1984: Thread

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Pols running mind control on Pols as usual...


Russian Invasion Has Elevated "Treason"-Mania To Never-Before-Seen-Heights

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/romneys-treason-smear-of-tulsi-gabbard

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill on
Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Kent Nishimura / Los
Angeles Times via Getty Images); Lt. Col. Tulsi Gabbard, former
Congresswoman from Hawaii (Wikipedia Creative Commons)

The crime of "treason” is one of the gravest an American citizen can
commit, if not the gravest. It is one of the few crimes other than
murder for which execution is still a permissible punishment under
both U.S. federal law and the laws of several states. The framers of
the U.S. Constitution were so concerned about the temptation to abuse
this term — by depicting political dissent as a criminalized betrayal
of one's country — that they chose to define and limit how this crime
could be applied by inserting this limiting paragraph into the
Constitution itself; reflecting the gravity and temptation to abuse
accusations of "treason,” it is the only crime they chose to define in
the U.S. Constitution. Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution
states:

    Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying
War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and
Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the
testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in
open Court.

Treason was the only crime to be explicitly defined and limited by the
Founders because they sought “to guard against the historic use of
treason prosecutions by repressive governments to silence otherwise
legitimate political opposition.” In other words, the grave danger
anticipated by the Founders was that "treason” would radically expand
to include any criticisms of or opposition to official U.S. Government
policy, activities they sought in the Bill of Rights to enshrine as an
inviolable right of U.S. citizenship, not turn it into a capital
crime.

In a 2017 op-ed in The Washington Post, law professor Carlton Larson
reviewed the increasing tendency to call other Americans "traitors”
and explained: “Speaking against the government, undermining political
opponents, supporting harmful policies or even placing the interests
of another nation ahead of those of the United States are not acts of
treason under the Constitution. Regarding the promiscuous use of the
word by liberals against Trump, Professor Larson wrote: “An enemy is a
nation or an organization with which the United States is in a
declared or open war . Nations with whom we are formally at peace,
such as Russia, are not enemies.” For that reason, even Americans
actively helping the Soviet Union during the Cold War could not be
accused of “treason” given that there was no declaration of war
against the USSR. Using the most extreme hypothetical he could think
of to illustrate the point, he explained: “Indeed, Trump could give
the U.S. nuclear codes to Vladimir Putin or bug the Oval Office with a
direct line to the Kremlin and it would not be treason, as a legal
matter.”

For that reason, treason has rarely been prosecuted in the U.S.:
“according to the FBI, the U.S. government has successfully convicted
fewer than 12 Americans for treason in the nation’s history.” While
Americans who rebelled against the British crown were technically
traitors, as were those who waged war against the union during the
Civil War, prosecutions have been exceedingly rare. That means that
through all the various wars the U.S. has fought from the 18th Century
until now — the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, the
Mexican-American War, the two World Wars of the 20th Century, the Cold
War, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the dirty wars in Central America,
the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, the War on Terror — the number of
total treason prosecutions is less than a dozen. That is because
Americans understood, based on constitutional constraints and Supreme
Court law restricting its scope, that this crime is very difficult to
charge and applies only in the narrowest of circumstances.

That understanding is now gone. During the War on Terror and the
invasion of Iraq, neocons routinely accused war opponents and skeptics
of their “anti-terrorism” civil liberties assaults of being traitors.
David Frum's stint as Bush White House speechwriter enshrined this
"patriotism” attack as his and their speciality. Bush and Cheney's
speeches, especially leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the 2002
midterms, and then the 2004 re-election campaign, inevitably featured
innuendo if not explicit claims that Americans opposed to their war
policies were against America and on the side of the terrorists: i.e.,
traitors. The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson produced a campaign ad for
the 2002 Georgia Senate race morphing the face of the Democratic
incumbent Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, into Osama bin
Laden's. Upon leaving the White House, Frum continued to build his
career on impugning the patriotism and loyalty of anyone — right,
left, or in between — who opposed all the various wars he wanted to
send other people's children to go fight and die in.

But it was the Trump era that transformed treason accusations from a
periodic transgression into the standard, reflexive way of criticizing
Trump and his movement. Indeed, Frum now performs the same service as
he did during the early Bush years at The Atlantic, CNN and MSNBC,
where he is most beloved by Democrats for casting this same aspersion
against any opponents of Democratic Party politicians. From the middle
of the 2016 campaign to this very day, accusing one's political
adversaries of being traitors to the U.S. — in the form of Russian
agents — have become so common that Democrats now barely know any
other insult to express. An entire generation has been trained to
believe that “treason” is the crime of expressing views that undermine
Democratic Party leaders, diverge from the U.S. security state, and/or
dispute the consensus of the U.S. corporate press.

