Twitter Files: FBI, CIA, DHS Will Not Be Held Responsible for Violating Your Natural Rights
Twitter Files: FBI, CIA, DHS Will Not Be Held Responsible for Violating Your Natural Rights
Where were outraged Republicans when I was being targeted by the FBI and Michigan State Police Red Squad for the crime of protesting against the Vietnam War?
All of a sudden, the FBI is bad.
Now that Biden’s election victory is safely in the past, the story about his degenerate son is allowed to crawl from the shadows. The so-called “Twitter Files,” released after Elon Musk purchased the company, reveal the FBI had suppressed the story. In response to criticism, the FBI called those responsible for outing the agency’s attack on the First Amendment during an election “conspiracy theorists.”
In the not-too-distant past—before the rise of the crony capitalist Donald Trump—the FBI was held in high esteem by the general public, thanks to decades of propaganda portraying what is essentially America’s political police force as white hat do-gooders going after human traffickers, bank robbers, drug dealers, and money launderers.
That’s public relations. The primary role of the FBI, as its late director, J. Edgar Hoover said, is to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" individuals and organizations the state considers political enemies.
In 1970, as an 18-year-old antiwar activist, I was targeted by the FBI. I discovered this in the late 1970s when the Michigan State Police closed down its notorious “Red Squad,” an undercover operation that monitored me and other high school students involved in opposition to the Vietnam War. I was contacted by letter and told the Red Squad had a file on me.
“Red Squad officers investigated and exposed political enemies of the establishment and aimed to disrupt any social movement that appeared threatening,” wrote Detroit Under Fire. “Street level operatives attended meetings, surveilled offices, infiltrated organizations, and gathered information on demonstrations and protests.”
I did not receive a file, only a notification that I was a target. The Red Squad files are sealed. “Unlike FBI COINTELPRO, there are few documents available to reproduce from the [Detroit and Michigan State police] Red Squad files, because the court order requiring their preservation also sealed them, for privacy concerns… researchers can view the restricted Red Squad files… but may not quote from or reproduce the documents in any way.”
Red Squads collaborated with the FBI and its COINTELRPO to kill free speech and activism. Following the revelations of the Church Committee, red squads, rebranded in the 1970s as “intelligence units” embedded in police departments (along with the CIA), were supposedly disbanded. I don’t believe it for a second. The state does not abandon successful anti-liberty operations like COINTELPRO. It rebrands them.
In 1970, I was “neutralized,” along with others, for exercising the First Amendment and publishing an antiwar newspaper distributed in public high school. An informant planted a bag of marijuana in a car and the police swooped down and arrested us. Possession of marijuana was a felony in 1970. I faced a long prison sentence, similar to the one suffered by Detroit activist John Sinclair.
Thanks to my family and a decent lawyer, I was able to beat the charge. However, it would be years before I discovered FBI-Red Squad involvement in the bust. The orchestrated bust accomplished its objective—our “underground” antiwar newspaper ceased publication.
After a second bust months later, I decided it was time to move out of the state, away from the police who considered me a communist, an accessible target for harassment. In 1970, if you opposed the war, you were considered a certified communist by the state. I didn’t read Mao’s Little Red Book or praise Che Guevara. I wanted the war to end.
Decades later, I had to laugh when self-righteous Republicans crowed it was unfair the way the FBI demonized Trump and those who protested the election victory of Joe Biden and the Democrat faction of the uniparty outside the sacred temple of “democracy” (neoliberal-speak for dominance of the financial elite), the USG capitol.
I don’t recall Republicans demanding the FBI be shuttered, let alone officially censured, for violating the rights of millions of Americans during the civil rights and antiwar period—or, for that matter, attempting to railroad activists into prison for the crime of opposing an illegal and immoral war. Needless to say, my experience at the hands of the state has shaped my anti-state ideology. I am now considered a domestic terrorist, the same as I was in 1970. Some things never change.
Now we have the so-called “Twitter Files.” What do these “files” (internal correspondence released by Elon Musk) reveal? The files reveal the FBI and CIA were providing Twitter with a hit list of people to de-platform (the CIA is especially adept at compiling lists, as it did in Indonesia, resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands).
I was one of the people on the list. I am permanently banned from Twitter. A single post about Ukraine did the trick. I believe, but of course cannot prove, that the FBI, and DHS, CIA, Pentagon intelligence, have followed my activity for years, along with that of millions of other Americans now considered domestic terrorists, the number one national security threat facing America.
According to the Senate, this Substack blog and larger social media are “accelerating the spread of extremist content,” that is, content at odds with the lies and fabrications of the state. Criticizing the state and its “partners” and “stakeholders” is considered terrorism of the worse sort. In order to demonize the targeted, they are denounced as “white supremacists.”
Since 2019, both the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have repeatedly identified domestic terrorism, specifically white supremacist violence, as “the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat to the homeland.” Directors of both agencies have echoed this assessment in numerous public statements and appearances before Congress, and the Biden administration has promised to make combating domestic terrorism a priority.
Thus, tweets about neo-Nazi thugs strangling a pregnant ethnic Russian woman in Odesa, or killing a young woman and her infant child by shrapnel in Donetsk, are considered terrorism. Because the truth about what is going on in Ukraine counters the narrative of brutal Russian troops bent on rape and murder invading poor little democratically-minded Ukraine (and its violent neo-Nazi serial murderers).
The FBI is not going anywhere. As the Democrat farrago of lies and baseless accusations against Trump and the Republican faction fade into the sunset, we can bet our bottom fiat dollar Republicans will be celebrating the FBI, as the Democrats are now doing.
Ditto the CIA. It’s not going anywhere. CIA psych ops are too effective and important, and even the absurd ops are considered crucial to national security (maintaining and protecting the status quo and the financial elite, demonizing and “neutralizing” those opposed to the neoliberal agenda of pillage, plunder, and predation).
Social media—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al—now constitutes a sprawling surveillance and government censorship apparatus. The wokesters at these Silicon Valley transnational corporations are cooperating with a state that takes no prisoners. For now, they believe they are taking out “domestic terrorists” (all scurrilous white supremacists, of course) threatening those posting kitten photos, recipes, jokes, trivia, and ephemeral cultural detritus, in addition to reposting war propaganda.
Elon Musk, guilty of helping Ukronazis kill Russians, is not a friend of liberty and a defender of the First Amendment. He is a death merchant. Musk is addicted to controversy and, like all malignant narcissists, craves being the center of attention, no matter how negatively he is portrayed.
The FBI and CIA should have been deconstructed after the revelations of the Church Committee. That investigation was cut short before it could reform criminal agencies of the state. The dirty work of the national security state is ongoing behind the scenes, working to undermine your freedom of expression, and your natural right to speak your mind.
I'm still waiting for some ground breaking, not yet known/assumed by those with a clue, revelation. But as this twatter nonsense is a text book limited hangout op, I won't be holding my breath. Anyway, keep doing what you do Mr Nimmo. Merry Christmas.