Do You Think You’ll Ever Know, Now That You Have Handed Your Mind to the Machine?

by Edward Curtin / March 26th, 2025

We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile. This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on screens and digital media where words and images flow away like water in a rapidly moving stream. The late sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, updating Marx’s famous quote “all that is solid melts into thin air,” called this “liquid modernity.”

Welcome to Operation Pandemonium

See, these experts purport to say: What we tell you is true, but it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions. You must drink the waters of uncertainty forever lest you become a conspiracy nut. But if you don’t want to be so labelled, accept the simplest explanation for matters that disturb you – Occam’s razor, that the truest answer is the simplest – which is always the official explanation.  If this sounds contradictory, that is because it is. It is meant to be. We induce schizophrenia.

And it is, these experts suggest, because we live in a world where all knowledge is relative, and you, the individual, like Kafka’s country bumpkin, who in his parable “Before the Law,” tries to get past the doorkeeper to enter the inner sanctum of the Law but is never allowed to pass; you, the individual, must accept the futility of your efforts and accede to this dictum that declares that all knowledge is relative, which is ironically an absolute dictum. It is the Law. The Law of contradictions declared from on high.

Many writers, journalists, and filmmakers, while allegedly revealing truths about the U.S. and its allies’ criminal operations at home and abroad, have for decades slyly conveyed the message that in the end “we will never know the truth,” the real facts – that convincing evidence is lacking.

This refusal to come to conclusions is a sly tactic that keeps many careers safe while besmirching, intentionally or not, the names of serious researchers who reach conclusions based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence (the basis for most murder convictions) and detailed, sourced facts, often using the words of the guilty parties themselves, but are dismissed with the CIA weaponized term “conspiracy theorists.”

This often escapes the average person who does not read footnotes and sources, if they even read books. They read screens and the mainstream media, which should now be understood to include much of the “alternative” media. And they watch all sorts of films.

But this “we will never know” meme, this false mystery, is shrewdly and often implicitly joined to another: That we do know because the official explanation of events is true and only nut cases would believe otherwise. Propaganda by paradox. Operation chaos.

The JFK Assassination and the Release of Files

There are so many examples of this, with that of President Kennedy’s assassination being a foundational one. In this case, as with the current phony Trump release of more JFK assassination files, the ongoing “mystery” is always reinforced with the implicit or explicit presupposition that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, but yet implying that there are more mysteries to explore forever because “people” are paranoid. (Trump’s position, as he recently told interviewer Clay Travis, is that he has always believed Oswald assassinated Kennedy, but he wonders if he may have had help.) They are paranoid not because of government and media lies, but because “popular culture” (not highbrow) has created paranoia. To spice this up, there is often the suggestion that President Kennedy was assassinated on the orders of the Mob, LBJ, Cuba, or Israel, when the facts overwhelmingly confirm it was organized and carried out by the CIA. A. O. Scott’s recent front page article in The New York Times in response to the JFK files release – “J. F. K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?” (the title appropriately taken from a very fast-paced Billy Joel song and video) – is a perfect example of such legerdemain.

Thus the ruse to keep debating the assassination, get the latest documents, etc. to satisfy “people’s” insatiable paranoia. To pull out CIA fallback stories 2, 3, or even 4 when all else fails. Dr. Martin Schotz, the JFK researcher, rightly compares this to George Orwell’s definition of Crimestop:

‘Crimestop’ means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the powers that be]… and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ‘Crimestop’, in short, means protective stupidity.

It’s the crazy people’s fault, not Scott’s or those who back him up at The Times, a newspaper that has been lying about the JFK assassination from day one. The same goes for the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, et al., and so many key events in U.S. history. It is a game of creating mental chaos by claiming we do know because the official explanation is correct but we don’t know because people have been infected with paranoia. If only people were not so paranoid! Unlike us at The Times, goes the implicit message.

The Epistemological Games of Certain Filmmakers

It is well known that people today are watching far more streaming film series and movies than they are reading books. That someone would lucubrate with pen in hand over a footnoted book on an important issue is now as rare as someone without a cell phone. The optical-electronic eye-ear screen connection rules most lives, mental and sensory. Marshall McLuhan, if a bit premature while referring in 1962 to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest – wrote sixty-three years ago in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. [my emphasis] So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

Four years ago this month, I wrote an article – “You Know We’ll Never Know, Don’t You?” – about a new BBC documentary film series by the acclaimed British filmmaker, Adam Curtis, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.”

