[News] The Freedomless, Heavily Surveilled Hellscape the US Plans to Bring to Its Own People

[Anti-Imperialist News]

orinocotribune.com
<https://orinocotribune.com/the-freedomless-heavily-surveilled-hellscape-the-us-plans-to-bring-to-its-own-people/>
The
Freedomless, Heavily Surveilled Hellscape the US Plans to Bring to Its Own
PeopleBy Rainer Shea – Jul 29, 2021

Revolutionaries in the US need to adopt the mentality that they’re being
perpetually targeted by counterinsurgency, because they already are.
Throughout this last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, the US National
Security State has unleashed
<https://mronline.org/2020/07/03/anatomy-of-a-counter-insurgency/> vilifying
propaganda about the demonstrations coming from “outside agitators,”
promoted media glorifications of the police which portray law enforcement
as sympathetic to racial justice, used America’s network of liberal NGOs to
funnel support for the movement into the Democratic Party, and flooded
militant protests with liberal “peace police” to temper radicalization.

All of this has no doubt been done with the orchestration of US
intelligence; covert government propaganda within US media has been
officially
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/planting-stories-in-the-press-lifting-of-us-propaganda-ban-gives-new-meaning-to-old-song/237493/>
legal since 2013, and the FBI has been working to infiltrate and co-opt
social movements for decades. But such tactics are just the most
surface-level aspects of the counterinsurgency that our government is going
to wage in response to the social upheaval, power grid breakdowns, mass
migrations, and additional pandemics that US military analysts expect
<https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbmkz8/us-military-could-collapse-within-20-years-due-to-climate-change-report-commissioned-by-pentagon-says>
to
befall the country in the coming decades. What we must prepare for is a
full domestic replication of the invasion and occupation tactics from
Washington’s wars abroad.

To carry out these tactics, the US will need to put those within its
borders under the most extreme environment of propaganda, censorship, and
surveillance imaginable. Here’s what this environment will look like.

*Propaganda*
To understand the role that propaganda and co-optation tactics like the
ones from the George Floyd protests are going to play in this coming war
against liberation struggles, we must understand what that liberation
movement will look like. This year, in response to unprecedentedly huge
anti-police protests and the subsequent acceleration
<https://stephensemler.substack.com/p/the-flow-of-military-equipment-to> of
US military aid to police departments, sociologist Temitope Oriola predicted
<https://ca.news.yahoo.com/news/united-states-risk-armed-anti-215132391.html>
an armed anti-police insurgency within the US.

He said that the poorest and most disenfranchised members of the colonized
communities in this country reflect the characteristics of populations
which have historically resorted to armed struggle to try to attain
liberation. And that when they start proportionately retaliating against
the ever-intensifying incidents of police brutality, their insurgency is
going to carry too much social weight to be ended simply by assassinating
movement leaders. The Africans, Natives, and indigenous brown immigrants
will have already taken on their rightful role as the vanguard of the
proletarian revolution on this continent, a role that they’ll be able to
take due to their disproportionate targeting and exploitation under
colonialism.

And at a certain point within our generation, the settler state’s
systematic destruction of their wealth and increasing brutalization of
their communities will leave them with no choice but to wage a revolt. A
revolt too resilient to be quelled by the loss of some of those within
their ranks. As Oriola speculates, “Entities operating independently will
spring up, but over time, a loose coalition may form to take credit for
actions of organizationally disparate groups for maximum effect. There will
likely be no single leader to neutralize at the onset. Like US global
counter-terrorism efforts, neutralizing leaders will only worsen matters.”

If the conditions of the colonized peoples in this country are going to get
this bad, the US counterinsurgency leaders will have an obstacle towards
the initial component of their strategy. As the *Joint Publication 3–24:
Counterinsurgency* manual describes, swaying a population towards the side
of the US military is indispensable to the military’s victory:

To be effective, officials involved in COIN [counterinsurgency] should
address two imperatives — political action and security — with equal
urgency, recognizing that insurgency is fundamentally an armed political
competition…. COIN functions, therefore, include informational, security,
political, economic, and development components, all of which are designed
to support the overall objective of establishing and consolidating control
by the HN [host nation] government. … This is the core of COIN, because it
provides a framework around which all other programs and activities are
organized. As described above, depending on the root causes of the
insurgency, the strategy may involve elements of political reform,
reconciliation, popular mobilization, and governmental capacity building.

