Tag: police state

Sue Mi Terry: When FARA Applies to US Allies

Last week, I wrote a detailed analysis of how the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) has become a tool of government overreach, often used selectively to stigmatize inconvenient voices, control narratives, and criminalize ordinary interactions with foreign entities. Today, I explore how Dr. Sue Mi Terry’s recent indictment under FARA flips the script: a career insider and former CIA analyst accused of failing to register as a “foreign agent” of South Korea, one of America’s closest allies. Her case is both troubling and perplexing, highlighting the selective enforcement of FARA and its chilling effect on intellectual freedom and open exchange – principles essential to democracy.

Dr. Terry is not a natural candidate for libertarian sympathies. A staunch advocate of hawkish policies on North Korea, she has spent her career in Washington’s revolving door of government and think tanks. Adding to the irony, her husband, columnist Max Boot, once wrote that “Washington should ramp up enforcement” of FARA, a sentiment that now feels uncomfortably prophetic. While it might be tempting to indulge in a bit of schadenfreude, this isn’t a Menendez-style tale of gold bars and hidden cash. It’s a case built on think-tank funding and diplomatic dinners, routine activities in Washington’s policy circles.

What makes this case alarming isn’t the behavior itself, which, while ethically debatable, is typical for Washington. What is troubling is the inconsistent enforcement of FARA, a law so vague and expansive it can be used to target virtually anyone. Just as bookkeeping errors have been elevated to secure felony convictions against political opponents or tax evasion infamously took down Al Capone, FARA allows the government to transform minor infractions into significant criminal liabilities. Terry now faces up to a decade in prison – not for harming U.S. interests, but for failing to dot every “i” and cross every “t.”

Her case may be an exception but underscores a broader truth: FARA’s misuse threatens intellectual freedom, open dialogue, and fairness. Principles must outweigh personalities – even when the target is someone whose politics we may vehemently oppose. If the government can do this to a well-connected insider, what chance does anyone else have?

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Former EU Official Admits That The EU Canceled The Romanian Election

While accusing Elon Musk of interfering in the upcoming German election, Former European Commissioner Thierry Breton said if the AfD (Alternative for Germany) were to win the election, the European Union could cancel the result just as they did in Romania.

Breton declared in Orwellian fashion that “Freedom of expression is a fundamental element in Europe,” and then he went on to give the example of Romania, where the elections on December 8 were annulled, suggesting that the same thing could happen in Germany. This is the first admission by a European leader that the election in Romania was cancelled at the behest of the European Union.

His admission contradicts the official narrative that the presidential election was stopped by the Romanian judiciary. “Let’s apply our laws in Europe when they risk being circumvented and when they can, if not applied, lead to interference. We did it in Romania and, obviously, we will have to do it, if necessary, in Germany,” Breton said.

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DEA Judge Cancels Marijuana Rescheduling Hearings Amid Legal Challenges, Pushing Back Reform For At Least Three Months

The first hearings on the Biden administration’s marijuana rescheduling proposal that were set for next week have now been canceled following a legal challenge from pro-reform witnesses, a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) judge has ruled.

While DEA Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) John Mulrooney rejected key arguments from rescheduling proponents about how alleged improper communications and witness selection decisions by DEA Administrator Anne Milgram warranted the agency’s removal from the process altogether, he ultimately granted a request for leave to file an interlocutory appeal—canceling the scheduled January 21 merit-based hearing and staying the proceedings for at least three months.

And although Mulrooney cited statutory restrictions on his office’s ability to take actions such as removing DEA as the “proponent” of the proposal to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), he sharply criticized the agency over various procedural missteps that he argued contributed to a delay of the rulemaking, potentially indefinitely as a new administration is set to come into office next week.

Central to the movants’ motion to remove DEA are allegations that certain agency officials conspired with anti-rescheduling witnesses who were selected for the hearing. The judge didn’t outright deny those claims and, in fact, noted a “disturbing and embarrassing revelation” about such communications. However, he said even if those claims were substantiated, they wouldn’t on their own constitute an “‘irrevocable taint’” that will affect the ultimate outcome of the proceedings.” Therefore, he said, it wouldn’t affect his office’s authority to relegate DEA in the hearings.