The series is a pastiche film filled with seven plus hours of fleeting, fragmented, and fascinating archived video images from the BBC archives where Curtis has worked for decades, accompanied by Curtis’s skeptical commentary about “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere.” These historical images jump from one seemingly disconnected subject to another to reinforce his point. He says it is “pointless to try to understand the meaning of why things happen.” He claims that we are all living as if we are “on an acid trip.”

While not on an acid trip which I have never taken, I was reminded of this recently as I watched a new documentary – Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) – by the equally famous U.S. documentary filmmaker, Erroll Morris, a film about the CIA’s mind control operation, MKULTRA, and its use of LSD. As everyone knows, the CIA is that way-out hippie organization from Virginia that is always intent on spreading peace, love, and good vibes.

While the content of their films differs, Curtis’s wide-ranging and Morris’s focused on Manson and the book by Tom O’Neil, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, I was struck by both filmmakers tendency to obfuscate while titillating their audience with footage and information that belies their conclusions about not knowing. In this regard, Curtis is the most overt and extreme.

Morris does not use Curtis’s language, but he makes it explicit at Chaos’s end that he doesn’t believe Tom O’Neil’s argument in his well-researched book that Charles Manson was part of a CIA mind-control experiment led by the psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Jolyon “Jolly” West. West worked in 1967 for the CIA on MKULTRA brainwashing projects in a Haight Ashbury clinic during the summer of love, using LSD and hypnosis, when Manson lived there and was often in the clinic with his followers.

On April 26, 1964, West also just “happened” to visit the imprisoned Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department, and when West emerged from the meeting, he immediately declared that in the preceding 48 hours Ruby had become “positively insane” with no chance that this “unshakeable” and “fixed” lunacy could be reversed. What happened between the two men we do not know – for there were no witnesses – but one might assume West used his hypnotic skills and armamentarium of drugs that were integral to MKULTRA’s methods.

MKULTRA

MKULTRA was a sinister and secret CIA mind-control project, officially started in 1953 but preceded by Operation Bluebird, which was renamed Operation Artichoke. These operations started right after WW II when U.S. intelligence worked with Nazi doctors to torture Russians and others to reveal secrets. They were brutal. MKULTRA was run by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and was even worse. He was known as the “Black Sorcerer.” With the formula for LSD, the CIA had an unlimited amount of the drug to use widely, which it did. It figured prominently in MKULTRA mind control experiments along with hypnosis. Tom O’Neil sums it up thus:

The agency hoped to produce couriers who could imbed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins. . . . MKULTRA scientists flouted this code [the Nuremberg Code that emerged from the Nuremberg trials of Nazis] constantly, remorselessly – and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to ‘induced pain’ and ‘psychosis.’ They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields. [my emphasis]

In 1973 during the Watergate scandal, CIA Director William Helms ordered all MKULTRA documents destroyed. Most were, but some were forgotten, and in the next few years, Seymour Hersh reported about it and the Senate Church Committee went further. They discovered records that implicated forty-four universities and colleges in the experiments, eighty institutions, and 185 researchers, Louis West among them. The evil cat and its large litter were out of the bag.

MKULTRA allegedly ended in 1973. But only the most naïve would think it did not continue under a different form. In 1964, McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message.” The new medium that was developed in the decades since has been effectively pointed straight at the brain as you watch the screens. And the message?

Tom O’Neil’s Powerful Case

While admitting that he has not conclusively proven his thesis because he has never been able to confirm Manson and West being together, O’Neil amasses a tremendous amount of convincing circumstantial evidence in his book that makes his case very strong that they were, and that Manson’s ability to get his followers to kill for him was the result of MKULTRA mind control and the use of LSD, which he used extensively and which was introduced by the CIA and used by West. Both men had an inexhaustible amount of the mind-altering drug to use on their victims.

