Wish you were here, we could talk. The proprietor reminds me that there’s no substitute for talk. Places like hers have been springing up and getting banned and spreading for five hundred years. From Constantinople and Mecca and Damascus, war carried them to Europe, where they disturbed the serenity of La Serenissima, then spread civic and intellectual ferment to Oxford and London and throughout Europe. Miles’ Coffehouse hosted a republican cabal, the Coffee club of Pepys’ diary, and prospered despite losing a couple regulars to the chopping block. On the continent, the Café de Foy sparked the thought of storming the Bastille. The Café Durand gave birth to Zola’s “J’accuse.” The Café de Flore was Sartre’s soapbox.
They crossed the ocean to this country’s migration portals, gestated Beatnik subversion, and when the Vietnam War began to rankle at home, coffee houses brought antiwar sedition to the gates of Fort Bragg and Fort Hood. At a coffee house in Cleveland Philip Durachinsky twiddled his thumbs in philosophy club, allegedly hatching his plans for nicking titillating personal information, Department of Energy data, and who knows what else.
I came late to the historic coffee houses, Florian, the International, Giubbe Rosse, Café A Brasileira, when they had long since settled down as romantic institutions. I never encountered a coffee house in the florid subversive stage till this one, with its freethinking connoisseurs of the psychotropic bounty of the plant and fungus kingdoms. This third place of mine is one too many for the government authorities among my few attentive readers. I’ve been blinked and bumped and tailed here, I’m on secret surveillance and emergency-detention lists at my local CIA fusion center. It can’t be this great good place, it must be me. Perhaps it’s my utterances. In the Phoenix Program days,“suspicious utterances” used to put you on blacklist D. And there’s nothing more suspicious to our CIA regime than human rights and rule of law.
You might be on some blacklist now too, having read this far, unless you’re reading this with Tor. But then if you’re reading this with Tor you’re on one anyway. It’s hardly a distinction anymore, Every Tom, Dick and Harry is on some fecal roster or other. When the balloon goes up they’re going to put us all away, it seems. That’s what the Stasi thought, too, till the GDR fell. At this stage repression is futile. It’s too late now, no one can stop what is happening.
You’ll know if we’re meant to be sharing a cow cage at FEMA camp. Evidently some old timer taught the fusion center drones the old Phoenix Program eye-of-God trick. It is ever so frightening, if done right. But if the godlike omniscience depends on cops, good luck. These are the people you remember so vaguely from high school, that smoldering burnout or small scrappy brain-damaged nose guard, that guy who had to join the army, or that cross stocky woman who gnawed on cigarettes.
Turning police into junior spy cadets has always been CIA’s way. The spooks jeer at them behind their backs, and they’re careful not to give them anything hard to do. But even by those standards, they must have assigned my dossier to some truly hopeless plateaued loser. Police recruits are chosen for their modest intellectual endowments, so they don’t get bored and leave; nonetheless, it must be insupportably boring, surveiling me. It’s not as though I’m hard to find. I’m a creature of habit these days.
It’s harder to know what I’m up to, perhaps. That’s beyond you. It’s beyond CIA, now they’ve been caught with their pants down and we know their tricks. It’s beyond NSA. They’re overrated. So it helps to have an active imagination. Perhaps you picture me chortling over Phillip Marshall’s manuscript, or Julian Assange’s insurance file, or John Wheeler’s purloined minutes from Mitre’s subcontract with Ptech; or illegal Batelle germ warfare research snuffled out with FruitFly.
Or the workflow chart and 1-A file on Ibragim Todashev or something, anything. Otherwise the tedium must make you want to eat a gun. After all, your job is busywork, my guilt or innocence don’t matter, enemies are enemies and cops can always fabricate some threat – just get on the horn to Shotspotter, order up some gunshots.1 CIA has brought about the Phonenix/Condor end-stage here at home: complete collapse in the integrity of law enforcement.
