Life in the Crosshairs: "Conspiracy Theorists" Targeted by Our Rulers

[Charles Drago]

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/obama-staffe...11-groups/

For those who won't accept the reality of long-term hostile penetrations of "alternative history" groups and websites by agents of the power structure, I give you the Raw Story report (link above) which begins:

"In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama's appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated 'cognitive infiltration' of groups that advocate 'conspiracy theories' like the ones surrounding 9/11."

Believe this: Nothing changes.

[Ed Jewett]

Comment on this story by "American Everyman" at http://willyloman.wordpress.com/ :

(Wow. What a genius. uh, hello, Mr. Sunstein, they’ve been doing that already for years and the process has been used many, many times in the past; George Sams, Jr. with the Black Panthers Party, William O’Neill with the Black Panthers Party, Julius Butler with the Black Panther Party, Richard Held with the American Indian Movement (Pine Ridge – 70 or so killed), Richard Held with the Puerto Rico Independence Movement, Richard Held with Earth First!, Michael Fain with Operation Thermite Conspiracy (targeting Earth First!), Hal Turner, Brandon Darby with the RNC protest groups 2008, Brandon Darby with Common Ground in 2006, Morgan Reynolds with 9/11 Truth (for the “No Plane Theory”), Judy Woods with 9/11 Truth (for “Directed Energy Weapons”), Jim Hoffman with 9/11 Truth (for “1.8 Million Ceiling Tile Bombs”), Neils Harrit with 9/11 Truth (for “100s of Tons of UNexploded Nanothermite”), Greg Roberts with 9/11 Truth (for the infiltration and dumbing down of AE911Truth), Dwain Deets with 9/11 Truth (for the infiltration and dumbing down of AE911Truth), Steven Jones with 9/11 Truth (for his continuing “Thermite’ saga)… and of course you can go on and on with 9/11 Truth - Jon Gold, Nico Haupt, Col. Jenny Sparks, Arabesque… ect. ect. The point is, what Obama’s Department Head is suggesting is called COINTELPRO and it was created by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover’s reign of terror to root out “the commies” aka people who didn’t support grossly aggressive capitalism back in the 50s.)


This thread should be consolidated with Monitoring of conspiracy groups
Tosh Plumlee
and
Obama Advisor Promotes "Cognitive Infiltration"
Ed Jewett

[Ed Jewett]

Obama Information Czar Calls For Banning Free Speech


Sunstein: Taxation and censorship of dissenting opinions “will have a place” under thought police program advocated in 2008 white paper


Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, January 14, 2010

The controversy surrounding White House information czar and Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein’s blueprint for the government to infiltrate political activist groups has deepened, with the revelation that in the same 2008 dossier he also called for the government to tax or even ban outright political opinions of which it disapproved.

Sunstein was appointed by President Obama to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an agency within the Executive Office of the President.

On page 14 of Sunstein’s January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” the man who is now Obama’s head of information technology in the White House proposed that each of the following measures “will have a place under imaginable conditions” according to the strategy detailed in the essay.

1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing.

2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.

That’s right, Obama’s information czar wants to tax or ban outright, as in make illegal, political opinions that the government doesn’t approve of. To where would this be extended? A tax or a shut down order on newspapers that print stories critical of our illustrious leaders?

And what does Sunstein define as “conspiracy theories” that should potentially be taxed or outlawed by the government? Opinions held by the majority of Americans, no less.

The notion that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing JFK, a view shared by the vast majority of Americans in every major poll over the last ten years, is an example of a “conspiracy theory” that the federal government should consider censoring, according to Sunstein.

A 1998 CBS poll found that just 10 per cent of Americans believed that Oswald acted alone, so apparently the other 90 per cent of Americans could be committing some form of thought crime by thinking otherwise under Sunstein’s definition.

Sunstein also cites the belief that “global warming is a deliberate fraud” as another marginal conspiracy theory to be countered by government action. In reality, the majority of Americans now believe that the man-made explanation of global warming is not true, and that global warming is natural, according to the latest polls.

But Sunstein saves his most ludicrous example until last. On page 5 he characterizes as “false and dangerous” the idea that exposure to sunlight is healthy, despite the fact that top medical experts agree prolonged exposure to sunlight reduces the risk of developing certain cancers.