This is the subject of Morris’s film, wherein he interviews O’Neil on camera, who explains the extraordinary fact that Manson was able to mesmerize his followers to kill for him without remorse or shame. They “couldn’t get him out of their heads,” even many years later. This was, of course, the goal of MKULTRA – through the use of brainwashing and drugs – to create “Manchurian Candidates.” This case has much wider ramifications than the sensational 1969 Hollywood murders for which Manson and his followers were convicted; for clearly Mansion’s “family” that carried out the murders on his orders appeared in every way to be under hypnotic control. How did a two-bit, ex-con, pipsqueak, minor hanger-on musician learn to accomplish exactly what MKULTRA spent so many years working on?

Yet at the end of his film, Morris makes a concluding comment without even a nod to the possibility that O’Neil is correct. He says he doesn’t believe O’Neil. I found it very odd, jarring, as though O’Neil had been set up for this denouement, which I think he had. But at the same time I recognized it as Morris’s method of setting up and then undermining the narrative protagonists in his films that are ostensibly about getting to factual truths but never do; they are stories about how all we ever have are endless interpretations and the unknowable, confounded by human fallibility. Everything is lost in the fog of Morris’s method, which is no accident.

Frank Olson

I then found an interview that O’Neil did in 2021 in which he said he pulled out of Morris’s film proposal because Morris wanted to make a film that combined the Frank Olson story (a CIA biologist) with his about Manson. In the interview, O’Neil said he knew Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, who has spent a lifetime proving that the CIA murdered his father in 1953, but he didn’t explain why he pulled out of the project. However, he appears extensively throughout Chaos, being interviewed on camera by Morris, only to be undermined at the end. Why he eventually agreed to be part of the project I do not know.

I am certain he has seen Wormwood (2017), Morris’s acclaimed (they are all acclaimed) Netflix film series about the biologist/ CIA agent Frank Olson and his son, Eric Olson’s heroic lifelong quest to prove that the CIA murdered his father because he had a crisis of conscience about the agency’s use of torture, brainwashing, LSD, and U.S. biological weapons use in Korea, much of it in association with Nazis. The evidence is overwhelming that Frank Olson did not jump from a NYC hotel window in 1953 but was drugged with LSD to induce hallucinations and paranoia, smashed in the head, and thrown out by the CIA. [Read this and view this] Despite such powerful evidence available to him before making Wormwood, in another example of Morris’s method, he disagrees with Eric Olson’s decades of conclusive research that his father was murdered.

Conclusion

Filmmakers like Adam Curtis and Erroll Morris are examples of a much larger and dangerous phenomenon. Their emphases on the impossibility of knowing – this seeming void in the human mind, an endless acid trip down a road of kaleidoscopic interpretations – is much larger than them. It is deeply imbedded in today’s society. One of the few areas in which we are said to be able to know anything for certain is in the area of partisan politics. Here knowingness is the rule and the other side is always wrong. Fight, fight, fight for the home team! Here the nostalgia for “knowledge” is encouraged, as if we don’t live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

With the arrival of the electronic digital life, “knowledge” is now screening. If you don’t want to confirm McLuhan’s prediction – “as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside” – it behooves everyone to step back into the lamplight to read and study books. And take a walk in nature without your machine. You might hear a little bird call to you.

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Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.

 

Police and Prisons Belong in Museums

by David Swanson / March 27th, 2025

I want to recommend three new books about abolishing police and prisons. And I want to recommend multi-issue abolitionism beyond those two institutions.

What else would I abolish? Well, a list might start with war, fossil fuels, militaries, prisons, nuclear energy, police, nuclear weaponry, campaign bribery, health insurance companies, the death penalty, the livestock industry, Wall Street, borders, poverty, the NSA, the CIA, the United States Senate, Fox News, MSNBC, the Star Spangled Banner, the cyber truck. I could go on. Lists will vary around the world.

By abolitionism I mean,  primarily, persuading masses of people of the superiority of a new way of doing things, and effecting the political changes to create that new way of doing things. You can’t get rid of police or prisons or wars or Fox News by blowing up a building or zeroing out a budget, if people are all left believing that they need or want those institutions. The darn things will quickly be back stronger than before.

Persuading people that there is a better way than police or nukes or oil is a major project. Persuading them of several of these things at once may sound dramatically and senselessly more difficult. On the other hand, many of the same arguments that apply to one topic apply to several others. The survival of life on Earth actually requires a sort of panabolitionism. And if we were ever to combine the energies of all the people who each want one destructive, counterproductive institution abolished, together we’d have a lot of power.

