Sunday, September 30, 2018

Congratulations to the Republican branch of the Democrat Party, you got what wanted. You proved that elections don’t matter and should be cancelled. October 2018 Supreme Court session opens with only 8 justices

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9/30/18,Tripwire Crossed – James Comey: “It is idiotic” to rush the FBI,” tcth, sundance

“Phase 1 – Activate last minute delay chaos (prior “Me Too” investment)

Phase 2 – Use sex assault claims to demand investigation, further delay. Use republicans, not democrats, to establish/frame the delay.

Phase 3 – Use investigation to frame validity narrative; further delay. Use republican fear, not democrats, to continue the delay.

[October 1, 2018 Supreme Court session begins with only 8 justices]

Phase 4Use “deeply flawed” investigation narrative to penetrate mid-term membrane…. “Let the voters decide”.

Phase 5 – The mid-term election.

So far, the DC UniParty is executing this flawlessly.”
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Among comments:
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Sammy Hains says: September 30, 2018 at 6:28 pm

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The same people who found Dr. Ford’s testimony “credible,” also found gang rape accusers Crystal Mangum (Duke lacrosse), Jackie Coakley (Rolling Stone & Jamie Leigh Jones (KBR) totally credible-Ann Coulter

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Above, 9/29/18, Ann Coulter twitter



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Al Qaeda group White Helmets given refugee status in UK, begin evacuation from Syria with “support” from US, UN, among others. US taxpayers are all terrorists now

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“The United Kingdom is resettling Al Qaeda’s Syrian medical unit, called the “White Helmets,” as “refugees” in UK. The White Helmets organization is funded by UK’s MI6 and America’s CIA, and is headed by Raed Saleh, who was prohibited from visiting the US because he’s a terrorist. These jihadists won’t just have UK honors (and they already have: a Hollywood Oscar-winning ‘documentary’ full of lies about how ‘heroic’ the White Helmets are), but, presumably, they’ll also obtain UK citizenship.”…9/29/18, UK and US Now Overtly Honor Al Qaeda, Strategic Culture, Eric Zuesse
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UK government article:

9/24/18, White Helmets Resettlement," gov.uk/government


Under the well-established practices of the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (VPRS), the Home Office is working closely with UNHCR, the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to resettle the families.

The Home Secretary Sajid Javid said:

“White Helmets volunteers saved the lives of thousands of innocent civilians during the Syrian conflict and suffered terrible losses in the process.

I am therefore proud that the UK is resettling these brave individuals and their families and giving them the opportunity to rebuild their lives here.”

The Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said:

“The actions of the White Helmets demonstrate true modern day heroism. They are rightly respected for their courageous, life-saving work and have previously been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. We welcome the first White Helmets to be resettled in the UK.

These brave volunteers have rushed to pull people from the rubble when bombs have rained down on Syria and I’m proud that the UK has led the way in their evacuation and resettlement.”

International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt said:

“The White Helmets who have risked their lives to rescue thousands of Syrian civilians are facing persecution from the Assad regime. We should be so proud of Britain’s role supporting their life-saving work and now providing them and their families with sanctuary and helping them rebuild their lives.

We are also exploring how we can learn from their valuable experience and expertise protecting civilians in need.” 
 
The White Helmets are a civil defence organisation that has saved over 115,000 lives and protected the Syrian people who are bearing the brunt of the conflict.

The UK has already resettled over 12,800 of the most vulnerable refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict, with the government on track to meet its commitment of resettling 20,000 by 2020.

Over £2.71 billion [$3.5 billion US] has been committed by the UK government since 2012 to meet the immediate needs of vulnerable people in Syria and of refugees in the region making it one of the largest donors. This is the largest ever response from the UK to a single humanitarian crisis.”
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Added: UK Telegraph: 98 White Helmets and 324 of their relatives:

9/24/18, “Britain grants asylum to 100 White Helmet rescuers and relatives after Syria evacuation,” UK Telegraph, Josie Ensor

A total of 98 White Helmets and 324 of their relatives were evacuated out of southern Syria through Israel to Jordan in July, in an unprecedented rescue mission conceived by Britain, Germany and Canada, and supported by Israel, Jordan, the US and the United Nations.”
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Added: Netherlands stopped support for “White Helmets:”

9/10/18, The Netherlands is stopping support for Syrian opposition [White Helmets] due to inadequate supervision of aid projects; British organization denies criticism, de Volkskrant, Ana van Es (google English translation from Dutch)

US created the propaganda group White Helmets to sell US taxpayers on bombing and regime change in Syria: 3/3/2017, An Oscar for a Propaganda Flick, Consortium News, Patrick Henningsen: “Hollywood activists prefer their human rights causes blessed by the U.S. government, which contributed to the dubious Oscar for “The White Helmets” propaganda flick, writes Patrick Hennigsen.”
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Added:
 
"The ‘news’-media might as well be owned directly by the weapons-makers."
 
9/29/18, UK and US Now Overtly Honor Al Qaeda, Strategic Culture, Eric Zuesse

“The United Kingdom is resettling Al Qaeda’s Syrian medical unit, called the “White Helmets,” as “refugees” in UK. The White Helmets organization is funded by UK’s MI6 and America’s CIA, and is headed by Raed Saleh, who was prohibited from visiting the US because he’s a terrorist. These jihadists won’t just have UK honors (and they already have: a Hollywood Oscar-winning ‘documentary’ full of lies about how ‘heroic’ the White Helmets are), but, presumably, they’ll also obtain UK citizenship.

“The Syria White Helmets Exposed as US UK Agents” is a 4-minute video about them. It’s an entirely accurate representation regarding their personnel and funding-sources. 

It even shows Al Qaeda in Syria executing a civilian; and, then, White Helmets — this ‘humanitarian organization’ — collecting his corpse just seconds later, as part of their ‘heroic’ work, for the US-and-allied invaders of Syria. The invading nations use Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch to train and lead ‘our’ boots-on-the-ground fighters to overthrow Syria’s secular, non-sectarian, Government, which is headed by the secular Shiite Bashar al-Assad. These US-Saudi-Israeli-allied proxy fundamentalist-Sunni-jihadist boots-on-the-ground do the actual dirty-work of killing people for their sponsoring aristocracies. In this particular instance the executioners are al-Nusra itself, which is Syria’s Al Qaeda branch, and in that video they have eliminated yet another person that the US and UK aristocracies want to be eliminated. The great independent investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley has written numerous articles (such as this) providing detailed documentation of how US and UK billionaires have funded the propaganda selling throughout the world the campaign to overthrow Syria’s Government. Though the invading countries call this a ‘civil war’ in Syria, it’s actually a war that wouldn’t even exist but for the work, since 2009, of CIA and MI6 and those others from Western ‘democracies’, which are making suckers of their own nations’ citizens — Americans, British, and citizens of the other invading countries — via their lying ‘news’-media, none of which will publish the truths that this 4-minute video is showing. So, the aristocrats’ publics are kept ignorant of such reality.