To claim that encouraging people to get out in the sun is to peddle a dangerous conspiracy theory is like saying that promoting the breathing of fresh air is also a thought crime. One can only presume that Sunstein is deliberately framing the debate by going to such absurd extremes so as to make any belief whatsoever into a conspiracy theory unless it’s specifically approved by the kind of government thought police system he is pushing for.

Despite highlighting the fact that repressive societies go hand in hand with an increase in “conspiracy theories,” Sunstein’s ’solution’ to stamp out such thought crimes is to ban free speech, fulfilling the precise characteristic of the “repressive society” he warns against elsewhere in the paper.

“We could imagine circumstances in which a conspiracy theory became so pervasive, and so dangerous, that censorship would be thinkable,” he writes on page 20. Remember that Sunstein is not just talking about censoring Holocaust denial or anything that’s even debatable in the context of free speech, he’s talking about widely accepted beliefs shared by the majority of Americans but ones viewed as distasteful by the government, which would seek to either marginalize by means of taxation or outright censor such views.

No surprise therefore that Sunstein has called for re-writing the First Amendment as well as advocating Internet censorship and even proposing that Americans should celebrate tax day and be thankful that the state takes a huge chunk of their income.

The government has made it clear that growing suspicion towards authority is a direct threat to their political agenda and indeed Sunstein admits this on page 3 of his paper.

That is why they are now engaging in full on information warfare in an effort to undermine, disrupt and eventually outlaw organized peaceful resistance to their growing tyranny.

[Ed Jewett]

Soros funds infiltration of 9/11 truth, election protection, and �independent� journalism
By Wayne Madsen
[/FONT]Online Journal Contributing Writer

[/FONT]
Feb 20, 2009, 00:28

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(WMR) -- WMR has learned from well-placed sources that international hedge fund mogul and financier of �progressive� causes George Soros has been, for a number of years, infiltrating 9/11 �truth� organizations, groups advocating election reform, and so-called �independent journalism� enterprises in order to hijack agendas and, eventually, cause the groups to collapse from within or be absorbed into larger organizations servile to Soros and his agenda.
By far, the largest group Soros and his allies has infiltrated and taken over is the Democratic Party of the United States. It now totally adheres to a corporatist line and has purged from its leadership Dr. Howard Dean and replaced him with Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, a Democratic Leadership Council adherent. The Soros faction and its allies has also seen to it that Bill Richardson, Caroline Kennedy, and others who represent the �Democratic wing of the Democratic Party� have been shut out of the Obama administration.
In many ways, Soros� operation is strikingly similar to the FBI�s former Counter-Intelligence Program, also known as COINTELPRO. There is also ample evidence that Soros� program is linked to Israeli intelligence operations in the United States and that some presidential campaigns in 2008 were infiltrated by the joint operation, including those of Democratic candidate and former Senator Mike Gravel, and Republican candidate Ron Paul.
Soros� operations, according to our sources, involve his Open Society Institute, as well as Soros Fund Management LLC, in which his son, Jonathan Soros, plays a leading role.
For Soros, his political operations in America are much the same as they are in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, and other countries: divide, confuse the political sides, and conquer.
The modus operandi is that Soros operatives either help establish �progressive� organizations or join them after they are established with a new infusion of a modest to substantial funding. The agenda of the organization is then altered to make it look either like a far-out �conspiracy� association or the infiltrators of the organization create internecine battles between factions or tamp down its fervor. In some cases, the organizations ultimately cease to exist or are combined with other Soros-controlled or influenced organizations.
In the case of alternative journalism operations, Soros� operatives launch attacks, some of them highly personal, against bona fide independent journalists and question their sources and investigations. WMR has been a primary target for such operations, according to sources familiar with Soros� tactics.
Soros� agents of disinformation and influence have moved in to �manage� the stories about jailed Alabama Democratic Governor Don Siegelman, the 2004 vote fraud in Ohio, the Turkish and Israeli intelligence penetration of the highest echelons of the U.S. government, the presence of Israeli spies among the accused 9/11 hijackers in the months prior to the terrorist attacks in 2001, and Russian-Israeli �Kosher Nostra� criminal activity from London to Kyiv and New York to Moscow.
Overall, Soros� operations are primarily focused on controlling the left through the use of censors and online gatekeepers in the media operations he funds. Recipients of Soros� money are found running web sites, some of them well known; hosting TV and radio programs; and writing regularly for major periodicals.
Soros has ingratiated himself to many on the Left but that was his goal. However, there are a number of progressives who are wise to Soros� operations and will continue to expose them regardless of how many more billions he amasses from shorting stocks, speculating on national currencies, and destroying jobs.
With the palindrome SOROS -- if you replace the �S�s� with $ -- as in $oro$, you will be left with �oro,� the Italian and Spanish word for �gold.� It sums up Mr. Soros nicely, if that is his real name, and not �Goldfinger.�

