Saturday 11th of January 2025
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a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis... AND DANGEROUS....

“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. 

You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”  

 

These words of British dramatist Harold Pinter upon his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature inspire the continuing mission of Consortium News as we celebrate our 30th year in 2025:

 

CN’s mission is to show its readers and viewers that it is happening. The U.S. is arming, funding and aiding an active genocide. It is provoking and prosecuting the worst war in Europe since World War II. It is building unnecessary tension with China and stirring up tension in the Western Hemisphere.

But if you pay attention to mainstream media, none of this is happening  — while it is happening. U.S. coups and bombings around the world that have killed multiple millions of innocent people over eight decades never happened, even while they happened. 

The job of the anti-disinformation industry, often with ties to U.S. intelligence, is to marginalize or silence outlets like Consortium News so the public isn’t told it’s happening.  

The public’s eyes must stay shielded from the crimes their tax dollars are financing. Americans are not to see what is happening. While it is happening. 

They don’t want you, the reader, to fund a site like this. They want you to read a mega-corporation production of news in close collaboration with the state and the intelligence agencies that is financed by other mega-corporations and that hides what’s happening — today and in the past.

We ask you to defy them. Donate in these last days of our Winter Fund Drive so you’ll always know what is happening, while it is happening. 

(Below is more from Pinter’s indispensable speech.)

 

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“The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. 

Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant …”

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/10/it-is-happening-while-its-happening/

 

Harold Pinter (born Oct. 10, 1930, London, Eng.—died Dec. 24, 2008, London) was an English playwright, who achieved international renown as one of the most complex and challenging post-World War II dramatists. His plays are noted for their use of understatement, small talk, reticence—and even silence—to convey the substance of a character’s thought, which often lies several layers beneath, and contradicts, his speech.

 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harold-Pinter

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

 

 

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME AMERICA.

 

SEE ALSO: 

under the US sky of unfair trade...

 

the book that "does not exist"...

 

 

why?.....

AN EXAMPLE OF LONG TERM AMERICAN DEVIOUSNESS.... KHALID Sheikh Mohammed WANTS TO ADMIT TO A CRIME HE HAS BEEN CHARGED OF. THE MASTERMINDING OF 9/11...

THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT REFUSES TO ACCEPT HIS PLEA — AFTER HE HAS SPENT 18 YEARS IN THE GUANTANAMO BAY PRISON. WHY? WHY?

THE SIMPLE ANSWER WOULD BE THAT KHALID "DID NOT DO" WHAT HE'S ACCUSED OF... AND THE EVIDENCE IN THE HANDS OF THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT WOULD SHOW HE WAS NOT THE MASTERMIND.....

 

FROM THE BBC:

The accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks on the US will no longer plead guilty on Friday, after the US government moved to block plea deals reached last year from going ahead.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, often referred to as KSM, was due to deliver his pleas at a war court on the Guantanamo Bay naval base in south-eastern Cuba, where he has been held in a military prison for almost two decades.

Mohammed is Guantanamo's most notorious detainee and one of the last held at the base.

But a federal appeals court on Thursday evening halted the scheduled proceedings to consider requests from the government to abandon the plea deals for Mohammed and two co-defendants, which it said would cause "irreparable" harm to both it and the public.

A three-judge panel said the delay "should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits", but was aimed at giving the court time to receive a full briefing and hear arguments "on an expedited basis".

The delay means that the matter will now fall into the incoming Trump administration.

 

What was scheduled to happen this week?

At a hearing beginning on Friday morning, Mohammed was scheduled to plead guilty to his role in the 11 September 2001 attacks, when hijackers seized passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside of Washington. Another plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.

Mohammed has been charged with offences including conspiracy and murder, with 2,976 victims listed on the charge sheet.

He has previously said that he planned the "9/11 operation from A-to-Z" - conceiving the idea of training pilots to fly commercial planes into buildings and taking those plans to Osama bin Laden, leader of the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda, in the mid 1990s.

Friday's hearing was set to happen in a courtroom on the base, where family members of those killed and the press would have been seated in a viewing gallery behind thick glass.

Why is this all happening 23 years after 9/11?

Pre-trial hearings, held at a military court on the naval base, have been going on for more than a decade, complicated by questions over whether torture Mohammed and other defendants faced while in US custody taints the evidence.

Following his arrest in Pakistan in 2003, Mohammed spent three years at secret CIA prisons known as "black sites" where he was subjected to simulated drowning, or "waterboarding", 183 times, among other so-called "advanced interrogation techniques" that included sleep deprivation and forced nudity.

Karen Greenberg, author of The Least Worst Place: How Guantanamo Became the World's Most Notorious Prison, says the use of torture has made it "virtually impossible to bring these cases to trial in a way that honors the rule of law and American jurisprudence".

"It's apparently impossible to present evidence in these cases without the use of evidence derived from torture. Moreover, the fact that these individuals were tortured adds another level of complexity to the prosecutions," she says.

The case also falls under the military commissions, which operate under different rules than the traditional US criminal justice system and slow the process down.

The plea deal was struck last summer, following some two years of negotiations.

 

What does the plea deal include?

The full details of the deals reached with Mohammed and two of his co-defendants have not been released.