US State Department document dated 22 October 2010 — prior to the “Arab Spring” — and sent to all US Embassies in the Arab world, funneled funds to the Muslim Brotherhood and other “moderate Islamists” who sought regime-change, instead of “stability” there.

On 17 April 2011 (which was before Jeff Bezos owned) the Washington Post headlined with shocking honesty “US secretly backed Syrian opposition groups, cables released by WikiLeaks show, and reported on the “Movement for Justice and Development [MJD], a London-based network of Syrian exiles. Classified US diplomatic cables show that the State Department has funneled as much as $6 million to the group since 2006 to operate the satellite channel and finance other activities inside Syria.” The cables had just been published by Wikileaks. Furthermore, “the cables indicate money was set aside at least through September 2010.” Obama had not cut off George W. Bush’s anti-Syrian aggression. There was no doubt that MJD was a regime-change-in-Syria organization: “The group, which is banned in Syria, openly advocates for Assad’s removal. US cables describe its leaders as ‘liberal, moderate Islamists’ who are former members of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Then, on 21 November 2011, Sibel Edmonds at her Boiling Frogs Post bannered “BFP Exclusive: Syria- Secret US-NATO Training & Support Camp to Oust Current Syrian President” and she reported that,

The joint US-NATO secret training camp in the US air force base in Incirlik, Turkey, began operations in April-May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria. Since then, in addition to Col. Riad al-Assad [no relation to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad], several other high-ranking Syrian military and intelligence officials have been added to operations’ headquarters in the US base. Weekly weapons smuggling operations have been carried out with full NATO-US participation since last May. The HQ also includes an information warfare division where US-NATO crafted communications are directed to dissidents in Syria via the core group of Syrian military and Intelligence defectors.

One Wikileaked document from the private-CIA firm Stratfor on 7 December 2011 reported the agent’s extensive discussions with the Pentagon and allied foreign militaries, and said that Special Operations Forces “teams (presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground [in Syria] focused on recce missions and training opposition forces. One Air Force intel guy (US) said very carefully that there isn’t much of a Free Syrian Army to train right now anyway.” (In other words, finding non-jihadists to take down Assad was proving to be far more difficult than had been anticipated.) Creating a Syrian civil war was then just a hope, and, “the idea ‘hypothetically’ is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within.” But that hoped-for sectarian split-up of Syria likewise failed to materialize. Syria’s Government was too widely supported by the population. Consequently, US President Barack Obama made one other attempt to use the Muslim Brotherhood to get the ‘rebellion’ going. But this effort also failed. So, by the time of December 2012, Obama finally turned to al-Nusra. Here’s how that happened:

On 10 December 2012, the Telegraph bannered “Syrian rebels defy US and pledge allegiance to jihadi group” and reported that, “Rebel groups across Syria are defying the United States by pledging their allegiance to a group that Washington will designate today a terrorist organization for its alleged links to al-Qaeda. A total of 29 opposition groups, including fighting ‘brigades’ and civilian committees,have signed a petition calling for mass demonstrations in support of Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist group which the White House believes is an offshoot of al-Qaeda.” 

As a direct consequence of that decision by the ‘moderate rebels’ whom the US was backing, Obama committed his Administration to use Al Qaeda in Syria, al-Nusra, to train and lead the ‘moderate rebels’ (all jihadists other than ISIS), America’s proxy-fighters to bring down Syria’s Government. Obama continued that policy to the very end of his Presidency.

His goal was to replace Assad with a dictator who would be controlled by the Saud family (who own Saudi Arabia), which family the CIA has been trying, ever since 1949, to place in control over Syria. Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, continues this policy.

What is more despicable than this treachery, from our own governments, in our own era? Countries are being invaded by ours; these invaded countries haven’t invaded nor even threatened ours, but nonetheless we accept these invasions by ‘our’ governments and pay taxes to make these murderous invasions possible. Such aggressor-governments as ours do not actually represent us, but we tolerate them, decade after decade, as they slaughter people abroad, and blow up the US federal debt to pay for the aristocracy’s voracious and vicious operation of global conquest, which they call ‘humanitarian’, though they know it’s the opposite.

These governments represent only their respective aristocracies, the controlling owners of their international corporations. Like every aristocracy, each aristocracy portrays, as being ‘the nation’s enemy’, not itself (that aristocracy), but whatever foreign governments the given aristocracy aims to conquer. Each invading country’s ‘news’-media play differing segments of their own domestic population — Blacks, Whites, men, women, heterosexuals, homosexuals, etc. — against each other, so that none will blame the actually tiny number of aristocrats, who, behind the scenes, control that vile government and produce the problems (such as the bombings and jihadists that have produced the refugee-crisis in Europe) and the enormous ongoing injustices throughout the world.

The US and UK governments, and their Saudi and Israeli and other allies, don’t care about the welfare of their respective publics — the public who pay the taxes to support the given aristocracy’s invasions and military occupations and also its coups (that one having cost US taxpayers at least $5 billion and destroyed the target-country).

Even after lying (or “deceiving”) their publics into invading and occupying Iraq in 2003 on the basis of lies, and then repeating this in Libya in 2011 on the basis of lies, and then repeating it yet again now in Yemen on the basis of lies, the public seemingly don’t learn, they don’t repudiate all politicians and ‘news’-persons who have assisted this with their lies. After doing this a certain number of times, the publics themselves increasingly share in their respective aristocracy’s and its ‘news’-media’s evil. The public’s role becomes then no longer mere negligence, but increasingly also complicity, in what their aristocracy (and its lying ‘news’-media) is doing to the world. All that the aristocracy have to do is to fool their respective public by means of their ‘news’-media — the media these aristocrats own and control, just as they own and control the government itself

And thus those lies produce the public’s complicity, by making the public the aristocracy’s mental slaves working to support that aristocracy’s foreign ventures, which slaughter and displace millions of people and destroy their countries, by faked ‘civil wars’ etc. Our governments are so ‘humanitarian’, spreading ‘democracy’ — lies.