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

Copyright � 2008 WayneMadenReport.com

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the [/FONT]Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).[/FONT]
Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
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http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/...4391.shtml

[Jan Klimkowski]

There are some very interesting details in the Raw Story piece.

As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Sunstein is in charge of "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs," according to the White House Web site.

Sunstein's article, published in the Journal of Political Philosphy in 2008 and recently uncovered by blogger Marc Estrin, states that "our primary claim is that conspiracy theories typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a 'crippled epistemology,' in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources."

By "crippled epistemology" Sunstein means that people who believe in conspiracy theories have a limited number of sources of information that they trust. Therefore, Sunstein argued in the article, it would not work to simply refute the conspiracy theories in public -- the very sources that conspiracy theorists believe would have to be infiltrated.

Sunstein, whose article focuses largely on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, suggests that the government "enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories. It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts."

Download a PDF of the article here.

Sunstein argued that "government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories." He suggested that "government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."

"We expect such tactics from undercover cops, or FBI," Estrin writes at the Rag Blog, expressing surprise that "a high-level presidential advisor" would support such a strategy.

Estrin notes that Sunstein advocates in his article for the infiltration of "extremist" groups so that it undermines the groups' confidence to the extent that "new recruits will be suspect and participants in the group’s virtual networks will doubt each other’s bona fides."

Sunstein has been the target of numerous "conspiracy theories" himself, mostly from the right wing political echo chamber, with conservative talking heads claiming he favors enacting "a second Bill of Rights" that would do away with the Second Amendment. Sunstein's recent book, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, was criticized by some on the right as "a blueprint for online censorship."

Sunstein "wants to hold blogs and web hosting services accountable for the remarks of commenters on websites while altering libel laws to make it easier to sue for spreading 'rumors,'" wrote Ed Lasky at American Thinker.

As with Britain's Alastair Campbell, a more appropriate job title for Sunstein is that held by Goebbels: Director of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda - Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.

"Crippled epistemology", eh? :fight:

My response is the famous apocryphal remark commonly attributed to Lincoln:

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

[Ed Jewett]

Obama Regulation Czar Advocated Removing People’s Organs Without Explicit Consent
Friday, September 04, 2009
By Matt Cover, Staff Writer

Cass Sunstein speaking at Harvard Law School. (Photo: Matthew W. Hutchins, Harvard Law Record.)
(CNSNews.com) – Cass Sunstein, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), has advocated a policy under which the government would “presume” someone has consented to having his or her organs removed for transplantation into someone else when they die unless that person has explicitly indicated that his or her organs should not be taken.

Under such a policy, hospitals would harvest organs from people who never gave permission for this to be done.

Outlined in the 2008 book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” Sunstein and co-author Richard H. Thaler argued that the main reason that more people do not donate their organs is because they are required to choose donation.

Sunstein and Thaler pointed out that doctors often must ask the deceased’s family members whether or not their dead relative would have wanted to donate his organs. These family members usually err on the side of caution and refuse to donate their loved one’s organs.

“The major obstacle to increasing [organ] donations is the need to get the consent of surviving family members,” said Sunstein and Thaler.

This problem could be remedied if governments changed the laws for organ donation, they said. Currently, unless a patient has explicitly chosen to be an organ donor, either on his driver’s license or with a donor card, the doctors assume that the person did not want to donate and therefore do not harvest his organs. Thaler and Sunstein called this “explicit consent.”