This is nothing new. When Ed Murphy wrapped up his job making capture-or-kill lists for the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, he came home to find the 116th Military Intelligence Group doing it here. On their list were the likes of Rennie Davis, some madcap Yippies, patrician fuddy-duddy Benjamin Spock. The 108th MIG spied on New England. For the black element there was less capturing and more killing. When Frank Strausser of the Memphis PD blew Martin King’s face off, the 111th MIG was up on a roof, holding their fire with bated breath, snapping photos with Instagram abandon. That is how CIA works, at home and abroad. When there’s dirty work they cannot do by law, they put soldiers or cops up to it.
The MIGs worked for Dick Ober’s shop. Nothing has changed. Why, just a few years ago CIA dispatched a death squad to rule out exculpatory testimony in the shambolic Boston Marathon show trial. They took Aaron McFarlane, a cop too brutish and dirty even for the Oakland PD, a shaved ape that even the FOP can’t recycle. They put McFarlane to the test at the elite FBI Academy at Quantico, where he passed the swimming test with flying colors. They assigned the newly-minted Special Agent two sidekicks of suitable intellect, Massachusetts state cops Curtis Cinelli and Joel Gagne. With the characteristic dim-witted alacrity of paramilitaries everywhere, Cinelli and Gagne kept watch for imaginary terror cells as McFarlane murdered Ibragim Todashev execution-style, with a coup de grâce right in the crown. As Frank Snepp noted, Phoenix programs are ‘jerry-rigged,’ run with built-in organizational deficiencies that let maniacs and sadists slip in through the cracks. That way you’ve always got a few bad apples spoiling the barrel when you need to rub someone out. Nowadays the one-stop shop for organizational deficiencies is FBI.2
Complicity in Todashev’s extrajudicial killing spurred higher echelons in the State Police to get on the bandwagon with the official culprits. State investigators had jibbed at FBI interference with dissonant evidence such as Daniel Morley’s bomb factory. But once state police stood guard over murder of a witness, the duped troopers had a stake in the foreordained outcome of Tsarnaev’s show trial.
CIA’s mission has not changed: eliminate the opposition. That’s you, if you’re thinking for yourself. This is the global war on meeting and talking. But what’s the threat? What’s the point? What are they so scared of? CIA’s impunity is under threat. They can’t exist without impunity, their raison d’etre is crime. Human rights and international criminal law are converging on the world’s most pressing problem, the CIA regime.
Intelligence is changing in the outside world. CIA sticks to its last, destroying opposition at home and abroad, running criminal enterprise for gain. But elsewhere intelligence has a new mission: attribution of internationally wrongful acts. In Russia and Iran (and not just there – you’d be surprised who’s onboard,) the highly professional security services expose and denounce CIA crime. International criminal law applies, although in practice it would be enforced only following a war. But under the customary international law of state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts, the World Court can rule, imposing reparations, restitution, satisfaction or compensation with interest. When aggrieved states invoke that procedure the US can and does settle or meet its legal obligations. There is no alternative. You’ll never hear about it here behind CIA’s iron curtain, but the US government submits to pacific resolution of disputes in accordance with the UN Charter. Even with archenemy Iran. You can tell the wheels are grinding finer when captive CIA media break out in panicky ejaculations of Disinformation! or Conspiracy Theory!
State responsibility for satisfaction may include prosecution of specified criminal officials. If Gina Haspel goes to prison for the crime against humanity of systematic and widespread torture, or for some face-saving technical infraction, this is how it will happen. For a discredited kleptocracy bleeding influence and primacy, a sacrificial victim costs less than compensation with interest. Ask Dick Nixon.
Our first CIA head of state George Bush made one big mistake: he let Congress ratify the ICCPR. No doubt he thought they could talk their way out of it. He probably thought it was a toothless joke like the Bill of Rights. The Gulf War had gone to his head and he fancied himself a statesman, like the diplomats he met as a green UN Ambassador. It’s called acculturation, tried and true monkey see, monkey do. It works! It gets the most primitive cultures on the hook for human rights compliance. Bush even tried to ratify the Convention Against Torture, and his successor did do.
