VIDEO: Protesting George Friedman, CEO Of Stratfor, in Austin & San Francisco

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On January 22, journalist and political prisoner Barrett Brown was convicted in a Texas court of controversial charges. In addition to a 63-month sentence, Brown is expected to pay $890,250 in restitution to the private spy agency, Strategic Forecasting (a.k.a. “Stratfor”). This monumental fine, which turns a theoretically free citizen into an indentured servant of a corporation, is meant to hold Brown responsible for a hack by the Anonymous group LulzSec — even though the government admitted it didn’t have any concrete evidence to show he’d taken any material part in the hack.

Jeremy Hammond, a member of LulzSec, pled guilty in May of 2013 and was sentenced to ten years in prison. The hack, carried out under the instruction of the FBI’s agent saboteur and snitch Sabu, revealed millions of emails that showed the complex interrelationship between the private intelligence firm, multinational corporations, and the surveillance state. The emails also revealed how Stratfor had infiltrated activist groups from Texas to India.

On February 2, 2015, George Friedman, Stratfor’s CEO, was scheduled to sign his book “Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe,” at Book People, an independent bookstore in Austin, Texas. It would be Hammond’s 1,065th day in prison; Brown had been incarcerated for 874.

George Friedman, you should have expected us.

Private Sadism Companies & The Torture Report

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Although the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence study itself is noticeably reticent to call what the CIA did torture, mostly using the word in footnotes, and talking about laws against, and concerns about, torture it does say, in the foreword by Committee chairman Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), that, “While the Office of Legal Counsel found otherwise between 2002 and 2007, it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured.”

People will be furiously debating the cons and pros — and yes, there are people, besides Dick Cheney and Fox News commentators who think torture is okay — of government sponsored torture.

But to focus just on the government misses the forest for the trees. Let’s give full credit where it is due. This was not just a public sector activity. This was a joint public-private sector initiative, done with the witting, if not altogether competent, participation of the private sector.

ISIS: The Boogeymen of Our Times, Justifying Empire & Imperialism

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When faced with the prospect of analyzing the current rise of ISIS, or the misinformed albeit widely accepted threat of Russia, or that of Iran, it is imperative that we keep in mind a few key points.

One of these is the US foreign policy strategy of containment, or more aptly, the strategy of limiting the power of anyone who challenges the United States’ hegemony on the global chessboard. The memo depicting this strategy was penned under the supervision of influential neo-conservative statesmen Paul Wolfowitz in 1992, thus dubbed the “Wolfowitz doctrine,” and was not intended for public release. I would argue strongly that the evidence of the past decades suggests that this is still the dominant foreign policy doctrine that has been followed under both the Bush and Obama administrations.

The preeminent strategy outlined therein is to “establish and protect a new order,” that accounts for “the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.” The goal is to protect a world order in which the United States is the supreme power, and to stop any nation who seeks to challenge this dominance and overturn America’s preeminent position.

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