RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/the-attack-on-salman-rushdie-is-an-ominous-warning/

The news coming from New York State that the author Salman Rushdie has been stabbed onstage is both frightening and grim.

It is frightening because, without full details of how seriously injured Rushdie has been, it is tempting to fear the worst. Media reports initially suggested that Rushdie was well enough to walk off stage, but the news that he has been transported by air ambulance to a hospital after being stabbed in the neck suggests his injuries are severe. It is grim because any violence being done to a public figure is abhorrent, but in the case of Rushdie, it is almost inevitable that this particular incident has been occasioned by one of the most notorious cause celébrès that has ever been seen in the publishing world, namely the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.

When the book was published, Rushdie was already an established literary novelist, a Booker Prize winner for Midnight’s Children, whose every book was making waves in both British and American publishing. It was therefore either a bold or provocative move to write a novel that led to Rushdie being accused of blasphemy. A fatwa was declared upon him at the beginning of 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, which began a tidal wave of violence that included Rushdie’s Japanese translator being murdered, his Italian translator being seriously injured and his Norwegian publisher being shot. There was even a massacre in Turkey, resulting in the deaths of 37 people, and the intended target, Rushdie’s translator Aziz Nesin, only escaped death because his would-be assailants were unable to recognize him.

Leaving aside the literary merit of The Satanic Verses — it is not Rushdie’s most accessible, though certainly his most discussed — it represents a truly vile step for totalitarian thought that an author could be forced into hiding from his would-be killers, as Rushdie was for many years.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-white-house-privately-demanded

Alex Berenson

Biden Administration officials asked Twitter to ban me because of my tweets questioning the Covid vaccines, even as company employees believed I had followed Twitter’s rules, internal Twitter communications reveal.

In a White House meeting in April 2021, four months before Twitter suspended my account, the company faced “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform,” a Twitter employee wrote.

The employee recounted the meeting discussion afterwards on Twitter’s internal Slack messaging system. The message, and others, make clear that top federal officials targeted me specifically, potentially violating my basic First Amendment right to free speech.

The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter. But if the companies are acting on behalf of the federal government they can become “state actors” that must allow free speech and debate, just as the government does.

Previous efforts to file state action lawsuits against the government and social media companies for working together to ban users have failed. Courts have universally held that people who have been banned have not shown the specific demands from government officials that are necessary to support state action claims.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/garland-wray-clam-trump-search-after-information-free-all-ongoing-jan-6-probe

By John Solomon and Natalia Mittelstadt

Stoic like a judge delivering a verdict from the bench, Attorney General Merrick Garland declared Thursday he was playing things by the book and wouldn’t talk about the raid and ongoing investigation of former President Donald Trump.

“The Department of Justice will speak through its court filings and its work,” he said, declining to answer any of the multitude of questions Americans have, except that he approved the Monday raid on the 45th president’s home and doesn’t object to releasing the search warrant.

Garland, however, was hardly as tight-lipped about the other major ongoing investigation that has consumed his department: the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

In testimony, speeches and news interviews he has talked expansively about the nature of the probe, the forced collections of evidence and who and how many are being investigated — even as many defendants have not yet had their day in court.

Usually, it is taboo for federal prosecutors to talk about anything related to grand juries. But in his one-year anniversary speech, Garland gave the total number of grand jury subpoenas and search warrants executed, the amount of video footage collected, and the number of electronic devices seized through warrants and subpoenas. It was a rare moment of transparency in an evidence collection process normally shrouded in the same secrecy as the raid on Trump’s home and office.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/why-arent-our-generals-learning-daniel-greenfield/

A third of the way into his article, “Afghanistan Did Not Have to Turn Out This Way”, David Petraeus, former head of Central Command, who led forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and then headed the CIA, admits the war was never going to end.

“Some senior officials, including me, had cautioned that we would not be able to do in Afghanistan what we had done in Iraq—that though we might be able to drive violence down, we would not be able to ‘flip’ the country, as we had during the surge in Iraq, and provide it a whole new beginning,” he writes.

“When we recognized that we couldn’t ‘win’ the war, we did not even seriously consider that we might just ‘manage’ it,” Petraeus complains.

Managing the war would mean a permanent military presence in Afghanistan.

There was never any serious plan to withdraw from Afghanistan. Nation building, Petraeus argues, “was not just unavoidable; it was essential”. “How else do you help build the forces and capabilities that allow you to hand off crucial tasks—such as denying sanctuary to terrorists, securing the population and infrastructure, and running the country and its myriad institutions?”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/11/fbi-wont-let-facts-get-in-the-way-of-a-good-story/

“We have a saying in my office. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

So said FBI supervisory agent Henrik Impola to one of the FBI informants working the FBI-inspired, organized, and executed scheme to “kidnap” and “assassinate” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

That comment, made in December 2020, just a few months after several men were arrested for their alleged role in the plot, was repeated by a defense attorney during opening statements Wednesday morning in the retrial of two remaining defendants in the federal case. 

A Grand Rapids jury in April handed the Justice Department a shocking and rare defeat when jurors failed to return a single guilty verdict in what the government considers one of its biggest domestic terror investigations in decades. Two men were acquitted on every count after lawyers convinced the jury the men had been entrapped by the FBI; jurors couldn’t reach a verdict on alleged ringleader Adam Fox and Barry Croft, Jr. Both men now face a new trial.

Impola’s warning should be the FBI’s new motto; he also could be the poster boy for the modern-day FBI. Not only did he handle the main informant in the Whitmer operation, Impola worked out of the Detroit FBI field office when a man named Steven D’Antuono was in charge. The purpose of the caper, one with D’Antuono’s fingerprints all over it, was to produce negative news coverage for Trump while millions of Americans were voting for president in 2020; the president was accused of inspiring “white supremacist right-wing militias” to take out one of his most loathed political adversaries.

One week after the arrests in the Whitmer plot were announced on October 8, 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray invited D’Antuono to take over a plum assignment—head of the FBI field office in Washington, D.C. The promotion gave D’Antuono control of the most powerful FBI office in the country several weeks before the events of January 6.