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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
US Security State’s War on the Bill of Rights
US Security State’s War on the Bill of Rights
Glenn Greenwald
“One of the primary topics we cover on System Update is the abuse of the U.S. Security State and its vast powers – the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS – for domestic political purposes. When the U.S.. Security State was created in the aftermath of World War Two, the central taboo was that it would never turn its powers inward. It was permitted to operate in total secrecy and use often lawless methods because it was intended to focus only on foreign enemies and to interfere in the internal affairs of foreign adversaries but was never to be weaponized in American politics or turned against the American people.
“There is now abundant evidence that leaves no doubt that this taboo simply no longer exists. Whistleblowers within these agencies who risked their liberty over the last 25 years to reveal the agency’s secrets did so because they said they were so offended and horrified that the weapons of the security agencies were now being regularly turned on the domestic population. That the CIA directly and aggressively interfered in and manipulated both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections is beyond dispute. Both the Russiagate collusion conspiracy theory of 2016 and the 2020 lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation came directly from the bowels of the CIA and were fed to The New York Times and the Washington Post. Just last month, an appellate court ruled that the FBI and other agencies within the Biden administration committed one of the most egregious and systemic violations of the First Amendment in decades, if not ever, by systematically pressuring Big Tech platforms to censor the political speech of Americans that they dislike. That’s just a small sample. The story shows grave and constant domestic repression by these intelligence agencies.”
[Note: I corrected typos and grammar mistakes in the transcript from the video.]