The following are excerpts translated from my latest interview with Sputnik News, which was broadcast live on July 19.
Q:… What is happening to the freedom of speech in America? Are the current powers-that-be using secret services against journalists deemed troublesome, such as Tucker Carlson? …
ST: Tucker Carlson’s evening show is the only mainstream media program which is at odds with the matrix of constructed reality presented by CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, by ABC, NBC, CBS, and all the rest. His daily average of 3 million+ viewers is roughly one percent of the U.S. population and several percentage points more of those who take an active interest in media offerings. It is a thorn in the side of those who would also like to apply to him the blunt tool used by Facebook and Twitter against Donald Trump. It should be stressed that the American intelligence “community” is a scary misnomer, bearing in mind that we are talking of a gigantic apparat which is literally capable of surveilling every spoken and written word everywhere.
Tucker Carlson accused the FBI in his evening program on Fox News—three weeks before he accused the NSA of reading his emails—of setting up and fanning the disturbances on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. There have been several dozen participants in those events—whom the state-controlled narrative insistently calls rioters or even insurrectionists—who have been shielded from any legal consequences, who have been spared criminal proceedings which are applied with gusto to others. This would be in accordance with the years-long practice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to incite crimes and felonies, to encourage individuals to plot criminal acts, in order to arrest them—and then to claim credit for having prevented those acts….
Q: Excuse my interrupting you, but the evidence presented by Glenn Greenwald in support of such claims is backed by solid evidence. It is not a wild conspiracy theory, it is supported by the very indictments against some of the individuals who have been targeted in this manner. I only wanted to mention this for the sake of our audience…
ST:… And now for something particularly interesting. Right after the 2015 terrorist attack by two Islamists in Garland, Texas, CNN itself accused the FBI of directly encouraging the perpetrators to act upon their jihadist ideas. The same method was applied two years later to a mentally unstable pizza delivery man [Khalil Abu Rayyan] in Dearborn, Michigan. In other words, FBI agents routinely goad individuals to commit crimes solely in order to turn them into dangerous villains who were stopped in their tracks by the vigilant agency and sentenced to many years in prison. Such ploys of course justify the agency’s very existence by making it look like it is really preventing terrorist attacks.
This apparatus and this scenario—actively seeking out potential perpetrators of crimes, in order to cajole them and then arrest them—is no longer used against potential jihadists. The members of extremist groups within the Islamic community in the U.S. are no longer interesting. The target has shifted to white Americans who support Donald Trump, and who are therefore a priori suspicious as would-be “homegrown” extremists and terrorists. In this context, the very fact that you are a white, heterosexual male, in addition a practicing Christian, especially if you belong to an evangelical denomination, makes you suspicious and potentially liable to surveillance. Let me add that just two weeks ago the FBI directly asked Americans, in a tweet and later on its website, to spy and report on their neighbors, co-workers, and even family members, for so-called suspicious behaviors potentially conducive to what it called homegrown violent extremism. Denying the legitimacy of Joseph Biden’s victory last November is treated as a red flag, indicative of the claimant’s path to radicalization. All this is truly worthy of George Orwell…
Q: Let’s deal with the important question of what the objective was of spying on Tucker Carlson. What is your take on this?
ST: They wanted to find some lead that could be used as the basis for outright banning of his program, or to put the pressure on Fox News to have his show terminated, short and clear. … They had been acting as an integral part of the anti-Trump establishment long before Trump was elected in 2016. Let us remember that this same FBI embraced the material concocted by a certain former agent of the Intelligence Service, and duly packaged into a dossier at the behest of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. …
The FBI was fully aware that this material had been prepared by the former British intelligence operative [Christopher] Steele for money, and that it was ordered by Democrats, in the form of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. All the same, the FBI uncritically took over this material for its own investigation. However, when asking for a court order allowing it to spy on the Trump campaign on the basis of the Steele Dossier, it did not disclose that the material was initially produced on the order of the Democratic campaign. At the same time, this same FBI did not take adequate measures against Hillary Clinton when it became known that she had been using her private server in her own house to handle and store tens of thousands of official emails which were by definition liable to security classification, including many which were designated secret and top secret. And yet the FBI did not act.
This is not some weird idiosyncrasy which is at odds with the normal modus operandi of a security agency professionally conducting its work. No, quite the contrary, we are looking at a deeply ideologically committed part of a complex mechanism. “Deep State” is the established term, but I prefer to call it “permanent state.” It saw in Trump a temporary aberration which must not be permitted and which must be removed. …
It is obvious that the services are perfectly ready to use all means to discredit and politically destroy those who do not think like they do. At the same time they faithfully serve, and even protect from well-deserved criminal prosecution, those who are their ideological allies and who subsequently turn into their order-givers. …
Q: James Clapper… in 2013 lied to Congress about the NSA collecting data on Americans, and later said he had forgotten to mention the surveillance program… In 2014 John Brennan, the CIA Director, apologized for his agency eavesdropping on members of Congress. In 2015 they were also spied on, at the time when the Iranian nuclear deal was being negotiated. All this was happening with the progressive, adored Barack Obama at the helm… This raises the question as to what the true role of these agencies is, and how powerful they are, when we only see these occasional disclosures for which nobody has ever been held responsible. What does this tell us about the rule of law in today’s America?
ST:… The process is gaining speed. With the support of the media it is reaching the point where any mention of any fact we are considering today, which is at odds with the approved narrative, will be characterized as fake news and outright lies. Carlson’s accusations against the FBI have been instantly characterized as lies by the media, without any prior analysis of their veracity. This excludes any possibility of debate.
—
Dear Readers,
Big Tech is suppressing our reach, refusing to let us advertise and squelching our ability to serve up a steady diet of truth and ideas. Help us fight back by becoming a member for just $5 a month and then join the discussion on Parler @CharlemagneInstitute and Gab @CharlemagneInstitute!