“I can no more remove or re-designate the Administrator than I can hold parties in contempt and fine them,” Mulrooney said. “The strangeness of this unsupported approach is amplified by the fact that the appointment of a new DEA Administrator by a different political party is imminent.”

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Virginia GOP Governor Claims Legalizing Marijuana Sales Would Harm Children And Increase Crime

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) emphasized during his State of the Commonwealth address that he’s not interested in cooperating with lawmakers to legalize marijuana sales in the state, claiming that doing so would hurt children, worsen mental health and increase violent crime.

“Strong communities work to prevent harmful drug use,” the governor said during the speech on Monday.

Use, possession and limited cultivation of cannabis by adults are already legal in Virginia, the result of a Democrat-led proposal approved by lawmakers in 2021. But Republicans, after winning control of the House and governor’s office later that year, subsequently blocked the required reenactment of a regulatory framework for retail sales. Since then, illicit stores have sprung up to meet consumer demand.

Supporters of regulating commercial sales in the state say the move would not create a cannabis market in Virginia but instead regulate the state’s existing illicit market, which some estimates value at nearly $3 billion. But Youngkin has rejected the idea, issuing a veto of a legal sales measure passed by lawmakers after Democrats retook control of the legislature last year.

“Everyone knows where I stand on establishing a retail marijuana market,” Youngkin said in his speech. “Let’s work together on other issues where we can find common ground.”

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NEW VIDEO Shows J6 Trump Supporter Rosanne Boyland Shot in the Face by Police Projectile, Then Pushed Down and Smothered, Before Metro Police Officer Beat Her with a Stick as She Died on US Capitol Steps

President Trump held his first press conference on Tuesday after Congress certified him the winner of the 2024 presidential election on Monday.

During his press conference from his home in Mar-a-Lago, President Trump made headlines when he announced he was changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico – to the Gulf of America.

President Trump also told the assembled journalists that he heard there was a second person who died on January 6, 2021 at the pro-Trump protests on Capitol Hill.

Actually, Mr. President, four people died that day, three were killed by police action, on January 6, 2021.

Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed in cold blood by Officer Michael Byrd. Kevin Greeson died of a heart attack. Benjamin Phillips was killed when Capitol Police fired exploding cylinders into the crowd, and he was knocked unconscious, and Trump supporters were unable to revive him. And Rosanne Boyland was gassed, pushed down, smothered until unconscious, and then beaten with a stick by Officer Lila Morris several times as she lay dying on the US Capitol Steps.

The Capitol Police also attempted to kill Derrick Vargo when they pushed him off a three-story ledge. He survived with serious injuries.

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Judge Threatens To Break the UK’s Wall of Secrecy Around Assange’s Persecution

After nine years of legal battles, a British judge has finally challenged the wall of secrecy erected by British and Swedish authorities around the legal abuse of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Judge Foss, sitting at the London First-Tier Tribunal, has ruled that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) must explain how it came to destroy key files that would have shed light on why it pursued Assange for 14 years. The CPS appears to have done so in breach of its own procedures.

Assange was finally released from Belmarsh high-security prison last year in a plea deal after Washington had spent years seeking his extradition for publishing documents revealing US and UK war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The CPS files relate to lengthy correspondence between the UK and Sweden over a preliminary investigation into rape allegations in Sweden that predate the US extradition case.

A few CPS emails from that time were not destroyed and have been released under Freedom of Information rules. They show that it was the UK authorities pushing reluctant Swedish prosecutors to pursue the case against Assange. Eventually, Swedish prosecutors dropped the case after running it into the ground.

In other words, the few documents that have come to light show that it was the CPS – led at that time by Keir Starmer, later knighted and now Britain’s prime minister – that waged what appears to have been a campaign of political persecution against Assange, rather than one based on proper legal considerations.

It is not just Britain concealing documents relating to Assange. The US, Swedish and Australian authorities have also put up what Stefania Maurizi, an Italian journalist who has been doggedly pursuing the FoI requests, has called “a wall of darkness”.