The four-year CIA/media "scandal” that dominated the Trump years was
nothing but one protracted, melodramatic treason accusation. The
dominant narrative insisted that Trump and his allies were controlled
by Moscow, subservient to the Kremlin, and were acting to promote
Russian over American interests. That Trump was loyal not to the
country that elected him but, instead, to an adversarial nation is
something Democrats now believe as an article of faith.

So trivialized and banalized were accusations of treason over the last
six years that body language analysis became sufficient to allege it.
When Trump and Putin met in Helsinki in July, 2018, journalists and
politicians joined random DNC loyalists in citing Trump's purportedly
submissive posture, tweeting the hashtag “TreasonSummit” over and
over. The Washington Post tapped "body language experts” to announce
in its headline: “In battle for nonverbal dominance at U.S.-Russia
summit, Putin was the clear winner, experts say.” Former CIA Director
John Brennan pronounced: “Donald Trump’s press conference performance
in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes &
misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of treasonous.” As Trump traveled
to that summit, the most embittered political loser in world history,
Hillary Clinton, tweeted: “Question for President Trump as he meets
Putin: Do you know which team you play for?"; the next day, following
their joint press conference, she proclaimed: “well, now we know.”

    Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to &
exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing
short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is
wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???
    — John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) July 16, 2018

One of the former New York Times reporters hired by The Intercept in a
needy attempt to vest the site with popularity among the corporate
press, James Risen, rode the Helsinki media wave with a 2018 article
headlined: “Is Trump a Traitor?” He of course answered it with
innuendo designed to suggest an affirmative answer, and was duly
rewarded with an appearance the next night on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show,
where Risen and the host explored the same theme of treason. House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi “asked" in 2019: “What does Putin have on
[Trump], politically, personally or financially?” Major magazine
covers frequently showed the Kremlin (or what they mistook as the
Kremlin) taking control of the White House. All of that carried over
to the hysterical and ongoing exaggeration of January 6, which was not
a mere riot but an insurrection, a "coup” attempt, incited and carried
out by "traitors” to the United States.
The Intercept, James Risen, Feb. 16, 2018; MSNBC's Chris Hayes, Feb. 17, 2018.

Hillary Clinton's campaign relied on little else beyond accusing Trump
and anyone else who opposed her of being a Kremlin asset. In 2020,
Clinton decided to publicly claim, without a whiff of evidence, that
then-Democratic-presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who
volunteered to fight in the Iraq War which Clinton demanded and who is
now a U.S. Army Reserves Lt. Colonel, was being "groomed by the
Russians” to run as a third-party candidate (as usual, Clinton lied:
upon dropping out of the Democratic primary, Gabbard immediately
endorsed Joe Biden for president).

(That someone is an American war veteran or current member of the U.S.
military, like Lt. Col. Gabbard, does not and should not immunize them
from criticism. That goes without saying. Members of the military are
just as prone to error or other failings as anyone else. But —
contrary to the current liberal understanding — there is an enormous
difference between merely criticizing someone and accusing the person
of being a traitor and/or a Russian agent. And it does seem advisable
to expect that people who constantly cheer U.S. wars and demand that
others besides themselves and their children go fight and die in them
— such as Hillary and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) — at least think twice
before accusing those who have volunteered to fight for their country
in those wars of being guilty of treason or being an agent of a
foreign power. Such caution — based on the recognition that "traitors”
to the U.S. are unlikely to volunteer to risk their lives for the U.S.
— doesn't seem like too much to ask.)

As pervasive as “traitor” accusations were during the Trump
presidency, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has elevated this
"treason” mania to never-before-seen heights. Everyone and anyone who
questions or deviates in any way from the prevailing bipartisan
consensus is accused of being a treasonous Russian agent based on the
slightest infraction. The two public figures most vilified as traitors
in the lead-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine were former Rep.
Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), now a U.S. Army Reserves Lt. Colonel, and Fox
News host Tucker Carlson. In that pre-invasion vilification campaign,
a preview was offered for how intolerant the climate would be for any
questioning, no matter how rational or partial, and how casually the
treason accusation would be weaponized against anyone who spoke
off-key.

