracted from Putin during his national showcase of the Sochi Winter Olympic games by pulling off the coup in Kiev, an embarrassment for the Russian boss of which the timing was critical to the deal going down. The neocons could barely control their glee, boasting about 'democracy' that was nothing more than mob rule. But America has long been based on a passel of lies, hypocrisy and imperial meddling all sold by being (to quote Sinclair Lewis) “wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross” at least since the end of World War II and the creation of the CIA. With the German Nazis and Japanese defeated, Europe in ruins and America essentially taking control of the old British Empire this country has done nothing but meddle in the affairs of others,  planning and staging coups, backing murderous torturing despots to protect western business interests, assassinations, proxy wars, economic sabotage, full blown wars under our own flag and now with the advent of communications technology spying on the private communications of foreign leaders and engaging in economic espionage.

While Obama may have been a Constitutional law professor – although given his ongoing assistance in nullifying it while in office it has to be considered that maybe that is the reason he got the gig in the first place – he doesn’t bother much with history, unless of course it is the state sanctioned version of a moral and triumphant nation and champion of human rights that promotes John Wayne whup-ass diplomacy. Not that a petulant narcissist like Obama actually gives a rat’s ass about anything remotely resembling the truth but here is a short list of places where his great government of ours has meddled in over the past several decades including official military involvement as well as CIA operations (listed in alphabetic not chronological order and not all inclusive):

Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Bosnia, Cambodia, Chile, Columbia, Congo, Cuba, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Egypt, El Salvador, Georgia, Greece, Grenada, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Korea, Laos, Liberia, Libya, Pakistan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Uganda, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen…

..and of course Ukraine.

The state-corporate media is of course complicit but with the Clinton era wave of consolidations and a history of CIA/government meddling such as Operation Mockingbird, the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine, the revolving door between the Pentagon and defense contractors and the ex-generals who are trotted out as “experts” without any mention of glaring conflicts of interest it is more like the media and the government have now merged with the former serving as nothing more than a propaganda arm, Pravda on the Potomac. Having a dumbed-down, steeped in superstition, brainwashed and quite frankly stupid populace that is more concerned with the exploits of the Kardashians and Justin Bieber than what it is that truly affects their lives on a larger level doesn’t hurt the efforts of the rogue government to impose their big lie of democracy at gunpoint on the majority of the world. The level of willful ignorance in what is at least theoretically an advanced society is stunning and we are well on our way to the land that was prophesied in the biting social satire “Idiocracy”. The absence of any questioning of exactly why it is that this impetuous ass of a president and the neocon embeds within the system are so hellbent on risking a serious conflict with a powerful, nuclear armed nation such as Russia over a situation that is spinning out of control in one of the countries that sits on its border. Does anyone ever bother to think of what Obama or any US president would do if meddlers from another country would foment a civil war in Mexico or Canada? But we already know the answer to that for it is we who are the exceptional and the reverence of all things military in this land of fear and woe borders on the fanaticism of a cult.

Since the end of the ‘good war’ the bulk of the meddling was justified by having to fight the hyped and blown out of proportion menace of global communism emanating from the Soviet Union, when that long needed Manichean devil justify a permanent state of war. The manufacture and sale of bullets, bombs, aircraft, tanks etcetera was just too big of a moneymaker to ever beat those swords back into plowshares and set about building a just society and President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell address way back in 1961. So we had well in excess of sixty years of meddling in foreign lands to defeat a trumped up menace that justified the whole bloody business of death and destruction. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and crackup of the USSR the gravy train risked derailment but thanks to Poppy Bush with his meddling in Iraq and Bubba Clinton with his bombing the shit out of Belgrade and other misadventures the warfare state managed to lurch along until September 11, 2001. The war machine hit the jackpot that day with their War on Terror (translation: Muslims) that thanks to that “New Pearl Harbor” that the neocons  so desired allowed for the fleecing of a terrified nation therefore a new series of wars/meddling and an unprecedented redistribution of wealth to finance the full blown cancer of a massive and bloated surveillance machine that thanks to Snowden’s revelations we now can see that it is not about “terrorism” at all.  So with the phony War on Terror now belatedly being exposed as a fraud what would be better to justify increased looting of the Treasury, beggaring Americans and finishing the job of destroying the middle class once and for all but a resurgent Red Menace?

(Image: AP/Charles Dharapak)