On September 24th, the UK Government headlined “News Story: White Helmets resettlement”, and reported: “The UK will support White Helmets volunteers and their families, who were evacuated from Syria, under the government’s Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme.” These jihadist mercenaries are now ‘vulnerable persons’, no longer merely ‘heroes’. The Government can even claim this, in public. They’re then implying that their public are total fools. Will British citizens actually believe that these Al Qaeda affiliates are suitable to become their fellow-citizens?

How much longer will the populations in the invading countries continue to tolerate their aristocratic masters? Have things not gotten to the point where it is clear what those masters are doing? How much longer will their hypocrisy continue to succeed? Al Qaeda jihadists are now being invited, as ‘heroes’, to become UK citizens. Is that not enough? More than enough? Way too much?

The problem isn’t those Al Qaeda affiliates. It is the UK Government that’s doing this traitorous action. The Deep State, the international aristocracy, runs not only the US but the UK and many other governments, just like the CIA secretly protected and brought to America leading Nazis after World War II. This is typical of the lying and psychopathy that’s done to serve billionaires....The White Helmets is therefore just another example of such lying and psychopathy, more of The West’s make-pretend-kindly prettified nazism, cosmetifying an actually horrific monster.

NOTE: On September 25th, UK’s new anti-Tony-Blair (i.e., anti Deep-State) Labour Party voted to ban arms-sales to the US-UK-Saud ally Israel, because of Israel’s barbaric treatment of Palestinians; so, one cannot yet say that all political options short of an actual revolution have quite been exhausted. Though UK’s aristocracy hates this post-Blair Labour Party, that Party does have a chance to win power, but only if the public recognize that their own nation’s aristocracy itself is their nation’s enemyIn Israel, America’s Associated Press reported this Labour Party vote as if that vote were an anti-Semitic act, aimed against Jews, instead of an act of basic decency aimed against Israel’s Government. How much of a fool does one have to be to trust such ‘news’-media? The ‘news’-media might as well be owned directly by the weapons-makers as be owned by those firms’ owners who own also the ‘news’-media that control the voters. It’s the same Deep State that rules in many countries. It thrives on wars, on lies, and on oppression, both at home, and abroad. It needs to be replaced by democracy (not the current fake variety), in all countries it now rules.”



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Saturday, September 29, 2018

Trump did have strings attached after all, the worst imaginable for civilized human beings: George Soros, who has caused more human suffering than anyone alive today

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Trump’s personality and desire to be liked by people "who will never accept him are preventing his supporters from realizing their potential and achieving anything that will have a lasting effect....The ‘Make America Great Again’ movement must learn to accomplish their goals in spite of their beloved leader and his flaws.”..."In 2004, Soros lent Trump a cool $160 million to help with the construction of Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune reported."

9/28/18, “Trump Isn’t Going To Save The United States,” William Craddick, Disobedient Media

Lack Of Resolve To Go After Old Acquaintances”

“Trump has done nothing to go after individuals undermining his administration, though in some cases he has publicly espoused a supposed desire to take strong action. A blatant example of this are the Clintons, who Trump and his family have a historied friendship with. Trump’s long time friend Bill Clinton encouraged Trump to run for President in 2015. Ivanka Trump, who has been accused of leaking administration secrets in the past, was also an old pal of Chelsea Clinton’s. The hard truth is that despite Trump’s bluster about Hillary Clinton and the crimes she is claimed to have committed nothing will ever happen to her.

Billionaire philanthropist and political activist George Soros is one of Trump’s biggest opponents, dumping millions into various organizations of the Resistance movement. He has been accused of attempting to foster a color revolution to destabilize the United States. [“Yes! Yes! Yes!”] But Trump has not mentioned Soros’ name once since the 2016 Presidential debates. He has never mentioned Soros on Twitter.

Indeed, the President did business with Soros, who leant the real estate mogul capital for the construction of his tower in Chicago. When Trump became active in the Tea Party movement, he openly defended Soros from criticism. Upon assuming the Presidency, he brought on Steve Mnuchin, who worked for Soros-backed SFM Capital Management and Soros Fund Management LLC, as Secretary of the Treasury….

Trump’s tenure has also revealed the presence of a number of flaws. He overemphasizes his economic recovery, ignores attacks on his supporters in the real and digital world, is apparently unaware that his own officials are likely waiting till the end of his administration to pursue negative foreign policy objectives, and seems unwilling to go after his former friends, business colleagues and social acquaintances. All of these factors, combined with his constant desire to be well liked by even his enemies are beginning to create the very real risk of undermining goals of the movement that elected him….

Overemphasis On Economy While Supporters Marginalized 

While the rapid growth of American economy and a rising stock market have created wealth and opportunity, it has come at the cost of the attention President Trump gives to his constituents. 

While Trump’s Twitter feed is a ticker tape of Fox News headlines and recent stats about the booming economy, he very rarely, if ever tweets about violence directed towards his supporters. 

Attacks or threats of attacks on members of Trump’s movement have occurred as recently as September 11th, 2018 without comment from the President. Social media giants such as Facebook and Google directly allow foreign interests such as China to take a leading role in censoring communications of any right wingers, populists or anti-war proponents. This collaboration has dire implications for US security. Trump has yet to take action against groups targeting his base outside of strong words or probes that have not yielded real solutions to these problems.

Discriminatory focus on particular topics isn’t an anomaly for Trump. He also criticizes certain criminal, terrorist or extremist groups such as ISIS or MS-13, yet never mentions others like Antifa or Mexican cartels, giving these groups more space to operate due to decreased scrutiny. A walking contradiction, Trump will intervene in a foreign country over his concern for injured children yet not take similar forceful action against rampant crime and trafficking in Sanctuary Cities such as Chicago.

The tendency to ignore the pain of his people to spotlight the economy makes for a hollow victory. Trump himself frequently mentions that his economic recovery is fragile and could be immediately reversed by his predecessor. There is, however, an even more dangerous element likely not being considered by either Trump or his base:

Dramatic economic recovery can be a precursor to the outbreak of war.

Observers seeking to guess at which countries America might engage with militarily need only look where US sanctions are being applied – locations such as Iran, Syria, Turkey, China, Venezuela, Russia, or the European Union where anti-American sentiment has been on the rise. Sanctions provide valuable intelligence on the ability and resolve of a targeted country to respond militarily and economically in a conflict.

It’s doubtful that Trump is actively seeking to start foreign wars with these countries himself. A booming economy, sanctions and a newly robust military are all useful tools to employ in immediate negotiations with foreign states. But many groups delayed by Trump’s election will still proceed with their goals when he leaves the Oval Office. Trump’s tenure will only be another two to six years. The various factions who make up the bureaucratic class play the long con and will continue to exist after his administration has run its course.