They argued that this could be remedied if government turned the law around and assumed that, unless people explicitly choose not to, then they want to donate their organs – a doctrine they call “presumed consent.”

“Presumed consent preserves freedom of choice, but it is different from explicit consent because it shifts the default rule. Under this policy, all citizens would be presumed to be consenting donors, but they would have the opportunity to register their unwillingness to donate,” they explained.

The difference between explicit and presumed consent is that under presumed consent, many more people “choose” to be organ donors. Sunstein and Thaler noted that in a 2003 study only 42 percent of people actively chose to be organ donors, while only 18 percent actively opted out when their consent was presumed.

In cases where the deceased’s wishes are unclear, Sunstein and Thaler argued that a “presumed consent” system would make it easier for doctors to convince families to donate their loved one’s organs.

Citing a 2006 study, Thaler and Sunstein wrote: “The next of kin can be approached quite differently when the decedent’s silence is presumed to indicate a decision to donate rather than when it is presumed to indicate a decision not to donate. This shift may make it easier for the family to accept organ donation.”

The problem of the deceased’s family is only one issue, Sunstein and Thaler said, admitting that turning the idea of choice on its head will invariably run into major political problems, but these are problems they say the government can solve through a system of “mandated choice.”

“Another [problem] is that it is a hard sell politically,” wrote Sunstein and Thaler. “More than a few people object to the idea of ‘presuming’ anything when it comes to such a sensitive matter. For these reasons we think that the best choice architecture for organ donations is mandated choice.”

Mandated choice is a process where government forces you to make a decision – in this case, whether to opt out of being an organ donor to get something you need, such as a driver’s license.

“With mandated choice, renewal of your driver’s license would be accompanied by a requirement that you check a box stating your organ donation preferences,” the authors stated. “Your application would not be accepted unless you had checked one of the boxes.”

To ensure that people’s decisions align with the government policy of more organ donors, Sunstein and Thaler counseled that governments should follow the state of Illinois’ example and try to influence people by making organ donation seem popular.

“First, the state stresses the importance of the overall problem (97,000 people [in Illinois] on the waiting list and then brings the problem home, literally (4,700 in Illinois),” they wrote.

“Second, social norms are directly brought into play in a way that build on the power of social influences [peer pressure]: ‘87 percent of adults in Illinois feel that registering as an organ donor is the right thing to do’ and ’60 percent of adults in Illinois are registered,’” they added.

Sunstein and Thaler reminded policymakers that people will generally do what they think others are doing and what they believe others think is right. These presumptions, which almost everyone has, act as powerful factors as policymakers seek to design choices.

“Recall that people like to do what most people think is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do,” they wrote. “The state is enlisting existing norms in the direction of lifestyle choices.”

Thaler and Sunstein believed that this and other policies are necessary because people don’t really make the best decisions.

“The false assumption is that almost all people, almost all of the time, make choices that are in their best interest or at the very least are better than the choices that would be made [for them] by someone else,” they said.

This means that government “incentives and nudges” should replace “requirements and bans,” they argued.

Neither Sunstein nor Thaler currently are commenting on their book, a spokesman for the publisher, Penguin Group, told CNSNews.com.

In a question-and-answer section on the Amazon.com Web site, Thaler and Sunstein answered a few questions about their book.

When asked what the title “Nudge” means and why people need to be nudged, the authors stated: “By a nudge we mean anything that influences our choices. A school cafeteria might try to nudge kids toward good diets by putting the healthiest foods at front.

“We think that it's time for institutions, including government, to become much more user-friendly by enlisting the science of choice to make life easier for people and by gently nudging them in directions that will make their lives better,” they wrote.

“…The human brain is amazing, but it evolved for specific purposes, such as avoiding predators and finding food,” said Thaler and Sunstein. “Those purposes do not include choosing good credit card plans, reducing harmful pollution, avoiding fatty foods, and planning for a decade or so from now. Fortunately, a few nudges can help a lot. …”

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/53534

[Dawn Meredith]

Obama Information Czar Calls For Banning Free Speech


Sunstein: Taxation and censorship of dissenting opinions “will have a place” under thought police program advocated in 2008 white paper


Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, January 14, 2010

The controversy surrounding White House information czar and Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein’s blueprint for the government to infiltrate political activist groups has deepened, with the revelation that in the same 2008 dossier he also called for the government to tax or even ban outright political opinions of which it disapproved.