The result was disgrace in the most public forums in the world. Anyone can watch it on webtv.un.org. The humiliating blow-by-blow is recounted in the prior posts linked below. The international community subjected US doctrine to controlled demolition by simple logic and world-standard law.
Spy regimes obsess about doctrine, for self-deception is a must. That’s how you fall for the nonsense that justifies state crime. The doctrine’s contradictory and more and more ridiculous as crimes of state compound. Law cannot justify state crime. Only blind loyalty can do that. To restore their ruined standing and self-image, US bureaucrats tinker obsessively with human rights distortion, devising increasingly absurd ways of breaching the legal principle of non-intervention (UNGA resolution 2131 (XX), duty k(1); A/RES/36/103 (XXXVI), duty l). The US twists black-letter law with mad logical contortions to attack US enemies, excuse its most brutal allies, and exempt the US government altogether. US apparatchiks parse the tightly-drafted language of their binding commitments in ridiculous ways. They pervert their own constitution and laws to void the universal obligations of a sovereign state. When cornered in international forums they doggedly repeat the same meaningless phrases word for word. When the US faced the Committee Against Torture after its global torture gulag was exposed, CIA installed David Kramer3 as Assistant Secretary to concoct loony legal pretexts. CIA fed unsourced vilification to elderly academic Gay McDougall and used their Reuters assets to propagate it as official UN human rights reporting. US bureaucrats in human rights forums express themselves in a characteristic bizarre galimatias, the legal analog of Koko signing frown-cry-frown-sad. It makes them figures of fun worldwide, most recently in the UN Security Council.
As they made fools of themselves and their hapless State and Justice ‘focal points,’ CIA tried to recoup with a frantic effort to corrupt the cognizant institutions. They packed Human Rights Watch with soldiers and spies and put an MI6 agent on Amnesty International’s board. They set up fake humanitarian watchdogs to make a silly hash of human rights with nonsense claims. They almost succeeded. Human rights institutions are under attack as a tool of conniving spies.
They didn’t expect what happened then. A revolutionary vanguard took human rights into their own hands. A movement emerged, Peoples-Centered Human Rights (PCHR.)
At the formal inception of human rights, their purpose was protecting humans from overreaching states. In these days of privatized intelligence and corporate coercion, the PCHR movement wields human rights against oppression in all its forms. They won’t stop at writing laws; they want to demolish and rebuild institutions to enforce them. They’re not pacifists, they’re preparing for struggle in solidarity with the outside world. To satisfy their right to peace, cessation of hostilities is not enough. They want demilitarization: shut US bases here and overseas. You can’t trick them into fixating on guns, they’re out to dismantle the systemic paramilitary violence that ties CIA, their law-enforcement muppets, and gun-fondling washouts and wannabes nationwide. To defend your right to life they’ve stopped wasting time with new red tape governing when a cop can shoot you. They’ve moved on from police reform to police abolition.
So who goes on CIA’s capture-or-kill list for this? Ajamu Baraka leads the movement. He’s the Trotsky of human rights, fomenting perpetual bottom-up revolution based on an ethical framework of evolving rights. Meanwhile, in unofficial table-top exercises Ajamu pseudonymously rises to prominence in a threat matrix with subjective indicators of dissent as pathology, and in commercial data on his emails and blasts cooked into eigenvectors of influence, centrality, and reach. At a certain point he acquires a code word, a nickname, and some compartments. So if a cop in Atlanta shoots Ajamu in a rueful mix-up, and the thick-as-mince blue line frantically pins it on some bug-eyed Right-Stuffer, you’ll know which threads to pull, at Fort McPherson and GISAC, and in the NHB at Langley. The bloody footprints will lead back to CIA. This is not hypothetical. CIA has multiple contingency plans. Strausser’s successor, and James Earl Ray’s, are in the pipeline now.