The DNC has openly admitted that they can rig their primary process if they please. After Trump stormed the GOP in 2016, there is little doubt that they too will take steps to ensure that such an upset could never happen again. Anti-war supporters expecting that Trump’s successor to be a non-interventionist along the lines of Rand Paul are fooling themselves. The President after Trump will likely be open to entanglement in war. They will care even less about Trump’s base despite the fact that the “Resistance” openly state their long term goals of wiping out the opposition. Trump’s Presidency is merely delaying the inevitable….

Will The Right Solve It’s Own Problems?

None of this is put forward to suggest that Trump doesn’t care about the United States, or doesn’t love his country. But it does show that for all the appeal to his supporters, Trump is a flawed individual. His Presidency was heralded as a new era of reform. 

A more realistic outlook began to set in when Trump made the hypocritical decision to bomb Syria in the first few months of his Presidency despite decrying such a move previously.

Trump is the dam holding back the floodwaters of total chaos that are bubbling over in the United States. When he is gone, no one with any meaningful power will lift a finger to stop the establishment’s inevitable purge of conservative, nationalistic and patriotic Americans. The great gulf that has begun to divide the country will soon be beyond repair. This administration is likely the United States’ last chance to fix its systemic issues before real calamity sets in.

Many don’t wish to acknowledge this. They don’t want to accept the very real danger represented by corrupt and incompetent establishment figures still active in the administration,and their stagnation in the face of a resurgent far Left. There is more interest in maintaining the excitement of a nonstop pep rally than acting to secure the country.
  
Trump’s personality and desire to be liked by demographics who will never accept him are preventing his supporters from realizing their potential and achieving anything that will have a lasting effect.

For a true return to an American golden age, the ‘Make America Great Again’ movement must learn to accomplish their goals in spite of their beloved leader and his flaws.”

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Added: Tragically for all Americans, Donald Trump has a soft spot for genocidal open borders profiteer George Soros: 

8/16/2016,Donald Trump took Liberal Icon George Soros’ Money,” Daily Beast, Betsy Woodruff

“Over the years, the two billionaires have had tabloid-friendly professional dealings, teaming up to build one of North America’s most recognizable skyscrapers—and shared billing on a lawsuit over the sale of the most expensive building in New York City. 

The two billionaires even palled around one Christmas Eve. None of this means Donald Trump is a covert George Soros puppet. But it’s already given some conservatives pause.


“It is such a huge project, and the prices he said he was getting were so outside the norm,” Robert Glickman, then the head of Chicago’s Corus Bank, told the Tribune. “It was reasonable to say, ‘Is this real?’”

Trump crowed about pre-sales of condos in the building.

“It’s a great tribute to Chicago, to the location and to a great design,” he said, according to the paper. “And, I guess, to Trump, when you think of it.”

The mogul was also very pleased about raising the funds to build the skyscraper.

“It’s a very expensive building to build because of the quality we are putting into it,” the Tribune reported him saying. “So people of course would say, ‘Gee, that’s a lot of money to raise.’”


It’s not a lot of money to raise when Soros has your back.
According to Gizmodo, the tower is the Western Hemisphere’s second-tallest residence….

In the years since then, Trump has shown little interest in bashing his old lender.

A search of tweets from the mogul mentioning Soros turns up zero results. And Trump even once encouraged conservatives to lay off the billionaire.



Glenn Beck highlighted the exchange on his radio show and criticized Trump for his glibness.

Trump even nabbed a Team Soros alum for his finance team. His national finance chairman, Steven Mnuchin, has worked for the Soros-backed SFM Capital Management and for Soros Fund Management LLC, as the Center for Public Integrity noted in a report.

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Defending this country is the only thing US Defense Dept. doesn’t do. US officially became ‘world’s policeman’ via Truman Doctrine, gave US excuse to intervene globally. Neocons needed replacement for Cold War, so came up with taxpayer funded endless global war on terror and for ‘Democracy.’ If you’re a US ‘ally,’ you get freebies-Daily Bell, Wendy McElroy, 3/19/2015

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Commenter: In 1947 we also went from having a War Department to a Defense Department when defending this country is the only thing it does not do.quick draw mcgraw

3/19/2015, How America became the World’s Policeman, The Daily Bell, Wendy McElroy, Editorial

“Conclusion”

“The Truman Doctrine was the official beginning of an aggressive ‘peacetime’ intervention during which America became the world’s policeman. ‘Friendly’ nations were often bought off by supporting cooperative but repressive leaders. 

Unfriendly ones often experienced economic sanctions and the arming of their domestic opponents.

The historian Charles Beard once commented that the best description of the foreign policy of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman is “perpetual war for perpetual peace,” which the historian Harry Elmer Barnes later used to title a book. And, yet, the Cold War was not perpetual. Arguably, it ended when the Soviet Union did. What next?

Dan Sanchez observed at the antiwar.com site (Oct. 23, 2014), “In 1990, Murray Rothbard clearly identified the earliest signs of the ultimately successful decade-long push by the neocons [the now hawkish right] to replace their dearly missed Cold War with a global, imperialist, and permanent War on Islamic fundamentalism and for ‘Democracy’.” Rothbard explained,

[I]f the Cold War died in the Communist collapse of 1989, what can…justify the policy of massive intervention by the U.S. everywhere on the globe? In short, what cloak can the Establishment now find to mask and vindicate the continuance of U.S. imperialism? With their perks and their power at stake, the Court apologists for imperialism have been quick to offer excuses and alternatives …

The new face of America’s perpetual war has some cosmetic changes. The enemy is terrorism, not communism. The goal is liberation and democracy, not containment. The battleground is arid soil, not Asian jungle. The soldiers are not drafted but volunteers or mercenaries.

But it all seems oddly the same because the fundamentals are identical. Through unending war, America has utterly deserted any commitment to neutrality abroad. And the Old Right was correct; the domestic government has become a behemoth and power is centralized in the hands of the executive.

The elimination of the neutrality rights of nations is now so complete that neutrality can be challenged even when no declaration or act of war has occurred. Merely viewing a nation as a potential ally or enemy now warrants intervention, up to and including a military presence.

In 1821, John Quincy Adams declared that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” America is now abroad. And she is the monster.”