Sunstein was appointed by President Obama to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an agency within the Executive Office of the President.

On page 14 of Sunstein’s January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” the man who is now Obama’s head of information technology in the White House proposed that each of the following measures “will have a place under imaginable conditions” according to the strategy detailed in the essay.

1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing.

2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.

That’s right, Obama’s information czar wants to tax or ban outright, as in make illegal, political opinions that the government doesn’t approve of. To where would this be extended? A tax or a shut down order on newspapers that print stories critical of our illustrious leaders?

And what does Sunstein define as “conspiracy theories” that should potentially be taxed or outlawed by the government? Opinions held by the majority of Americans, no less.

The notion that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing JFK, a view shared by the vast majority of Americans in every major poll over the last ten years, is an example of a “conspiracy theory” that the federal government should consider censoring, according to Sunstein.

A 1998 CBS poll found that just 10 per cent of Americans believed that Oswald acted alone, so apparently the other 90 per cent of Americans could be committing some form of thought crime by thinking otherwise under Sunstein’s definition.

Sunstein also cites the belief that “global warming is a deliberate fraud” as another marginal conspiracy theory to be countered by government action. In reality, the majority of Americans now believe that the man-made explanation of global warming is not true, and that global warming is natural, according to the latest polls.

But Sunstein saves his most ludicrous example until last. On page 5 he characterizes as “false and dangerous” the idea that exposure to sunlight is healthy, despite the fact that top medical experts agree prolonged exposure to sunlight reduces the risk of developing certain cancers.

To claim that encouraging people to get out in the sun is to peddle a dangerous conspiracy theory is like saying that promoting the breathing of fresh air is also a thought crime. One can only presume that Sunstein is deliberately framing the debate by going to such absurd extremes so as to make any belief whatsoever into a conspiracy theory unless it’s specifically approved by the kind of government thought police system he is pushing for.

Despite highlighting the fact that repressive societies go hand in hand with an increase in “conspiracy theories,” Sunstein’s ’solution’ to stamp out such thought crimes is to ban free speech, fulfilling the precise characteristic of the “repressive society” he warns against elsewhere in the paper.

“We could imagine circumstances in which a conspiracy theory became so pervasive, and so dangerous, that censorship would be thinkable,” he writes on page 20. Remember that Sunstein is not just talking about censoring Holocaust denial or anything that’s even debatable in the context of free speech, he’s talking about widely accepted beliefs shared by the majority of Americans but ones viewed as distasteful by the government, which would seek to either marginalize by means of taxation or outright censor such views.

No surprise therefore that Sunstein has called for re-writing the First Amendment as well as advocating Internet censorship and even proposing that Americans should celebrate tax day and be thankful that the state takes a huge chunk of their income.

The government has made it clear that growing suspicion towards authority is a direct threat to their political agenda and indeed Sunstein admits this on page 3 of his paper.

That is why they are now engaging in full on information warfare in an effort to undermine, disrupt and eventually outlaw organized peaceful resistance to their growing tyranny.

Stalin would approve. (And we thought Nixon was bad).

So, this would make DPF illegal???

I had seen several articles re. infiltration and monitering, which we all know has been going on forever anyway, disgusting as it is, but to make it ILLEGAL???? Erick warned me that Obama would be worse than Bush.
I did not think that possible. I become more sickened daily.

Dawn

[Peter Lemkin]

Obama Information Czar Calls For Banning Free Speech


Sunstein: Taxation and censorship of dissenting opinions “will have a place” under thought police program advocated in 2008 white paper


Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, January 14, 2010

The controversy surrounding White House information czar and Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein’s blueprint for the government to infiltrate political activist groups has deepened, with the revelation that in the same 2008 dossier he also called for the government to tax or even ban outright political opinions of which it disapproved.