CIA had finalized plans to kill Occupy leaders. Decapitation went beyond the planning stage at Langley’s inter-agency meetings. CIA tried and failed to murder Scott Olsen. CIA deployed two assassins, Robert Roche of the Oakland P.D. and a gas-masked gunman whose identity is undisclosed and secret. The two tried to murder Scott Olsen with tear-gas and flash-bang grenades.
And Occupy had nothing like the People’s-Centered Infrastructure Ajamu has set up: the US Human Rights Network, with formal institutional ties to the UN High Commissioner’s NGO outreach mechanism; and the Black Alliance for Peace, based on face-to-face working relationships with civil society worldwide. Ajamu, like Martin King, moved on from electoral politics to struggle as revulsion against CIA impunity peaked worldwide. Like Malcolm X, Ajamu multiplies our force with international solidarity – and the Bandung tendency that buoyed Malcolm has since been codified and institutionalized in law. CIA is panicked. They’re getting Vietnam flashbacks, night terrors of Viet Cong Infrastructure.
McDonald’s fries potatoes. CIA kills dissidents. In large bureaus procedure prevails. Dick Ober used Chicago police to execute Fred Hampton. Ober used armed irregulars of FBI COINTELPRO agent Ron Karenga to kill Malcolm X. Ober coordinated the inter-agency civil/military assassination of Martin King. Ober’s Operation CHAOS killed more than those three. Ober used city and highway police to murder Phillip Gibbs and James Green at Jackson State. There was no three-strikes rule to put Ober in a cage for life. Ober is no ordinary murderer. He is one of the CIA criminals who have ruled your country since 1949.
So be ready. Gina Haspel will be presented with four or five active plans to kill Ajamu Baraka. That is her job. She has nothing to lose in choosing one. She is already hostis humani generis in law, enemy of all humankind. She must act. The world-standard law Ajamu espouses would bring her down and extirpate the criminal enterprise she lives for. Modern multilateral lustration works; I’ve seen it done in other undeveloped countries. First we’ll have to storm the secret police, as the Germans did, and seize the files, or get them from some Shady Rat tóngshì, or something.
And all because Ajamu got us talking. Talk is the underlying threat to this criminal state. The Viet Cong never asked for the mass antiwar risings in America. They merely hoped Americans would talk among themselves, in dulcet coffee shops like this one, or in public squares, or in their homes, and reach their own conclusions. As Alan Grayson said, quoting a buoyant man in flight from Apartheid, “People will change their minds.” Community underpins real politics: ask Italy’s communists; ask Hezbollah or Iran’s Basij; ask Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism; or ask the shoestring NGOs who sit here over coffee or tea. Community comes first. This is where community is mended. If you pay attention you can see the proprietor at her deft and unobtrusive work. She’s repairing the rents this state has made with synthetic controversy and partisan two minutes’ hate, with factitious enemies and CIA’s strategy of tension. Healing us. We’re healing. CIA cancer is remitting. Soon we’ll be ready to rejoin the outside world.
Clandestine state crime is self-limiting disease because discreet cooperative endeavor is a two-edged sword. Secret police can do it. We can do it, too. We, some of us, purged government officials who don’t know our rights. Some of us have not stopped with removing bad apples, they’ve disbanded their police force. Some of us caught the Justice Department shitting on the law it doesn’t like, flouting Article 17 to attack the honor and reputation of Article 19’s defenders. Some of us caught CIA using illegal biological weapons of mass destruction. Some of us live in America, some live elsewhere. Us is everyone on earth. Them is the criminal CIA enterprise infesting this country and others. So if you know where the bodies are buried, drop in, any time, in the flesh, or not.
- When Rochester cop Joseph Ferrigno shot some poor sap, the department planted a drop gun and his buddy Robert Wetzel put Shotspotter to work fabricating evidence of gunshots.
- FBI has proven capacity to deodorize criminal police, providing CIA with a farm team of disposable torturers and assassins like McFarlane.
- After his ignominious stint as CIA’s State Department mole, Kramer gained awkward notoriety when Russia caught him spying and called for him to be questioned under mutual legal assistance law.