The new books I have in mind are Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible by Sonali Kolhatkar; Skyscraper Jails: The Abolitionist Fight Against Jail Expansion in New York City by Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti; and No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement by Micah Herskind, Mariah Parker, and Kamau Franklin. These books are not the persuasive case for abolition, so much as accounts of the struggles of activists who work for abolition or for steps toward abolition. There are such things as partial steps toward abolition, just as there are such things as false steps that do not lead in that direction (even if they pretend to).

In Talking About Abolition, Cat Brooks is quoted as saying that “the data and the logic” establish that housing, mental health support, living-wage jobs, healthcare, and education reduce violent crime more than police and prisons do. But of course that doesn’t strike some people as “logic” at all. So the data becomes very important, including international and regional comparisons. One good source of data — here — establishes overwhelmingly that moving at least part of what gets spent on prisons and police into other programs would accomplish more, not less, of what prisons and police claim to be for, namely reducing violent crime — programs such as trauma assistance, hospital case workers, mentoring, training, jobs, courses on preventing sexual violence, and such as summer jobs, financial support, sports, positive parenting, early childcare, etc. The reason why it’s “logical” that general investment in better lives reduces crime more than police and prisons do, is in part because so many crimes arise out of misery, and in part because places that have made those investments tend to have less violent crime than places that have invested instead in police and prisons.

This is not a new discovery, or a truth that simply sets us free. There are a couple of major longstanding hurdles. First, U.S. city budgets often devote a huge percentage to police, and the primary reason seems to be antidemocratic corruption by profiteers, moneyed interests, and police unions. All of this is, of course, a perfect parallel to a national government’s war spending and its causes.

Second, just as when someone hears about war abolition they want to know what to do when Hitler comes to get them, when someone hears about police abolition, they want to know whom they should call in an emergency. Cat Brooks’ answer that you should deal with it yourself or “hush” is not likely to persuade everyone.

As with war, so with police, a major part of the answer will strike the skeptic as evasive. If you demilitarize the world, if you establish the rule of law, if you create nonviolent conflict resolution mechanisms, if you set up populations with training in unarmed civilian defense, if you get rid of the weapons, etc., life on Earth might survive and even prosper with the redirection of resources, and Hitler (long since dead, by the way) won’t get you. If you eliminate poverty, create universal public healthcare, provide free quality education from preschool to college, and ensure safe and stable lives for all, not to mention — and, surprisingly, it is hardly ever mentioned in abolish-police books — getting rid of the hundreds of millions of guns in the United States alone, the kind of emergency in which you’d want to call the police won’t come up.

But what if it does? Even if it’s as rare as lightning? What if it does and I have nightmares about it until it does? That’s where unarmed civilian defense, and nonviolent interrupters and de-escalators come in. There are, in fact, other ways to non-destructively prepare to confront that which may no longer need confronting. And these other methods will become both more understandable and less needed as partial steps toward abolition are taken.

In fact, one of the successes underway by police abolitionists is the establishment — already achieved in a number of U.S. cities — of alternative numbers to dial in emergencies, at which you can reach skilled providers of assistance with mental health, de-escalation, and other needs, and to which you can specify what kind of assistance you do or do not want. Other paths to success would seem clear if we had democracy. As with the federal budget and the Pentagon, so with local budgets and the police: when you show people what budgets look like, the majority of people want to move money out of the police and the Pentagon into useful things. The trick lies in building the power to make that majority will into governmental action.

While Talking About Abolition provides inciteful interviews with a dozen remarkable activists and academics, Skyscraper Jails and No Cop City each focuses on a particular campaign, respectively the efforts to close the jail on Rikers Island in New York City and to prevent the construction of the Cop City militarized police training facility outside Atlanta. The two campaigns have faced fierce opposition. To grossly oversimplify, the New York opposition has been slicker, slimier, more dishonest, and more successful. An astroturf campaign has been created in New York, not to oppose prison closures or abolition, but to claim the title of Abolitionist, even while pushing for new multi-billion-dollar jails in skyscrapers to “replace” Rikers, even while not closing Rikers at all, even while maintaining that these are all steps toward eliminating prisons. As you might have guessed, not everyone has fallen for that sales pitch, and a good deal of corrupt anti-democratic action has been required as well.