Sunstein was appointed by President Obama to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an agency within the Executive Office of the President.

On page 14 of Sunstein’s January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” the man who is now Obama’s head of information technology in the White House proposed that each of the following measures “will have a place under imaginable conditions” according to the strategy detailed in the essay.

1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing.

2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.

That’s right, Obama’s information czar wants to tax or ban outright, as in make illegal, political opinions that the government doesn’t approve of. To where would this be extended? A tax or a shut down order on newspapers that print stories critical of our illustrious leaders?

And what does Sunstein define as “conspiracy theories” that should potentially be taxed or outlawed by the government? Opinions held by the majority of Americans, no less.

The notion that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing JFK, a view shared by the vast majority of Americans in every major poll over the last ten years, is an example of a “conspiracy theory” that the federal government should consider censoring, according to Sunstein.

A 1998 CBS poll found that just 10 per cent of Americans believed that Oswald acted alone, so apparently the other 90 per cent of Americans could be committing some form of thought crime by thinking otherwise under Sunstein’s definition.

Sunstein also cites the belief that “global warming is a deliberate fraud” as another marginal conspiracy theory to be countered by government action. In reality, the majority of Americans now believe that the man-made explanation of global warming is not true, and that global warming is natural, according to the latest polls.

But Sunstein saves his most ludicrous example until last. On page 5 he characterizes as “false and dangerous” the idea that exposure to sunlight is healthy, despite the fact that top medical experts agree prolonged exposure to sunlight reduces the risk of developing certain cancers.

To claim that encouraging people to get out in the sun is to peddle a dangerous conspiracy theory is like saying that promoting the breathing of fresh air is also a thought crime. One can only presume that Sunstein is deliberately framing the debate by going to such absurd extremes so as to make any belief whatsoever into a conspiracy theory unless it’s specifically approved by the kind of government thought police system he is pushing for.

Despite highlighting the fact that repressive societies go hand in hand with an increase in “conspiracy theories,” Sunstein’s ’solution’ to stamp out such thought crimes is to ban free speech, fulfilling the precise characteristic of the “repressive society” he warns against elsewhere in the paper.

“We could imagine circumstances in which a conspiracy theory became so pervasive, and so dangerous, that censorship would be thinkable,” he writes on page 20. Remember that Sunstein is not just talking about censoring Holocaust denial or anything that’s even debatable in the context of free speech, he’s talking about widely accepted beliefs shared by the majority of Americans but ones viewed as distasteful by the government, which would seek to either marginalize by means of taxation or outright censor such views.

No surprise therefore that Sunstein has called for re-writing the First Amendment as well as advocating Internet censorship and even proposing that Americans should celebrate tax day and be thankful that the state takes a huge chunk of their income.

The government has made it clear that growing suspicion towards authority is a direct threat to their political agenda and indeed Sunstein admits this on page 3 of his paper.

That is why they are now engaging in full on information warfare in an effort to undermine, disrupt and eventually outlaw organized peaceful resistance to their growing tyranny.

Stalin would approve. (And we thought Nixon was bad).

So, this would make DPF illegal???

I had seen several articles re. infiltration and monitering, which we all know has been going on forever anyway, disgusting as it is, but to make it ILLEGAL???? Erick warned me that Obama would be worse than Bush.
I did not think that possible. I become more sickened daily.

Dawn

Just wait until we get what was planned at the end of a pre-planned failed Obama Admin...someone to the right of S. Palin....there will be no turning back then. I'd say America [as we know it] has but three years...better get your asses in gear...or pack for the concentration camps......

...and of course DPF is 'illegal'...it could be so interpreted under the unPatriot Act and now.....hey, lots of legislation to 'cite'. You're the lawyer....help him help him....Yosarian.....help the bombardier. But I am the bombardier! Well then help him help him! :damnmate: [Catch-22]. These increasingly are 'end times', but not for the biblically inclined...but for the fascisticlly inclined. IMO

[John Kowalski]

Sunstein's tactics are taken right out of the FBI's Cointelpro. Break up dissenting groups by planting disinformation. This is what the FBI did the to the Black Panthers, Socialist Workers Party, and any other group who had a dissenting opinion. If the Internet and online chat groups had existed during Hoover's time, he would have done exactly as Sunstein recommends.