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43% of all Likely Voters want The Wall, up 6 points from July 2017. 70% of Likely Republican Voters want The Wall. Of course, they're never going to get it-Rasmussen poll, 9/23-24, 2018…(To entire political class, US has already merged with Mexico and Central America)

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Sept. 23-24, 2018: “Should the United States build a wall along the Mexican border to help stop illegal immigration?”

Yes:

Republicans 70%
Independents 40%

9/27/18, “GOP Voters Want ‘The Wall’; GOP Congress Doesn’t,” Rasmussen Reports

“The Republican-led Congress has produced yet another big spending bill that fails to fund President Trump’s border wall even though a sizable majority of GOP voters supports the project.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 43% of all Likely U.S. Voters now think the United States should build a wall along the Mexican border to help stop illegal immigration, up from just 37% in July of last year. More than half (51%) still oppose the wall, but that’s down from 56% in the previous survey. (To see survey question wording, click here….

The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on September 23-24, 2018 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.”….
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Added: From Rasmussen poll above, subscription:

“Should the United States build a wall along the Mexican border to help stop illegal immigration?”
 
Yes:

Republicans 70%
Independents 40%
Democrats 19%
Conservatives 72%

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Of Likely Voters who want The Wall:

92% Strongly Approve of Trump performance
63% Somewhat Approve of Trump performance
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Comment: Some Rasmussen data is free, some is subscription. I’m a platinum subscriber. Unfortunately, it’s now clear that Candidate Trump never intended to build The Wall. As soon as he was elected, he made The Wall contingent on congressional approval. If Candidate Trump had said The Wall was contingent on congressional approval, it would’ve ended The Wall as a campaign issue–because we all know congress would never approve it. Many Americans desperately want The Wall and will never get it because both political parties want open borders. All the money in the world is behind open borders. Not a penny is behind allowing Americans to have their own country and culture.
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Added: Rasmussen Poll question asked of all Likely Voters, 9/23-24:

“2* How likely is that illegal immigration will be greatly reduced during Donald Trump’s presidency?”

57% Very likely or somewhat likely
40% Not very likely or not at all likely
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“30% Very likely  
27% Somewhat likely  
24% Not very likely  
16% Not at all likely
4% Not sure”




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Friday, September 28, 2018

Obama created fake twitter-like network including fake ads to incite Cuban ‘smart mobs’ to rise up and overthrow Cuban government, 2009-2012. He used US tax dollars, Cayman Islands bank, illegal operations in Spain, servers in Spain and Ireland-AP, 4/3/2014…(Thanks to Obama, in 2017 US diplomats in Cuba reported brain damaging audio attacks)

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The US [Obama administration] created an entire fake social network for Cubans that aimed to stir unrest and overthrow the Cuban government, according to the [AP story] published in the Guardian (4/3/14).”
 
Obama used a Cayman Islands bank account to hide operations, front companies included an illegal one in Spain. Obama’s attempted coup guaranteed that Cuba would harm innocent Americans in return. American diplomats dumb enough to go to Cuba after Obama’s attacks should’ve expected brain damaging audio attacks among other things. Of note, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is mentioned in this article as having met with multiple persons in Hillary Clinton State Dept. regarding his possible interest in becoming involved with the US online operation to undermine the Cuban government. Article says Dorsey had no comment.

4/3/2014, US secretly created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest and undermine government," AP in Washington via UK Guardian 

“USAid started ZunZuneo, a social network built on texts, in hope it could be used to organize ‘smart mobs’ to trigger Cuban spring.”

In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a US 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 unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company’s ties to the US government.

McSpedon didn’t work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the US Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in US 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 US 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.”

At its peak, the project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the US government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes.

“There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,” according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord, one of the project’s contractors. “This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the Mission.”

The program’s legality is unclear: US law requires that any
covert action by a federal agency must have a presidential authorization.

Officials at USAid would not say who had approved the program or whether the White House was aware of it. McSpedon, the most senior official named in the documents obtained by the AP, is a mid-level manager who declined to comment.

USAid spokesman Matt Herrick said the agency is proud of its Cuba programs and noted that congressional investigators reviewed them last year [2013] and found them to be consistent with US law.

“USAid is a development agency, not an intelligence agency, and we work all over the world to help people exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms, and give them access to tools to improve their lives and connect with the outside world,” he said.

“In the implementation,” he added, “has the government taken steps to be discreet in non-permissive environments? Of course. That’s how you protect the practitioners and the public. In hostile environments, we often take steps to protect the partners we’re working with on the ground. This is not unique to Cuba.”

But the ZunZuneo program muddies those claims, a sensitive issue for its mission to promote democracy and deliver aid to the world’s poor and vulnerable--which requires the trust of foreign governments.

“On the face of it there are several aspects about this that are troubling,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and chairman of the appropriations committee’s State Department and foreign operations subcommittee.

“There is the risk to young, unsuspecting Cuban cellphone users who had no idea this was a US government-funded activity. There is the clandestine nature of the program that was not disclosed to the appropriations subcommittee with oversight responsibility. And there is the disturbing fact that it apparently activated shortly after Alan Gross, a USAid subcontractor who was sent to Cuba to help provide citizens access to the Internet, was arrested.”

The Associated Press obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents about the project’s development. The AP independently verified the project’s scope and details in the documents — such as federal contract numbers and names of job candidates — through publicly available databases, government sources and interviews with those directly involved in ZunZuneo.

Taken together, they tell the story of how agents of the US government, working in deep secrecy, became tech entrepreneurs — in Cuba. And it all began with a half a million cellphone numbers obtained from a communist government.

ZunZuneo would seem to be a throwback from the cold war, and the decades-long struggle between the United States and Cuba. It came at a time when the historically sour relationship between the countries had improved, at least marginally, and Cuba had made tentative steps toward a more market-based economy.

It is unclear whether the plan got its start with USAid or Creative Associates International, a Washington for-profit company that has earned hundreds of millions of dollars in US contracts. But a “key contact” at Cubacel, the state-owned cellphone provider, slipped the phone numbers to a Cuban engineer living in Spain. The engineer provided the numbers to USAid and Creative Associates “free of charge,” documents show.

In mid-2009, Noy Villalobos, a manager with Creative Associates who had worked with USAid in the 1990s on a program to eradicate drug crops, started an IM chat with her little brother in Nicaragua, according to a Creative Associates email that captured the conversation. Mario Bernheim, in his mid-20s, was an up-and-coming techie who had made a name for himself as a computer whiz.

“This is very confidential of course,” Villalobos cautioned her brother. But what could you do if you had all the cellphone numbers of a particular country? Could you send bulk text messages without the government knowing?

Can you encrypt it or something?” she texted.