Nonetheless, the project of building a New York skyline of humans in animal cages stacked into the clouds has generally operated under the banner of “Close Rikers,” generating — it is my impression — less indignation around the country and world than has been merited and than has been gained by the resistance of the forest defenders opposing the creation of Cop City.

False steps that lead not toward abolition but often toward the strengthening of a destructive institution sometimes rely on distinguishing good prisons or wars or whatever from bad. In the case of wars this habit is strong even among passionate opponents of wars.

The problem with Rikers is not that it is an improper prison — though who wouldn’t choose a prison in Scandinavia if they had a choice? — just as the problem with Gaza is not that it is an improper war — though you might take your chances in Yemen if forced to pick. The problem with Rikers is not that it’s on an island or that it lacks some new technology. The problem is that Rikers puts people, some convicted of crimes and many (83% in 2023) not, in cages to dehumanize and brutalize them to no useful purpose. As Rikers began as a humane reform of an older prison, skyscraper prisons are now marketed as a humane reform of Rikers. But the whole system is incapable of humaneness.

One of the best features of Skyscraper Jails is that it quotes some of the powerful comments residents of New York City submitted to public officials who were required to pretend to seek public input but listened not a bit. Now we can listen for them.

One of the worst features of Skyscraper Jails is near the end of the book, where the authors claim that “there will be no peaceful transition” and “strife” will be required “equaling at least that of the French Revolution, guillotines and all — just as the abolition of slavery and realization of formal equality for Black people required a great, bloody, civil war.”

Fun times ahead, folks! At least for propagandistic nonsense. Some three-quarters of the world rid itself of slavery and serfdom within a century, much of it without a “great, bloody, civil war” which most certainly did not bring the degree of formal or informal equality brought by the Civil Rights movement. We should look to the wisdom and coherence of Ray Acheson’s book Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages, in which war is one of the institutions to be abolished.

It’s disconcerting to read that what needs opposing is “organized violence” but not war, or to see incarceration defined as “warfare,” but, you know, warfare not opposed as warfare. This pattern may provide a clue to the absence of the guns from these books. No Cop City, No Cop World is explicit about its support for property destruction, while hinting at openness to supporting serious violence, but never bringing up guillotines or civil wars. This topic, which I suggest is critically important, is, however a very small part of these excellent books. One of the reasons it is important is the need to build larger movements through bringing in large numbers of people who are mostly opposed to violence. Another reason is the need to grow stronger by combining the movements that oppose wars, prisons, police, etc. They have much to learn from each other in addition to creating larger numbers through joining together.

No Cop City gives us a rich understanding of the history, context, and players in the struggle in and outside Atlanta, as well as lessons that could prove very valuable for similar struggles in numerous other places. Cop City is not a national project but a model for a militarized war rehearsal ground coming soon to a metropolitan area near you. The book also makes clear the connections to war, the training of police by the Israeli military, the military equipment and language and thinking. Atlanta is our most unequal and most surveilled U.S. city with one of the deepest traditions of racism. But as it does, so others will follow.

And as the inspiring opponents of Cop City go, others should follow as well. While I question acceptance of all tactics, no matter how counterproductive, as the supreme activist value, I cannot help but marvel at the tremendously broad coalition (lawyers and children and campers and voters and protesters and saboteurs and a native American nation and environmentalists and peace activists and Central Americans, etc.) and variety of approaches that have taken on Cop City and at least partially and temporarily stopped it in its tank tracks. This is a movement — in the tradition of Occupy — with direct democracy, consensus, and a modeling of a better society on a smaller scale — a life-changing experience in multiple senses.

Imagine a world of growing numbers of encampments dedicated to creating a life without poverty, cruelty, or violence — with no exceptions, no exceptions for certain types of victims, no exceptions for violence on a large enough scale, no exceptions for structural violence hidden in systems of denial of healthcare or a safe environment, no exceptions for people labeled “felon” or “enemy” or “foreigner.” Does abolition sound like a “negative” idea? Think of the world it could give birth too and just try not to smile.

First published at World BEYOND War.

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and War Is a Crime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook. Read other articles by David.

Making Our Rights Disappear: The Authoritarian War on Due Process

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / March 26th, 2025

If Trump can disappear them, he can disappear you.

—Robert Reich

The war on due process is here.

No trials. No hearings. No rights. Just indefinite detention and secret deportations.