The article says that these tactics are legal. Is it legal or constitutional for the government to attempt to challenge dissenting groups in this way? I thought that the government had an obligation to protect, not destroy free speech.

[Ed Jewett]

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Open letter from Cyril Wecht to Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule

Cyril Wecht was kind enough to give me permission to share his letter to the authors of that awful "Conspiracy Theories" paper where the authors suggested the government infiltrate spaces where conspiracies are discussed to sow doubt and dissuade people from looking into such matters.

Here is what Cyril had to say to the authors, Cass Sunstein (now an Obama appointee) and Adrian Vermeule. Both men were professors at Harvard.

I recently learned of your jointly written article, "Conspiracy Theories", in which you contend that "Conspiracy theorists" typically suffer from a "crippled epistemology". Such individuals are considered by you to be "members of informationally and socially isolated groups (that) tend to display a kind of paranoid cognition".

In your litany of conspiracy theories, you have included those people who hold "the view that the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy". In an obvious attempt to portray such critics and disbelievers of the Warren Commission Report as paranoid nuts and fruitcakes, you cleverly list this extremely important, highly controversial, 46 year old, still ongoing controversy among several absurd conspiratorial allegations, e.g., "doctors deliberately manufactured the AIDS virus, the moon landing was staged and never actually occurred; the plane crash that killed Democrat Paul Wellstone was engineered by Republican politicians", etc.

While this kind of quasi-intellectual, semantical game playing may have legitimate application in a law school classroom in order to stimulate debate and enhance the development of legal reasoning among future attorneys, it is an insulting ploy that is far beneath the dignity of two distinguished professors when utilized in the manner set forth in your article.

Is it conceivable that you are not aware of the fact that 70-80% of teh U.S. public (and even higher percentages elsewhere in teh world) has repeatedly and consistently expressed disbelief in the WCR in every national poll conducted on this subject from 1965 to the present time? Do you not know that the House Select Committee of the U.S. Congress (1977-79) concluded that the WCR was wrong in its official determination that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in plotting and executing the assassination of JFK?

Are both of you so intellectually arrogant and strongly defensive of the federal government that you are willing to publicly state that more than two-thirds of the American public and a bi-partisan committee of Congressmen are cognitively dysfunctional? From whom have the two of you derived such power and right to ridicule and defame so many people?

But this part of your cleverly orchestrated diatribe pales by comparison to the far more egregious and dangerously frightening proposition that you have advanced with incredible academic chutzpah, namely, your recommendations for "Governmental Responses".

Officially sanctioned government counterspeech "to discredit conspiracy theories'; the hiring of "credible private parties to engage in counterspeech"; the official banning of conspiracy theorizing; the imposition of "some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories;" etc,

Unbelievable!

Gentlemen, why are you being so hesitant and conservative in your proposed efforts to rid our society of conspiracy theorists, including all of us who reject the WCR and the scientifically preposterous "single bullet theory"? Why not simply have us arrested, placed in concentration camps, tried by special government tribunals (presided over by eminent sycophantic law professors like the two of you to ensure correct verdicts), and then executed? After all, if we need to make America safe, we had better get serious.

In closing, I should like to be so bold and daring as to invite either, or both of you together, to engage in a public debate with me -- anywhere, anytime -- relating to the JFK assassination and the WCR. Even though I am only a lowly Adjunct Professor of Law at a school that admittedly does not rank among the elite institutions such as Harvard and the University of Chicago, I would endeavor to do my best to make such a public presentation interesting and intellectually stimulating.

Please let me know where and when you would like to arrange for such a debate. What a formidable challenge I would be confronted with having to contend with the combined sagacity and erudition of two such prominent legal scholars.

Very truly yours,

Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D.
Past President, American Academy of Forensic Sciences
Past President, American College of Legal Medicine
Clinical Professor of Pathology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
and Graduate School of Public Health
Adjunct Professor, Duquesne University Schools of Law, Pharmacology
and Health Science
Distinguished Professor of Pathology, Carlow University

posted by Real History Lisa at 11:44 PM - Permanent Link