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‘Deadly Exchange’: How US Police Learn Their ‘Worst Practices’ From The IDF

It is not uncommon for police to drive around with their lights flashing in Black and working-class neighborhoods in Atlanta. This is a tactic used to intimidate and make their presence known; for residents of these neighborhoods, it can feel like psychological warfare. US law enforcement learned this strategy from Israeli forces.

Thousands of law enforcement officials have traveled to Israel to learn new repression strategies and surveillance techniques from the Israel National Police, Israel Defense Forces, and the Shin Bet, who inflict violence, crowd control, and surveillance onto Palestinians. Anti-imperialist advocates say the tactics being taught to US law enforcement were battle-tested on Palestinians and spread to the US to target Black and Brown communities through a training relationship that grants Israeli forces more power and profit, causing further harm to Palestinians.

These programs are facilitated by the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, and the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange Program—the latter of which was started in 1996. US leaders sought Israel’s guidance to curb terrorism, and a ‘deadly exchange’ of worst practices between US and Israeli forces was born. Federal, state, county, and municipal law enforcement executives including local police departments, the FBI, and ICE have traveled to Israel, while thousands of officials have attended conferences with Israeli experts in the US. An inaugural “US-Israel Security Conference” by JINSA occurred last month, where a former Israel Defense Forces commander was included as a guest speaker.

“Within these programs, worst practices are shared to promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing practices that already exist in both countries,” said Rania Salem, an organizer with the US Palestinian Community Network. “US forces take whatever is working in Israel and they bring it here and inflict it on Black and Brown people.”

Police departments in New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Atlanta, among others, have close ties with Israeli forces. Salem said that the increasing militarization of US police in recent decades is due in large part to the “funding and support of Israel’s brutal military occupation.” She said that in return for these trainings the state of Israel gets in good standing with the US for future support, and its forces learn new tactics in return—Salem said that Israel learned stop-and-frisk and racist traffic stop techniques from US law enforcement.

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Technocracy, Fear-Mongers, & The Conspiracy

The term, ‘conspiracy theory’ became part of common parlance during the ‘Covid era,’ but although all of us know what it refers to – and who are supposed to be the ‘conspiracy theorists’ in question, namely those people who saw through the ‘pandemic’ scam and everything it entailed – the precise nature of the ‘conspiracy’ is probably less clear. When I ask individuals what they understand by it, they usually answer in more or less vague terms. So what is it? 

In his book, HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy (2003) – followed in 2006 by Weather Warfare – Jerry Smith indicates the importance he attributes to the concept by capitalising it throughout. Smith relates it to what he regards as a weapon for warfare; to wit, the ‘High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP),’ and uncovers what the powers behind this project would have preferred to remain undisclosed, for obvious reasons, once one is apprised of the reasons for its establishment by the ‘Conspiracy.’ Here I do not wish to delve into the specifics of HAARP, but merely focus on Smith’s illuminating insights as far as the ‘Conspiracy’ is concerned. His answer to the question about its ‘what?’ is scattered throughout the first of the two books mentioned earlier. Here are some excerpts (Smith, 2003, p. 22-24):  

Some people believe that there is one over-arching conspiracy, a cadre of incredibly powerful people who want to rule the world. Most of us dismiss such people as paranoid kooks. Still, there is no denying that for over a hundred years a movement has been developing among the world’s top intellectuals, industrialists and ‘global villagers’ to end war and solve societal problems (like overpopulation, trade imbalances and environmental degradation) through the creation of a single world government. Whether this globalist movement is a diabolic ‘conspiracy’ of the evil few or a broad ‘consensus’ of the well-intentioned many, in fact matters little. It is as real as AIDS and potentially just as deadly, at least to our individual freedom, if not our very lives…

To grasp why Smith employs the term ‘deadly’ with regard to the Conspiracy, one has to read the book, but here it is sufficient to point out that, if nations were to surrender their own sovereign right to deal with overpopulation, environmental problems, and so on, as they see fit – even if this were to be done in cooperation with international agencies – a ‘one solution for all’ system would mean that policies would be imposed on them which are not suitable, or acceptable, for their own needs.

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He Lost the Title to His Home Over a Small Property Tax Debt. Years Later, He’s Finally Getting It Back.

A Nebraska man whose house title was seized over a modest property tax debt has finally gotten it back, ending a yearslong legal battle that almost saw him lose his home and all of its value in excess of what he owed the government.