This is the fate that awaits every one of us, not just immigrants (legal or otherwise), if the government’s war on the Constitution remains unchecked.

More than two decades after the U.S. government in its post-9/11 frenzy transported individuals, some of whom had not been charged let alone convicted of a crime, to CIA black sites (secret detention centers located outside the U.S. authorized to torture detainees) as a means of sidestepping legal protocols, the Trump Administration is using extraordinary rendition to make those on its so-called “enemies list” disappear.

The first round of arrests and deportations to a mega-prison in El Salvador supposedly targeted members of the infamous Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

Carried out with little evidence and without court hearings or due process, these roundups reportedly may also have swept up individuals with no apparent connection to gang activity apart from common tattoos (firearms, trains, dice, roses, tigers and jaguars) and other circumstantial evidence.

In a particularly Kafkaesque explanation for why some of the Venezuelan migrants who have no criminal records were targeted for arrest and deportation, government lawyers argued in court that their lack of a criminal record is in itself cause for concern.

In other words, the government is prepared to preemptively arrest and make people disappear, without any regard for legal protocols or due process, based solely on the president’s claim that they could at some point in the future pose a threat to national security.

This takes pre-crime and preemptive arrests to a whole new sinister level of potential abuses.

Are you starting to sense how quickly this could go off the rails?

This is how democracies collapse. This is how rights disappear overnight.

As lawyers challenging the government’s overreach warned, “If the President can designate any group as enemy aliens under the Act, and that designation is unreviewable, then there is no limit on who can be sent to a Salvadoran prison, or any limit on how long they will remain there.”

Also among those in danger of being made to disappear without any legal record or due process are individuals who have not been charged with or convicted of any crimes.

The most egregious of these incidents involve college students, scientists and doctors, all of them legal permanent residents of the U.S. who, while never having been charged with a crime, are accused of threatening national security by taking part in anti-war protests over the growing death toll in Gaza as a result of the Israeli-Hamas war, or sympathizing with the Palestinians, or being associated with someone who might sympathize with the Palestinians.

When merely exercising one’s right to criticize the government in word, deed or thought is equated to an act of domestic terrorism, we are all in trouble.

The mass arrests and roundups thus far have been so haphazard that there is a very real likelihood that innocent individuals have also been swept up and deported.

American citizens could very well be next in line for this kind of treatment.

This is the danger of allowing any president to use expansive wartime powers to bypass the Constitution’s prohibitions against government overreach and abuse: suddenly, everything that challenges the government’s authority becomes a national security threat and every dispute a national emergency.

Through his use of executive orders, proclamations and so-called national emergencies, President Trump has essentially declared war on the rule of law.

Make no mistake: while immigrants, illegal and legal alike, have largely been the first victims of the Trump administration’s efforts to circumvent the Constitution in order to make them disappear, it’s our very freedoms that are being made to disappear.

At the heart of these freedoms is the right of habeas corpus.

Translated as “you should have the body,” habeas corpus requires the government to either charge a person or let him go free.

While the Constitution allows the writ of habeas corpus to be suspended in cases of rebellion or invasion when public safety is imperiled, the Trump Administration’s efforts to keep the nation in a permanent state of emergency in order to justify its power grabs leaves “we the people” subject to the kinds of arbitrary mass round-ups, arrests and deportations that have been favored by despots and dictators.

This is usually where the self-righteous defenders of Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional tactics insist that the protections of the Constitution only apply to U.S. citizens.

They are wrong.

At a minimum, as the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed, the rights enshrined in the first ten amendments to the Constitution apply to all people in the United States, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. Those rights include free speech, peaceful protest and criticism of the government, assembly, religious freedom, equal protection under the law, due process, legal representation, privacy, among others.

Then again, what good are rights if the government doesn’t respect them?

What good are rights if the president is empowered to nullify them whenever he wants?

For that matter, what good is a government that betrays its own citizens?

History has shown us that when governments operate without checks and balances, tyranny follows. The question is not whether mass arrests and indefinite detentions could be expanded to American citizens—it’s how long before they are.

If we allow the erosion of due process, if we accept that a president can unilaterally decide who is a threat without oversight, then we have already lost the freedoms that define us as a nation.