We do know that a deal means he would not face a death penalty trial.

In a court hearing on Wednesday, his legal team confirmed that he had agreed to plead guilty to all charges. Mohammed did not address the court personally, but engaged with his team as they went over the agreement, making small corrections and changes to wording with the prosecution and the judge.

If the deals are upheld and the pleas are accepted by the court, the next steps would be appointing a military jury, known as a panel, to hear evidence at a sentencing hearing.

In court on Wednesday, this was described by lawyers as a form of public trial, where survivors and family members of those killed would be given the opportunity to give statements.

Under the agreement, the families would also be able to pose questions to Mohammed, who would be required to "answer their questions fully and truthfully", lawyers say.

Central to the prosecution agreeing to the deals was a guarantee "that we could present all of the evidence that we thought was necessary to establish a historical record of the accused's involvement in what happened on September 11th," prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., said in court on Wednesday.

Even if the pleas go ahead, it would be many months before these proceedings would begin and a sentence ultimately delivered.

 

Why is the US government trying to block the pleas?

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin appointed the senior official who signed the deal. But he was travelling at the time it was signed and was reportedly caught by surprise, according to the New York Times.

Days later, he attempted to revoke it, saying in a memo: "Responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior authority."

However, both a military judge and a military appeals panel ruled that the deal was valid, and that Mr Austin had acted too late.

In another bid to block the deal, the government this week asked a federal appeals court to intervene.

In a legal filing, it said Mohammed and the two other men were charged with "perpetrating the most egregious criminal act on American soil in modern history" and that enforcing the agreements would "deprive the government and the American people of a public trial as to the respondents' guilt and the possibility of capital punishment, despite the fact that the Secretary of Defense has lawfully withdrawn those agreements".

Following the announcement of the deal last summer, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, then the party's leader in the chamber, released a statement describing it as "a revolting abdication of the government's responsibility to defend America and provide justice".

 

What have the victims' families said?

Some families of those killed in the attacks have also criticised the deal, saying it is too lenient or lacks transparency.

Speaking to the BBC's Today Programme last summer, Terry Strada, whose husband Tom was killed in the attacks, described the deal as "giving the detainees in Guantanamo Bay what they want".

Ms Strada, the national chair of the campaign group 9/11 Families United, said: "This is a victory for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other two, it's a victory for them."

Other families see the agreements as a path towards convictions in the complex and long-running proceedings and were disappointed by the government's latest intervention.

Stephan Gerhardt, whose younger brother Ralph was killed in the attacks, had flown to Guantanamo Bay to watch Mohammed plead guilty.

"What is the end goal for the Biden administration? So they get the stay and this drags into the next administration. To what end? Think about the families. Why are you prolonging this saga?" he said.

Mr Gerhardt told the BBC the deals were "not a victory" for the families, but that it was "time to find a way to close this, to convict these men".

Families on the base were meeting with the press when news of the delay was made public.

"It was supposed to be a time of healing. We'll board that plane still with that deep sense of pain – there's just no end to it," one said.

 

Why are the proceedings happening in Guantanamo?

Mohammed has been held in a military prison in Guantanamo Bay since 2006.

The prison was opened 23 years ago - on 11 January 2002 - during the "war on terror" that followed the 9/11 attacks, as a place to hold terror suspects and "illegal enemy combatants".

Most of those held here were never charged and the military prison has faced criticism from rights groups and the United Nations over its treatment of detainees. The majority have now been repatriated or resettled in other countries.

The prison currently holds 15 - the smallest number at any point in its history. All but six of them have been charged with or convicted of war crimes.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0kvklv7zjyo

 

THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT DOES NOT WANT A "PUBLIC TRIAL"... NEVER... WHY?

A PUBLIC TRIAL WOULD SHOW THAT KHALID DID NOT DO IT OF HIS OWN VOLITION AND "MAY HAVE DONE IT" ON BEHALF OF HIS MASTERS: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA — VIA BIN LADEN WHO WAS THEN ASSASSINATED BY OBAMA, SO THAT BIN LADEN COULD NOT TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT THE REAL DEAL....

THIS IS ON PAR WITH THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK... THE LAST PIECES OF THE PUZZLE HAVE NEVER BEEN RELEASED. WHY? BECAUSE THEY SHOW THE CONSPIRACY BY THE "DEEP STATE", VIA SOME WILLING HELPERS, INCLUDING THE SECRET SERVICE — ITSELF INFILTRATED BY THE CIA...

WHY IS KHALID STILL ALIVE IS A BILLION DOLLAR QUESTION....

GOODNESS FROM THE AMERICAN HEART? SADISM+ TO TRAIN SOLDIERS IN THE ART OF TORTURE? A USEFUL FOIL WHO CANNOT SAY ANYTHING BUT IS A REMINDER OF THE "NASTINESS OF OTHERS" TOWARDS THE AMERIAN EMPIRE?

A brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND THE WORLD IN GENERAL...

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

 

 

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME AMERICA. THE AMERICAN "DEEP STATE" HAS VOWED TO DESTROY RUSSIA SINCE 1917... IT HAS ALSO VOWED TO DESTROY CHINA AND CONQUER THE ENTIRE WORLD... SEE: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171