Indeed, the comments of the former Congresswoman and the Fox cable
host which triggered this avalanche of public accusations were
stunningly benign. Gabbard's crime was that she echoed twenty years of
statements by U.S. officials and scholars across the spectrum by
arguing that NATO expansion up to the Russian borders, and
particularly the prospect of membership for Ukraine, was genuinely
threatening to Moscow; thus, she argued, the U.S. and NATO, in order
to attempt to diplomatically avert a horrific war, should formalize
its intent not to offer NATO membership to the country occupying the
most sensitive and vulnerable part of the border with Russia.
Carlson’s sin was also to express a view that many in Washington —
including former presidents Obama and Trump — had long affirmed:
namely, that while Ukraine is not a vital interest to the U.S., it is
and always will be to Russia, and therefore there is no reason the
U.S. should even consider involvement in a military confrontation
between the two over that country. As The Atlantic's editor-in-chief
Jeffrey Goldberg put it after extensively interviewing Obama in 2016
about his foreign policy "doctrine”:

    Obama's theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest
but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain
escalatory dominance there. . . . "The fact is that Ukraine, which is
a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination
by Russia no matter what we do," [Obama] said.

One need not agree with Gabbard's proposed pre-war diplomatic solution
to see the utter madness of accusing her of being a traitor or Russian
agent for advocating it (we will never know whether it would have
worked, since Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeatedly rejected
such a concession based on the apparently sacrosanct determination
that the U.S. “will uphold the principle of NATO's open door" even if
that "open door" is situated right on the most sensitive region of
Russia's border, which was twice used in the 20th Century alone to
attack them, costing them tens of millions of Russian lives). Nor must
one agree with Carlson's view — that Ukraine and its borders are of
insufficient strategic importance to the U.S. to warrant risking
American treasure or lives (to say nothing of a potential nuclear war)
to defend it — in order to find repugnant the notion that this is a
"treasonous” thought to express. Yet each of them was repeatedly and
vocally accused of treason and being a Kremlin apologist if not an
outright asset merely for advocating such intrinsically rational
perspectives, ones long deemed mainstream in Washington until about
three weeks ago, when they instantly became taboo.

This week featured perhaps the lowliest and sleaziest treason
accusations yet. On Sunday night, Gabbard posted a two-minute video
online in which she said something completely indisputable:
“indisputable” in the sense that the U.S. Government itself admits it
and nobody contests it. She did not say that there are bio weapons
labs in Ukraine: either ones funded by the U.S. or anyone else. What
she did say — in her characteristically clear and blunt manner — is
that there are labs in Ukraine in which dangerous pathogens are being
cultivated and stored, and that it is reckless in the extreme for the
U.S. and/or Ukraine not to have secured or disposed of them when
Russian troops were massed on the Ukrainian border, indicating the
high possibility of an invasion that could result in these pathogens
being accidentally released during war.

Gabbard's warning is scarcely different from what U.S. Under Secretary
of State Victoria Nuland said when testifying last Monday in the
Senate, in response to Sen. Marco Rubio's (R-FL) question of whether
“Ukraine has biological or chemical weapons” (we examined Nuland's
response here); what U.S. officials themselves claimed in response to
questions about Nuland's comments; and what Reuters reported were the
warnings from the World Health Organization about the dangers of
Ukrainian labs. A separate Reuters article designed to debunk Russian
accusations about bioweapons labs in Ukraine noted that Ukraine's
"laboratories have received support from the United States, European
Union and World Health Organization.”

And as we documented in a video report broadcast this week, the
distinction between a “bioweapons lab” and what Nuland described as
Ukraine's “biological research facilities” is often mere semantics in
U.S. jargon. The U.S. indisputably develops biological weapons (the
2001 attack using highly sophisticated weaponized anthrax strains came
from a U.S. Army lab, according to the FBI, and the U.S. has funded
the work of Chinese scientists to manipulate coronaviruses to make
them more contagious and lethal), yet nonetheless insists they are not
“biological weapons” because the motive in developing those weapons is
to study, not deploy, them. Thus, if Ukraine's labs had weaponized
biological pathogens but the U.S. believed they were developed for the
purpose of studying rather than unleashing them, the U.S. would insist
that there are no “biological weapons” in these labs even though they
are identical to what one would manufacture with a more nefarious
intention.

Despite Gabbard's anodyne concerns, the response to her, as well as to
Carlson for featuring guests (including me) to discuss this biolabs
story, has been as dangerous as it is unhinged. On March 10, The Daily
Beast posted a sensationalized tabloid tweet promoting its article
about Gabbard that went mega-viral, designed to feed into the innuendo
that Gabbard is a Kremlin agent. The tweet, retweeted by ten thousand
people, screams: "EXCLUSIVE: Russian-American national Elena Branson
was indicted this week for lobbying for pro-Kremlin policies while not
registered as a foreign agent. She gave to one U.S. politician: Tulsi
Gabbard.” One has to read to the fifth paragraph of the article to
learn that “the combined total of those donations isn’t colossal by
any means—a whopping $59.95.”