Oriola’s prediction says that when the revolt starts, black elites will
join the settler ruling class in calling for “peace.” This unity between
colonialism and the country’s tiny black bourgeoisie will be used to spin
the narrative that black America is overwhelmingly opposed to the actions
of the “extremist” rebels, and that whites should therefore feel no guilt
in reporting insurgency participants or insurgency sympathizers. The
liberal NGO-industrial complex, and its deep ties to the media, will come
in handy throughout this “pro-peace” propaganda campaign.

But this won’t be enough to end the revolt, prompting the anti-insurgency
propaganda to take on a more paranoid nature.

If this revolt can’t be stopped through targeted assassinations, it
certainly won’t be stopped by denunciations of the “extremist” insurgents.
As Oriola says, “African American leaders will likely be helpless to stop
the insurgency. Anyone who strongly denounces it in public may lose
credibility among the people. Authenticity would mean developing a way to
accommodate the insurgents in public rhetoric while condemning them in
private.” And there’s where the necessity for creating an atmosphere of
paranoia will come in; to make a movement with this much popular backing
appear to lack credibility, the state will have to portray the rebels not
just as “extremists,” but as agents of a conspiracy by Washington’s
adversaries.

This is the approach that Colombia’s white supremacist government has taken
towards demonizing the anti-austerity and anti-colonial protests that have
been rattling the country. The Colombian government, with the direction of
a neo-Nazi faction
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/neo-nazi-advising-colombia-police-break-national-strike/277048/>
that’s
taken control over law enforcement, has been attributing
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/neo-nazi-advising-colombia-police-break-national-strike/277048/>
the demonstrations and all related anti-neoliberal organizations to a
subversion plot by “Castro-Chavismo.” This fearmongering about foreign
interference is part of the “dissipated molecular revolution” theory, a
model for counterinsurgency developed by Colombia’s fascist former
president Álvaro Uribe. It posits that by treating everyone that challenges
free-market fanaticism—from human rights organizations to unions to civil
society—as part of this supposed foreign-orchestrated conspiracy, the
government will be able to preemptively stamp out Colombia’s potential
socialist revolution on a molecular level.

RELATED CONTENT: US Dollar — and Washington’s Military Primacy — Lurch
Closer Towards Collapse
<https://orinocotribune.com/us-dollar%e2%80%8a-%e2%80%8aand-washingtons-military-primacy%e2%80%8a-%e2%80%8alurch-closer-towards-collapse/>

The neoconservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, which has put forth
statements
<https://www.heritage.org/americas/commentary/colombia-being-threatened-leftist-violence-bidens-silence-deafening>
endorsing
facets of Uribe’s conspiracy theory, has already adopted
<https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/beijing-funding-riots-america-its-time-investigate>
the equivalent tactic for demonizing BLM. Last fall the think tank utilized
US claims of Chinese interference, along with debunked
<https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8yURIS7S9zg> Xinjiang atrocity propaganda
from the fat-right Christian propagandist Adrian Zenz, to bolster its
argument for China being behind the protests:

The Chinese Communist Party has an interest in sowing discord in the US,
particularly during an election year. Robert O’Brien, President Donald
Trump’s national security adviser, last month said the CCP has targeted US
election infrastructure with cyberattacks. Criticizing America for systemic
racism is not just hypocritical but a convenient distraction from the
Chinese Communist Party’s human rights violations against Uighurs and other
Turkic Muslim minorities in China’s Xinjiang province. Americans have a
right to know who is behind the continued violence in our cities. As a
sovereign nation, we should know whether a foreign government is fueling
this internal damage to our country. The US government should connect the
dots and investigate the extent of the Chinese Communist Party’s support
for the Black Lives Matter organization and the riots. It’s past time for
answers.

When the anti-police insurgency starts, these kinds of conspiracy theories
about the anti-colonial liberation movement will be more broadly embraced
by the media. At least among the settlers who’ve psychologically separated
themselves from the oppression of the colonized, and who therefore won’t be
sympathetic to the actions of the insurgents, this will make the insurgency
appear lacking in legitimacy. Which will create the perceived justification
for the atrocities that the occupier is going to carry out to try to crush
the rebellion.

*Censorship*
To get its counterrevolutionary propaganda accepted going into these next
several decades, the government will have to wall off the country’s
communities from information that counters the official narratives. US
military analysts see the contradictions that are piling up within our
society, and they see pacifying the population to make way for a military
clampdown as the only solution. A 2016 US Army War College document
clarified <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/12/21/city-d21.html> how
important these class warfare strategists view public perceptions, stating:

Presenting compelling narratives can enhance legitimacy and authority in
the eyes of many stakeholders (such as the urban population). Understanding
the utility and power of digital media, therefore, allows for enormous
reach and breadth that can indirectly alter the battlefield. The
user-friendliness of mass media and mobile technology allows adversaries to
manipulate and garner favorable public opinion and recruit support. For
these reasons and more, civilian and military leaders cannot afford to
ignore the requirement for compelling narratives. In the final analysis,
the battle of narratives and the contradictions of security are likely to
be at the forefront, especially as the most likely contingencies will be
humanitarian or stabilization operations. Moreover, such operations could
even take place within the continental United States, as demonstrated by
the Los Angeles riots and the responses to Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm
Sandy. Presenting a positive image of the military to the American public
is indispensable for continued support.

