The Empire Strikes Back - 5

Dredd Blog has been doing a series about how the federal government strikes at those who would oppose, or shine light on, certain of its indiscretions.

Of course we are not the only blog so doing, nor are we the best investigative reporters on the subject, in fact we often take what others find out, to then extrapolate with Dredd Blog caricatures and psychological symbolism, to try to give readers a unique, or at least a more rare, perspective.

Let's start with another view on the matter of the empire striking back:

The Obama DOJ's effort to force New York Times investigative journalist Jim Risen to testify in a whistleblower prosecution and reveal his source is really remarkable and revealing in several ways; it should be receiving much more attention than it is. On its own, the whistleblower prosecution and accompanying targeting of Risen are pernicious, but more importantly, it underscores the menacing attempt by the Obama administration -- as Risen yesterday pointed out -- to threaten and intimidate whistleblowers, journalists and activists who meaningfully challenge what the government does in secret.

The subpoena to Risen was originally issued but then abandoned by the Bush administration, and then revitalized by Obama lawyers. It is part of the prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent whom the DOJ accuses of leaking to Risen the story of a severely botched agency plot -- from 11 years ago -- to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program, a story Risen wrote about six years after the fact in his 2006 best-selling book, State of War. The DOJ wants to force Risen to testify under oath about whether Sterling was his source.

(Greenwald, Salon). At the Toxins of Power Blog in the post The Toxic Bridge To Everywhere, certain toxins are fingered as a source of this kind of Big Brother mentality.

But more than that, since the facts of this case span both the Bush II Regime and the Obama Regime, you might want to read The Territorial Realm Of The Toxins Of Power, a post which indicates that a meme complex can develop, propagate, and then perpetuate itself.

In the case cited in the quote above, the normal, legitimate government-secrecy meme, which appropriately keeps certain things secret, was infected with a toxin of power.

That toxic infection worked in a manner that corrupted the meme's normal pattern in the brain of the host of the meme, as shown in the series A Structure RE: Corruption of Memes.

Once infected, carriers of the toxin began to want to make more and more things secret, in an inappropriate Big Brother way, eventually demanding that everything be made secret.

As the toxins strengthen, those in the government secrecy meme complex then experience a morph in their ideology to the point where they even begin to want to imprison those who have a different view of government secrecy (journalists, whistle blowers, activists, scholars, etc.).

As the toxic memes replicate to then spread throughout the government secrecy meme complex, those memes eventually can propagate to other hosts allowing them to last from one presidential administration to another, in effect becoming a perpetual cognitive epidemic.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.