To ensure that their smear of Gabbard as a likely Kremlin asset is not
dissipated by this rather dispositive fact — that an American citizen
whom Gabbard never met and does not know donated a trivial sum to her
campaign —The Daily Beast quickly added that the donations, despite
the paltry and laughable sum, "do raise questions about why an alleged
Russian agent, tasked with currying favor with U.S. politicians, would
zero in on Gabbard, and only Gabbard.” In the article's very first
paragraph, the smear artists at this tabloid made their intentions
clear: that this “new development this week is sure to reinforce the
half-jokes that Gabbard is a 'Russian asset'; as it turns out, her
campaign took money from one” (by “Russian asset," The Daily Beast
mean an American citizen accused by the DOJ but not convicted, a vital
distinction which all authoritarian state-media outlets like The Daily
Beast no longer recognize).

On Monday, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) considerably escalated the attacks
on Gabbard's patriotism. In a mega-viral tweet, the
four-time-draft-dodging, son-of-a-rich-politician, investment-banker
Republican — who skipped the Vietnam War after protesting in favor of
it, opting instead to send other Americans to fight and die, and then
justified the fact that all five of his sons avoided military service
on the grounds that helping him get elected was their "service” —
accused the life-long Army officer and Iraq War veteran of being a
traitor:

    Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda. Her
treasonous lies may well cost lives.
    — Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) March 13, 2022

Romney's endorsement of this “treason" accusation seemed to have given
the green light to liberals to reveal their true authoritarian selves
in all of their grotesque, naked darkness. On Monday, the hosts of
ABC’s The View, led by Ana Navarro, demanded that Gabbard and Carlson
be criminally investigated by the DOJ over their views about the war
in Ukraine (on Twitter, Navarro reaffirmed her call for a criminal
investigation of the pair, arguing that “persons engaged in domestic
political or advocacy work on behalf of foreign principals” are
engaged in a crime absent FARA disclosures: an odd view for someone
whose career began by pressuring the U.S. Congress to fund and support
Nicaragua's death squads used by the contras — of which her father was
a member). The discredited-and-fired former FBI agent Peter Strzok
suggested that the two were involved in some form of sinister
“coordination.” The founding father of the current iteration of MSNBC,
Keith Olbermann, went a step further and argued that the duo should be
militarily detained and given a trial only if they are lucky and the
U.S. decides to be generous. People across the spectrum, including the
most banal liberal YouTube hosts, cheered Romney's deranged "treason”
accusation against Gabbard.

Romney's accusation that Lt. Col. Gabbard is guilty of treason is
repugnant and false for numerous reasons. First, as the vehemently
anti-Trump constitutional law site Just Security explained in 2017 as
it became increasingly acceptable to call Trump a "traitor” over his
alleged ties to Russia, the Constitution confines "treason” to aiding
and abetting an actual, declared “enemy” of the U.S., a term which
Russia — for reasoning that applied then and now — does not come close
to meeting (emphasis added):

    Whatever one thinks of Russia, Vladimir Putin, or the current
state of relations between it/them and the United States, we are not
at war with Russia. Full stop. Russia is therefore not an “enemy” of
the United States. Full stop. Collaborating with Russia is a serious
allegation, and may violate other federal laws. But treason is
something very special, unique, and specific under U.S. law–and, as my
friend and UC-Davis Professor Carlton Larsen has long explained, for
good reason. Let’s keep it that way.

In an article the following day, responding to their disappointed
critics who wanted desperately to call Trump a "traitor," that site's
constitutional law scholar Steve Vladeck explained how narrow of a
term “treason” is due to judicial rulings applying its scope. Among
other things, a country cannot be deemed to be at “War” with the U.S.
or an “enemy” of it absent a Congressional declaration of war against
it, which — thankfully — does not exist for Russia:

    There is no international armed conflict between the United States
and Russia, nor has Congress done anything to recognize one, so “war”
is out….[A] statute enacted not long after the treason statute–the
Alien Enemy Act of 1798–is much more specific about who alien
“enemies” are, referring to “all natives, citizens, denizens, or
subjects” of a country against which the United States has “declared
war.”