To counter the domestic “civil unrest” and “anarchy” that the report says
will materialize in the coming decades due to widening inequality, drastic
crackdowns on the flow of information are being planned. The War College
report says that “class conflict” might

…greatly complicate the post-combat, pacification, and occupation
periods…the restoration of order and stability would have to accompany if
not precede major disaster relief operations. This effort could also create
opposition…The other problem when dealing with cyberspace in relation to
megacity contingencies is that adversaries can exploit the almost automatic
transparency that it creates — both to show US forces in bad light and
their own actions very positively…Part of IPB [intelligence preparation for
the urban battlefield] prior to any action in a megacity or sub-megacity
must be to identify the services providers for both telecommunications and
the Internet. It is also important to identify online opinion-makers who
could have a major impact in any controversy over US military intervention.

Why are these analysts emphasizing telecommunications? Commentator Eric
London, who’s written
<https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/12/21/city-d21.html> an article
about this report, speculates that it’s because “invasion plans must
involve efforts to shut down the internet, cell phone service, and ensure
the local media publishes only US military propaganda.” This is the tactic
that the imperialists and their neo-colonial proxies have used in response
to Colombia’s protests, with a suspicious internet disruption having
occurred
<https://netblocks.org/reports/internet-disrupted-in-colombia-amid-anti-government-protests-YAEvMvB3>
in early May of this year—right when the demonstrators most needed
communications and journalism.

So those within the US cities that the military might invade—which is
essentially every city—should prepare for an even more extreme version of
this censorship. This can be done by forming
<https://iaf-fai.org/2020/10/11/skills-for-revolutionary-survival-5-communications-equipment-for-rebels/>
independent,
radio-based communications networks between revolutionary cadre members.

And why does the War College emphasize identifying online “opinion-makers”?
Because journalists who will try to expose the state’s coming domestic war
crimes, like everyone else who challenges the US empire in the coming
decades, are going to increasingly have targets on their backs. The US
empire’s show trial and torture of Julian Assange, which have been done in
response to WikiLeaks exposing US war crimes in Iraq, show how similar
journalists are going to be treated when they reveal the truth about how
the US military treats its own people.

When the situation on the ground gets too hectic for the government to be
able to detain these journalists, or when the military simply wants to be
efficient in smoking out threats within the information war, the military
could simply try to kill these reporters on the spot. This is what the U.S.
did to al-Jazeera’s journalists in Iraq during Washington’s battles to take
down the Fallujah guerrilla resistance. Al-Jazeera’s reporters, who were
some of the only ones to expose US atrocities, reported repeatedly
<https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/jul/13/Iraqandthemedia.broadcasting1>
coming
under fire from U.S. forces. Specifically fighter jets.

At one point, when the US demanded al-Jazeera leave Fallujah as a condition
for a cease-fire, the US punished al-Jazeera for not leaving by bombing the
house where the network’s reporters had been in the night prior. The owner
of the home died, another one of the many casualties of Washington’s
attempt to effectively colonize Iraq.

>From then on, every time the fighter jets spotted these reporters they
became under fire. The US neo-colonial regime in Iraq justified this by
claiming
<https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/cpa-iraq/transcripts/20040411_Apr11_KimmittSenor.html>
that al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya were “misreporting facts on the ground and
contributing to a sense of anger and frustration.” The same accusations
will be made against those who try to expose what the military is going to
do to those within US borders in the coming decades, and these journalists
will face the same kinds of extreme violence.

And it’s not just the military, the police, or the intelligence agencies
that are going to be participating in this campaign to snuff out
journalism. The ruling class is importing para-state methods for
repression. Methods that have been used in brutal recent U.S. foreign
occupations like Washington’s dictatorial rule over the Iraqi city of
Fallujah, or Washington’s reign of terror over Afghanistan that depends
<https://soundcloud.com/empire-files/cia-stories-death-squads-in-afghanistan>
on CIA death squads. In both of these countries, private military
contractors have been taking on an increasing role, especially as Biden
pulls official troops out of the region and replaces them with mercenaries.
And such mercenaries are already taking on the role of surveilling
journalists within US borders, no doubt with the ultimate objective of
terrorizing these journalists into submission.