In 2014, Kevin Fair was unable to pay his $588 property tax bill after quitting his job to care for his dying wife, Terry, who had been diagnosed with a debilitating case of multiple sclerosis. The next year, the Scotts Bluff County government quietly sold that debt to a private investor, Continental Resources, which continued to satisfy the Fairs’ property taxes—until 2018, when the company sent the couple a bill for $5,268.

The family would have to pay that total—their tax debt, along with interest and fees—within 90 days, or lose their house. They would also lose all of their equity, even though their home was worth about $55,000 more than what they owed.

That was business as usual in Nebraska, which was one of many states engaging in legalized home equity theft. “People are shocked about how the law actually operates,” Jennifer Gaughan, chief of legal strategy at Legal Aid of Nebraska, told me in 2023. The law was indeed shocking: Local governments were permitted to sell tax debts to investors, without sending correspondence to the debtors. Three years later, as in the Fairs’ case, the investor would mail the property owner the new bill, which, of course, had grown substantially, with 14 percent interest and other fees. If the owner couldn’t pay within 90 days, then the county treasurer would give the title of the house to the investor, who would then take the home, sell it—and keep the change.

“It’s usually elderly people…people who own their homes outright who don’t have a mortgage, and there’s usually some kind of intervening situation,” said Gaughan. “It’s not just poverty. It’s illness, or something happens in their lives….And then they don’t have notice of it. And then [the home] is being taken.”

The Fairs sued, arguing that losing the equity in their house in excess of what they owed violated the 5th Amendment’s Takings Clause, which promises that the government cannot take private property “without just compensation.” The pair lost multiple times, including at the Nebraska Supreme Court. 

The U.S. Supreme Court considered the issue in 2023. The plaintiff in that case, an elderly woman named Geraldine Tyler, accrued a $2,300 property tax debt on her condo in Hennepin County, Minnesota, after some neighborhood incidents, including a nearby shooting, prompted her to move to a retirement community. Unable to finance both her rent and her debt—the total bill came to $15,000 with penalties, interest, and fees—the local government seized her condo, sold it for $40,000, and kept the $25,000 profit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruled that was fine.

The high court’s justices unanimously disagreed. “A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the State to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public fisc than she owed,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more.” Tyler was 94 years old when the decision came down.

With that ruling in mind, Nebraska’s top court reconsidered its previous decision and ruled that Fair would not have to sacrifice the additional equity in excess of his debt. Whether or not he would be able to retain his title, however, remained unclear, until late last month when he came to an amicable agreement with Continental Resources.

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Carter and Chile: How humanitarian was the president?

On March 9, 1977, at one of Jimmy Carter’s earliest White House press conferences as president of the United States, the very first question was about Chile.

At a meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva the day before, a State Department official had expressed “profoundest regrets” for the covert U.S. role in undermining Chilean democracy, and the subsequent “suffering and terror that the people of Chile have experienced” under the military dictatorship. Now, the U.S. media wanted to know if those remarks reflected the new President’s unique position on human rights as a criterion for U.S. foreign policy.

President Carter bluntly disavowed the apology. “I think that the remarks made by the delegate concerning our past involvement in Chilean political affairs were inappropriate,” he declared, dismissing them as “a personal statement of opinion” that did not represent the U.S. government.

But Carter did take the opportunity to call attention to human rights, which, until his election, was utterly disregarded as a principle of U.S. foreign policy. “We are still concerned about deprivation of human rights in many of the countries of the world,” Carter noted. “I think Chile would be one of those [places] where concern has been expressed. And I want to be sure that the American people understand that this is a very sensitive issue.”

Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, who rose to be the 39th president of the United States, ushered the “sensitive issue” of human rights into the White House. As the first post-Vietnam, post-Watergate President, Carter aimed to restore a righteous decency to a U.S. Government contaminated by the dishonesty and criminality of the Nixon-Kissinger era. Carter also sought to bring a semblance of integrity and morality to the exercise of U.S. foreign policy now known for Henry Kissinger’s imperial abuses of power in smaller countries around the world and embrace of dictatorships in Latin America –most notably the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile.

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