She was looking for a direct line to regular Cubans through text messaging. Most had precious little access to news from the outside world. The government viewed the internet as an Achilles’ heel and controlled it accordingly. A communications minister had even referred to it as a “wild colt” that “should be tamed.”

Yet in the years since Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother Raul, Cuba had sought to jumpstart the long stagnant economy. Raul Castro began encouraging cellphone use, and hundreds of thousands of people were suddenly using mobile phones for the first time, though smartphones with access to the Internet remained restricted.

Cubans could text message, though at a high cost in a country where the average wage was a mere $20 a month.

Bernheim told his sister that he could figure out a way to send instant texts to hundreds of thousands of Cubans— for cheap. It could not be encrypted though, because that would be too complicated. They wouldn’t be able to hide the messages from the Cuban government, which owned Cubacel.

But they could disguise who was sending the texts by constantly switching the countries the messages came from.

“We could rotate it from different countries?” Villalobos asked. 

“Say one message from Nica, another from Spain, another from Mexico”?

Bernheim could do that. “But I would need mirrors set up around the world, mirrors, meaning the same computer, running with the same platform, with the same phone.”

“No hay problema,” he signed off. No problem.
……
After the chat, Creative hired Bernheim as a subcontractor, reporting to his sister. (Villalobos and Bernheim would later confirm their involvement with the ZunZuneo project to AP, but decline further comment.) Bernheim, in turn, signed up the Cuban engineer who had gotten the phone list. The team figured out how to message the masses without detection, but their ambitions were bigger.

Creative Associates envisioned using the list to create a social networking system that would be called “Proyecto ZZ,” or “Project ZZ.” The service would start cautiously and be marketed chiefly to young Cubans, who USAid saw as the most open to political change.

“We should gradually increase the risk,” USAid proposed in a document. It advocated using “smart mobs” only in “critical/opportunistic situations and not at the detriment of our core platform-based network.”

USAid’s team of contractors and subcontractors built a companion website to its text service so Cubans could subscribe, give feedback and send their own text messages for free. They talked about how to make the website look like a real business. “Mock ad banners will give it the appearance of a commercial enterprise,” a proposal suggested.

In multiple documents, USAid staff pointed out that text messaging had mobilized smart mobs and political uprisings in Moldova and the Philippines, among others. In Iran, the USAid noted social media’s role following the disputed election of then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009 — and saw it as an important foreign policy tool.

USAid documents say their strategic objective in Cuba was to “push it out of a stalemate through tactical and temporary initiatives, and get the transition process going again towards democratic change.“ Democratic change in authoritarian Cuba meant breaking the Castros’ grip on power.

USAid divided Cuban society into five segments depending on loyalty to the government. On one side sat the “democratic movement,” called “still (largely) irrelevant,” and at the other end were the “hard-core system supporters,” dubbed “Talibanes” in a derogatory comparison to Afghan and Pakistani extremists.

A key question was how to move more people toward the democratic activist camp without detection. Bernheim assured the team that wouldn’t be a problem.

“The Cuban government, like other regimes committed to information control, currently lacks the capacity to effectively monitor and control such a service,” Bernheim wrote in a proposal for USAid marked “Sensitive Information.”

ZunZuneo would use the list of phone numbers to break Cuba’s internet embargo and not only deliver information to Cubans but also let them interact with each other in a way the government could not control. Eventually it would build a system that would let Cubans send messages anonymously among themselves.

At a strategy meeting, the company discussed building “user volume as a cover … for organization,” according to meeting notes. It also suggested that the “Landscape needs to be large enough to hide full opposition members who may sign up for service.”

In a play on the telecommunication minister’s quote,the team dubbed their network the “untamed colt.”

At first, the ZunZuneo team operated out of Central America. Bernheim, the techie brother, worked from Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, while McSpedon supervised Creative’s work on ZunZuneo from an office in San Jose, Costa Rica, though separate from the US embassy. It was an unusual arrangement that raised eyebrows in Washington, according to US officials.

McSpedon worked for USAid’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), a division that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union to promote US interests in quickly changing political environments—without the usual red tape.

In 2009, a report by congressional researchers warned that OTI’s work “often lends itself to political entanglements that may have diplomatic implications.” Staffers on oversight committees complained that USAid was running secret programs and would not provide details.

“We were told we couldn’t even be told in broad terms what was happening because ‘people will die,'” [the usual excuse when running US taxpayer funded illegal operations] said Fulton Armstrong, who worked for the Senate Foreign Relations committee. Before that, he was the US intelligence community’s most senior analyst on Latin America, advising the Clinton White House.

The money that Creative Associates spent on ZunZuneo was publicly earmarked for an unspecified project in Pakistan, government data show. But there is no indication of where the funds were actually spent.

Tensions with Congress spiked just as the ZunZuneo project was gearing up in December 2009, when another USAid program ended in the arrest of the US contractor, Alan Gross. Gross had traveled repeatedly to Cuba on a secret mission to expand Internet access using sensitive technology typically available only to governments, a mission first revealed in February 2012 by AP.

At some point, Armstrong says, the foreign relations committee became aware of OTI’s secret operations in Costa Rica. US government officials acknowledged them privately to Armstrong, but USAid refused to provide operational details.

At an event in Washington, Armstrong says he confronted McSpedon, asking him if he was aware that by operating secret programs from a third country, it might appear like he worked for an intelligence agency.

McSpedon, through USAid, said the story is not true. He declined to comment otherwise.
___
On September 20, 2009, thousands of Cubans gathered at Revolution Plaza in Havana for Colombian rocker Juanes’ “Peace without Borders” concert. It was the largest public gathering in Cuba since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1998. Under the watchful gaze of a giant sculpture of revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Miami-based Juanes promised music aimed at “turning hate into love.”

But for the ZunZuneo team, the concert was a perfect opportunity to test the political power of their budding social network. In the weeks before, Bernheim’s firm, using the phone list, sent out a half a million text messages in what it called “blasts,” to test what the Cuban government would do.

The team hired Alen Lauzan Falcon, a Havana-born satirical artist based in Chile, to write Cuban-style messages. Some were mildly political and comical, others more pointed. One asked respondents whether they thought two popular local music acts out of favor with the government should join the stage with Juanes.  

Some 100,000 people responded — not realizing the poll was used to gather critical intelligence.

Paula Cambronero, a researcher for Mobile Accord, began building a vast database about the Cuban subscribers, including gender, age, “receptiveness” and “political tendencies. USAid believed the demographics on dissent could help it target its other Cuba programs and “maximize our possibilities to extend our reach.”