We must demand accountability. We must challenge policies that violate constitutional protections. We must support organizations fighting for civil liberties, educate ourselves on our rights, and refuse to be silenced by fear. Because when the government starts making people disappear, the only way to stop it is by making our voices impossible to ignore.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, freedom does not die in a single act of repression—it dies when the people surrender their rights in exchange for false security.

The Constitution can’t protect us if we don’t protect it.

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John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Read other articles by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World Affairs

by Jonathan Cook / March 26th, 2025

The Left and Right take the same reality-based view of the world but respond to it in different moral terms. Liberals, on the other hand, live in an alternate universe – of pure make-believe.

Sometimes it helps to pare things back to their essentials, especially when complexity is being exploited not to illuminate but to confuse. So here is my short, complete idiot’s guide to world affairs:

There are two reality-based understandings of what we call “world affairs”, or sometimes “foreign news”.

1. The first sees the United States as the beating heart of a highly militarised, global empire – the strongest ever known, with more than 800 military bases around the world. The US has divided the world into, on the one hand, “democracies” and “moderate states” that do its bidding and, on the other, “dictatorships” and “terror regimes” that won’t or can’t submit to its dictates.

The former are allies that reap some of the benefits of belonging to the empire, while the latter are presented as a threat to world peace. They must be constantly intimidated, contained, sanctioned and occasionally attacked.

The goal of organising the world this way is the control of global resources, chiefly oil. Western publics thereby enjoy limited privileges that come at the cost of deprivation for those outside the empire. These privileges are intended to keep the US empire’s publics docile and loyal. At the same time, the empire allows members of its elite to amass vast wealth from the exploitation of the world’s resources – wealth so vast that most people are incapable of grasping the extent of it.

This worldview is generally consistent with what is termed a left-wing disposition. It sees the existing system as a bad thing that needs to be ended.

2. The second worldview agrees with all of the above, except it thinks this is a the best system possible in the circumstances and must be preserved at all costs. This outlook is generally consistent with what is termed a right-wing, or conservative, disposition.

In other words, these two groups see things in largely the same way but respond to the same reality differently.

The second group, the conservatives, want to keep the world divided, justifying this to themselves on various grounds they usually refer to as “pragmatism”. In essence, they believe it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and it’s important that we remain the top dog. At some level this outlook rests on a barely concealed racist conceit, often that white or Christian peoples are civilisationally better than other peoples and that, were the world to be organised differently, chaos and barbarism would ensue.

The first group, the Left, want to end the division of the world into two camps, “them” and “us”, arguing that this is dangerous. This empire’s logic justifies pumping money that could be spent improving the quality of ordinary people’s lives, and securing the future of the planet, into the arms industries. It reinforces the logic of the West’s war machine that relies on fomenting a permanent climate of fear. In such a febrile political climate, people are easily manipulated into backing wars or the oppression of other, usually brown peoples. The empire’s division of the world rationalises racism, selfishness and violence, and prevents cooperation. It is inherently unsustainable. And in an age of nuclear weapons, it risks driving us into a confrontation that will quickly end life on the planet.

Of course, not everyone’s outlook fits into these two categories that see the world as it is. There are also liberals who don’t understand much of this. They live in a world of make-believe, an unreality manufactured for them, both by western politicians dependent on a billionaire donor class and a western media owned by billionaires deeply invested in maintaining a divided world that keeps them fabulously rich.

What we call “politics” is chiefly a pantomime in which the West’s wealth elite work hard to maintain the illusion for liberals that the empire is a force for good, that the suffering of brown people is a necessary short-term sacrifice if history is to continue on its progression towards a perfect capitalist liberal democracy that will benefit everyone, and that in this regard the West’s wars producing even more suffering for brown people are actually “humanitarian”.

In simple terms, conservatives support the permanent oppression of brown people because they fear them, rightly understanding they will never agree to their oppression. Liberals, on the other hand, support what they assume is the temporary oppression of brown people because they think that oppression is beneficial: it eventually purges brown people of their defective ideological and cultural habits, leading them to see things our way.

If it feels like too many of your friends and neighbours are indifferent to a genocide that has been live-streamed for a year a half, that is probably because, at heart, they are – whether they identify as conservatives or liberals.

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Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.

 

Netanyahu’s War on Israeli Institutions

Authoritarian Politics

by Binoy Kampmark / March 28th, 2025

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waging a war on many fronts. He has ended the tense ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza in spectacularly bloody fashion and resumed bombing of Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon. Missiles fired at Israel from the Houthi rebels in Yemen also risk seeing a further widening of hostilities.