    This is an extremely narrow definition (we haven’t declared war
since 1942), and does not even cover the opposing side in un-declared
wars, such as Vietnam, the conflict against al Qaeda and its
affiliates, and so on. But even assuming, for the sake of argument,
that the treason statute is broader than the Alien Enemy Act, and that
opposing forces under more limited use-of-force authorizations are
indeed “enemies” for purposes of the treason statute (there are
vanishingly few examples of such prosecutions), it still requires, at
a minimum, the existence of an armed conflict under both domestic and
international law–something noticeably lacking with regard to the
United States and Russia.

So it is impossible — legally and Constitutionally speaking — to be a
"traitor” to the U.S. or be guilty of "treason” by helping Russia in
any way, given that the U.S. is not at war with Russia and that
country cannot be considered an “enemy” of the U.S. outside of the
crazed confines of liberal cable networks and newspaper op-ed pages.

But the more important reason why Romney's accusation is both ignorant
and authoritarian is that expression of political views — which is all
anyone can accuse Gabbard and Carlson of having done — cannot be
criminalized at all, let alone deemed treasonous. There is simply no
question that Gabbard's "guilty” opinions (the U.S. should have
promised not to offer NATO membership to Ukraine and it is urgent that
Ukraine's dangerous biological labs be secured) are constitutionally
protected speech under the First Amendment. That would be true even if
her expressed views had not been long-standing mainstream opinion in
the West for the last two decades. The same is obviously true of
Carlon's argument that Ukrainian borders are not vital enough
interests to the U.S. to warrant his country's involvement in that
conflict.

In other words, mainstream U.S. opinion-makers are now doing exactly
what the founders most feared: abusing the concepts of "treason” and
"traitor” to criminalize political dissent. As the Seventh Circuit
explained in its 1986 ruling about treason and sedition: “[t]he reason
for the restrictive definition is apparent from the historical
backdrop of the treason clause. The framers of the Constitution were
reluctant to facilitate such prosecutions because they were well aware
of abuses, and they themselves were traitors in the eyes of England.”
As two constitutional scholars, Paul Crane and Deborah Pearlstein
explained (emphasis added):

    While the Constitution’s Framers shared the centuries-old view
that all citizens owed a duty of loyalty to their home nation, they
included the Treason Clause not so much to underscore the seriousness
of such a betrayal, but to guard against the historic use of treason
prosecutions by repressive governments to silence otherwise legitimate
political opposition. Debate surrounding the Clause at the
Constitutional Convention thus focused on ways to narrowly define the
offense, and to protect against false or flimsy prosecutions.

This danger of weaponizing “treason” accusations against dissenters is
obviously heightened during wartime. The neocons’ propensity to hurl
treason accusations at anyone opposing their wars is part of what made
them so despised before they were re-branded as liberal heroes of the
#Resistance. And most of the worst civil liberties crises in U.S.
history arose from the desire to label war dissidents or those
suspected of misplaced allegiances as “treasonous": the Alien and
Sedition Act of 1798, the 1917 Espionage Act and Woodrow Wilson's
accompanying prosecutions of war opponents, the internment of
Japanese-Americans, the grave excesses of the McCarthy witch hunts.
But ever since Trump's election began to appear possible, accusing
political opponents of being traitors became a staple of liberal
discourse, and has greatly intensified in the wake of both 1/6 and now
the war in Ukraine.

One reason Romney's "treason” allegation against Gabbard attracted so
much attention is because, as a wealthy scion of a political and
financial dynasty, Romney is perceived (or at least expected) to be
more sober and responsible than the standard cable news or op-ed
#Resistance liberals, who call people “Russian agents” with greater
frequency and ease than most people buy socks. Yet the fact that the
2012 GOP presidential nominee so recklessly, inaccurately and
dangerously hurled this smear, this accusation of grave criminal
wrongdoing, against Gabbard illustrates just how authoritarian and
repressive the current climate has become.

If there is any one overarching, defining hallmark of a tyrannical
culture, it is the refusal to tolerate any dissent from or questioning
of official government policy, and to criminalize such dissent by
equating it with treason. Indeed, many of the same Americans who are
doing exactly this love to flamboyantly express horror as Russia does
the same against its own war opponents.

It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find any despot in
history who does not weaponize accusations of “treason" against
dissidents as a central instrument for control. That U.S. discourse
has now descended completely to that level is barely debatable. Just
look at the last forty-eight hours of treason accusations against
Gabbard, to say nothing of the last six years of liberal anti-Trump
mania, to see how acceptable and reflexive such behavior has become.