Cambronero concluded that the team had to be careful. “Messages with a humorous connotation should not contain a strong political tendency, so as not to create animosity in the recipients,” she wrote in a report.

Falcon, in an interview, said he was never told that he was composing messages for a US government program, but he had no regrets about his involvement.

“They didn’t tell me anything, and if they had, I would have done it anyway,” he said. “In Cuba they don’t have freedom. While a government forces me to pay in order to visit my country, makes me ask permission, and limits my communications, I will be against it, whether it’s Fidel Castro, (Cuban exile leader) Jorge Mas Canosa or Gloria Estefan,” the Cuban American singer.

Carlos Sanchez Almeida, a lawyer specializing in European data protection law, said it appeared that the US program violated Spanish privacy laws because the ZunZuneo team had illegally gathered personal data from the phone list and sent unsolicited emails using a Spanish platform. “The illegal release of information is a crime, and using information to create a list of people by political affiliation is totally prohibited by Spanish law,” Almeida said. It would violate a US-European data protection agreement, he said.

USAid saw evidence from server records that Havana had tried to trace the texts, to break into ZunZuneo’s servers, and had occasionally blocked messages. But USAid called the response “timid” and concluded that ZunZuneo would be viable — if its origins stayed secret.

Even though Cuba has one of the most sophisticated counter-intelligence operations in the world, the ZunZuneo team thought that as long as the message service looked benign, Cubacel would leave it alone.

Once the network had critical mass, Creative and USAid documents argued, it would be harder for the Cuban government to shut it down, both because of popular demand and because Cubacel would be addicted to the revenues from the text messages.

In February 2010, the company introduced Cubans to ZunZuneo and began marketing. Within six months, it had almost 25,000 subscribers, growing faster and drawing more attention than the USAid team could control.
___
Saimi Reyes Carmona was a journalism student at the University of Havana when she stumbled onto ZunZuneo. She was intrigued by the service’s novelty, and the price. The advertisement said “free messages” so she signed up using her nickname, Saimita.

At first, ZunZuneo was a very tiny platform, Reyes said during a recent interview in Havana, but one day she went to its website and saw its services had expanded.

“I began sending one message every day,” she said, the maximum allowed at the start. “I didn’t have practically any followers.” She was thrilled every time she got a new one.

And then ZunZuneo exploded in popularity.

“The whole world wanted in, and in a question of months I had 2,000 followers who I have no idea who they are, nor where they came from.”

She let her followers know the day of her birthday, and was surprised when she got some 15 personal messages. “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” she told her boyfriend, Ernesto Guerra Valdes, also a journalism student.

Before long, Reyes learned she had the second highest number of followers on the island, after a user called UCI, which the students figured was Havana’s University of Computer Sciences. Her boyfriend had 1,000. The two were amazed at the reach it gave them.

“It was such a marvelous thing,” Guerra said. “So noble.” He and Reyes tried to figure out who was behind ZunZuneo, since the technology to run it had to be expensive, but they found nothing. They were grateful though.

“We always found it strange, that generosity and kindness,” he said. ZunZuneo was “the fairy godmother of cellphones.”
___
By early 2010, Creative decided that ZunZuneo was so popular Bernheim’s company wasn’t sophisticated enough to build, in effect, “a scaled down version of Twitter.”

It turned to another young techie, James Eberhard, CEO of Denver-based Mobile Accord Inc. Eberhard had pioneered the use of text messaging for donations during disasters and had raised tens of millions of dollars after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Eberhard earned millions in his mid-20s when he sold a company that developed cellphone ring tones and games. His company’s website describes him as “a visionary within the global mobile community.”

In July [2010], he flew to Barcelona to join McSpedon, Bernheim, and others to work out what they called a “below the radar strategy.”

“If it is discovered that the platform is, or ever was, backed by the United States government, not only do we risk the channel being shut down by Cubacel, but we risk the credibility of the platform as a source of reliable information, education, and empowerment in the eyes of the Cuban people,” Mobile Accord noted in a memo.

To cover their tracks, they decided
to have a company based in the United Kingdom
set up a corporation in Spain
to run ZunZuneo.

A separate company called MovilChat was created in the Cayman Islands, a well-known offshore tax haven, with an account at the island’s Bank of NT Butterfield and Son Ltd. to pay the bills.

A memo of the meeting in Barcelona says that the front companies would distance ZunZuneo from any US ownership 

so that
the “money trail will not trace back to America.”

But it wasn’t just the money they were worried about. They had to hide the origins of the texts, according to documents and interviews with team members.

Brad Blanken, the former chief operating officer of Mobile Accord, left the project early on, but noted that there were two main criteria for success.

“The biggest challenge with creating something like this is getting the phone numbers,” Blanken said. “And then the ability to spoof the network.”

The team of contractors set up servers in Spain and Ireland to process texts, contracting an independent Spanish company called Lleida.net to send the text messages back to Cuba, while stripping off identifying data.

Mobile Accord also sought intelligence from engineers at the Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica, which organizers said would “have knowledge of Cubacel’s network.”

“Understanding the security and monitoring protocols of Cubacel will be an invaluable asset to avoid unnecessary detection by the carrier,” one Mobile Accord memo read.

Officials at USAid realized however, that they could not conceal their involvement forever — unless they left the stage. The predicament was summarized bluntly when Eberhard was in Washington for a strategy session in early February 2011, where his company noted the “inherent contradiction” of giving Cubans a platform for communications uninfluenced by their government that was in fact
financed by the US government
and influenced by its [US] agenda.

They turned to Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, to seek funding for the project. Documents show Dorsey met with Suzanne Hall, a State Department officer who worked on social media projects, and others. Dorsey declined to comment.

The State Department under then-Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton thought social media was an important tool in diplomacy.  

At a 2011 speech at George Washington University, [Mrs.] Clinton said the US helped people in “oppressive Internet environments get around filters.” In Tunisia, she said people used technology to “organize and share grievances, which, as we know, helped fuel a movement that led to revolutionary change.”

Ultimately, the solution was new management that could separate ZunZuneo from its US origins and raise enough revenue for it to go “independent,” even as it kept its long-term strategy to bring about “democratic change.”

Eberhard led the recruitment efforts, a sensitive operation because he intended to keep the management of the Spanish company in the dark.

“The ZZ management team will have no knowledge of the true origin of the operation; as far as they know, the platform was established by Mobile Accord,” the memo said. “There should be zero doubt in management’s mind and no insecurities or concerns about United States Government involvement.”