RELATED CONTENT: Gaza: a Vision of What Capital & Empire Intend for the
Rest of the Globe
<https://orinocotribune.com/gaza-a-vision-of-what-capital-empire-intend-for-the-rest-of-the-globe/>

*Surveillance*
This month in Minneapolis, a mercenary company whose contractors refuse to
name their employer has descended on the city. They’re there to suppress
protests against last month’s killing of Winston Smith. Smith, a black man
who the US Marshall Service attempted to arrest, didn’t behave the exact
way the officers would have preferred, and was effectively executed on the
spot as punishment.

Smith’s story is a case not just of censorship—with police refusing to
release the footage of the event that might contradict their claim about
Smith provoking the officers—but recently turned into a case of
surveillance. Because when the mercenaries have been unable to prevent
their own recent atrocities from being exposed to the public, they’ve begun
keeping tabs on the people who’ve exposed them.

Earlier this month, as the Smith protesters in Minneapolis were holding an
open-air conference to describe their experiences with the mercenaries to
journalists, a reporter from the news outlet Unicorn Riot wrote
<https://mobile.twitter.com/UR_Ninja/status/1417531793239121922> online
that “A mercenary is perched high in the parking ramp taking cell phone
pics of the press conference right now.” Below this statement the reporter
included a photo of a man with shades and a baseball cap in a dark room
above, snapping pictures seemingly both with his phone and with a camera on
a tripod next to him.

Are the speakers and journalists at this event now in danger because of
this? Given that these speakers said this mercenary company has inflicted
brain trauma on protesters, physically grabbed them, and profiled them,
this situation presents an elevation in the level of the danger which
activists and journalists in this country normally face. (Which is a high
danger as is.) The totally unaccountable and disconnected nature of these
mercenaries relative to the community they’re operating within has made it
seemingly benign for them to stalk people who dare to speak out. And it’s
this extra layer of impunity which privatized surveillance affords that’s
going to make the domestic counterinsurgency—which in Minneapolis is
already in its early stages—heavily rely on privatized spying.

The 2016 War College document describes that when the military invades and
occupies America’s urban areas—or when it conducts domestic operations
against rebels in any other places — mass surveillance is going to be
integral. It recommends using “human intelligence assets” within these
conflict zones, which that mercenary company is evidently already providing
in Minneapolis. The company has also been reported to be operating a
“fusion center” within the city, which has potentially involved the types
of protest infiltrators and agent provocateurs who were sent
<https://theintercept.com/2020/11/15/standing-rock-tigerswan-infiltrator-documents/>
into
Standing Rock by the mercenary company TigerSwan.

TigerSwan also set up an entire de facto intelligence center, but not in
response to protests as small-scale as the Smith demonstrations. Which
shows just how paranoid the US National Security State has recently become,
and how prevalent these privatized spook hubs will become by the time the
insurgency starts.

Drones will also be involved in this effort to totally monitor cities. The
War College says that “Human intelligence assets will be able to offer far
greater insight on adversaries because of their ability to capture emotions
and relationships — things that will long remain outside the purview of
even the most sophisticated drones.” By measure of surveillance, the
impoverished neighborhoods of places like Minneapolis could become like
Gaza, where drones are a constant threat in terms of both surveillance and
weaponry. The *Washington Post* reported
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-gaza-lives-shaped-by-drones/2011/11/30/gIQAjaP6OO_story.html>
in
2011 that:

Across northern Gaza, the response to the arrival of drones overhead is
swift and, for some, almost involuntary. Their near-constant presence
shapes life beneath them in a thousand ways—from how Islamist militants
communicate to the color of exercise clothes chosen for a morning jog to
the quality of satellite-television reception. When the buzz begins, an
unemployed tailor in the hilltop village of Ezret Abed Rabbo walks to his
window and opens it—one, then another, until the glass in all of them is
safe from what he expects to be an imminent blast. The most recent rocked
the area in late October when Israel responded with drones and F-16s to the
attack on Ashkelon, killing nine Palestinian militants. “For us, drones
mean death,” said Hamdi Shaqqura, a deputy director of the human rights
center. “When you hear drones, you hear death.”