Domestically, he has been conducting a bruising, even thuggish campaign against Israeli institutions and their representatives, an effort that is impossible to divorce from his ongoing trial for corruption. He has, for instance, busied himself with removing the attorney journal, Gali Baharav-Miara, a process that will be lengthy considering the necessary role of a special appointments committee. On May 23, the cabinet passed a no-confidence motion against her, prompting a sharp letter from the attorney general that the Netanyahu government had ventured to place itself “above the law, to act without checks and balances, and even at the most sensitive of times”.

High up on the Netanyahu hit list is the intelligence official Ronen Bar, the Shin Bet chief he explicitly accuses of having foreknowledge of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. “This is a fact and not a conspiracy,” a statement from the prime minister’s office bluntly asserted. At 4.30am that morning “it was already clear to the outgoing Shin Bet head that an invasion of the State of Israel was likely.”

The PMO failed to mention Netanyahu’s self-interest in targeting Bar, given that Shin Bet is investigating the office for connections with the Qatari government allegedly involving cash disbursements to promote Doha’s interests.

While Bar has been formally sacked, a measure never undertaken by any government of the Israeli state, the Israeli High Court has extended a freeze on his removal while permitting Netanyahu to consider replacement candidates.

It is the judiciary, however, that has commanded much attention, pre-dating the October 7 attacks. Much of 2023 was given over to attempting to compromise the Supreme Court of its influence and independence. Some legislation to seek that process had been passed in July 2023 but the Supreme Court subsequently struck down that law in January 2024 in an 8-7 decision. The relevant law removed the Court’s means to check executive power through invalidating government decisions deemed “unreasonable”. In the view of former Chief Justice Esther Hayut, the law was “extreme and irregular”, marking a departure “from the foundational authorities of the Knesset, and therefore it must be struck down.”

Even in wartime, the Netanyahu government’s appetite to clip the wings of an active judiciary remained strong. In January 2025, it made a second attempt, with a new, modified proposal jointly authored by Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar. The law, passed by the Knesset in its third and final reading on March 27, alters the committee responsible for appointing judges. The previous nine-member judicial selection committee had been composed of three judges, two independent lawyers and four politicians, equally divided between government and opposition. Now, the relevant lawyers will be government and opposition appointees, intended to take effect after the next elections.

The convulsions in Israeli politics have been evident from various efforts to stall, if not abandon the legislation altogether. The law changing the judicial appointments committee had received 71,023 filed objections. While it passed 67-1, it only did so with the opposition boycotting the vote. Benny Gantz, the chair of National Unity, wrote to Netanyahu ahead of the readings pleading for its abandonment. “I’m appealing to you as someone who bears responsibility for acting on behalf of all citizens of this country.” He reminded the PM that Israeli society was “wounded and bleeding, divided in a way we have not seen since October 6 [2023]. Fifty-nine of our brothers and sisters are still captive in Gaza, and our soldiers, from all political factions, are fighting on multiple fronts.”

The warning eventually came. To operate in such a manner, permitting a parliamentary majority to “unilaterally approve legislation opposed by the people, will harm the ability to create broad reform that appeals to the whole, will lead to polarization and will increase distrust in both the legislative and executive branches.”

Before lawmakers in a final effort to convince, Gantz, citing former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, issued a reminder that “democracies fall or die slowly when they suffer from a malignant disease called the disease of the majority”. Such a disease advanced gradually till “the curtain of darkness slowly [descended] on society.”

Gantz also tried to press Levin to abandon the legislation ahead of the two Knesset plenum readings. In a report from Channel 12, he called it a “mistake” to bring the legislation forward. The response from Levin was that the legislation was a suitable compromise that both he and Sa’ar had introduced as a dilution on the previous proposal that would have vested total control in the government over judicial appointments. The revision was “intended to heal the rift of the nation”.

Healing for Netanyahu is a hard concept to envisage. His authoritarian politics is that of the supreme survivalist with lashings of expedient populism. Sundering the social compact with damaging attacks on various sacred cows, from intelligence officials to judges, is the sacrifice he is willing to make. That this will result in a distrust in Israeli institutions seems to worry him less than any sparing from accountability and posterity’s questionable rewards.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.