The memo went on to say that the CEO’s clean conscience would be “particularly critical when dealing with Cubacel.Sensitive to the high cost of text messages for average Cubans, ZunZuneo negotiated a bulk rate for texts at 4 cents a pop through a Spanish intermediary. Documents show there was hope that an earnest, clueless CEO might be able to persuade Cubacel to back the project.

Mobile Accord considered a dozen candidates from five countries to head the Spanish front company. One of them was Francoise de Valera, a CEO who was vacationing in Dubai when she was approached for an interview. She flew to Barcelona. At the luxury Mandarin Oriental Hotel, she met with Nim Patel, who at the time was Mobile Accord’s president. Eberhard had also flown in for the interviews. But she said she couldn’t get a straight answer about what they were looking for.

“They talked to me about instant messaging but nothing about Cuba, or the United States,” she told the AP in an interview from London.

“If I had been offered and accepted the role, I believe that sooner or later it would have become apparent to me that something wasn’t right,” she said.
___
By early 2011, Creative Associates grew exasperated with Mobile Accord’s failure to make ZunZuneo self-sustaining and independent of the US government. The operation had run into an unsolvable problem. USAid was paying tens of thousands of dollars in text messaging fees to Cuba’s communist telecommunications monopoly routed through a secret bank account and front companies. It was not a situation that it could either afford or justify--and if exposed it would be embarrassing, or worse.

In a searing evaluation, Creative Associates said Mobile Accord had ignored sustainability because “it has felt comfortable receiving USG financing to move the venture forward.”

Out of 60 points awarded for performance, Mobile Accord scored 34 points. Creative Associates complained that Mobile Accord’s understanding of the social mission of the project was weak, and gave it 3 out of 10 points for “commitment to our Program goals.”
Mobile Accord declined to comment on the program.

In increasingly impatient tones, Creative Associates pressed Mobile Accord to find new revenue that would pay the bills. Mobile Accord suggested selling targeted advertisements in Cuba, but even with projections of up to a million ZunZuneo subscribers, advertising in a state-run economy would amount to a pittance.

By March 2011, ZunZuneo had about 40,000 subscribers. To keep a lower profile, it abandoned previous hopes of reaching 200,000 and instead capped the number of subscribers at a lower number. It limited ZunZuneo’s text messages to less than one percent of the total in Cuba, so as to avoid the notice of Cuban authorities. 

Though one former ZunZuneo worker — who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about his work — said the Cubans were catching on and had tried to block the site.
___
Toward the middle of 2012, Cuban users began to complain that the service worked only sporadically. Then not at all.
ZunZuneo vanished as mysteriously as it appeared.

By June 2012, users who had access to Facebook and Twitter were wondering what had happened.

“Where can you pick up messages from ZunZuneo?” one woman asked on Facebook in November 2012. “Why aren’t I receiving them anymore?”

Users who went to ZunZuneo’s website were sent to a children’s website with a similar name.

Reyner Aguero, a 25-year-old blogger, said he and fellow students at Havana’s University of Computer Sciences tried to track it down. Someone had rerouted the website through DNS blocking, a censorship technique initially developed back in the 1990s.

 Intelligence officers later told the students that ZunZuneo was blacklisted, he said.

“ZunZuneo, like everything else they did not control, was a threat,” Aguero said. “Period.”

In incorrect Spanish, ZunZuneo posted a note on its Facebook page saying it was aware of problems accessing the website and that it was trying to resolve them.

"¡Que viva el ZunZuneo!” the message said. Long live ZunZuneo!

In February [2012], when Saimi Reyes, and her boyfriend, Ernesto Guerra, learned the origins of ZunZuneo, they were stunned.

“How was I supposed to realize that?” Guerra asked. “It’s not like there was a sign saying ‘Welcome to ZunZuneo, brought to you by USAid [US taxpayers].”

“Besides, there was nothing wrong. If I had started getting subversive messages or death threats or ‘Everyone into the streets,'” he laughed, “I would have said, ‘OK,’ there’s something fishy about this. But nothing like that happened.”

USAid says the program ended when the money ran out. The Cuban government declined to comment.

The former web domain is now a placeholder, for sale for $299.

The registration for MovilChat, the Cayman Islands front company, was set to expire on March 31.

In Cuba, nothing has come close to replacing it. Internet service still is restricted.

“The moment when ZunZuneo disappeared was like a vacuum,” Guerra said. “People texted my phone, ‘What is happening with ZunZuneo?’

In the end, we never learned what happened,” he said. “We never learned where it came from.”
…………………………….

Added: From Slate article: “America’s [Obama administration] bizarre and ill-advised plan to build a fake twitter to topple Castro:”

5/3/2014, Only built 4 Cuban tweets,” Slate.com, Joshua Keating

“USAID evidently thought it a good idea to help facilitate the creation of a barebones “Cuban Twitter,” which ran on cellphone text messaging to avoid Internet censors. It was thought that if the program caught on, it could help activists form “smart mobs” to protest the Cuban government…. 
 
This lack of transparency is what separates the project from projects like Voice of America, or Radio Martí, which everyone is aware are U.S. government stations, or other U.S.-supported efforts to help activists circumvent Internet censors.

There’s also the fact that the ZunZuneo team was apparently using the service to gather data on Cubans without their knowledge. For instance, when the Colombian rock star Juanes played a concert in Havana in 2009, the service sent out blasts asking respondents whether they thought “two popular local music acts out of favor with the government” should be onstage. One hundred thousand people responded—unaware that they were essentially participating in a U.S. government poll.

ZunZuneo fizzled out in 2012 when the project ran out of money—to the bafflement of many of its Cuban users. This Facebook page seems to be the only remnant of it left online. 

Given that U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba is where logic goes to die, the story shouldn’t be all that surprising. (For the last six years [2008-2014], the U.S. government has spent more than $24 million flying a plane around Cuba broadcasting propaganda that no one is able to hear.) But this one’s still a doozy.

Without ever really accomplishing anything of note, ZunZuneo manages to give rhetorical ammunition to leaders like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who see U.S. social networks as agents of the U.S. government (Twitter’s Jack Dorsey was apparently approached about funding the project but did not comment in the AP’s article), and those like Vladimir Putin who say USAID aims to destabilize the countries where it works, and could make the Cuban government reconsider its decision to allow more cellphone and Internet access. (Although maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing in the long run for the Cuban opposition?)
...........
I also imagine the Chinese companies behind programs like WeChat can’t wait for the next time U.S. regulators raise concerns about their services being infiltrated by Chinese intelligence.”



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