Israel’s innovations in necro-politics will contribute to America’s
internal counterinsurgency in additional ways. Quoting European
researchers, the War College also mentions that “The basic notion is that
citizens with smartphones have become mobile sensors, reporting on events
in the city with tweets, photos, messages, and the like. ‘This transforms
human beings into potential sensors that not only have the ability to
process and interpret what they feel and think but also to geographically
localize the information (sometimes involuntarily) and spread it globally
through the Internet, thus drawing people-generated landscapes.’” In
addition to the numerous other ways US internal security has been “
Israelified
<https://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/from-occupation-to-occupy-the-israelification-of-american-domestic-decurity/>”
in this last decade or so, Israelification and privatization are playing
dual roles in bringing this surveillance vision to fruition. As the* Washington
Post* reported
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/nso-spyware-pegasus-cellphones/?utm_campaign=pwrem-usa&utm_medium=acq-nat&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=interactive-pegasus-project&fbclid=IwAR3DsSp_PMeB-WeEkBBq9mIlHv51_uO26rdwsptGZHsWvEJ0cpDxHTfzEO4>
this
month:

Military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for
tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful
hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists,
business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal
Khashoggi, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and 16
media partners The phones appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers
that are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their
citizens and also known to have been clients of the Israeli firm, NSO
Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private
spyware industry, the investigation found.

Since the NSO describes its clients as “60 intelligence, military and law
enforcement agencies in 40 countries,” this tactic of mobile device
infiltration could easily be used in the counterinsurgency surveillance
effort that the War College anticipates. It will be as easy as a flip of
the switch. And in the zones where this Zionist-facilitated private
surveillance network has established the most intense presence, the mass
spying will consist not just of drones, police cameras, mercenary cameras,
movement infiltrator spies, and digital monitoring. It will also include
high-tech surveillance towers that can perpetually watch every outdoor
person and vehicle within a radius of up to 7.5 miles.

These are the monitoring devices that the Israeli tech firm Elbit has built
<https://theintercept.com/2019/08/25/border-patrol-israel-elbit-surveillance/>
along the US border in recent years. The purpose of the towers is to
immediately alert the border patrol whenever an indigenous southern migrant
enters US territory, similarly to how Israel gets its forces to kill any
Palestinian who tries to flee the impoverished Gaza strip. “Now we won’t be
able to go anywhere near here without the big US-Israeli eyes monitoring
us, watching our every move,” reported
<https://theintercept.com/2019/08/25/border-patrol-israel-elbit-surveillance/>
one
member of the indigenous Tohono O’odham community, which lives continuously
under the watch of this system.

And the system is going to expand much further. The company aims to
eventually establish the same kinds of towers along the northern border,
and within the country’s ports and harbors. If you live near one of these
places, The Intercept has described
<https://theintercept.com/2019/08/25/border-patrol-israel-elbit-surveillance/>
what
you’ll be subjected to:

US Customs and Border Protection will soon construct a 160-foot
surveillance tower…The tower will be outfitted with high-definition cameras
with night vision, thermal sensors, and ground-sweeping radar, all of which
will feed real-time data to Border Patrol agents at a central operating
station in Ajo, Arizona. The system will store an archive with the ability
to rewind and track individuals’ movements across time—an ability known as
“wide-area persistent surveillance.”

All the ways that the imperialists accuse countries like China, north
Korea, and Cuba of being dictatorial, the imperialists are themselves. And
as their empire continues to decline, they’ll keep importing these tactics
in necro-politics from foreign colonial laboratories like Israel and Latin
America.

We in the core of the empire are going to be met with a concentrated
version of the horrors that our government has inflicted upon Iraqis,
Colombians, Palestinians, and so many others. And for the colonized peoples
within US borders, like the Tohono O’odham or the African communities of
Minneapolis, these horrors are already here; they’re just extensions of the
colonial genocide that these nations have been subjected to since the start
of colonialism. Philadelphia police bombed
<https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/8/8/20747198/philadelphia-bombing-1985-move>
a neighborhood to snuff out a black liberation group in 1985, and the US
government was shooting
<https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/police-violence-against-native-americans-goes-far-beyond-standing-rock/>
unarmed
indigenous civilians at Standing Rock just five years ago. The precedents
for what the military is planning have long been set by colonialism.

To survive the domestic bombing campaigns, house raids, death squads,
arbitrary detentions, massacres, tank firings, drone strikes, and other
warfare tactics that the state will meet us with after the revolt begins,
we revolutionaries within the US must adopt the resistance tactics of those
fighting against imperialism’s warfare abroad. These tactics, which range
from forming radio-based communications channels to building
morale-resilient cadres to operating with special stealth protocols, are
only logical to embrace in the face of the state’s plot to bring its own
global warfare approaches home.


Rainer Shea

Rainer Shea exposes the lies of capitalism and imperialism while
encouraging people to fight for a socialist revolution. Go to my Patreon
here: patreon.com <https://t.co/d0wE7iHfS5?amp=1>
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